Intro To Freelancing 1/3: How to get started, find first client & build a portfolio

hello everybody seems we are live all right excited to be with you here today on this live stream always love doing youtube live stream looks like we have a lot of people showing up this looks like 132 when I'm looking at this alright this today's stream is going to be amazing I don't think you have seen as good of a stream this week for sure this is my goal to make this the best stream you have seen it this week it's going to be really really incredible I have a presentation for you that I did a couple of weeks ago to over a thousand a group of over a thousand designers and they got amazing results they were so excited about this I was like we have to put this on YouTube so that everybody can watch this so I'm super super excited all of you I can see the comments I'm not gonna look at the comments for right now but we're gonna have a presentation I think it's gonna be like we're gonna be here for about one hour we're gonna do some Q&A at the end and it's going to be super super cool so I'm assuming you can see me well and you can hear me well let's jump right into it let me share my screen okay so today we have a presentation it's actually the first time that I'm doing it's not just one live stream it's a series of three streams so today's what part one out of three for people who just want to get started with freelancing so I know a lot of people right now we're in this crazy situation some people lost their job some people lost clients some people are thinking that the their job may be not as secure as they thought it was so they want to get started on freelancing they want to build this muscle they want to build this opportunity of another income stream that's gonna help them eventually maybe go full-time but right now just getting started just build that confidence just get that first client and we're gonna give you here everything that you need so let me jump into here so my goal here's my goal with this three-part series I want to help you get your first client I want to help you be all the processes and understand everything that you need in order to serve clients so we're going to talk about everything from pricing proposals and client relationship all of that stuff so that you can have the confidence and I want you to motivate you to take the action I know how scary it is sometimes to do some of the stuff that I'll cover here so my goal here is to motivate you give you the confidence show you how it works show you that I was struggling as well and I did the exact same steps and it worked for me I know that it can work for you so that's what we're gonna do so here's basically the outline of how these three sessions are gonna go and by the way if you're not subscribed it's a good idea to subscribe now so that you'll get notified in the next session if you're watching this after ie livestream they're probably going to be in the description a playlist for all the sessions so today I'll talk about my story I'll share how I'll get started I'll show you some horrible you know work of mine we'll talk about how to get your portfolio in the air like super practical what you need if you don't ever portfolio you will have one by next week if you'll take action on what I'm teaching you today and we're talking about how to find your first client so it's going to be super super actionable if you're gonna stay to the end you'll have the exact steps what you need to do next week to start getting clients immediately okay and we're gonna build you the confidence to do it the next session next session is gonna be on Thursday so there's already a YouTube thingy for you to put a reminder on it we're gonna talk about pricing we're gonna talk about proposals we're going to talk about negotiation everything that's kind of money related we're gonna talk about this in Thursday hopefully by Thursday if you're gonna start taking work well I don't know if it will be able in two days but you'll you'll start getting leads immediately and I want to give you the framework to how to talk money with them in on the third session which is going to be next Thursday we're gonna talk about what clients value we're going to talk about how to deliver a good service we're gonna talk about how to communicate with clients how to manage finance and how to take this free land thing saying and make sure that you can do it full-time by the way I see you can't see my face so now you can see my face isn't it better with my nice face on the slide so you can see there's a lot of emotion going on here it's important for you for me for you to see the emotion all right so here's the thing about this and now I can say this with 100% that if you put in the work on what I'm going to show you today you will get a paying client there's I don't know if you're following me on instagram if you're not you should probably be doing this but I've shared the results of some of the people that were in the group when I did this presentation this one guy from Columbia got 15 leads in one week taking action on the advice that I gave here and there was another another woman who got like close the client but after getting like also like 10 leads and closed one of them all within a week because they were taking action on this stuff so pay attention and do the work okay if you do the work this works it's not gonna be easy but it's going to work so here's the problem look I know you're watching me right now on YouTube so I know you watch YouTube okay you're probably maybe you're watching my channel maybe you're watching the future Christo maybe you're watching some other design related channels but here's the problem and I'm part of that problem a lot of times we give you expert advice and that expert advice is like you know build your network build your build your brand you know do value pricing you know be it be a high value consultant and all of that is like super expert thing that is really really difficult to do if you're a beginner actually what you really need is to somebody to just show you the basics step by step get you to do the fundamentals correctly and so that you can get started you'll get to the expert things but the expert thinks if you're getting started with it too early it's just going to confuse you let me know in the comments if you can relate to that and let me share a personal story so part of this quarantine stuff that were you know we're stuck at home I decided to buy an electric piano so that I can learn how to play and I can you know learn with my son as well and we started learning together with this app that teaches you how to learn the piano and you know straight ahead they're telling you how to read the notes and so they're teaching you the theory and one thing that I noticed is right I can read notes now I can read better than but there's no way that I'm going to be able to actually play this correctly because there's there's a difference between theory and actually putting it into practice and I feel it's the exactly the same with you know design or freelance advice