How to Start Getting Freelance Work

alright let me try that again looks like I just started um do you want to comment and let me know if my audio is coming in if you can hear everything just fine yes audios good okay cool nice very cool I'm gonna go ahead and throw up one more message on Instagram just to let people know one last time that this is live so people can trickle in and we can have a good old time get as many people here as possible in the meantime while we're getting set up go ahead and take a second and let me know where you guys are joining from I'm always curious about that all right hey Instagram just letting you guys know if you were interested in joining the livestream on how to get freelance or how to start getting freelance clients go ahead and follow the link in my bio we are now live I'm gonna hang out casually for about the next hour or so hope to see you there awesome thanks for letting me do that cool so we've got let's see who we have here we've got someone from Brazil we've got someone here from Taiwan so we've got side effect from Taiwan Cheers Yuri is here from Brazil we've got Mario from Bulgaria that's sweet Joshua from the UK Rita from Belgium Kieran from India wow we have such a such an awesome representation general or sorry Jiro from Argentina Jay from Seattle Oh Jay what's up man been a minute Jonathan from the UK I thought atharva from India Simon from Germany Wow Joan from Barcelona what's up man Shin from China hopefully I said that right we've got Alvaro from Spain hi COEs hanging out from Germany reveal a rebel from Turkey George from London Wow we've got awesome awesome representation sweet guys this is this is fun this is cool so as I might have mentioned just a bit ago this is my second ever live stream so if I'm awkward headed or if I mess something up please forgive me but I'm looking forward to trying to do something a little bit different I thought with each monday publishing a new kind of a youtube I'm sorry a new keisha or somewhat technical rendering tutorial this would be kind of an interesting and kind of a complementary series that would kind of bookend the week so I thought it'd be sweet to do a casual we'll hang out like every Friday but not just aimless talking the the idea would be that each week I'll I'll check in with everyone in on Instagram or my email list or wherever and find out what you guys are interested in hearing about and then the goal would be to yeah to kind of prep a little bit I've got some bullet points I'm gonna run through today just to have a loose structure and then of course once we get through that you know any sort of Q&A anything like that I'd love to chat and hang out so so that's kind of what we're gonna be doing today and and today maybe you know the first few of these live streams maybe just me kind of getting into a routine and and really getting comfortable with all this but hopefully it'll be a fun way to connect on a regular basis again I know we're all kind of holed up in our own little corners of the world so I don't know I think it'll be fun let's see I'm gonna do my best to balance keeping an eye on the comments but also keeping on track and trying to offer as much little pointers as I can that will help you guys out sweet looks like the audio and videos coming in pretty good I actually chose to stream in 1080 because I was concerned about bandwidth I'm not sure if that's still an issue it looks like I have a great connection so maybe next time we'll try 1440p which is about the highest I can go since my monitor won't actually know I should be able to do 4k streaming my monitor won't display full 4k but my camera I'm using a Sony a7 3 which sends a 4k signal into my computer so that should be possible so anyway we'll see ya a good audio and video is pretty important I find that I spend so much time on YouTube myself that I think that that's gonna be pretty important going forward so any suggestions you guys have I'm always down also preemptively I live unfortunately near some train tracks and there's every Friday they do lawn work like maintenance so I'm already hearing lawnmowers and eventually we might hear leaf blowers so I'm hoping that my audio setup doesn't um bring too much of that into the conversation but anyway let let's stop delaying here we've got about 55 people on here which is pretty rad I'm gonna go ahead and I'm gonna be glancing down at my phone a lot because I made a note with all the bullet points I want to get through today on my phone but in the future since this seems to be a pretty cool since this seems to be a pretty cool format that you guys are into I will look at doing some PDFs or some some slideshows maybe with like Google slides and like finding a way to toggle between those and just me talking here but I got to figure that out so somebody asked where I am and what time it is a great question I should have said that so I'm in Southern California so I don't live in LA I'm about an hour and a half east of LA so I'm kind of anyone in the US or in California if you were to head toward Palm Springs from LA you would pass by where I live so I'm closer to Riverside um and right now it's 909 a.m. so I've got my my second cup of coffee here since I'm a morning person I'm already on to decaf but I love my coffee so I'll be sipping coffee pretty much throughout the day cool so I'm gonna I'm gonna try to jump in here and not waste anybody's time and but later as we go I'm gonna be kind of curious to find out timing wise if this works for people I I struggled to choose a time because I know there's people everywhere from Australia to the UK to India to to the US 9 a.m. just happened to work on my schedule today so we'll see I also don't know weekend's versus weekdays what works for you guys I don't know how many you go into an office still and have to work around employers if this is a inconvenient time for you guys but these are all things we can discuss later a couple more people in here I see familiar name Derrick Elliot's live that's sweet love your tutorials man so it's 9:45 p.m. where where somebody else is from yeah it's crazy how it's it's all over the world all different time zones all right guys so I'm gonna try to jump into this so when I asked about so actually was a few months ago that I actually yeah a couple months ago that I put a pull out on Instagram asking people what topics they'd be interested in hearing about if I was to do the series and I got a ton of responses so if you replied to anything I did on Instagram thank you so much I went ahead and saved all those in a file and I feel bad because sometimes I ask you guys to let me know what to do next on Instagram and then I have to file it away for like a month or two while my schedule clears up so I can actually act on that so this is the first attempt at that so I had tons of great recommendations and between in the first two on the list were time management for freelancers and then how to start getting freelance clients and when I asked you guys again almost everybody hands down like 200 to one basically said we want to know how to get more for you than its clients or start getting freelance clients so and to split hairs those are actually two different topics in my opinion you do different things to get more clients if you're already working as a freelancer then you do to just start getting freelance clients and so this is particularly particularly going to focus on starting out if you guys haven't done that yet and I also want to throw a disclaimer out there I'm not a pro yes I I do freelance professionally but like I started my business a year ago so I have less experience than some people and and I've learned a lot along the way and I'm gonna do my best to share as much as I know with you guys okay so we're gonna we're gonna start this off with me assuming that your work is all ready good enough to start freelancing and I know that sounds a little obvious and harsh but the point here is that I'm going to assume that your work is at a level that somebody is willing to pay you for it and that is how you're gonna know if you're ready if a company or an individual is willing to pay for your services then you are ready to jump in and and and so how do you find out you know it's like you kind of have to get that first client basically and and anyone who saw the video I put out a while ago about my professional journey you might remember that I started getting I got my first client on Craigslist not a really glamorous marketplace and and you know you're not gonna find the super huge gigs and the big recognizable brand names looking for freelancers on Craigslist but at the time that's just what I did and it turns out that it worked it worked for me so when you when you're starting out you're going to you're going to need to kind of pay your dues so to speak and I know that stinks but everyone has to start somewhere and I would encourage you to look at your first maybe three freelance clients as learning opportunities not money-making opportunities and I know that is counterintuitive but this is key because you're gonna learn so much on those first three gigs that it would almost be in my mind I was like oh it's almost criminal if I'm charging somebody because I'm being really inefficient with my time on those first three gigs I had I was not fast at what I was doing I was doing a lot of trial and error a lot of research a lot of googling and watching a lot of tutorials to figure out what I had to do to get my client what they wanted so you shouldn't be billing them a lot of money if most of the time you're learning yourself and not just producing work for them so just as a reminder I think that it's good to charge money for your first few gigs but not a lot and don't set your expectations super high there's this is good for a couple reasons the client that you service for not a super high fee is going to be stoked when you're actually able to give them what they wanted at a very good deal and then think of this fact that you're not making as much money from it think of that as an education tax you're kind of earning less because it's an opportunity that this client is gracious enough to afford you because you're gonna have to do some learning on the job okay so that's the first thing I really want to get out of the way is that mindset when you begin you're going to need to lower some expectations and this is also why I recommend having a full time job when you start freelancing I don't think it's good to quit your job immediately to go into freelancing and if you're fresh out