Just sharing my four years freelancing experience.
As a freelancer, the first important thing I have to consider is that I eagerly need stable income to maintain my livelihood. Almost all the earnings in the first two years are from my web design service in my country, I got a couple of common problems when I started, How to find the clients? How to get better prices? Well, let’s me start to tell you my stories and I summed up the a few main points of my experience, hope it will help some new freelancers.
Create a website
At the first stage, no one knew me, that’s terrible, you know some younger designers are usually not a social guy and like to stay in the room and spend a whole day to learning or designing, so maybe we don’t have the wide social network, well then, what’s the next? Build a portfolios website? Right, is there any better way than this solution? Temporarily no! So I created a simple personal website(Strictly, it’s only an online resume like the picture above), put all my old works on it, posted some articles in my blog for SEO and then, started to waiting for the client knock my door. Unfortunately, no one contacted me, my old colleagues often asked me, “how is your business going on?”, I was lost for an answer, and I knew they wanna convince me to return to company and they want me know that I’ve made a wrong decision, but, this marks a beginning, isn’t it?
Become a man of value
One day, I chatted with a friend on Gtalk, he gave me a good suggestion.
“ You should create some valueable stuffs on your website and share it to your target customers, and communicate with the other designers in order to improve your business, make your website living, let’s your clients to know who you are and how you are working, and then you will get their friendly feedback.”
I inspired by this opinion, started to write some design tips, show my daily work and so on. After two months, some people reached my website from the search engine, they adviced me something about web design, and shortly afterwards ,my first client was coming. Oh, yes!
Let more persons know you
Since then, I have more and more clients, one thing is worth to say, some kind clients introduced me more customers and kindly gave me many advices.
“ Let more persons know you, no matter where they are, even if they based in the other side of the earth, don’t forget the social media is the best assistant, and don’t locked yourself in the local place…”
Join the global comunity
No doubt that my client’s advice was opening a new window for me, they let me know a larger external world. So, since 2013, I stopped my local web design service, and entered into the international market — I became a full time WordPress Theme Author on Themeforest(I’m sure you know it), this job can bring me the stable passive income and release my time, I’m enjoy in this job up to now.
I’ve benefited a lot from it, especially good for my design ability, and improve my English, lol
So at last, I just want to say again, don’t leave yourself alone, just let more persons know you, join the wider world now and keep in touch with this world, not only the computer.