I know you can listen to all this value pricing all this high-end expert advice but you can't really take action on this because you still need to get your basics down build your confidence on the smaller things before you can move in into the more advanced stuff so there's I don't know if there's kind of a misconception that you can get started from zero to get into like super professional millionaire or whatever with zero you know with one jump but most likely and at least I know that's for sure it happened to me I had to go through all of the steps in between so I didn't just start it out from from zero to hero making six figures and all that kind of stuff I worked with shitty clients I build website for $100 you know fifty dollars logo I did all that stuff and that helped me on the way so we're gonna try to make your journey faster but that still doesn't mean you don't have to start at the beginning so we'll talk about the beginning now here's the thing ego might be the thing that's blocking you because maybe a lot of things I'll say today when you hear me say it you're gonna be like yeah I knew I should have probably done that you knew you should have done that but you still didn't do it okay maybe it's your portfolio that's not live yet and maybe it's not reaching out to people who you know can you know can become your client and that is because your ego he's trying to protect you protect you from failure protect you from rejection protect you from what other people are going to think about you right oh but I put up this portfolio but it's not perfect what are other designers are gonna think about you but you have to realize that you know you're not in competition with anybody right you're scrolling on Instagram or on YouTube all day long you see all these amazing designers and you think oh I need to be better than them or at least as good as them otherwise I'm not qualified to you know put my work out there and charge for my work and all of that stuff but it's completely not true you're not in competition with anybody so it's the ego it's your you know your fear of being mocked or being rejected that's actually stopping you from progressing so part of what I'll try to do today is to tell you put that ego aside do what it takes you know don't worry about other people judging you nobody really cares it's I know I don't mean to sound mean but nobody really cares about you okay so you just do your own thing and worry about yourself okay so as we said there's like expert advice and a lot of it talks about you know building a brand building a network but you have to realize there's things that you need to do in the short-term and there is things that are long-term play in the short-term if you want to get clients next week you need to do whatever it takes to get clients okay you're not gonna have magical clients drop out of the air just because you've posted you know one nice post on Instagram you need to do whatever it takes to get clients and you need to start building confidence because if you don't have the confidence you'll never be able to charge the high prices and you know build yourself as an expert if you're not starting small you need to have a portfolio online in the short-term if you don't have that that's blocking you from starting from at least getting the ball rolling and on the short-term you need to have some testimonials so have some successes early successes even if those are small successes even if those are not amazing clients even if they're not high paying client having those things matters a lot and will facilitate growing you and helping you start working on the long term so on the long term you do need to you know build expertise and niche down and build a net work and build a brand for yourself and consider get consistent clients and all increase your presence and all of that stuff but that is stuff that takes time and that is stuff you don't need to worry about it this week right right now be focused on getting the ball rolling then after you have the ball rolling start thinking about the long term and again the long term takes time so you should be doing this but don't worry about this right now and don't be confused between the short term and the long term between the beginners and the and and the things that you need to do later on when you're more of an expert okay so I want to share my story with you I think it will help you see that you know I'm not some innate genius so this is me back in 1999 oh I was such a nice and sexy high school kid so these are my earliest kind of dabbling into design and obviously you know you can spot my genius in there I mean you can see that I was always super talented born with you know the magic touch of a designer I'm just kidding you can see that I pretty much sucked I was looking at you know drawings online I was trying to do that all that stuff and you can see that I'm trying to do the shadowing right and all of that but I pretty much sucked then I had kind of a Epiphany I don't know how to call this but I got a recommendation on this book that's called drawing on the right side of the brain this was really a phenomenal book for me because it's like four weeks after I bought it I could draw what you're seeing on the right side which is at least a little bit more realistically so this book was really phenomenally actually taught me how to see and how to look at things differently and how to better draw so what happened and I'm reminding you I'm back in high school when I'm reading this I started to do these drawings and I started to paste them on the the wall of the classroom and you know that's before we had Instagram had walls on the on the classroom before we could post something on social network we actually posted it on the wall like a physical wall so I used to start posting my my drawings on the the class wall and some people actually started calling me you know the artist because he's the one that's growing and because everybody saw that I was drawing some people when I started playing around with you know the the graphic software Photoshop and that kind of stuff my friends from class started asking hey can you can you design my logo and back at the time there was forgot the name IRC chats you know back at the very early stage of Internet and so I started doing logos designs for my friends and as you can see I didn't I didn't do just one logo I did four directions for the client to choose from as you can see back at the time I actually put a credit on the logo so I wrote by gender which was my kind of a nickname online nickname back in the day and I was I started doing this for my friends and as time went by I started doing kind of a little bit of an illustration for my friends and just actually doing work for free now mind you back at the time I'm a high school kid so I don't really need to get paid but I'm actually starting to help people and gift them and give them all these kind of things now here's what actually happened and I wasn't really thinking about this but this is basically what happened with every project that I did I built