of college and you haven't had work experience I still think I I mean I don't discourage starting to freelance but I still think you should prioritize getting a job where you can learn from people in an industry that you're interested in because no matter where you get a job you're going to learn something even if it's at a restaurant even if it's at I don't know something that's unrelated to the design work that you want to do every single job anyone who will ever hire you is running a business that makes enough money to pay for you and that's probably I mean that's a huge accomplishment on its own so if you can learn from that business what they're doing to earn that money to be able to afford to pay you then that's that's part of your education as well so just throw in those guys out there to start now let's actually that's that's my whole preamble I know that that's a lot but but the last thing I'll say is aim for like so how good is good enough before you start freelancing I'm gonna say aim for 80% proficiency and what I mean by that is if your goal is a hundred percent and that is like what you think the average skills that your your clients may be going to if you look around it like let's say you're a 3d modeling guy or gal and you're gonna offer CAD services and you look around your portfolio and your skills should be about 80% as good as the average user who the average professional let me let me say that the average professional so in a lot of business cases 80% is about good enough to give the client what they want and and then as your skills go up over time you're going to charge more and work with bigger clients so start in the beginning with smaller clients and and charge them less basically so okay so now I'm going to get into the first main topic I'm gonna pause before I do that just to take a look at the comments real quick let's see a cool cool just making sure there's nothing critical I got a respond to what if you're already good at what you do man then you should be teaching this class Mario no I'm sorry that don't take that the wrong way I'm just having fun with you what if you're already good at what you do then then you can skip working with small clients and we'll get into that that's cool I love that okay so the first thing that I want to start by saying is with it the way this question was worded a lot of people say how do I find freelance clients and I want to rephrase that or re-frame that in a way because finding a freelance client doesn't mean that someone's gonna pay you your job or sorry your goal is to get a company who's willing to pay you for your services so it's not so much finding the clients it's like you need someone who's ready and willing to pay for your services so we go we find out how to do that by looking at this question why - why do clients hire freelancers to begin with okay you got to know that first usually in my experience companies are gonna hire a freelancer when they don't have enough bandwidth to do the work that they need done so that's one there everyone on their team is already too busy so they're looking for more temporary work to alleviate the pain of everyone being over worked so that's one reason people hire freelancers another one is technical limitations so let's say they they have basic in my case it's a lot of times people have some basic rendering skills in-house but then they're gonna unveil a product globally but they need some like flashy animation skills because they want more of a product commercial and while the guys or the gals who work at that company can do some basic renderings they're not up to snuff on career like production level animations so that's so technical skills if you have a skill that goes beyond what they have in-house then they're likely to hire you for a specific project then the next thing is creative limitations and this is one that's often overlooked so a lot of designers out there are good technicians meaning they know the software they can push the buttons they know how to operate the software however what really separates the most successful freelancers or independent creatives is their their ability to be creative and I know it sounds stupid but like what I mean is their vision think of your best sorry your favorite musicians your favorite directors for films or painters or whatever what makes them better than anyone else out there it's because they have a unique story a unique vision they are creative in what they're doing so if you have this kind of signature look or style or attitude about what you do that's your creative brand that a company may hire so if a company has a fairly traditional or unexcited product but they're hoping to appeal to a different audience then they may want to bring in someone who's got more of a creative vision and that's that's where if they don't have that in-house they may hire you for a project and then lastly companies might hire freelancers to save money so they don't have to hire say a new part-time or a full-time employee I'm gonna go ahead and say right now try not to work with someone who's hiring freelancers simply to save money I'm gonna say right up front competing on price is only something you do for a very short period of time and the very beginning of your career ideally okay so if if clients normally hire freelancers because they don't have enough internal bandwidth they don't have enough technical abilities in-house or they don't have the creative vision in-house to bring what they want to market or to life then those are the things that you're going to that's what they're looking for that's why they're trying to hire you and that's what you need to keep in mind when you go put your kind of hang your shingle up so to speak so so people can find you so so now why don't clients I'll hire freelancers this is the other side of this question we know why they do hire freelancers but why do they sometimes choose not to hire freelancers and that's because one they don't know you exist this is the biggest thing here most of us when you say I can't find freelance clients or how do I start the big thing is they need to know that you exist and if they knew you exist they're more likely to hire you they're guaranteed to not hire you if they don't know that you exist next is they don't trust you so a client doesn't or yeah a company or a client doesn't hire a freelancer that they don't trust and if they never worked with you before how the heck are they going to trust you once they find out that you exist so we're gonna get into this I'm going to answer these questions I'm not just throwing a bunch of questions at you but we need to keep in mind these these barriers that clients face when they go to hire freelancers so either they don't know you exist they don't trust you maybe they don't like you this is another big thing if you have a fairly outspoken or abrasive personality online or in person believe it or not that weighs heavily on whether or not somebody hires you if you're annoying to be around you're not gonna get hired no one's gonna want to work with you likewise I've turned clients away that I thought were not a good cultural fit when I had a first meeting with them face to face I was like sorry I can already tell in the pit of my stomach I'm gonna hate working with them so I just had to politely pass them along and say sorry my schedule is too full sometimes it's just not a fit and lastly they may not hire you if they can't afford you so every company has a budget you need to work on being competitive but also earning your fee that you deserve and not every company's going to be able to pay that especially especially in the beginning if you're working with smaller clients so now that we know the reasons clients hire freelancers and then the barriers that they run into when they start looking for freelancers oh I'll add one more that I can think of off the top of my head they also don't hire freelancers it seems like it's gonna take a lot of time and effort if you've never worked in a professional position before you may not be aware of how much time and effort and resources it takes to actually interview and hire and vet and on board and train somebody it is a huge undertaking and if someone's already busy and overwhelmed at work the last thing they want to do is put effort into chasing down freelancers it really is not easy so if you can make it easy for them that's a huge win and we'll get into that so what does all this mean you have a few goals and we're gonna talk about how you can achieve those goals and this is how you're going to increase your likelihood for getting those client gigs I'm gonna take a pause real quick to check out the comments again since I have nobody else moderating here let's see what's a good price to charge ooh I think that's enough I think that's a good topic for another livestream I'm more than happy to get into pricing what's up lots more people in here lots of technical questions unfortunately I'm not going to get into answering technical questions a software yet on this but questions on up work and fibers so these are some good ones good questions that are very so anything that's relevant to our topic right now to freelancing or finding clients hold those and we'll have a Q&A at the end and I'll be more than happy to talk on those in real time which i think is great ok so your goals here are now that we know that a client has certain obstacles they have to overcome when they go to hire freelancers we those are now our mission as a freelancer your mission is to overcome or remove those obstacles from your client and so the first one is that let's make sure a client can easily find you this is the biggest most obvious one so in the past full disclaimer I I did freelance for a couple years from 2014 2016 and it was very hard I kind of barely scraped by it was not profitable I was I was paycheck to paycheck even borrowing money sometimes um so that didn't work I tried for a couple years it was hard now it wasn't there's a lot of reasons it didn't work out and we can get into that on a later topic but what I know now is that I was making a lot of mistakes then but it was more what's more important is what I was not doing it's not that I was doing things wrong it's that I simply wasn't doing the right things and that's what I want to give you is some guidance and ideas of what right things you can do to stay busy with clients so first and foremost they have to be able to easily find you now I started really building an online presence to see I started blogging in 2013 I started writing