Looking for graphic design freelancing job opportunities? Work-from-home career opportunities in the web design field? Don’t waste time searching for freelance graphic design job postings. You can find more work if you present yourself as a business and contact companies direct.

Simply follow the tips in this article—you’ll find a step-by-step plan of action from targeting clients, to self-marketing, to getting ahead of the competition.

You really can make real money selling your own art work. So if you have an artistic talent, and you are looking for the latest home based business ideas to help you make BIG money, this article is your ultimate freelancers business resource.

How to Start a Freelance Graphic Design Business

In the world of freelance, you don’t need to be the greatest artist who ever lived. You just need to know how to reach new clients.

In the following article, I’ll show you how to get highly-paid business by freelancing in the marketing communications sector. Why focus on this sector? Because it’s the most profitable.

Start with your portfolio

Starting a freelance artwork business is a bit like opening a shop. Your shop window is the work you present to clients in pitching meetings. So your first task is dress your shop window—by creating an impressive portfolio.

Gather together all your work. Include anything and everything you have done for past clients or at college. Then write captions that summarize the brief each piece of work responds to. Add any good feedback you received.

Buy a sturdy stand-up presentation folder and add your work to it. Devote one sleeve to one project. Add examples of your work and reinforce with captions so your prospective clients have something to read—and you have prompts to help you explain your work whilst pitching.

If you don’t have enough work to show in a portfolio (i.e. under ten projects), you may want to work on some simulated briefs—that is, make up a brief and produce a visual that responds to it. Prospective clients won’t care if the briefs are real or not, they just want to see how good your work is.

Build yourself a website

Unless you are a web-designer, creating your own website is not essential, although it does give you some advantages. A website will help you to communicate your portfolio via email without sending attachments (promotions controllers will be suspicious of emails with attachments from unknown addresses—a link to a website is preferable).

If you have no experience of designing websites, don’t be put off, you can buy inexpensive templates online (www.templateshome.com is a good place to start, where you can buy smart website templates for around $50), and buying a dot.com address and uploading it onto a website browser should cost no more than $50.

Summarize your services and your ‘unique offer’ on your home page (read on to find out how to establish your ‘unique offer’). Include all your contact details on a separate page, and the best of your portfolio on another page. Now you’re ready to roll.

How to frugally market your business

Once you have arranged your portfolio, you need to design some publicity for yourself. There are two essential items you need, luckily they are not expensive to produce. They are business cards and mailer postcards.

Get the most out of your business cards

Business cards are your most important publicity items. They tell people how to contact you (don’t rely on email signatures—clients will wipe off your emails without hesitation and will not be able to contact you when a job comes up).

Executives normally keep vendor business cards in a case or card-box. Make sure you’re in it. And make sure your card has ALL your details: mailing address, telephone, cell phone number, email, and (if applicable) website address.

Your business card should be smart, clean, and easy-to-read. Don’t be too flamboyant. I know a designer who had his details printed from left-to-right on one side, and his details printed backwards from right-to-left on the other side. Whilst filing it away, his biggest potential client clipped it onto a backer card inside out. When she called upon it later she couldn’t make sense of it. Consequently she trashed the card and called another designer.

Print plenty of cards. An extra thousand won’t break the bank. Give several cards to new prospective clients at meetings (they may give them to their colleagues), and if you have existing clients or contacts, make sure they are well stocked with your cards so they can recommend you. Add a few cards in with your invoices. Leave a few cards in company reception areas, at sports clubs, and anywhere where your prospective clients are likely to congregate. Get them in people’s hands.

Market yourself with mailer-postcards

You may want to print some mailer postcards at the same time you print your business cards. Mailer postcards are a great way to show off your creative talents and get noticed. In an age when executives are familiar with receiving emails from scouting freelancers, postcards received through snail-mail are a novel and memorable way to sell your freelance services.

Showcase your best visual/visuals on side one, then write some marketing copy to sell your services on side two (and remember to include your full contact details). Your copy should focus on the benefits your clients will get from using you. For guidance on writing a persuasive mailer postcard take this free tutorial.

Think about who you are targeting

While you are waiting for your cards to print, you need to research the kind of companies to target for freelance work. Aim high; large corporations with multiple departments make better leads than small or medium-sized businesses. The work you get from a big company is likely to be more lucrative and on-going. You may also get internal recommendations across departments. One company can be a client for life and effectively pay off your mortgage.

