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How I got started and became a graphic designer, then became a 6-figure entrepreneur. I went from working in a small town making $30K a year to making $300K a year as an entrepreneur between age 27 to 37. This is my story of how I got started.
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From Broke to $100K a Year https://youtu.be/dxAhKLg87Gs
Day in the Life of a Full-time YouTuber https://youtu.be/_idPURDSvEs
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CAMERA GEAR I USE
📸 YouTube Camera Sony A7S III
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📸 Photography Camera Sony A7R III
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AUDIO GEAR
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VIDEO EDITING PC
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Roberto Blake is a Creative Entrepreneur, Keynote Speaker, and YouTube Certified Educator. He is the founder of Awesome Creator Academy and host of the Create Something Awesome Today Podcast.
Roberto Blake helps entrepreneurs and social media influencers, through educational videos on YouTube, motivational content on Instagram and career development advice on LinkedIn, as well as offering 1 on 1 Coaching and a Group Coaching Program.
**Disclaimer: Roberto Blake is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to www.amazon.com.
Disclaimers: all opinions are my own, sponsors are acknowledged. Not financial advice, for entertainment purposes only.
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Some of you may not realize that I
was a graphic designer and freelancer
long before I was ever a YouTube content creator
with 500,000 subscribers. It is actually the thing
that allowed me to transition from retail work
into having an actual career and profession.
And it would actually take me much further
in life that I could have ever anticipated.
And this video is kind of a video that is one
of those one for them, one for me type deals.
Want to talk about why I became a graphic
designer and a little bit about my early journey.
The impact that it’s had on me, how it allowed me
to become an entrepreneur later with a multiple
six figure business earning about twenty five
thousand dollars a month as of 2020. And I also
made a video about that and how I spend my income,
if you’re curious about that sort of thing.
A Link Is in the description for you. Yeah.
Let’s let’s talk a little bit about my background
in graphic design as well as photography.
Now, something you need to understand is that
I came from, you know, a single parent home
child of divorce, the oldest of four kids,
and grew up in an immigrant family.
So you can imagine that in my life, school was
something that was very important for a long time
until it wasn’t. Ultimately, I found myself
very depressed and disenchanted in my
last, you know, two years of high school.
I had a lot going on at home. There
was a very specific health situation
with my sister and her having surgeries. And
I was also getting bullied and harassed a lot.
And I mean a lot while I was at school.
And I also had some teachers that frankly
just were not always great. I think some
of you might be able to relate to this, the
kind of people who tell you like things, the
worst things they possibly could tell you about
yourself and you internalize that and believe it.
So it wasn’t going great for me. I also was
starting to come to the realization that a
dream that I had of becoming an animator and
a cartoonist and working for Disney and Marvel
came the realization that I felt
I didn’t have the talent for that.
And then financially, I didn’t have
the resources to truly pursue it
at the highest level and make up for
any natural talent that I was lacking.
So I thought about it and I ultimately
decided that I still wanted to do something
as a career that was passionate about something,
as a career that really relied heavily on my
creativity, because I wanted
to be the person, my family
that didn’t live for their nights and weekends and
actually pursued their creativity as a full-time
income. And so what I ultimately decided
was my interest and fascination and love
of graphic design and web design
was what I was going to pursue.
Upon leaving high school. And so
I went to college for advertising,
graphic design, and I was in a small
military town near Fort Bragg. OK.
You could you can kind of feel now.
Interesting. It was for me growing up.
I was a military brat who had moved all over the
place. I was born in Brooklyn. And to be in this
smaller town, which I grew up in a lot of
small towns, I never fit in like at all.
I was creative nerd art, nerd, science nerd.
It wasn’t going well for me. Okay. However,
in college, I went to a
community college. I had to work
to be able to pay for that because I did
not want to take out any student loans.
I didn’t want to go into debt.
I saw too many horror stories.
And so I just worked my tail off. It meant
I was constantly exhausted and overworked.
You wanna talk about burnout?
You want to talk about hustle?
I lived through a version of that
maybe 20 years ago that I don’t even think
people can fully relate to and appreciate today,
because it was a very different time and
it meant a very different thing back then.
Maybe some of you do understand and can
relate. But those of you who are older,
I’m thirty seven. I think a lot of you understand
where I’m coming from. So back then, back in my
day, back in mine, everything was harder and
everything was much more cost prohibitive.
Opportunities weren’t raining
from the sky or from the Internet.
Like, for real. It was very difficult to find
ways to side hustle and make money. There wasn’t
websites like fiber. There wasn’t a YouTube
yet. That wouldn’t happen for many, many years.