small like a like a little tumblr bloggers I don't even know what it was I started writing very short like two or three paragraph essays on design and technology before anyone was paying attention and then I started putting a lot of time into like LinkedIn and a little bit of Instagram in 2014 I think is when I started doing that for design and writing articles on medium publishing them on I've always kept a website with like a blog with articles and stuff and then just lately I started focusing on some more video content of course but the point being is that I have been chipping away steadily putting a lot of content online and that increases the likelihood that someone's going to find me and so if you're if you're not constantly or continually putting more good content out there think of every little piece of content you publish online is a little beacon like a little lighthouse that could lead someone back to you and the stronger the piece of content and the the more you know the more likely it is to lead somebody to you so I don't use Facebook and I don't really use Twitter I have one but I stopped using it so I only use a little bit of LinkedIn a fair bit of Instagram but I'm getting burnt out on insta go to be honest and and now I'm all in on YouTube so in my website so I really like finding a platform that resonates with you that you feel comfortable at that you really click with people on and then double down on that and the content you put on there needs to not be salesy or promotional it needs to actually be helpful and I know again you've heard this deliver value yada yada yada but don't overthink it simply ask yourself what like don't put out a piece of content that you wouldn't want to like does that make sense if you're up you know in the past I felt like burned out or intimidated about trying to do freelance so I actually wrote just an off-the-cuff post about a week ago on LinkedIn that's actually been quite popular and it was just me kind of offering a nudge to a lot of people saying hey a lot of things have changed lately a lot of us are at home some of us lost jobs if you ever thought about freelancing give it a shot because I think you're if if you've thought about it you should try it you have so little to lose and everything to gain and it was just must be encouraging but a lot of people it resonate with a lot of people and some of them said ah this is what I needed to hear so that's the type of content I'm talking about put out something that's encouraging motivational helpful maybe you learn something new and you're like ah I figured out how to do a new thing I want you to know how to do it so here I'm gonna share it with you that's the type of thing that is going to lead people to you and and start to gain their trust and things like that long before you ask them about working with them okay so you got to make it easy to find you so you need to be putting out pieces of content consider this meet your potential employers where they're looking so I am big I'm not big on Facebook I'm not on Facebook at all really but I'm big on LinkedIn because I knew from an early stage that if I wanted to freelance or start my own business that the people who would be potential clients are gonna be on LinkedIn they're probably not spending all day on Facebook now there are other people who maybe Facebook is a good like let's say your professional dog trainer you should be on Facebook you're gonna find more people who will respond who be your clients there but if I'm more of a b2b a business-to-business if I'm gonna try to sell my services to a studio or a company then I need to be on LinkedIn where people are actively looking and LinkedIn is almost a social network where it's like it's okay to be on there when you're at work so I'm more likely to engage with people there so think about going where your clients may be hanging out if you're a videographer you should be on LinkedIn or sorry not like um Vimeo and YouTube and really active on on those socials where people are going to be maybe even behance you know things like that so then ask yourself what are they searching for these potential clients of yours are they looking for something like the word freelancer are they looking for a studio or an agency do they need renderings they need CAD work every piece of content you put out on the platform that your potential clients are hanging out on should try to align with the thing they're looking for so if I am trying to get more animation work I need to and actually this is this is an interesting insight I did want to start doing more animation work this past year so I started I realized I didn't have that much and even though I knew a fair bit about animation because I trained keyShot before I didn't actually have a lot of good examples myself so I gave myself one week to pull together a show reel for a demo reel for animation and I combed through a bunch of old projects I had kicking around on the computer somewhere a couple years old and I pulled all the animations put them in a folder and I looked at some other I looked at some projects that had some like pretty strong compositions and I'm like what if I just do a simple camera animation and rerender this out that type of thing and then I basically crammed you know I used one week to get together a demo reel or a show reel and then I put it on in our sorry LinkedIn getting everything mixed up I put it on YouTube and I titled it like will Gibbons design freelance or I think I like product animation studio or demo real or something the point was that the piece of content was titled whatever I thought my client would be looking for so when they searched it online there's a high likelihood that my demo reel is gonna pop up and then they come to me and it's only been it's been fairly recent that I've been getting a lot more consistent strong qualified leads and it's because a lot of them are finding me on YouTube not just through that one video in fact it's through all the teaching content I put on YouTube and we'll come back to that but so start by asking yourself what is your potential client looking for and make sure that the keywords and the subjects of what they're searching for is at the root of the piece of content that you're putting out there so let's say you wanted to be an instructor and you you have a software that you know really well if a lot of your clients if you want to sell a training program then you need to make sure that you are constantly demonstrating that you are good at training people and so you would be putting out free tutorials if somebody sees that piece of free content you build trust and they already start to wonder if they could pay you for that service type of thing okay I'm going to take a quick pause to look at the comments here I've seen quite a few things coming in man a great question jumps out what do I think about working for free a very good question try only on one circumstance what I do that [Music] because it's tough I'm gonna try to okay again anyone who has a really good question try to type it in later for the Q&A otherwise I'll come back through these because there's some really good ones in here I'd love to talk to but I don't want to derail a conversation for anyone who's trying to attend for this entire but we're gonna call this a lecture as boring as that sounds okay keep the comments coming guys I will get back to them by the end okay lastly okay this is this seems dumb but as far as making it easy for them to find you your clients make your email address or some email address easily available I make my email address will at will Gibbons comm publicly available everywhere I don't have a separate email for inbound leads as much as I'm tempted to do that if you're concerned about your privacy and keeping a separate email account totally isolated set up a new free gmail account called like so if my email is will gibbons at gmail.com i could create a new email that says like hello we'll get bins at gmail.com you know what I mean and that's like the email that you publish everywhere and you're oh you're okay if it gets spam email but you know that that's the email address you're gonna open every time you go to look at new customer leads your contact info has to be somewhere not somewhere it needs to be attached to nearly every piece of your content it should be pretty much in your social profiles your BIOS your footnote footers of the website the contact page really pretty much everywhere don't make it hard for people to find you and yeah anyway enough about that so make it easy to find you that's the huge one and start publishing content on those on those networks so the next one is make it easy for a client to trust you so first we had they don't exit client doesn't know that you exist so start by making it easy for a client to find you next they don't trust you right we talked about that so how do we make it easy for a client to trust us if we've never interacted with them before the first step is your work that's the easiest one your portfolio if it's good enough will win the trust of somebody and they will hire you a company who is willing to pay good money for the best work out there think of I'm not gonna drop names here but think of some of the biggest or most well-known or sought-after designers in your field they're really really strong portfolio their work I hate to say it but kind of speaks for themselves those people are getting lots of requests because their work is so strong and and that's gonna be the number one thing if you have a few rotten eggs in your portfolio it's a big turn-off that loses confidence because your employer goes well they don't know the difference between good work and bad work and if they're showing me mediocre or bad work what if I pay them and they do bad work for me that's no good so really smaller portfolio with only strong pieces don't include anything that's so said don't feel like you got to fill out your portfolio literally this small portfolio is fine a good example actually will throw out a name a Cornelius Tamarack he's he comes to mind I know he does a lot of work but he doesn't publish everything he does he's really good at self editing and he publishes finished pieces very infrequently I want to say every few months maybe once a year he comes out with a new piece and they're all stellar he does so much detail work so when you go to his website it's not like it's brimming with new projects all the time but when he drop something it's always a home run and that's the type of confidence and self editing that you