Do a Google search for all the big companies who have offices within a reasonable driving distance, and examine each website for contacts. Build yourself a database of contacts in a spreadsheet including the names, titles, email addresses, mail addresses, and telephone numbers of all key sales and marketing contacts within your target companies.

Follow a rigid marketing strategy

Start by sending out your postcards to all the addresses on your database. A week after drop-date, send each of your contacts a personalized email asking if they use freelancers and requesting a meeting to discuss your offer. Include a link to your website so contacts can view your portfolio. If you don’t have a website, ask your contact to reply for samples of your work, then send a maximum of three pdfs or jpegs that total under 2MB (anything over this will be deleted when inboxes get crammed).

There are three things to consider when you are sending emails to prospective clients on your database. First, always send personalized emails to one contact at a time. Never send a round-robin. Second, keep your first email short and polite, asking for permission to send over some samples. Never attach visuals to your introductory email, your email will be deleted as spam. Third, set up an automatic email signature, so your prospective clients can quickly access your contact details. Although most people use business cards to find vendor addresses, some people use email to look up contacts.

Follow up your email with a phone call the next day to get the contacts’ feedback to your samples. Ask if the department uses freelancers and what creative requirements the department has. If your contact regularly uses freelancers, request a meeting to discuss your full portfolio. If your contact doesn’t use freelancers, ask for another contact within the organization who does. Use your database to keep track of all the people you have contacted and when you contacted them, so you know which people to follow up on and when.

Contact plenty of people, and the law of averages states you’ll get plenty of meetings booked.

Present yourself as client-focused whilst pitching

The key to a successful pitching meeting is to be well-prepared and client-focused. Before you travel to the company office, examine the company’s website so you know what kind of brief your contact would give you if you get lucky. Tailor your portfolio for the company by ordering your most relevant work first (that’s why you should use retractable sleeves in your portfolio, allocating one project to one sleeve).

At the meeting, make sure your pitch is relevant. Ask to see the company’s existing publicity, then talk about your most similar graphic design assignments.

Give your prospective client enough information to help them see what you can do for them. With each item of work you present, summarize the original brief, say how you creatively interpreted the brief, and give a sense of how effective the project was. Don’t go into a full project analysis unless asked, and don’t assume your prospective client will want to know the intricacies of your portfolio.

At the end of your meeting, ask if you can meet colleagues in the same department, ask for contacts in other departments, and hand out plenty of business cards. When you get home, send a thank-you email to your contact, reminding them to keep you in mind, and update your activities in your database so you know when to contact them next.

Be persistent

It’s important to remain visible. Promotions controllers are more likely to outsource work to people they meet in person. Pretend that you will be in the area one day and ask to ‘pop in’ for a brief chat—you may have more luck arranging informal ad-hoc meetings than formal put-it-in-your-diary meetings. When you visit a company, remember to take your portfolio and plenty of business cards. You never know who you might meet.

You’ll find that prospective clients often say things like “I have no projects at the moment, but I’ll keep you in mind”. Don’t get frustrated, and certainly don’t beg for work on the phone. Just make a note in your database to keep track of responses, then send reminder emails to contacts every month, just so they really do keep you in mind. Give them a phone call every couple of months; sooner or later they will give you work.

Freelance graphic design pricing

Typical publicity designers earn between $40 and $75 per hour (£25-£40). If you’re good you should think about charging $50, then look to increase by $5 each year depending on your situation.

Clients will often ask you to quote on a project. Estimate the total number of hours you’ll spend working on the first proof, add an extra hour-per-page for artwork corrections, then add another two hours for unforeseen complications such as downloading large files for print. Remember to charge for any time you spend working on the project, including downloading and disk burning time. (Unlike freelance copywriters, designers don’t usually charge for meeting time.)

If you have fixed a price and the client changes the original brief spec half-way through the graphic design assignment, tell your client that you will bill an additional hourly rate for any extra time you spend.

How to boost your freelancing job opportunities

The advice above should help you to get your freelance artwork business off the ground, so you can be completely self-sufficient within six months. Now let’s examine some ideas for artists who want to go beyond self-sufficiency. How can you create surplus demand for your services, so you can literally pick and choose your jobs? How can you double, treble, even quadruple your regular income?

