Do what you enjoy: Anne started her Prêt à Voyager (Read To Travel) blog over 18 years ago. Since then, she’s combined what she’s learned, what inspires her, and her graphic design eye to operate a creative coaching content business.
Diversify revenue streams: Anne meets her audience where they are, offering lower-priced products, such as a book and entry-level workshop, to higher-end services, such as one-on-one coaching and on-site corporate training.
Draw a map (preferably on a banana): Think differently and get out of your everyday mindset as you grow as an entrepreneur and content business owner.
Learn from your community: Your community can teach you, and you can teach them. Paying attention to both can help you fill in knowledge gaps.

The Story of Anne Ditmeyer

Anne Ditmeyer is a creative coach. And a workshop facilitator. And a writer. A designer. A consultant. She’s a multi-passionate entrepreneur, building a portfolio career that thrives on authenticity, connection, and creativity.

“I’ve never been one to do things the traditional way,” Anne says. “I know that I can only do things that feel true for me.” Spending just a little bit of time in her microcosm of content reveals how true that is.

Connecting the dots from graphic design to content entrepreneur

Maybe her background in graphic design – evident all over her content – gives Anne the foundation of her ecosystem. “It informs all my work,” she says. Or maybe it’s her love of travel and exploring new places. Over 18 years ago, the American exp-pat now living in Paris launched the blog Prêt à Voyager (Ready to Travel) and related Instagram account with a map highlighting her journey across six US states, two countries, and literally sailing around the world.

While Anne added channels and revenue streams – including coaching, virtual workshops, a newsletter, a book, and its companion site on Substack – she still points to her blog as her “business card to get so many of my initial clients.”

She offers corporate workshops and facilitates retreats, often in person, for team-building and mapping exercises. In 2020, Anne launched her Write Your Own Rules Workshop, which is now a virtual two-hour, self-paced workshop for 50 Euros (about $54 US dollars).

Anne’s built her business organically, “pivoting and moving out of something and into something else, but the same ideas applying across different domains,” she says. From the Write Your Own Rules workshop, she added Mapping Your Path, a three-month workshop and community she hosts several times a year. She also introduced a biweekly newsletter to help subscribers feel inspired and, as its name says, Connect the Dots.

Writing the pocket playbook for possibility

In May 2024, Anne published her first book, OVERRIDE! What If There Was Another Way?

“The question ‘what if there was another way?’ is at the core of everything I do,” she says. It’s also a thought exercise she regularly challenges her clients to consider.

Anne explored her options over the years before deciding to self-publish (through Lulu, the parent company of Tilt Publishing). She wanted control over her publishing timeline, the book’s content and design, and how she connected her book to her audience. Thanks to the community of readers, followers, and students she’s built, Anne was also well-positioned to sell her book directly.

“[I] didn’t even know I was writing a book at the beginning. I would just take myself out to a cafe and write micro-chapters,” she says. The vision came together. Anne put her graphic design skills to work for both the interior and cover design and function. She wanted a compact book that readers could easily carry and had digestible chapters printed on paper that was easy to write on so readers could actively engage with the content.

She didn’t do it all on her own, though. She worked with a developmental editor to shape early drafts into a polished manuscript and a copy editor for proofreading the final product. And though she says that she didn’t tell many people that she was writing a book – she wanted the process to unfold organically and not be driven by public pressure — she turned to her communities and a few new ones throughout her writing, including the London Writers’ Salon and ALLi, and resources like London Book Fair and lulu.com.

As for the final book product? It engages readers with interactive prompts, thought exercises, and strategic design, all on that paper where readers can actually write.

Mapping the path to authentic connection (literally)

Regardless of the content channel to reach her audience, Anne’s goals are the same. “I like to give people the confidence to explore and get lost,” she says. In some cases, maybe figuratively – exploring new ideas, unconventional concepts, visions for the year ahead. And in some cases, that exploration might be literal. But both, inevitably, involve a map (she even dedicates a category on her blog to it).

Anne encourages people to draw mind maps, a map of the year ahead, mapping out goals and intentions, maps of favorite places, aspirational maps, etc. She says she likes “using maps as a creative tool to get people to explore more. In a lot of my work, I’m engaging people in their inner child and to be playful. Also, [for them] to go analog ’cause we can be so stuck in the digital and in screens.

“I want people to stop thinking how they think they’re supposed to and how society has trained us and allow ourselves to think different ways and think creatively,” Anne says.

But it’s about more than just inspiring creativity or encouraging reflection. Sometimes, to truly stretch into creative ways, people need to try something completely new. Something you’ve never done before. Something like drawing on a banana.

And yes, it is exactly what it sounds like. Anne does a creative exercise that involves taking a pen (she recommends a ballpoint pen) and drawing right on the peel.

Why a banana? “It is ephemeral; it does not last forever, so you don’t have to be precious about it. Because I think we can get stuck in perfectionism, and so we never take action,” Anne explains.

Trusting the process and fostering organic engagement

Anne encourages her audiences to try a variety of exercises to express creativity, foster out-of-the-box thinking, and find new strategies for taking action. Her content products also offer a variety of access points to meet the audience where they are, from the book, a lower price point, to one-on-one coaching, which involves a bigger investment.

Her success in creating connections and conversations informs her understanding of the audience. Many of her clients have long incubation periods, sometimes nearly two years from discovery to enrollment in her Mapping Your Path workshop.

So then, how does she extend her invitation to new audiences?

Anne prefers an organic approach to her audience growth, describing her process as “planting seeds for fruits of labor.” She believes that connecting with an audience needs to be an authentic practice that is true to her.

She looks for existing communities in which she enjoys engaging, such as groups for authors, creators, travel enthusiasts, women entrepreneurs, and special interest groups. She also relies on word of mouth from her audience, workshop participants, community members, and other clients.

“It’s trusting the process, but also trusting that I get to the right people and letting all the different people add up over time,” Anne says.

The post How Anne Ditmeyer Redefines Entrepreneurship with Creative Design appeared first on The Tilt Publishing.

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