want to have in your portfolio and that makes it easy for someone to hire you okay that's obvious but what else the next way you can make it easy for them to trust you is professionalism we're not all communication majors I get it we're not all public speakers but being professional is absolutely paramount and this is another reason why it's good to go to and work for a company before you start freelancing on your own so professionalism goes beyond just how you dress in fact I honestly don't think dressing is a huge part of professionalism unless you're going to a public workspace like in an office but the number one thing for me is clear communication a professional person communicates clearly they're not careless with the words they use they don't they don't send out emails with poor grammar missing punctuation they read everything twice before they post it so it doesn't get misinterpreted and when you're on the phone or the email they don't cut corners they make sure that they're understood before moving on so start with clear communication because it shows a client that you're detail-oriented that you care about the details and they will then connect that those traits to the work that you're gonna do for them potentially so have clear communication absolutely always next is email etiquette this is one that drives me nuts we all send a lot of emails we all receive a lot of emails I hate email well I hate the amount of time I spend in my email inbox let me at least say that so when people send me emails that are that are Carolee carelessly composed and missing information and things like that it's just a pain in the butt is just a such a pet peeve if you spend the extra five seconds or 20 seconds or two minutes to make sure an email is thorough not missing any attachments make sure that one word isn't spelled or misspelled in such a way that it changes the entire meaning of the email these are really important things okay everyone will judge you by the way your emails are composed so make sure you have good email etiquette another thing don't reply all unless be careful when a replying all and don't send follow-up emails that are just one word that say thanks or got it like that's the worst like don't clutter people's inboxes every time you send an email you should be thinking one or two email steps ahead to try to reduce the number of responses it's gonna take to finish that conversation okay I could do an entire one of these episodes on email etiquette I really like that topic next one is punctuality you're gonna be able to win the trust of someone if you are always on time my favorite saying and it's I don't know what maybe it's lifted from the military or something I don't know but it's like it goes like if you're early you're on time if you're on time you're late and if you're late you're screwed or something like that point being just by showing up at the time so if we had a meeting and you show up right at 9:00 for your client technically yes you may be on time but like it shows that you are not totally prepared you didn't come ahead of time if you come just a few minutes early if you're if you arrive at a meeting a little bit before it starts it shows that you care and respect their time enough to not make them wait never should a client be waiting on you to join a meeting or a call it should always be the other way around that goes a long way to win the respect of a client okay the next one is organization do not be disorganized I don't care how artistic and creative you are I don't care that you're a special little snowflake and you're the designer type that lives in a sea of chaos people don't when you're when you're being paid to do what you do you need to do it in a organized manner so you can always find the files you need you always have backups never lose client work always be able to quickly access whatever you need so the structure an organization of your computer and files also becomes really important there too so always be organized the next is presence I was on a call with a client a while ago and believe it or not when we were on the three-way zoom call the owner of the company was scrolling through their phone and just wasn't paying attention they were kind of checked out while this is the first time we're meeting and I'm talking with them and it immediately made me disengage with the conversation because if someone's not listening or not even paying attention like what's the point it's really distracting so always be present even on a phone call make sure that you're engaging and listening to what they're saying okay that that goes a long way last a second to last we have language this is very personal and cultural if if you're talking with the client and they're very there they're kind of drop in you know their swears right and left and they're very kind of slang orient it's probably okay they're not gonna look down if you kind of copy the same or follow their their lead there but don't go and start using a bunch of slang and and being offensive you saying it you know expletives if you're talking to a bunch of you know high level professionals it's just it's gonna make you look like you don't again care or respect their business so just consider that and last but not least never vent publicly this one's hard I know we live in a weird time social media seems to be everybody's outlet for sharing what they think about things and and we all get frustrated I am with you guys is very tempting to share with the world how I think about certain things politics you know being probably the most obvious one but the point being whether you had a bad day or worked with a poor client or a project didn't go well or you know it's something bigger it's stress its money its politics whatever it's it's keep those two your inner circle of friends go ahead and and talk but like don't share those publicly on social media this is my personal opinion you may disagree and that's okay if it's not a popular belief but I think if a client goes looking at your work that's mostly your portfolio and then there's a few random rants about about your point of view on on someone or something I don't think that does anything to further your business unless it is all about the cause that you believe in that your target client needs to believe in as well okay so just consider that I don't want to dwell on this too long the next one is social proof so we're talking still about how do we make it easy for a client to trust us well social proof is another good one if you have previous clients or as you work with more clients add them to your client list that's gonna give you social proof guest appearances so if you can appear on somebody else's podcast blog interview that type of thing anywhere else you can show up that's going to raise the how trustworthy you can be because gonna say Oh someone trusts so-and-so to have them on their show their podcast their you know blog or whatever it may be even a guest post on an Instagram is fine that always helps next is collaboration it's pretty similar but if you can do a live stream hangout with somebody if you can work on a project together where you guys both take your skills and bring what you're good at to a project that's good and make sure that you get tagged and stuff that type of thing again sorry if the leaf blowers start to come in there's nothing I can do about that so if there's a humming in the background guys really really sorry hang in there and the last thing is tags on social media of course so when I started my youtube tutorial series I asked every one of you to start tagging me and I'd share as much your work as I could and I did and that's fine it's great I love it I love calling out and sharing what you guys do after you learn from a tutorial and of course because of that I had very many people discovering me for the first time who wouldn't have known that I exist otherwise it wasn't necessarily for my own personal gain it was just a way of saying hey if you follow my tutorial I'd love to share your work with my audience um and then it got to be a lot I got a little bit it was like too much to keep up with actually after a while so I kinda had to pull back on that but anyway um next I want to say is Authority this is huge clients will trust you if you have authority but how do you build authority to begin with number one is teaching you can build Authority by teaching you don't have to be the best because lord knows I'm not the best at what I do but I teach what I do and I have a true joy for sharing how to do the things that I'm I'm used to doing with other people so because I'm I've got a lot of experience using some software I choose to teach it and it helps them out but I'll be honest almost all of my leads come from people discovering me and seeing that I know how to do this thing quite well and then that inspires confidence in my skill set so then they're there they trust that if they come to me I'll know how to do whatever they want me to do so teaching even if you're even if you're they have this thing called the leading learner if you learn something new then there's always going to be people who don't know that thing so if you learn something on a personal project of the weekend let's say you learn how to do a physics simulation in blender awesome make a video on that sharing that with other people and make that video as educational and entertaining and informative as you possibly can and some people will learn from it and that will put you in a position of authority right there next is writing so I write blog post I used to do a lot more but writing is not dead I know not as many people read articles but it is still a pretty critical tool a thing that you can do to learn how to communicate ideas effectively and it still puts you in a position of authority and as more things move to video and and spoken content they're still gonna be this like legacy need for like written content and and having like say an email newsletter is a great platform to learn how to write and communicate with people and last it's similar but publishing publish as much content in whatever medium or format you prefer but by publishing more ideas and sharing your own personal unique point of view that's based on some sort of experience you've had is also very important to build that authority whoo okay guys this is a lot this is intense I'm gonna try to make it through this we've got one more section here testimonials so this is one more way a client can trust you is if you have testimonials so past clients who've worked with