Offer something unique

You are most likely to be competing with other freelance artists in your area who offer a similar service and charge a similar fee. The fact that you might be better than them doesn’t guarantee regular work or considerable fee increases. You need to offer something unique to stand out in an increasingly crowded freelance arena. The idea is simple: offer something unique about your service, and clients will remember you; they will also be prepared to pay more for a specialized service, so you can charge a bigger fee.

A unique aspect of your service might be a specific skill you specialize in or a layer of service you provide that others don’t. For example, if you are a graphic designer, your unique selling proposition may be one of the following:

• Specialize in fast turnaround; i.e. newspaper advertisements designed and sent in a day
• Ability to work across media (Leaflet design, Animated presentation design, 3D design, web design)
• On call evenings and weekends: 24/7 design service
• Quick response promise: will respond to all emails and enquiries within 10 minutes
• Accuracy: a free proof-reading service before artwork handover
• Specialize in a particular style; i.e. exceptional picture research, Asian-appeal design, children’s design, etc

Specializing in one particular aspect of your job doesn’t mean you need to narrow the choice of services or design styles you can provide. Indeed, one unique aspect of your service could be its very broadness; that you can do everything from illustration to 3D design.

Even if you offer a highly specialized service, you can still market your general talents—you just make sure that the unique aspect of your offer is in someway highlighted, either when you phone potential clients, or written in your marketing materials.

A unique layer to your service will attract new clients and allow you to charge more. Once you’ve got new clients, you can offer a more general service too, resulting in maximum client lock-in. And of course, you’ll be offering your general service at a higher price for those new customers.

Communicate the unique aspect of your service online

Once you have isolated your Unique Selling Proposition, present it upfront on your website. By repeating your unique offer several times within your copy, you’ll increase your chances of your website being tracked by web-crawlers, boosting your chances of being found on the first page of the major search engines.

If you want to explore search engine marketing, to market yourself on the Web, you need to start by choosing niche keywords in order to increase traffic to your website. www.wordtracker.com is a useful tool that enables you to see what keywords people are typing into the search engines, and how many websites are competing for the same keywords. It costs around $8 per day or $240 per year.

Find a profitable niche

It’s no good offering a unique layer of service if people aren’t interested in it. The key to finding new customers is to offer a specialized service that lots of people are looking for, but that other artists in the area don’t offer.

If, for example, you offer a highly specialized service like “ancient coin photography”, your number of potential clients will be small, thus limiting your profitability. However, if you offer a more general service such as “book cover photography”, you compete against other freelancers and agencies offering the same service, thus reducing your chances of finding work.

You need to find a profitable niche; offer a high-demand and specialized service to a lucrative segment of the freelance market where there is little or no competition.

To do this, you need to 1) Target the most lucrative market, 2) Research the market, and 3) Offer a specialized service that responds to the needs of your market.

1. Target your most lucrative market.

   Suggestion: focus on marketing departments
   The most profitable freelance artwork jobs are found in the marketing communications sector. If you can design (or provide artwork for) direct selling promotional material such as brochures, adverts, and websites, you can charge much higher fees.

2. Research the market.

   Suggestion: get to know the promotions controllers
   Freelance designers with an understanding of marketing and copywriting are usually favored above designers with no marketing knowledge. That’s because today’s promotions controllers are likely to be project managers; intermediaries between copywriters and designers, and not necessarily creatives themselves. That means today’s publicity designers often have to work harder at interpreting what the client actually wants, and a knowledge of marketing communications often comes in handy.

3. Respond to the needs of your market.

   Suggestion: integrate copywriting into your artwork service and offer full marketing agency creative services
   Copywriting and design services have become interlinked in today’s creative freelance arena. Briefing a copywriter-designer duo is a much more persuasive proposition for promotions controllers than briefing a copywriter, then briefing a separate designer.

However, copywriter-designer duos are really only found in expensive agencies. This leaves a gap in the market; where freelance copywriters and designers can get together to offer full marketing agency creative services, without charging full agency prices.

If you are prepared to try a few new tricks, you can get yourself established in this profitable niche market and start making serious money.

