When you operate as a solopreneur it can get lonely. The work can keep you isolated. One of the best things I’ve found to keep me motivated, on the edge of creativity, and happy has been finding awesome communities.
Elegant Themes has built an incredible community around the Divi theme and so many great developers and content creators have built their own Divi communities as well.
Another major connection point has been podcast like the Josh Hall Web Design Show and Divi Chat.
There are also some incredible YouTube channels for education and the communities built in the chat can be awesome too…
Check out my channel at https://keeganlanier.com/watchyoutube.
Keegan 0:38
What’s going on everybody? Welcome to another episode of the side hustle to full time web designer podcast. In today’s episode, this is one that’s near and dear to my heart. You know, if you’ve been around here for a long time, you’ve listened to other versions of this podcast and previous generations, community is something that I’m very, very bullish on. And specifically today, we’re going to talk about not feeling alone when you work alone. So you know, as this past year, the entire COVID pandemic, we’ve all felt a little bit disconnected from a lot of other people. And we’ve gotten really creative. You know, the world has gotten extremely creative in how we go about connecting.
Keegan 1:19
You know, Zoom is on the rise, Zoom is as popular as it’s ever it’s ever been. And there are so many different things that help bring us together. And today I wanted to talk about a few of those that are specific to freelance web designers. And the importance of not feeling alone when you do work alone, because it’s so easy to sit in your office, to do the work to build the websites to be an army of one and disconnect from everything else and lose that lose the community, lose the connection, lose friendships, you know, all those things can can happen. If you dive too deep into your work and you become workaholic and you work seven days a week and you just dive so deep.
Keegan 2:07
The biggest thing that’s worked for me, especially in the last year, to stay connected has been finding community, specifically, one community in particular. And those of you who listen regularly, you know that I talk about Josh Hall pretty often. Josh Hall is a guy I consider a good friend. He’s someone I consider a leader in the Divi space in the web design space. And someone who really helps freelance designers become better, which is awesome, right? I mean, that’s, that’s incredible to be giving of your time like that. And Josh is definitely one of those guys. And so his community actually the Josh Hall Webdesign Club, is something that I joined last year in 2020. And the community that’s coming together, and they’re the group of people who have come together in that community, our next level, I mean, they’re number one, they’re extremely talented. Number two, they’re extremely kind. And number three, they’re really giving with the data that they’ve collected the knowledge they have in their brain.
Keegan 3:10
So the first number one and probably the most important tip that I could give you for how to not feel alone when you do work alone is to find the online community, or find community in your own area, you know, professional network developments, or professional network groups. Those have been harder to find and, you know, especially throughout 2020, but they’re becoming easier, and they’re starting to come back. So find people who are like minded, find people who have complementary skills that you can talk with and learn and see different points of view and different perspectives.
Keegan 3:48
Those always help you be a better version of yourself and a stronger solopreneur and if you want to become a true owner, founder entrepreneur who runs an agency with team members, you really want to have as much exposure to different types of people as you possibly can. You want to learn and see things from different perspectives that will only make you stronger. And you know, I believe that Divi has some of the best online communities in WordPress if not the absolute best community overall in WordPress, which is why I use the Divi theme. So if you if you’re coming across this podcast and you’re not a Divi user, and you’ve ever been interested in using it now’s as good a time as there’s ever been to jump on board with Divi the community is stronger than ever.
Keegan 4:37
The products that are being made to support Divi are better than ever. The way that Elegant Themes is about to retool Divi, the efficiencies, the performance and the focus on third party developers is going to change the absolute game for Divi for Elegant Themes and for WordPress, I think Divi is going to take an make massive leaps in the next year and a half or two years. It’s not even going to be recognizable. As far as what people said before, oh, it’s bloated with shortcodes. It’s such a big theme it takes forever to use, the hosting has to be incredible, or else the site doesn’t perform, which is already not true. People get great results with Divi. I get great results with Divi but it will be even better. And so that’s your number one, find your community.
Keegan 5:24
Number two, get dialed into Divi, I’ll put a link in the show notes below. If you’re interested in checking out Divi, now it costs you nothing extra. And it would mean a lot it would help support the podcast. If you use the link below it is an affiliate link, but it’s something that will give us a little bit of kickback and it costs you nothing. In fact, you might even get a discount depending on when you hear this.
Keegan 5:48
And the final tip here that I have for you are other podcasts like this. There’s so many great ones in this space. You know, Marketing Made Easy. Wes McDowell has his podcast, you’ve got the self made web designer podcast. There’s so many great podcasts out there. And then there’s even more YouTube channels out there. There’s the admin bar. There’s Darrell Wilson, there’s Josh Hall, there’s the digital Buddha. If you want to watch David Blackman who created Devi space, he has done a lot of live stream videos and video production. And he talks about WordPress, because that’s the space he lives in.
Keegan 6:29
So all of those things are really key. Get active. Get involved. Go to the site for our page go to Keegan Linear com This is now episode number nine. So you can go to Keegan linear.com/e09, you can check out this episode on the website. And you can get involved. Say hi, leave a comment. Tell me what you think about this topic. Tell me if you feel alone, let’s connect. I’m always happy to connect with anyone out there in the WordPress space. So I really hope that that these things have maybe sparked an idea or make you think a little bit differently about community and about working alone. Just because you do operate as a freelancer or a business of one does not mean that you really have to be alone.
Keegan 7:19
There are so many people out there who want to connect and who want to share their knowledge and who want to learn from you. That synergy is awesome. And it’s great when you find people who are like minded because man that’s when the that’s when the magic happens. So, go out there, create something amazing, and connect with amazing people out there. And I can’t wait to see what you’re able to do with your business with your freelance mind and hopefully your life. So go out there kick ass, and we’ll see you in the next episode of this podcast.