you or it could even be friends or colleagues if they say hey so-and-so is really good at teaching this thing I learned a lot from them that is a good testimonial if a client that you did work with ends up saying hey we hired so-and-so to help make these images for our website and now as a result our website looks awesome that is still a good testimonial and when it comes to testimonials specifically what I recommend you do and I've had the most luck with this is testimonials are a pain in the butt because not everyone's a good writer and not everyone wants to write a testimonial but if they're happy with your work generally open to the idea of helping you out so what I recommend that you do are what I recommend that you do is you write the testimonial you wish you could have send it to them and say hey I know you're busy I was hoping I could get a testimonial from you feel free to use this as a guide and most people are so lazy that they look at it and go yep that looks good go ahead and publish that yes obviously the leaf blowers are out of control I'm gonna put things on pause just for a minute I'm not gonna walk away but I'm gonna at least explain we have these trees outside and they drop these like yellow and purple leaves and they're out of control because we're in spring /summer and they are such a mess and now we got these guys with leaf blowers walking around trying to clear the pathway and everything so I'm gonna go give it a second here future live streams are gonna have to be at a different time because this is unacceptable the noise sucks sorry guys I'll come up with a better time comment below if or in the chat if weekends are doable for you guys I try to take weekends off I work still but like I know a lot of people have family time on the weekends but if you're open to it I might shift this to a Saturday instead of a Friday otherwise maybe it becomes a Friday evening the evening thing maybe instead of coffee it'll be um I don't know whiskey or something that could be interesting but they don't do leaf blowing after like noon so anyway I think the worst of its uh behind us okay so I'm gonna try to finish this up here so I want to see what we're doing on time okay almost at an hour okay so let's let's bring this back to where we were so we know that clients hire freelancers because they don't have the bandwidth to get the job done they sometimes have technical or creative limitations in-house or they're trying to save money from hiring a full-time person now you as a freelancer need to overcome the obstacles that clients have when it comes to hiring freelancers so they either don't know you exist we talked about how to do that they don't trust you we talked about how to build trust or they don't like you well that last part on they don't like you that's the I don't have a lot to say here other than be careful don't be too outspoken don't be too opinionated don't be too argumentative you can have strong opinions but don't be a bully when it comes to how you communicate those be tolerant or in doubt if if somebody has a kind of a different point of view in for the sake of business it's best to just keep your mouth shut and tolerate some of that rather than always getting the last word in if you can okay and then lastly they may not hire you because they can't afford you so in the beginning your I guess regardless in your career of where you are there's always gonna be clients who can afford you and clients who cannot afford you yet and you to make sure that you're only working with clients who can afford to work with you you don't want to waste a lot of time trying to decide if a client's worth pursuing all to find out that they only have a budget of say 500 bucks when you know the job is $2,000 job money needs to come into the conversation before you write any proposals or anything and that we can talk on a later livestream about the process of pitching and stuff I could do that but anyway the last thing I throw in here is marketing yourself so I had an interesting conversation the other day where somebody was like hey you you've done a good job marketing yourself you know any tips and I basically said huh it's a good question I really don't think about it as marketing myself what I try to do is I try to provide solutions and I think if everyone tries to provide solutions as long as they're qualified to do so you know then people are gonna think of you as the solution like if you can be synonymous with solutions if you always have an answer to someone's question if you always can demonstrate how something works they're likely to come to you people are likely to come to you when they need something from you I try to answer every DM in every email and I'm probably gonna regret saying this live because I'm gonna get a lot more questions now but I try to answer every DM and every email that comes in and I try to do so as quickly as I can sometimes it's not always possible I write an email newsletter which is you can subscribe if you haven't it's at will Gibbons comm / subscribe and every other week or so maybe every two or three weeks I send out an email to my list and it has links to the latest free tutorials new content cool things I find out usually I'll write a unique article that I think is going to be useful so so that is one channel I use to provide solutions and help for those people I give people more time when I respond if they're on my email newsletter also I create YouTube videos for free showing people how to do things that I've learned how to do so that's another solutions based platform on LinkedIn whenever people hit me up for troubleshooting and technical issues I try to answer those there so just try to do your best to always offer solutions and don't worry about capitalizing or charging people for those solutions eventually that's gonna come back to you in much more lucrative manners if you if you're always trying to find a way to squeeze a dollar out of every scenario you're not going to end up winning a lot of people won't like you as much and it's and people give business to people they like okay we'll just put it that way and then last thing is invest in those relationships there's a good book that's legendary called how to win friends and influence people by Dale Carnegie I believe I've only listened have a actually I think I've listened to it a couple of times but it's quite good it's old school and it's a lot of like just old man wisdom but it's very very filled with these like gems of how to get people to really know like and trust you and when it comes to the most successful businesspeople in the world that is the number one thing they do differently as they learn how to be they know how to be liked you know they everyone likes them so so they get the business and they get people to care about what they doing so at this point [Music] geez leaf blower City I'm gonna take a pause real quick I'm looking through the comments it looks like some people are saying weekends would be good for them so that's cool [Music] okay okay we got some votes for whiskey whiskey and we'll oh boy whiskey with will I'm a little concerned I do monetize this channel I want to make sure everything stays family-friendly so I need to be careful about that but we'll see okay so here we go I've given you guys a lot of this high level Theory stuff so if you're beginning I could see you going yeah well he's talking around the subject what do I literally do what are my actionable steps here and I hear you there but the reason I'm trying to give you this high level framework is because I don't want to give you a recipe to follow I want to give you an intuition and a framework that you can that's flexible enough for you to apply to your own situation so the idea is that you need to start by identifying why clients are gonna hire you what they're looking for how they're trying to search for you and then you need to meet them at all of those spots or locations and then all the other things I added in there is like how do you build Authority how do you get them to trust you how do you get them to like you those are all things that you're gonna work on continuously for years and years it's never done you don't just check it off a list like great I got a testimonial move on no you want to continue to grow that and get better and better at that over the years just like your portfolio is going to ever evolve now as far as further education on this I'm gonna give you a few tips that are gonna give you much more information than I have but here are some of the things that I've learned the most from over the years as far as business and being able to start getting more clients and stuff and the first one I'm gonna call out is this book the freelance manifesto this is by Joey Korman this guy ran or runs or did I don't remember exactly a motion design studio and then he also runs school of motion he's got a podcast it's a very very well written book very easy to read very very valuable information in here worth every cent it is linked below in the description so if you're looking for a book to read that's easy to get through that's not boring but also gives you actionable steps buy it don't think about it just buy it and if you do use my link down below I do get a little Amazon commish so that's nice it's like it won't cost you anything but it's a nice way to say that you liked this video and got something out of it now another thing I'm going to suggest is a is a website called fizzle fi z ZL e KO also link down below no affiliation there but I used them for about two or three years and they have this massive online community and library of courses and mentorship and stuff and it's all about how to create a business that you're passionate about online that you really like and it is such a good community I learned almost everything I know about online business from them very good people they've got a great podcast as well that goes along with it I love it so that's fizzle another article I want to point out is link below and it's it's written by a guy named Kevin Kelly and it's called 1,000 true fans so if you've been a little in the online space for a while you've pi heard this reference before but it's a really intelligent piece that became very popular kind of viral if you will and it talks about how you don't need to make millions you don't have to have that big of a following you just need to cute to build a thousand true fans and these are people who are really who share your values and are behind you and are going to support you in whatever you do and these are the