Been a busy week! Marketing problems, personal problems, re-continued email campaigns, Vlog attempts, photo-shoots and the ever continuing web development!

So what I'll address first is the marketing problems, though it's also mixed in with personal problems. What I mean by this is that I'm totally new to marketing, and I haven't even been a naturally social person to start off with. So this particular section in business is especially difficult for me. And the harder I've been thinking over it, trying to come up with a marketing plan, the stress has been building. As the stress builds, the more difficult it is to think clearly and learn anything, and I've been trying real hard, reading countless hours into marketing.

I've done everything so far, spent so much time and energy in starting this company for as far back as 04/2014. That's 10 months now and in April I will have been working on this for over a year. Every challenge that's come my way I've beaten, for nearly a year now. To actually almost reach the finish line (Officially launching the company) and then to fail just because what is essentially just talking about my company to people. It crushes me.

I do admit I need help and I'm not afraid to admit my weaknesses, I've realised I should be talking to people about these problems and that's just what I'm doing. I've talked to three people about my stress and problems in marketing; a marketing mentor, a lecturer and my best friend. I haven't made any real progress into planning and knowing exactly what I'm going to do yet, but I do feel a lot better after talking about it. What I need to do is learn what exactly is the help I need, I need specific questions to ask and that's something I feel I can do now with a lot of stress taken away.

There's been a ton of little things that have made me pretty happy about this week involving these 3 incredible people, but to talk about them will make this post 10x as long, I just feel I should acknowledge that these people have done a lot of good for me.

So onto other news, I've been back to e-mailing artists! This has easily been the best thing about Hire an Artist, getting to meet new artists and see their artwork! I absolutely love it. I must admit it can be a bit sad at times seeing all of the artists have given up on artistry (People and websites I dub 'Ghosts' or 'Zombies'). It's a pretty big majority and even I don't know half of the time if I'm emailing a zombie or not, but to see what people have created is incredible, I've seen from the most bizarre to the most beautiful. And every new artist brings something new. I can't properly describe just how amazing doing this can be.

Besides the good this does for me, just doing 2 days worth of e-mailing has give a nice boost to growth to our support base! We can never have enough artists behind the company though! I'm looking forward to Monday where I'll be doing more.

In other news I failed at the personal video messages (Or Vlogs if that's more appropriate). I simply didn't have the right equipment and venue to get it done. What I had was 2x powerful worklights, a white bedsheet, duct tape, tripod, a shoebox lid and an iPad. The filming set up with the iPad, tripod and the shoebox lid was really unconventional but it worked. What didn't work was the background, I used the duct tape to tape the sheet up on the ceiling but because it didn't reach the floor it was difficult to smooth it out. I could have added weights at the bottom or put holes through the corners and solve it but it wasn't mine to damage. Anyway, no matter how good the lighting would be, I couldn't achieve the overexposed white background.

After my failure I had two options, buy a white screen or a green screen. So essentially it's either something like a projector screen and hope to god I can achieve perfect lighting in a small space (Highly unlikely). Or get a green and digitally edit in a background, I still need even lighting on the green screen but it's going to be much easier this method as I can ChromaKey out all the green. Including all it's shades. Speaking of shades though, this will be my biggest problem. My shadow could cast on the green screen, which makes ChromaKey correctly incredibly difficult. In a small place like where I live is going to make avoiding this shadow difficult, thankfully I have two lights.

The first to shine on me directly in front, this will cast the shadow on the green screen which needs to be removed. The other light will go above me shining down, I'm no expert of light but my theory is that when the light rays come down and come in contact in the path of my shadow behind me, the light will pass through, thus eliminating the shadow or at least fading out the shadow greatly.

The only challenge to this theory is obviously the lighting, I will have to use duct tape on the worklight I have which is going to hang in the air. It's relatively light but it has some weight to it, if I don't have enough duct tape it's going to fall and smash (Disaster!). There is also getting the angle of the light right, there is a solution; More tape!

The green screen is getting delivered and is on it's way, if it's all a success I'll make my first Vlog and upload it in a future post!

So, in other news (Again!), the web development is going nicely. We're hitting a snag in the financial part which I expected. It's kind of hard to explain but the biggest source to these problems is me not explaining well enough what needs to be achieved. I'm the problem. Oh! The photo-shoot went awesome! Going to get some pictures to vastly improve my online profile, can't wait till I get the images back, I badly need them for LinkedIn! Also my best friend recommended I use one for Facebook? An interesting idea, it will make me unique since no-one else in my social circles hasn't done it, but I also don't want to attract TOO much attention to myself. I'll probably do it though since I do look pretty good in them. Confidence booster!