We’re talking about 2002 here. YouTube wouldn’t
be invented until 2005, wouldn’t be acquired until
2006, and wouldn’t become popularized until
about roughly two thousand and fourteen. So
that wasn’t really on the table. However,
by the fact that in high school itself,
I had learned how to code
before I was even a freshman.
I was learning the skills of web design and
graphic design on the very primitive Internet
that AOL was at the time, and so I actually had
an understanding of these things and a teacher.
There are good teachers. Don’t
ever get me twisted on that.
There are some great teachers. I had a
teacher that took an interest in me and
introduced me at a very young age to things like
Photoshop and Premiere Pro and things like that.
And so I had a background in video
editing before YouTube ever existed.
I had already been passionate about photography
since I was a child. It was something that both
of my parents did as a hobby. My uncles did
it. My Uncle Charlie actually taught me how
to develop film in the darkroom because he had a
whole studio set up in his basement in Florida.
And so he taught me how to develop film
and shoot film at a very young age. And
in college, I was one of the last people
to actually use the wet lab and develop,
you know, traditional film before
we went to a digital studio set up.
So this all goes back way back for me
to even my early years as a teenager. So
it’s something that has always been with me. I’ve
been an artist, an illustrator, a creative writer.
I’ve been doing storytelling and creativity
and visual art and design my entire life.
So it wasn’t a stretch for me to pursue graphic
design, what people used to call commercial arts
and commercial illustration. And I took a lot
of electives in illustration and photography.
My biggest frustration was probably the fact
that my graphic design teacher is
software was new to them back then.
They all came from print shops. They’d
worked in print shops 10, 15 years ago.
We’re now academics. They weren’t necessarily
practitioners. And that’s no offense to any
of them. It’s just something that then was
frustrating for me as someone who was coming
up in the world where software exist and not
having any real guidance or mentorship directly
, even though that’s what I was
paying for by going to college,
I wasn’t really getting what I was hoping for
when I was getting was access to resources,
though I was getting access to the Mac lab.
I was getting access to other software that
I hadn’t been using, like Adobe Illustrator
and Adobe InDesign at the time, Macromedia
, Dreamweaver and Flash. And that actually
allowed me to at least pursue a little
bit of animation and even make a decent
animated short at one point. And this is,
again, in the early, early years.
And unfortunately, this is something
or maybe fortunately, because it was really not
that good, lost to the lost of the sea of time
. OK, exist only in my memories. So. I really got
started at an early age and I was freelancing and
I was making stuff for churches and local
businesses, this included print fliers,
print ads, even websites,
you know, a lot of people.
What we do is, in fact, actually even some of
my photography and video stuff, I came up with
some of that in the church. This is how a lot of
us get our start. And so when you end up doing
that kind of thing in your local community, you
start to build a little bit of reputation for
it. I got to also help with my tech skills,
set people’s offices and network and stuff like
that as more people started building that out.
And so I got a lot of experience and
a lot of exposure doing those things.
And it wasn’t a lot of money. But, you
know, from a broke kid in a small town,
something’s better than nothing. You fast
forward to my early to mid 20s. I end up
leaving college directly to work for
a local company doing web hosting that
I was planning that applied to
that company after I got my degree
. It didn’t even take that. What it took was
my portfolio and my website already being built
and an opportunity and someone being able
to vouch for me. That’s it. And so I was
able to actually start working as a Web and
graphic designer at a Web hosting company.
And the owner also owned some other
businesses. So I actually also got to do
print work because he actually
also owned a real estate agency.
So I was doing some of that. You know,
all for one paycheck at the time.
So what ended up happening was I ended up
actually getting to use a lot of my skills
as a photographer for the company. And
I started shooting events locally and
I started doing stuff even for
the local clubs and restaurants.
I ended up making fliers to on the side,
and I just was doing whatever I could
with what I had at the time where I was.
And I think that’s a very important thing to
do. I think it’s a very important message.
Right. So when when I became a graphic
designer, it was because I wanted to pursue
a career in creativity. I wanted to do
something with my skills and my talents
that I was still very passionate about. Even if
it wasn’t at the time, my number one passion.
And it quickly became my number one passion
when I realized that if I had thought and
gotten my dream and working as an illustrator
or an animator at a company, I would have
ultimately had to make what other people want,
not express my own creative vision and ideas.
That’s also what ended up happening to
me as a graphic designer. At one point,
I ended up working for an ad agency
in New York for a little over a year.