people that you should be trying this is the audience you should be trying to build not just chasing numbers not just chasing likes those don't mean anything you want to build true fans people that you have true relationships with and people who believe in your cause I'm not gonna try to hide it this format of video this live stream with me doing kind of lectures on topics that I care about that I think are helpful this is me trying to build true fans out of all of you guys who are here and it's not because I selfishly want the fans it's because we all need a network we all thrive on on on social interaction and sharing ideas and stuff so that's why I'm doing this and I think if you read that article you're gonna learn a lot the last thing I want to give you is a thing called creative class it's by a guy named Paul Jarvis who is an awesome writer who lives up in Canada and Vanko for he's a bit of a role model of mine he's been really big in the online space as a writer and he used to be a website designer and now he does more products in consulting and he's just a really smart guy he wrote a book called company of one last year about why it's good to not always scale your business and his his is a creative class is I don't know how much it cost it may around 300 bucks it's very affordable for how good it is and it takes you through loads of lectures and there's tons of documents and templates there's even there's even a legal contract you can use that he got a legal like a sorry a lawyer to put together for you guys that's included in the price I believe it's super good so that's creative class Co they also have a podcast as well so those are the things that I would say if I was going back five years ago or telling you if your earlier on in your career these are the things I would say you're gonna get the most out of if you go and invest in those websites or communities or bits of learning content and there's something there for everyone I think this book is like 15 bucks I think fizzles like close to 400 dollars a year I think creative class is like 300 ish dollars and it's for it's a one-time fee forever it's not a subscription and Kevin Kelly's thousand true fans that's absolutely free if you have no money to spend on anything so hopefully there's something there for everybody here and is and lastly I will say as you keep all this in mind when you go about finding freelance clients again you got to start somewhere you're going to pick up one or two actually just start with one give them a heck of a deal tell them that to be honest with them tell them that you're fairly new and that you're willing to work with them on price and look at that as a learning opportunity be as professional as you can because if you nail that job the person who hired you has the ability to refer you to a ton more people and if they're a business owner they have a network of fellow business owners and friends and you will get clients from them this is how I got started this is how almost everyone I know got started the number one thing you can do to increase your chances of getting more work is to do a good job bend over backward for your client now when you get into working with jobs that are bigger companies with a lot more money involved in a lot more on the line you're going to build your confidence in your leverage and you're you're gonna be able to push back on those clients and kind of hold your ground and and be the true expert in the room but like that takes a little while to get there so start small and don't worry about where you think you want to be start by focusing on the job and just knock it out of the park and create a good reputation for yourself because that is the thing that will keep lead to more and more work and then as you try to get busier just keep sharing that content online and make sure that content is something that your potential client or other people can learn from and make sure it's you know optimistic and good-natured and not you know doesn't leave a bad taste and ever end in someone's mouth all those things together I think is what will ultimately help you get start getting freelance clients in the beginning and then continue to get more and more freelance clients so with that we're at an hour and three minutes I'm gonna go ahead and say anyone who needs to hop off it is so good having you on here it was awesome to hear from everyone I'm blown away by how many people attended from different parts of the world I just think it's awesome sorry for the leaf blowers we're gonna work on that I'm gonna schedule to set a different time in the future and I'm gonna take up I think we'll go for 27 ish more minutes I'm gonna go ahead and read through the comments and try to answer as many questions as you guys have until we're done and then I'm gonna have to get off because I have a client meeting in about 45 minutes I have a call with another client so who we're finishing the week strong okay so I'm gonna scroll up there were a few good comments I really did want to get to so first person the first major question that jumped out at me someone said local clients or global clients initially I started local for me in the u.s. Craigslist was local so that meant that we met at a Starbucks so we met in a neutral environment and I asked the guy you know hey Here I am thanks for your time what can I help you with I didn't know what I was doing but that's okay I like going to a coffee shop or a bar because it's really casual and you can really quickly get an idea of like what that person is gonna be like to work with and you're not agreeing to anything right on the spot you're just getting information so I say start local but if you live in like now I live in a place that's in the middle of nowhere and there's not a lot of good local business that I could serve so for me I now operate only online and I know and I don't work with anyone local to be honest I've worked with the majority of my clients are now all over the world um and to be quite honest I prefer not meeting in person but I do like face to face zoom calls when I can that's that's good okay so I say start off local if you can but if you live in the middle of nowhere use the internet you can get clients from anywhere and the next question is what if you're already good at what you do great that means that you can start charging more don't start by giving them a big discount understand the value of your work and make sure that your prices are fair so understand what the average going rate for what you do is meaning what are other people already charging for that service and then judge your work if your works better than average then maybe start at the fair market value and then bump it up ten or twenty percent now the only way you'll know if you're charging too much is if if you it if clients reach out to work with you and you're getting them all saying that you're too too expensive like let's say out of ten enquiries let's say seven or eight of them are saying you're too expensive then that probably means you're too expensive if fifty a forty or fifty percent of clients cannot afford your services then I say you're in a pretty good spot and then you go from there okay so what other questions we have well it's a good price to charge for a rendering when starting out interested in jewelry rendering and such okay this is one where I'm not going to give you a dollar value for I would love to do another webinar on pricing strategy because I don't charge people per rendering that's not how it works you are you have an expertise that you have built over assuming a quite a long period of time you have equipment that you pay for software and hardware you've got overhead you've got you know expertise all that stuff when you start itemizing things like I will charge you this for one rendering or I will charge you this amount per hour the hard thing with that is when you start to increase your rates people find it hard to spend a certain amount on one item and then they're like well if we want 50 of them it's gonna be 50 times more expensive that's kind of hard to deal with because if a client comes to you with a need for one or two renderings like what are you gonna do charge them five thousand bucks like no one's gonna pay that much for one image unless I shouldn't say no one but it's gonna you're gonna get pushback but in my experience at least with rendering a lot of clients are coming here saying like okay we have a whole lot of products we need our whole catalog digitized in one way or the other and if you give them a price per item and then they look at how many items they have you know it's gonna be I'm fumbling my words here but you really have to consider the volume of the amount of work that they're asking for sometimes it's fair to reduce the cost per image every increment of 10 or whatever the more work someone has for you the less you're gonna charge likely per delivery but I really try to understand the value of what the need is and make it fair so the client is paying what a fair price to get what they need done but you're also getting compensated fairly for your time I think that's the bigger question you need to ask and not worry about the dollar value it also depends on where you're located and what the clients used to paying this type of service so I'm gonna leave it at that we could go into depth on pricing in a later livestream what's my opinion about up work or Fiverr I think that they are fine I've never used either generally as a designer I I've not liked them in the past because to me they seemed especially in the beginning when all the work was truly $5 it was commoditizing design and there's a difference between design becoming what's the word for it there's a difference between design becoming the words escaping me but like making it like common versus making it a commodity and undervalue commodity so if you can get work on up work or fiber that's fine um here's the thing a lot of people live in places where it's like let's say your clients a lot of clients are coming out of the UK or or the US and they're used to paying a certain amount of money for work and let's say you live in a place where the currency like a fifty or a hundred US dollars is going to convert to a high amount of money wherever you live and you can if that will allow you to live for a while comfortably I don't think there's anything wrong with you going ahead and using those platforms to get work and to support yourself now in the u.s. a lot of designers don't like those websites because if I try to go compete with