Author: Vicky Ayala

Vicky is a digital strategist and personal brand coach who works with multi-passionate soloprepreneurs and teaches them how to build a thriving online business. She muses on the entrepreneurial journey and uses storytelling as a vehicle for showing others how to design a lifestyle that’s on purpose and by design. She is also founder of The Brand Asylum, a virtual training academy for solopreneurs who want to leverage and launch their way to success.

Do you look around and wonder “why not me” or rather “when is it going to be my time?” Are you toiling away at a desk job that you hate, all the while fixated on this version of who you want to be and where you want to go? I just spent 2 days and approximately 11 years building my personal brand. From the sleepless nights working at my day job in my office with my then partner, plotting how we were going to be awesome consultants to the sleepless nights working out of a basement by my lonesome, plotting how I am going to help…

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What’s that movie where the guy wakes up reliving the same day? Groundhog Day? Yea that feels like me. Mercury retrograde is gone and now the universe is showing me what is real instead of projections of what my life can be. I find myself thinking about the past. Thinking about people and perspectives from what feels like a lifetime ago. I wonder if this is all just a test to see if I’ve learned my lesson. Did I reflect inside enough to reveal the patterns that hold me back? Did I make myself aware enough to the inner crap…

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We live in the crowdsourcing era where you can post a Kickstarter for your creative project, an Indiegogo to pay for film festival application fees and a Go Fund Me to cover the cost of getting to and from Sundance, if that’s where you’re heading. There are a ton of benefits of going with the crowdsourcing model because, well, MONEY! This is how many gems are made. This is how many creative dreams are realized. This is how opportunities are created. As you build your own online presence, what you OWN is your collateral. So when do you go “solo”…

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I started out as a graphic designer. Eventually I evolved into web design. This wasn’t out of curiosity or desire but necessity. I was a consultant who needed a website to get work. Then I was a producer who needed an online presence to promote shows. Now I’m a multi-passionate creative entrepreneur who builds brand experiences for anyone who wants to enter my digital world. There’s this idea that we’re supposed to follow one trajectory. We use phrases like “stay in your lane” as a way to make sure others conform to a neat and tidy little box. Many coaches…

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You know that saying “birds of a feather flock together.” Nowadays that’s even more important for any chica living the entrepreneurial lifestyle. Now, when I say “entrepreneurial lifestyle” it’s not just those who are running startups and creating businesses. The entrepreneurial lifestyle is for anyone who’s creating a reality that’s on their own terms bringing their own vision to life. Now when we embarked on the entrepreneurial lifestyle, one of the things they left out of the brochure was a warning about how lonely the journey was going to be. If you’re extroverted and a social butterfly then this won’t…

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If you’re like 24% of the entire world wide web, then you have a website that’s powered by WordPress. It’s a super simple and easy to use content management system (aka CMS) for anyone who wants to setup a blog, online store, digital portfolio and/or multi-media site. Having a self-hosted WordPress site means you’re also managing plugins and themes, which can become a task in itself. What many WordPress users don’t realize is that the more you install plugins, the more you leave your website open for bugs and malware. Sure, adding features helps extend the capabilities for your site.…

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Most successful marketing campaigns are done by design. They are ideated in someone’s creative brain. Then these ideations are transferred to a memo pad and pen. From there the ideas are transformed and evolved into tangible concepts which are picked and prodded like some science experiment. Once the final masterpiece of a concept is agreed upon, it becomes the genesis of someone’s campaign. This is the trajectory of every cleverly written tweet, video and/or social stunt which becomes viral. MOST of the time. Once in a blue moon there will be something, usually a video, that goes viral on it’s…

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New year only means one thing – resolutions. You know, that unrealistic list that includes off the wall ideas which rarely, if ever, see the light of day. It’s a time when we “act good” as if the act of writing it out would manifest these “resolutions.” I threw out the concept of resolutions a few years ago. Instead I now focus on intentions. There’s a difference, at least in my eyes. Resolutions feel so “final.” Even the word gives an aura of “I want to fix something.” In reality, I don’t want to fix anything. I just want to…

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Malcolm Gladwell once said that it takes 10,000 hours to perfect any craft. Let’s look at the math. If you dedicate 20 hours a week to your passion, it would take you 10 years to master your craft. This makes sense because there’s a well known saying that it takes 10 years to be an overnight success. Talent is great but that’s only one piece of the whole. Hustle and a whole lot of W-O-R-K is what separates the “coulda-shoulda-woulda” stories from the success stories. So what gets in the way? It’s easy to look at the “lack of opportunities”…

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Sometimes we have to take on a day job to support the dream. I am currently learning this lesson as I juggle both a full-time passion business and a traditional agency job. For some working a flexible job is ideal. Waitressing + acting seem to go hand in hand. You get the flexibility with your time schedule while making some cash to support the hustle. What if the flexible job is not an option? Being a full-time “entrepreneur” in transition, I was having a hard time pivoting my brand into a business. As luck would have it, life decided to throw…

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Sometimes life throws us a curveball almost as if the Universe were screaming “PLOT TWIST” with our lives. This can be exciting such as that amazing opportunity to travel the world and getting paid to blog the experience. Then there are those curveballs which have more bite, such as an unfortunate illness or death in the family. These curveballs are often the prequel to whatever breakthrough you’re about to experience. Unfortunately they’re also disguised as breakdowns and often times they will turn your world upside down and sideways. When this happens we have a choice – cower in a fetal…

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I am in the tail end of a reinvention phase. A few years back I had confronted myself with that nagging question: “what are you doing with your life?” Knee deep in my 30s, this question plagued me in a way that it had not when I asked myself the same thing in my 20s. This time around I needed a real answer. I needed a responsible answer. I needed to stop being cute with the lackadaisical response and hone in on what my life’s purpose was going to be. At the time I needed an answer quick because I’m a…

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There are a number of ways you can monetize your craft. There’s the traditional “pay to play” model which is much like traditional distribution. If you’re a creative entrepreneur then this is often the biz structure you have for your craft. If you have a film, play or web series then generally speaking you collect money when people watch it, eg. tickets. What happens when this model doesn’t work or worse, what happens when this model gets over saturated that it becomes that much more difficult to turn a profit off a project? What about recurring income?  Have you thought…

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There’s a difference between a job, a passion and a purpose. If you get paid to perform a service or to deliver goods, that’s a job. If you love doing it, then that’s your passion. If it impacts the life of one other person, that’s your purpose. As a creative entrepreneur, I’ve come to realize one lesson that’s been the cornerstone of my journey – do it yourself. It’s one thing to be a Jane of all trades, where you wear various hats. There are pros and cons for being that type of person. However, I am not referring to…

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