Then I ended up going into marketing
and becoming a marketing manager
while also still doing the company’s website and
the beginnings of their social media before then
going independent. And I became independent, I
became a freelancer, started working for myself,
became self-employed, and I used those skills and
my abilities to utilize social media to be able
to get my own clients, as well as my search
engine optimization and all that good stuff.
Right. What ultimately happened is as a result
of that and then becoming a content creator on
YouTube, I was still using all of my skills
in terms of knowing how to work a camera,
the video editing skills
that I played with as a hobby
when I was a kid, and then also the
videography skills that I picked
up helping the church film. So when
you combine a lot of those things,
the side hustles, the wedding photography, all
of that. I learned how to basically build a
successful client services business.
And as my skills evolved, so did the
scope of what I would do as an entrepreneur,
a business person, and even a content creator.
YouTube let me used every single skill in my
toolbox and sharpen and polish it and learn how to
match it to the needs, wants
and desires of an audience.
And ultimately, I still ended up making money
specifically as a graphic designer, not only by
getting clients when I was a freelancer,
but when I transitioned beyond that into
consulting and things like that. I ultimately
ended up building a digital product off of
my graphic design skills for YouTube content
creators who don’t have any graphic design skills
called the YouTube starter kit.
And that is something that well
over a thousand content creators
have used and benefited from.
So being able to create value for a thousand
people and have them buy something that you’ve
made is a big deal and something that any
creative person, any artist would love to
have happen. And so what I will tell you is things
don’t always go the way that you think they will.
I started with one idea of my life and my career
had to pivot and pivot and pivot. And the
interesting thing is I continued to learn
and grow and experiment and take some risk.
Some chances. Probably not as much as I could
of or really should have to get a higher
level of reward, but worked out really
well for me and put me in a situation that allowed
me now I changed my life, but the lives of my
family members, some of my friends, and ultimately
the people who now work with me, my team. And it’s
something that I really owe a lot of to the
early people who invested in me within my own
family in terms of taking the time to teach
me things that they were passionate about.
I think that’s ultimately what
brought me to YouTube, was
I wanted to share things I’m passionate about
and teach people because it was done for me.
I don’t think you have to be a pro or an
expert to share the things that you love
and your understanding of them. I think you have
to be upfront that you’re not pro or an expert.
But consider the fact that I was still underserved
by people who are pros and experts
in academia and not getting what
I needed from them. There is an underserved
market of people who are not getting what
they want out of the traditional market or
academia or even at home from their family,
and they’re seeking it out. And if
we as creative people make things for
people like us, if you’re a creative
person, if you’re an introvert, if you’re
a nerd, if you’re whatever, if you
make things for the people like you
one, you’ll feel less lonely. And
two, it’s ultimately satisfying
to feel like you might have made a difference
that you would have appreciated if it was you.
So that’s the story of how and
why I became a graphic designer
and what led me to becoming a content creator. And
I think that it’s important once in a while for.
The audience to hear your story, to hear
where you came from, why it matters and why you
do what you do and what you’re passionate about
. At some point, I might do a video
about photography. A lot of you know
that it’s like I’m a sucker for camera
gear and I’m very passionate about it.
Recently gotten very into wildlife photography.
In fact, something I want to share with you.
You don’t have to feel any obligation. I
made a new website CreateAwesomeThings.com,
because, you know, my philosophy, create
awesome things and share them with the
world. So CreateAwesomeThings.com. It is
a Shopify store that I made so that if I’m
doing photography, you can buy
some of my wildlife stuff as
prints and posters or as canvases. And then I
do plan to do some stuff with my own personal
digital art in the future. And if you want
to buy some cool posters around any of that,
any of the motivational stuff as posters.
Then it’s going to exist in this
online store that I built. I also,
of course, plan to do a how to build
a Shopify store from scratch tutorial.
That’s something you’re interested
in. You definitely want to stay tuned.
But I just wanted you to know that this
thing exist. You don’t have to support
it. You don’t have to buy anything.
But I do want you to know that exist,
if it is something you’re interested in
or if you just are curious about my work.
Question of the day. What is a passion
that you’re pursuing? And is it a hobby
or a career? I’m really interested. Let me know
in the comment section. If you enjoyed this
video and getting to know me a little bit better,
maybe you should watch this video where I
tell my story about how I went from being
broke to making six figures in detail.
And it’s actionable advice for videos on
creativity and staying inspired. Check
out my playlist. Both of these will be
linked in the description down below. As
always, thank you so much for watching.
And don’t forget, go out there and create
something awesome today. Take care.
