How To REALLY Find Design Clients

on today's episode of the most pressing questions for most freelancers starting out how to really but really find clients stay tuned hey everybody what's up my name is Ron Siegel I'm freelance designer for the past 17 years and for the last six of them full time and on this channel I share some of my learnings and progress as a freelance designer and I've been sharing on this channel multiple times the way that I found clients usually by creating relationships getting referrals you know going to events but I came to understand after people asking me this over and over again even after I've shared what worked for me that sometimes it were worse for people is different for different people and so today I want to give you a different perspective on all the different possibilities for you to find clients and help you find the relevant one for yourself so as I've said what works for me personally is creating relationship with people and referrals and that's why in this channel I talked a lot about creating relationship networking making friends that kind of stuff however from my experience and meeting with other successful designers I know that for other people they have been able to find amazing clients and build a very successful career in completely different channels so the first thing I want to do here with you is cover all the different possibilities that you have and then we'll talk about how to understand what will work for you so let's just cover them pretty quickly what are all the possible channels for you to find clients so the first one as I said it's getting referral from people that you know from past clients from friends family and so forth the second one is that you'll be able to if you create content on blogs people might search for that content specifically and through creating content and SEO people will come to know you and understand you and then maybe they want to work with you so for example if you're looking to work with people in the music industry if you will work a lot of articles about let's say reviews of music covered designs if you will write a lot of articles about this and some musician might Google how to best design my new album they might reach your content learn to like you learn to trust you and then reach out for you for a project so that creating content in a blog form and then using search as a way for people to find you is something that can work YouTube you're on YouTube right now watching my video you might be a potential client you will see how I work how I think the kind of work that I'm doing and you might reach out to me from my experience I did get a lot of proposals or relevant clients come to me it's actually not super relevant clients reach out to me because of my youtube channel but honestly I didn't start my YouTube challenge to find clients just to share my learnings with other designers so my specific YouTube journey has not been able to come I mean wasn't oriented at finding clients but my friends AJ and smart runs you know a design agency they've opened up their YouTube channel strategically for attracting clients they're talking a lot about the design sprints and then everybody who end up looking clients who are looking to work with somebody to facilitate a designs brain found them on YouTube and they got as far as I know a lot of their clients from YouTube so YouTube might work for different people dribble you know a lot of people open up dribble accounts and dribble has a search function so somebody might look for um I'm based in Boston so I'm looking for another designer who is based in Boston let's see who's trending let's see who is the best in Boston they might search for you know the specific topics you axe Web Design whatever they might find you and off dribble and they might even hire you through dribble so dribble and actually be haints which is pretty similar because behance also has some kind of a search mechanism those can be channels for you by opening up a website there are portfolio there you can find clients linkedin linkedin is now at the moment 2019 super super hot I mean I know a lot of people who are finding most of their clients off LinkedIn again by creating content by creating relationship by being inside groups they might find clients so again this is a focused on this social network that is focused on creating business relationships so obviously most of your clients are there if they are business owners or that kind of stuff they might be on LinkedIn another one going to events that's kind of similar to referrals but it's also a way to go and meet potential clients at you know conferences that are relevant to their topic so if I'm working in with clients in the startup industry I go to startup events and I meet people you know we have a drink we talk what do you do what I do a create relationship they ended up hiring me so events is another way of meeting clients cold emails you know you might do a research if I want to work with a restaurant I'll look at restaurants that I want to build their website I might reach out to them send them some kind of a case study about how I can improve their website create a relationship and demonstrate my expertise that way and then that might lead into a paint project I know I'm going super super fast on this but I just want to cover give you kind of an overview of what's possible the third the next one is side project so a lot of designers in particularly do thinks that they enjoy on themself for themselves and they share it perhaps on social media and then potential clients might look for that so I've met this amazing Australian girl honestly I forgot her name but she's amazing with typography and she just did typography back home like this crazy illustration with type shared it on social media on Instagram a lot of people like this now she's like all over the world painting walls and doing like work for high-profile clients just because she did what she's passionate about and shared it not as client work but just a side project on her own social network so that's also a thing by the way I did not mention social networks here actually such as Instagram but Instagram you might say that it's another channel kind of like dribble or Oba Hanes where you might put your portfolio on there and people might find you through there and DM you and create a relationship with you another one is using paid ads so another thing that you might want to do is create paid ads let's say on Facebook where you're targeting the specific client that you want to address and you can create I've seen some people that are creating some kind of a case study funnels where you the client will actually see an ad for a case study let's say you're designing website so again restaurants owner you're targeting restaurant owner and then they're gonna click on a video that showcases how you have designed a website or a brand for a different restaurant owner a restaurant owner that will build a trust and that will lead for them to contact you at the end so kind of a funnel like this where you're reaching them through ads and the last one I feel like I'm really running them really fast and though but it's still we're seven minutes in so there's a lot to cover here the last one is freelancing website such as upwork freelancer.com or all those type of stuff I know they're they're being kind of bashed down is not a good place to find clients but I do know personally people who are very very successful on using those channels and they're still managing to be kind of premium sellers on these platforms so if you're really really good and you've kind of won this channel if you're on up work and you've got gazillions of good reviews you can put your prices higher and you can make a very very nice you know pay in compensation if you've kind of won this specific channel okay now that we know it's kind of overwhelming oh my god do I need to actually do all of these things which one is the right