my skill because I was doing another project I was doing another design I was doing it again and again and every time you do something you get you're practicing your skills and you're getting actually better another thing is I started practicing working with people so that was the first time ever that I didn't just you know did something for myself kind of in as an art I actually started to get feedback from people and trust me people don't care that you're doing them a favor and you're doing something for free they will still stay oh but I don't like the blue can you make this different and so that was my first experience actually getting feedback from people and see how that feels and see how to communicate why I think something is a good idea or a bad idea and it got my name out there again I wasn't thinking about this I didn't know anything about marketing but now I'm looking back and I'm connecting the dots and I'm seeing what I what I actually did was to get a lot of people to know that if you need something that is designed related you're you're gonna talk to Ron okay so that's basically what happened and actually that helped me to lead to land my actual first paying clients which was a father from a kid from my class and another friend of another father and one of my neighbors and a father of my girlfriend now mind you none of this none of them were a good client or high paying client or anything for most of them I was working for pennies most of them didn't value design or knew how to give me feedback but those were my my first project and I was in a way fortunate to you know get working experience so every project that I did again I got better at my skill and I got better at managing feedback and having some kind of a process for the design that I'm doing and I've started to build confidence because it doesn't really matter that they're not paying you a lot of money at first what you see is hey I actually did this I actually delivered it in a reasonable time frame so now I know you know how long these things take me hey this actually proved valuable for them you know they're using this website and they're they're using this design and it's valuable for them so you get confident about you being able to deliver good work so that's basically my story and will continue with my story into the portfolio and I'll show you my first portfolio so this is my first kind of professional portfolio and not at the top you can see the top two left's are websites that I did the top right one is actually 3d project that that that's actually the first freelance project that I ever did back in high school it was some kind of a biblical shrine that I basically modeled in 3d so those those were kind of three project and on the bottom you can see photography and you can see drawings now you know this isn't a good coherent portfolio there's not you can't see focus here obviously you can't see very much good design skills but it's something and this portfolio actually helped me to land multiple jobs by just showing them that I have some experience and I did something ok so it is important to have something okay and today there's no way that you're gonna work with somebody and that somebody's not gonna look you up online to see have you done something in the past who are you get kind of a sense for you so portfolio is basically a must okay it's very difficult if you're not like super today maybe I can get hired without a portfolio but getting hired initially without a portfolio is very very different now I encourage you to put a portfolio on your own website versus opening up a be Hanes or a dribble account and there's a few reasons for that first of all you want to own your own domain okay because people are either going to look you up and they're gonna search you maybe on Google or people are gonna ask you what's your website and you probably you want to tell them my website is my name calm or something like this rather than telling them oh go and be Hanes or something that that's really kind of when you're talking this out sounds much more professional and positions you as somebody who's doing this for pay and not versus a hobby or something like that now the second thing is when you have something on be Hanes and dribble which is not always a bad idea by the way but we're not going to talk about this right now you can't really control the messaging okay because you're basically you work within a temp and it's their template when you have your own website which it's okay if it's built on a template but you can control the messaging you can change how it looks you can change how you present yourself because you need to remember at the end of the day your website is a sales tool that's the reason that you have it there it's not just show my work it's show your work and you know get people the confident that you are the right people for them and people are not only hiring based on the quality of work they're also hiring based on who you are why should they work with you and that kind of stuff and to be able to communicate all that stuff you need to control the website and of course when you control the website you can create things like calls to action which basically is here's how you contact me here's a button click here and yeah make it easy for people to use it okay let me do kind of a break drinking water for a second and you can tell me in the comments how are you liking it so far you're enjoying I hope you're having a good time all right let's continue so what should you have on your portfolio so initially I'm back yeah all right you want to have something between three to five works so again that's not that many okay and it doesn't have to be it doesn't have to be client work let me go back so three to five works it's not that many if you have client work that's great if you don't have client work do some projects do some projects for fun do some projects you know for free volunteer or something like that but you can put at least three to five of them that's enough now you want to have a photo of yourself there because as I said people are hiring you okay people are not hiring a generic design skill or a portfolio they're they want to work with a person and so you want to have a good photo of you there if you can have a nicely taken photo of you that's preferable but in this week we're not gonna have any excuses so any photo will do okay you're not gonna wait for that professional photo nowadays with with your photo and you can blur the background and you can use all that kind of fancy stuff to try to improve the photos so just make sure that you have full of yourself and make it easy for people to contact you don't hide that contact button don't hide your email don't hide your you know your phone number whatever it is you put there just make it super visible and then basically link everything that you have where you're communicating with people whether it's your facebook Instagram whatever you have link everything there so now everybody that's checking you out or doing some kind of research will be kind of funneled into