Find yourself a copywriting buddy

Buddying up with a copywriter is a good way of offering a copywriting service without doing the copywriting yourself. A copywriting buddy benefits you in two ways: Not only can you offer a cheap copywriter-designer alternative to expensive agencies (a much more persuasive proposition for clients—they know they can hand the whole project to you at a fraction of the cost compared to using an agency), your copywriting buddy will also keep you in mind to design any assignments he or she finds from other clients.

You’ll get to know freelance copywriters as you work on freelance projects. Alternatively, do a Google search for copywriters in your region. Once you have identified a good copywriter, get in touch, send samples of your work, and ask if you can add their service onto your own website (and vice versa).

Why don’t you offer full marketing agency creative services yourself?

Learn how to do the copywriting yourself and you really will hit the jackpot, easily doubling, trebling, even quadrupling your regular income. If you’ve been inspired by some of the ideas in this article, ask yourself this question: why rely on a copywriting-buddy when you are perfectly capable of writing your own copy yourself?

Don’t let copywriting scare you

Most artistic people find the prospect of writing advertising copy daunting, preferring to concentrate on what they know. But you don’t need to be a born writer to be a copywriter. In fact, copywriting is 25% about writing and 75% about following a few basic rules that all copy adheres to. Click here to read a full list of copywriting rules (taken from 100 Copywriting Tips for Designers and Other Freelance Artists).

You don’t need to be a born writer to write marketing copy

If your writing skills are sufficient enough for you to write a comprehensible website for yourself, it should take you no longer than six weeks of part-time practice to learn the basics of writing effective marketing communications materials. This free tutorial shows you how to master the most fundamental rule of copywriting in four simple stages– you'll also learn how to write your own marketing copy in the process.

You’re the perfect person to offer a copywriting service

Writing as well as designing publicity makes perfect sense for freelance artists.

1. It makes life easier for your clients, because they avoid the time-consuming project management, briefing time, and service searching they would have to put into finding a separate designer and copywriter.
2. You’ll offer a consistency of message and aesthetic look that neither freelance copywriter nor artist could achieve on their own.
3. You’ll effectively offer the same service as an agency, but at the fraction of the cost. Your clients win—and you win too: you’ll be earning around $100 per hour, and each project could keep you busy for months. The result... more clients, happier clients, greater client lock-in, and up to four times more money.

You’ll be surprised how easy it is to learn copywriting

Forget about the expensive courses, you can learn the essentials with a good book. The three best are:

• The Copywriter’s Handbook,
  Robert W. Bly (Owl Books, 1990, $16)
  A clear, comprehensive guide to the business of and techniques used in advertising copywriting. Includes guidance on the tasks of a copywriter, the copywriting business, and how to write a variety of different printed publicity including public relations material, radio and TV commercials, speeches and sales literature.
  Robert W. Bly is an independent copywriter specializing in business-to-business and direct-response advertising.
• Teach Yourself Copywriting,
  Jonathon Gabay (Teach Yourself, 2001)
  A guide for anyone who needs to know how to produce advertising and marketing materials. The revised edition includes chapters on e-mail and Internet marketing and covers new theories and practices in copywriting.
  Jonathon Gabay is currently the director of a large advertising agency.
• 100 Copywriting Tips for Designers and Other Freelance Artists,
  Shaun J. Crowley (Wisemen E-books / TradeBit 2006)
  The only copywriting manual written specifically for designers. Reveals 100 copywriting tricks-of-the-trade, including guidance on planning and conceptualizing web and print publicity, how to defeat writer’s block, how to write copy that sells, and how to marry your copy and visuals together.
  Click here to find out more about the book.
  Shaun Crowley is a freelance copywriter, trainer, and marketing consultant.

Conclusion

• Don’t waste time searching for freelance graphic design job postings. You can find more work if you present yourself as a business and contact companies direct.
• Target the marketing departments of big companies, and be persistent.
• Use postcards, emails, the telephone, and ad-hoc company visits to promote your services.
• Focus on an area you specialize in and offer a unique level of service to attract new clients.
• Freelance designers with an understanding of marketing and copywriting are usually favored above designers with no marketing knowledge.
• If you want to offer a high-demand and specialized service to a lucrative segment of the freelance market where there is little or no competition, find a copywriting buddy and offer a complete marketing service.
• To further boost your freelancing job opportunities, learn how to write marketing copy yourself and offer full creative marketing agency services on your own.

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