other people on those platforms my rates are gonna be too high and I'm never gonna win a job and if I compete with some of the winning bids I won't even be able to pay my rent because unfortunately where I live everything just costs more money so I think it's I have nothing against those platforms if you can make them work for you okay what else we got what are my thoughts on working for free oh yeah so the only time I would work for free is if I saw a major gain from it a major gain I would need to be confident that it meant repeat work I would need to be confident that the piece goes in my portfolio I would need to be confident that I have full creative control over that job okay those are my criteria if a company says hey we're about to get a two million dollar cash injection we don't have the money now but if you do this work for us you're gonna win $10,000 worth of work from us for the next six months yes I would do it for free if if they said hey we don't have the money we're a non-profit but we're doing it for this good cause and I personally believed in that cause I do work for free for them and I say here's the stipulation I'm gonna cut you an invoice I'm gonna show you how much you would have to pay for this if you are a normal client this way they appreciate your work and then you say and the stipulation the reason I'm giving you this for $0 is because you're gonna give me full creative control over how this turns out and I get to put it my portfolio right away okay that's the stipulation it has to be worth it for you in the end you have to get something out of it um if it's spec work like hey do a project for free if we like you will pursue you that's not strong enough in my opinion I would not do that work okay the big problem with doing things for free is people undervalue what you do so that's why I always invoice if I do free work i invoice and I show them the invoice with how much it cost them and how much it cost me in my time and then I zero it out so they understand if they come back to me for work it's gonna cost and it's gonna cost quite a bit okay you just don't want to undervalue your skills if you work for free okay so what else we have on here I'm sorry lotsa so how old am I and what's my educational background so if you want to learn about that there's a 40 minute video from last week on my career and how I got here um I don't like to say my age I'm already getting I'm already getting to that point let's see I turned 32 this year I'm in November I'll turn 32 I'd like to think I'm still 28 in my mind I'm forever 28 but no I'm past that I'm turning 32 what else Oh Alex green was on what up man that's cool sorry I'm just seeing that now I've been teaching Rhino and Keyshia what so here's a question I've been teaching my juniors about rhino and Keyshia would qualification help with me being a freelancer for companies I think what they're asking sorry if I misunderstand I think you're asking more about that building Authority and the short answer is yes I think that if clients do their quick background check on you and you have made it clear that you are an instructor in any degree I think that can go a long way I would use words like instructor or mentor or master class I don't know whatever the word teaching sounds a little generic I would try to make it sound a little bit beefier like more like corporate training sounds better than software teaching you know what I mean so just think about that what else do we have in here how to get certified and lucky on okay Sookie shot doesn't have any certification program sorry you just have to get good I like this comment since I have a 1080 TI I can use Nvidia r-tx to real-time filter out background noise like the leaf blower I just need to make an edit in the install file to make it work with 10 series cards I hope that's a joke I don't quite understand it but I think it's funny if you're being serious and my mind's blown and I don't get it but I love it ok whoo lots of nice comments from you guys really appreciate it um what else we got going on here begin with freelance like up work so somebody was asking specifically should I start in a freelance web site like up work or go is it better to go to local businesses in personal webpage I don't think you can afford to not have a website these days this is pretty important I think a website or portfolio topic is another good one for a future live stream but I would say that you really need to have a website and a professional-looking website now does your website need to be flashy no everyone's got a good looking website these days I say you do you think deeper about your website it should mirror or oh now there's a train if that wasn't noisy enough yet there's trains behind me ok yeah so I say that your website needs to kind of embody what you believe in and support your work so if you're someone who's all about minimalism and ideas like let's say you're an art director or some like a scriptwriter or something I don't know your website should be mostly text and every single word should count every single thing on your website should be well considered don't put a stupid social counter or a share button or crap that doesn't belong or doesn't need to be there I think everyone needs to have a really good website I'm one of the few people who probably think that I mean I know people totally do fine on Instagram and all that stuff but I think you should have a great website it should be easy to find and you should share important ideas there because that's one thing that instills a lot of confidence it makes you look really professional the website doesn't have to be fan see just make sure it stays up-to-date and make sure that you communicate good ideas on it okay book suggestion to learn advanced 3d modeling um when I did SolidWorks there was a guy named Paul Tran in Southern California I was fortunate enough to get in person training from him this is back in two thousand twelve or thirteen he makes some books or at least he used to I don't know if he still does but he has books for sale on Amazon SolidWorks books are like this big really really good highly recommend them as far as like Rhino or polygonal modeling I'm not sure I do have one modeling book for poly modeling that I like on my bookshelf if you go to wil Gibbons comm slash learn you're gonna see links down at the very bottom of that page for recommended books okay how much do I earn on average I right now I'm earning enough to pay my bills and let's see and and now I earn a little I earn more than enough to pay my bills so that I have money left over that I can put it into a retirement fund so I can save for my future as well as invest in future business tools when I need them sorry that's as specific as I can get right now look I'm only one year into my freelance career and and my first goal is to make as much money as I was making before I left my last employer and it seems like this year I will do that so that's my that's the first win for me personally okay let's see don't uh so a lot of good a lot of people come agreeing with some of these that's cool thank you guys thanks for hanging out um let's see designers I follow man Oh where would I begin with that I so I'm in this weird position where I'm not a hardcore product designer I don't I don't do like I don't charge clients for for for designing products while I went to school for that I've fallen out of love with that I'm a pretty hardcore minimalist and I know that you're like wait there's things behind you you can't be a minimalist no well minimalism is all about removing the superfluous so you can make room for the most meaningful important things and for me I don't own anything that I don't you know get personal joy from and and product designs weird industrial designs a little weird by the time I finished my college I didn't want to design things that people bought and I didn't want to design products that came out every year that ended up in a landfill and look like I'm surrounded by products I there is a need for it I get it but personally I wanted to create things that did not that weren't physical I just I it's just not my thing so I started getting into the rendering work so a lot of the designers I follow are more I follow them because they have really good creative a good handle on things like form and proportion storytelling direction animation lighting photography videography I follow lots and lots of different people and I get the most inspiration from designers who don't do the same type of work I do so without answering that question specifically I'm gonna recommend that you look find the things that are most inspiring to you and then find designers who or other artists or professionals who demonstrate the things that inspire you in their own work and that will make your work more unique okay be careful don't scroll endlessly on Instagram and Pinterest because you're gonna end up creating the same boring maybe not boring but the same old stuff that everyone else is creating and that's not interesting okay let's see what else we have in here sorry uh ah we have clarification on r-tx voice interesting I will check it out thank you very much how do you know it's time to go freelance okay I mentioned this in the beginning and I don't fault you if you weren't around in the beginning it's time first of all you have to feel like it what you need to feel like the curiosity and the drive to actually go and check it out like give it a try and my early answer was it's time when someone's willing to pay you for your services aim to be it like an 80 percent proficiency meaning like 80 percent as good as what other professional work is work is being pre created sorry and basically the further you are away from the standard level of the work being created by professionals the less you're gonna have to charge and the smaller of clients you're gonna have to work with now if you've been working in the industry for five ten years and you've got great skills but you've just been too afraid or maybe you've never wanted to try freelance but now you're deciding it's time you've got the skill set you shouldn't jump in charging junior designer rates like you need to start at that mid level because don't don't don't take a year or two to get charging what you need to charge start off by charging what you're worth basically super nice comment from Fernando saying I helped him graduate on product design with my work here on YouTube so that's really nice of you I appreciate it man and super super stoked to hear that so we got another question