A beginner’s guide to selling yourself as a freelance web designer: Part 1: Understanding your | Heart Internet Blog – Focusing on all aspects of the web

Learning to sell yourself effectively as a freelance web designer is hugely important, but without a clear plan of action it can be difficult to get the results you want. This skill is essential to succeeding at any stage of your career/business and, even if you’ve got a large amount of experience, it’s always useful to update yourself and find opportunities to optimise your work life.

So, whether you’re just starting out or if you’ve already got a number of clients but are keen to keep growing, this series of blog posts will help you to boost your client base and advance your career.

How do I find good clients?

The first stage in selling yourself is to develop an understanding of who your ideal clients are and, to do this, you need to think about how these clients behave and think.

Try filling in this list to create detailed profiles of who your customers are, or, who you want them to be:

Target Audience

Occupation: Small business owner

Location: London

Goals: To enlarge their team, to expand into a new office, to add more products/services to their offering

Wants: New technology for their business, more employees, better quality design

Motivations: Profit, prestige, love for their business

Aspirations: To become a leading figure in their industry, to have more time for themselves

Fears: Not receiving enough new business, not keeping up with their competitors, low levels of company growth

Problems to be solved: They want to present their company effectively through great design and don’t have the resource for an in-house designer

In the same way that a product sold by a company won’t have much success if it doesn’t address the wants and needs of its target audience, you’re much more likely to win the clients that you want to work with if you understand how they view web designers before you start selling yourself.

Do you want to work with clients in a specific niche or industry, avoid clients with particular traits or get clients who can offer you higher levels of flexibility? As a freelancer, you’re free (no pun intended) to choose who you want to work with, so take the time to really ask yourself why you want to work with this type of client to give yourself the best chance to take on projects that you want to do and that you will enjoy working on.

Communicate with key people

The next phase is to get some insights into how clients often experience web design. If you’ve freelanced for people in the past, or if you know people who work with web designers, why not try asking them some questions to see what really matters to them in these working relationships? These questions can provide in-depth information to help you sell yourself, but they can create new possibilities and opportunities as well. You never know; if you’re having a great conversation with someone about freelance web design they might mention an upcoming project that they could really use your skills on or tell you about a contact who could give you some fantastic help or advice. In cases like these, having your list of the qualities for your ideal clients will also help you to more easily determine if these opportunities are right for you.

What kind of questions should I ask?

To get the ball rolling, here are a few example questions you could ask; you may want to add some questions that are more specific to your goals as well:

“What are the most important things you consider when choosing to work with a web designer”?

“What do you expect from freelance web designers that you work with”?

“What have web designers done in the past that has really impressed you”?

“Are there any downsides that you see to working with freelance web designers”?

If you’re finding it difficult to come up with enough questions, try to think about some broader topics to get ideas flowing.

These could include…

Deadlines

Working hours

Meetings

Communication

Offering extra services

Client relationships

Briefings

Payment

The length of projects

What’s the best way to ask my questions?

You’re likely to get the best results from asking questions in person, but, if you’re keen to hear from people who aren’t local to you, answers sent over social media platforms or email should still give you a decent amount of detail. Try to get answers from a range of different people whose opinions you value. This is because everyone’s answers are likely to be slightly different, but having a variety of perspectives can only give you more information to draw upon. If you’re struggling to find enough people to ask these questions to, you can also post them on forums to get a wide range of responses.

In the next post in this series, I’ll explain how to use the insights you’ve developed from this section to stand out from others and show potential clients why working with you will bring them the results they are looking for.

Image Credit: Gabriel Garcia Marengo

Comments

Please remember that all comments are moderated and any links you paste in your comment will remain as plain text. If your comment looks like spam it will be deleted. We're looking forward to answering your questions and hearing your comments and opinions!

Got a question? Explore our Support Database. Start a live chat*.
Or log in to raise a ticket for support.
*Please note: you will need to accept cookies to see and use our live chat service