Freelance Graphic Designing??

[NiiAbossey]

Is this freelance graphic designing really paying and how do people get to win contracts aside signing up on upwork.com and freelance.com and a few other places?

 

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[Madame Peccato]

There are multiple threads on the forum that answer your question.

Anyway, here's a quick step-by-step guide:

- Hit up the ol' Google and type in there "[industry or job or whatever] + city name"
- Find companies with outdated / bad / websites that could really use a redesign, or even those without a site (the yellow pages are great for this)
- Cold email / cold call / try to find out who makes the decision for the company and get in touch with them
- Propose them to make them a new website, mention you are new and are willing to make them a site for low pay / free to build up your portfolio, and that since you're building up your portfolio you want to make sure it's very good, so that you can win more jobs in the future
- Do an exceptional job, make sure the client is satisfied. If they are, you can ask them for referral, or if you could help anyone they know with their website.
- If you get referred to someone by your client, you (probably) just struck gold.
- If you didn't, repeat the first steps. Ideally, you'd want people you work for to refer you to more clients, but this doesn't always happen.

If you are unsure about how to start, examples of google searches could be: "plumber / electrician / lawyer / insurer / mechanic / in my city". Imagine you need a quick job done...think what you'd search on Google, and do the research yourself, see what comes up.

Of course all of this implies you are good at what you want to do, and that you are able to show up and deliver good work.

If you need help with cold emails or cold calls, there are plenty of resources both on this forum and on the Internet.

Good luck in your endeavors.

 

[NiiAbossey]

There are multiple threads on the forum that answer your question.

Anyway, here's a quick step-by-step guide:

- Hit up the ol' Google and type in there "[industry or job or whatever] + city name"
- Find companies with outdated / bad / websites that could really use a redesign, or even those without a site (the yellow pages are great for this)
- Cold email / cold call / try to find out who makes the decision for the company and get in touch with them
- Propose them to make them a new website, mention you are new and are willing to make them a site for low pay / free to build up your portfolio, and that since you're building up your portfolio you want to make sure it's very good, so that you can win more jobs in the future
- Do an exceptional job, make sure the client is satisfied. If they are, you can ask them for referral, or if you could help anyone they know with their website.
- If you get referred to someone by your client, you (probably) just struck gold.
- If you didn't, repeat the first steps. Ideally, you'd want people you work for to refer you to more clients, but this doesn't always happen.

If you are unsure about how to start, examples of google searches could be: "plumber / electrician / lawyer / insurer / mechanic / in my city". Imagine you need a quick job done...think what you'd search on Google, and do the research yourself, see what comes up.

Of course all of this implies you are good at what you want to do, and that you are able to show up and deliver good work.

If you need help with cold emails or cold calls, there are plenty of resources both on this forum and on the Internet.

Good luck in your endeavors.

Thanks this is helpful

 

[Guest70495]

The points written by Madame Peccato are exactly how I started, I'll also add a few more.
Maintain a portfolio on public showcase sites like dribble and Behance. Often people look for designs out there and you can get quite a few commissions from there.
Give out your business card with your face to the people who you get a meeting with, even if you don't close then and there they do remember your face and a often reach out when the need arises.
A lot of times you'll need to build stuff for free, and that's perfectly okay, but you could squeeze the money by referring them to your hosting affiliate network and making sure they sign up through that to get the extra cash or you could upsell stuff after you've made the site (monthly $xx often adds up to more money than just straight up asking money upfront and people are more prone to agree on small monthly payments).

 

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