working professionally in industrial design for five years in Queens so I'm assuming New York how did you connect with other people in the industry and rendering online or locally so New York was interesting man I love that city I went into it thinking I was gonna hate it and I did actually I didn't like it for the first year but then by the time I left I some of my heart is still in New York I love New York City um the energy that's the first thing everyone says it's hard to explain what that means but when you've been there you know the train system the you never feel alone even if you're walking around with your headphones in and you're surrounded by ten people who are all doing their own thing you kind of feel like you're part of this you feel part of a community both on a macro and a micro level it's interesting so the question was how do i inner network so when I was in New York I moved there for a job I was employed by Luxy on and they had an office there so I moved there and immediately my job was to get up to speed on keyShot and then my old buddy Richard who worked there who was teaching me a lot of what I know he brought me along for what we would call customer like calls or visits so what we would do is we would hit up a client a customer who we knew uses keyShot like an ID firm or a company that has internal design teams and we said hey we got new features in keyShot we'd love to show you the latest and greatest come by answer any questions you have about an hour to an hour and a half you can block out nine times out of ten they be like yes we would love you to come by because we weren't selling them anything it didn't cost him anything they just had to find some time so we would go in and this is where I got my experience because it was my job when we got there to run the demo and I would open up a file and I'd walk through keyshot and I would give them a high level like action-packed like here's what I think you're gonna get the most use out of in the software given what I know about your company and the types of products you guys do and so we repeated that a ton I went to ton and ton and tunc sorry I can't speak tons of customer visits where I just did that over and over and that's how I became really fluent in the software so I could speak while using it and that once I had those down pretty good then I started doing on-site customer training so for the next three years after that I would go fly to a company and I would teach them for anywhere between two and five days with their designers of keyshot and I built a network because the company I was working for lucky on who makes key shot they were flying me around to their customers to work with them so I was networking because it was part of my job at the time and and we would go to events and stuff and when you do the same thing for long enough and you are very consistent about sharing what you do with the world people start to remember um here's something interesting from a marketing study I think they say a customer needs to have seven touch points with a company before they are ready to make a purchase you are no different that if that holds true that means that a client needs to come across you in one way or another seven times before they're ready to buy from you and the more times they can come across you Instagram website email guest post Facebook YouTube I don't know whatever you get the point the more places they can come across your work or your name the better and so I didn't go out on a mission to network with people in New York it's just that my job had so much face time with people that that's just what happened naturally so hopefully that answers that question um Oh someone said they just study industrial design and have the same feeling about not wanting to create landfill I get you there there's a ton of companies that do good work out there don't throw the baby out with the bathwater I think that there's companies like I do and other you know firms that are known for creating more than just products but they create like systems and frameworks and social design and urban planning and stuff there's things you can do I think with your skill set that don't that aren't product related but it's going to take a lot of work for you to do some research and network with those companies okay sweet Jacob popped in from Buffalo saying that they're behind that's cool you can watch this it'll be alive after this thing is wrapped up or I mean sorry after this is live it'll be on the YouTube channel where can you reach out to me directly hey if you go to you either Instagram I'm at will at so okay let me rephrase that at the of the description of this video you should be able to find all my links all of my all of my social media and stuff contact info you should be able to follow those links to get in touch with me they're so cool we got one more question and probably have just about time for one more question so what's my current take on LinkedIn how often to my blog do I blog there what's my criteria to make something and LinkedIn as compared to social media platforms okay so I kind of so I I really dislike Facebook I've been off it for almost ten years not that that's like a bragging right but it kind of I don't know I feel like it is instagram has become so much like Facebook obviously it's owned by the same company that I am pretty much ready to like lit like I can't leave it quite yet because I interact with so many people through stories and stuff but I really dislike Instagram there's no like the the organic Reach is like 10% and there's a feel like I'm always being sold something just drive me nuts LinkedIn is one of the last social networks so to speak that doesn't have a whole ton of that sure they've got their own algorithms but I feel like when you post something on there it's pretty likely to get pushed out to anyone you're connected to and the organic reach is much better in my opinion now I would say what does it how is it different I try to maintain a a professional tone I don't share anything that I don't think people will not get value out of it drives me nuts when I see kind of clickbait be spammy posts on LinkedIn so don't join that cause just make sure you post good stuff make it relevant to what you want to be known for that's the big thing and how often do I post there not a ton I used to post almost daily there now it's like once every week or so not very often if I have a new video I'll share it if I have a new if I have something really like big I'm gonna push out on my email newsletter I may like publish telling people to hop on the newsletter little things like that I try to cross pollinate a lot of my social platforms just to get many people on the email newsletter because I think the email newsletter that I've been running I think that's gonna be my main platform here on out I want my YouTube my website and my email newsletter to be the the number one way people connect with me but um we can talk about that on a later livestream okay someone from Mexico would love to live in the US or Canada what do I think about job offering the u.s. do I have any advice I don't I'm sorry I know nothing about what it takes to get a job in a different country I wish I did oh somebody was asking about landfill no we're referring to when a product break and you throw them in the garbage then they get put in the ground and it's not good for the environment so I didn't mean like bad projects for the portfolio sorry so somebody else asking questions saying something about they've got a lot of industry cred but they're facing serious problems so clients that see my credentials they think they are not able to afford me and I get very few jobs because of that well I think that I think that clients who are assuming they can't afford you I think you need to attract clients who have bigger budgets to be quite honest if you have that type of experience then I would start by reaching out directly to what we call in the US fortune 500 and fortune 100 companies these are gonna be companies who have budgets of 20 to $200,000 you know for projects and it's not that you're you're gonna cost that much but if people are automatically assuming they can't afford you then you need to get in front of different clients I think and that's a different topic for another time ever scout out new clients are cold call I don't unfortunately I assumed I was gonna have to I got so ready when I left my old job to like do outreach but I've been busy and I've been turning away work and I've not been doing any outreach so I got pissed off when I heard other people say that because I was like oh nice for you must be nice but here I am and I've kind of found myself there within a year and it's just because I put out so much content I'm easy to find and people know me for one thing so that's that's that's what leads to that okay guys I have to get off I'm sorry I really want to keep going but I have a call really have to be prepared and on time remember we got to be punctual so early and we need to be prepared and organized all of which I can't do for my call with my client coming up if I don't get off here right now so mmm stay tuned if you guys want to know when the next one of these are coming I know a lot of you are on Instagram maybe hop on my email newsletter that's will Gibbons comm / subscribe I think and that way I will send out an email this weekend either sorry on Monday and all announced the new schedule for this livestream because I think this is cool I think we're gonna do a lot more of this and I think it's a great way to connect and I mean I want to have I want to see this become something bigger than me so a few you guys I'd love to even talk eventually about getting some of you guys on the livestream what about interview podcast II type stuff to guests I mean shoot I think there's a lot of opportunity to do cool stuff here so so anyway really guys appreciate it and whatever whatever you think would make this series cooler drop comment and last plug super good book check it out links are down below okay guys until next time happy rendering

Channel: Will Gibbons

Views: 3,908

Keywords: freelance, how to find clients, freelance clients, studio, product design, industrial design, visualization, animation, tutorial, lecture, webinar, start freelancing, become a freelancer, how to start freelancing, how much to charge, freelance pricing, freelancing tips, how to freelance, how to become a freelancer

Id: ip2PLJ3Qthg

Length: 94min 20sec (5660 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 19 2020