one for me so the truth is you're probably if you're just starting out you're probably not gonna be able to tell okay and I know that again I'm sharing all the time what I'm doing and what works for me but you have to be careful when you listen to me in general when you're listening to people giving advice you always have to be careful because the people who are giving advice me included are always biased to share what worked for them and that's not what works for everybody else you really need to understand yourself so my advice for you would be to if you're just starting out you need to dabble in too few things and see what works for you because each one of these channel requires different skills requires different mentality so for example if you want to succeed at referrals and going to events for example you need to be kind of a people person right you need to love to do Network and to meet with people and step outside of what a lot of people have kind of a outside their comfort zone because they don't like going and socializing with other people but that's what it takes to win that specific game if you want to succeed on dribble for example and you can you have to know the platform because dribble is a totally different play you have to learn how to gain followers how to get interact with the community and that's how you kind of build build your your yourself on that platform it requires totally different skills so here's what I suggest I suggest before you get started you ask yourself a few questions that will help you understand where you should focus yourself okay so the first thing that you want to ask yourself is what does it take to win with this specific channel and as I've mentioned each of them has kind of a different skills each of them is a different play and you have to ask yourself do I want to keep doing that thing long term will I actually enjoy doing this because you know to win with ads for example you have to be really in a way pushy and salesy and gain attention be kind of dramatic and maybe you're not the kind of person that wants to be that way right maybe it's just not for you so you have to understand first of all what works in this channel you can't say okay I want to win at a dribble right but you don't know how to do these maybe beautiful composition you don't know how to interact with the community you don't know how to gain followers because by gaining followers you gain kind of trust within the platform and that's probably what people are going to look for so you really need to digest they do your research in a way and actually I think that you can actually Google something like what does it take to to grow on dribble for example or how to do successful ads you need to do kind of a research and understand the the core skills of each of these channels and then to understand if you think you're gonna enjoy doing it long term some of those things to be honest you probably can't just know without doing right you have to experiment a little bit and it's possible that you will experiment with different channels in the beginning to see what works but you also have to consider when you ask yourself am I going to have an edge or because each one of these channels is a competitive Channel right a lot of people there's a lot of people who are trying to win on dribble on Instagram on B Haynes there is a huge competition there and you have to think do I have what it takes to win on that platform so I'll go back to my example just because that's how I'm thinking about this so in terms of referrals and building Network and going to events I have an edge because I live specifically in Tel Aviv Israel where there is a very big tech industry and startup communities and so I'm very close by I can just walk 10 minutes to an event right now where most of the people in the world don't have access because it's not walking distance for them right so I only have to compete in terms of events and networking I only have to compete with the people who are around me in Tel Aviv area and I know that most people feel uncomfortable going to events it's out of their comfort zone as I said so actually by me being able to do that and loving actually to go outside and meet people I have kind of beat a lot of the competition if I would want to win on dribble that's a completely different game for me okay because I now and now I'm competing with designers all over the world so it's a different game however depending on where you are because I know a lot of you are writing to me I don't live in a big city there is no clients nearby or events nearby so that means that you don't have an edge on referrals you might have an edge on something else you know that and you have to think about this and your edge could be your ability your skill where you are how much you charge all of these things can be an edge for you to win on a specific platform so that's what I want to encourage you to do I want you to encourage you to experiment with multiple things and see what you enjoy doing and what you're starting to gain traction with and obviously all of this to win on a certain channel takes time takes time to build yourself and so one of the things that after you experiment and you see what you're good at or you're what's working for you I want to encourage you to focus okay and select the one that works and then leave all the rest and double down on that because the way that these channel works is once somebody's the ones who are at the top get most of the work right so the people who are on up work and have the amazing reviews okay they can charge $200 an hour you know the one percent of freelancers on up work that have all these good reviews amazing reviews they can have they can charge $200 an hour worth the rest of the people on up work are charging whatever $15 an hour so the people who win take the most of the pot the people who have you know forty thousand followers on dribble are gonna get most of the offers on dribble so you and if you try to do everything if you're trying to be everywhere try to be on LinkedIn and on Instagram and maintain this and this and that and a blog and a YouTube you're just gonna overwhelm yourself and you're gonna be stay very small on all channels and most probably you're not gonna get amazing leads because you're not gonna win any specific channel so what I encourage is experiment at the beginning cuz you're not gonna know what's working you're not gonna know what you enjoy doing and what it takes to win so you need to explore a little bit when you're starting out but when something is working don't dilute your efforts by trying to win everywhere and be everywhere I you know I don't have a LinkedIn profile my portfolio has been very much neglected over the past two years I basically don't do anything besides the club relationship because that's what's working for me and all the rest of the things are kind of a waste of time for me so that's what I encourage you to experiment find what's working and then focus focus focus so you can be the best in that specific channel I hope that was helpful for you you're welcome to you know subscribe to the channel you're also welcome to stay to check out my Instagram channel which I'm posting daily also helpful tip so I'm hoping to guide you along you're a freelance and design journey and I'll see you on the next video

Channel: Flux Academy

Views: 90,400

Keywords: Design, designer, ran segall, flux, startups, startup, freelance designer, web design, web designer, web development, web developer, web development freelancer, web development tools, freelance web developer, web flow, how to start freelancing, web design business, how to freelance, start freelancing, freelance web design, Freelance, freelancer, freelancing, graphic design, graphic designer, web designer career, web design tutorial, website design, how to find clients

Id: bXP2FLcqJag

Length: 16min 11sec (971 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 09 2019