12 replies to this topic

[freshpub]

Your portfolio will be a very important tool. But you need something to show before you can build it.

Look around for a charity, an event, anything that you think might do with a good new website, or a redesign of their old one. Then approach them and offer to do the work for free, or at costs if they want some very specific stock pictures. And here is the first project to put in your portfolio...

But two things that you should do afterwards:

1-Ask whoever agreed to you doing with the website if they were happy with the way you did it. Ask for suggestions on how to improve your customer service. And if they were desperately happy with it all, ask for a testimonial, a short quote to put on your own website, in promotional literature and/or to use in a press release...

2-Get the local news involved. If the charity/event you've just finished working for is already planning to appear in the local paper, radio, tv news, ask if you can be mentioned as a sponsor, a volunteer or whatever they want to call you. Ask that they mentioned exactly what you did for them and that they are happy with your service. Create your own press release as well. Ask someone you know that is good with words if you can't do it yourself. Then sent the release to everyone you can think of and post it on your website and with press release agencies online.

Mailing the businesses in your area repeatedly could do you some harm as well as good. Many people don't read flyers, and if they do, they might get annoyed to see your name crop up again and again. Unsolicited direct mailings are good, but only if you don't do it too often...

Try getting in at business events. Doesn't have to be related with designing at all. Over here in the UK, we have networking events, specifically hosted to meet new business contacts. But almost every business owners I know are using free business courses and events about accounting, marketing, tax, purchasing... as a networking event, to make new business contacts.

Just a few ideas...

[innermountain]

How about marketing to a specific group, like chiropractors? People who have $ but often times don't have nice websites. And I know they can really benefit from them. They also know each other and so referrals could to well in the long run.

[Quatrux]

I agree with most replies here and also wanted to add, that if you're searching for bad websites and then calling them and offering a design, which is much better and modern than their current..

OK, you'll create a design for them, but usually they run on some kind of a CMS or a simple website programmed by someone, so you'll need to integrate it into the system, which can be quite hard or will take time, creating a design is not all, as usually freelancers need to know more or work in a team, if working in such a tactic for searching clients and offering services.

It's no problem if the site is simple HTML, which today you can't really know even if it has .html files which can be dynamic and a lot of whom can hide the headers of the website, even though usually these kind of sites has a nice design

So when offering a design, you need to offer the integration of it into the current system, which is usually harder when offering your own CMS with that design and creating the same content.