your website and gonna see what you want them to see okay again if you don't have three to five works start creating for fun one of the things that I'll challenge you to do within after you know this live stream is to start doing things every day okay give yourself some kind of a challenge this will be a great way to put yourself out there this will be a great way to improve your skills and this will give you something to put on your website so just starting to create you can either be your art or again it can be for your network you can tell them I'm a designer how can I help you or you can go into your favorite foundation or nonprofit and start offering to help them even for free as a volunteer that will give you great experience with both doing the actual work and working with a client okay for those of you who are technical let's talk about setting up the website now you know if you've been watching my channel you've probably heard me talk about web flow so many times however I'm not gonna tell you to set up a web flow I mean if you wanna and if you know how to use web flow that's amazing I have a web flow website but if you don't have the tech skills right now I don't want you to have any excuse why you don't have a website so you can go into Wix Wix is free Wix is easy pick a template upload your work and have it done now again my goal here is that you'll be able to start working next week it doesn't mean that you this is going to be your website forever doesn't mean that you know you always need to improve I don't like working with Wix or any other kind of template base but it's just for getting started so my goal here is no excuses if you don't have a budget you don't you you can't spend ten ten dollars for your website go two weeks they'll give you kind of a free domain they'll give you a template just do it okay but no excuses if you do have like $8.00 per month or something like that I suggest you go to Carbon made you'll be able to you know connect your domain which you can buy for like five dollars per year so it's rather cheap it has like really fancy and nice-looking templates so if I would be kind of like what's the easiest thing to do and I can afford to pay like $10 I would go with Carbon made it looks super professional if you want to save up and do kind of your own hosting you can use WordPress it does require some technical knowledge so again if you know how to set that up do it you can buy a template you can use some kind of a builder do-it-yourself however don't get into something too complicated okay just set it up and again kind of a medium effort if you know how to use web flow you can build it if you don't want to host with them because it's cause it costs money you can expert the code I also did this with my first web flow portfolio I've built it on web flow I've exported the code so I just literally paid like sixteen dollars to be able to export the code and then I cancelled my subscription and basically I got the web site done for like sixteen dollars and I could have hosted on my own on my own hosting which is like I don't know it's just four dollars per month or something like that again if you know don't start learning what flow right now because that will just I mean you should learn web flow but if don't let that hold you back again my goal is here is to drive you forward really really fast now here's the thing if you've wasted or invested more than three hours and you still don't have a website then you're doing something wrong again I'm I'm encouraging you to go with the quick and dirty put something out there right if you have clients and your website doesn't work you know we can talk about maybe improving it but right now nobody's even looking there so why are you you know hesitant of putting something out there and like most designers I know are like I know I should put my portfolio out there but I just yeah I'm struggling with it and again it's a struggle is usually the ego so take that out of the way okay let's talk about finding your first client because now you have a portfolio you spend that three hours you have something on the air let's talk about how to get them so basically there's three things that need to happen for people to hire you okay first they need to know you obviously they can't hire you if they don't know that you exist and that you do the work so the first thing is they need to know about your existence the second thing is they need to like you because nobody wants to work with an and nobody wants to work with somebody that they don't like okay after all and I've said this before people are hiring you not only for your skills they're gonna be working with you so they're gonna hire the person and so they need to like you the last thing is they need to trust you okay maybe they know you and maybe they really like you but if they don't trust that you can do a good work for their business they're not gonna give you money to do it okay so they need to trust you so those are the things that need to happen and basically everything in sales and marketing is basically how to get people to know you like you and trust you that being said I want you to take a second and think who already knows you likes you and trust you put that down in the comment I want you to write in the comment who knows you likes you and trust you already without you having to do anything all right yeah so you're right it is your family it is your friends it is your schoolmates it is your neighbors it is your community member church member whatever it's basically what you would call your personal network so think about this these are people who already know you already like you and already trust you that means that they are currently the highest highest likely the people with the highest likelihood of actually hiring you okay so those are the people that you currently need to talk to so instead of going to people that don't really know you and then you'll have to convince them to like you and then convince you to trust you you can already talk those are kind of the really the lowest hanging fruit of people that can immediately either become your client or recommend somebody else that can be your client now the thing about them recommending somebody else is that when we recommend somethings when we recommend someone to someone else basically we were kind of transferring the trust okay so if I'm going to say you know hey you know Alex you should really you should hire Bob Bob is a really really wonderful guy then immediately Alex likes Bob and trusts Bob because he likes and trusts me and I kind of transferred that credibility to him so those are the people that either going to hire you or they're gonna refer other people and by doing that they're gonna refer the trust and the the trust basically in the likeness to other people okay so here's basically how you do this you're gonna write to them or talk to them you can say hey you know I'm available to do design work right now is there anything that I can help you with you know or do you know anybody that can benefit from what I'm doing okay and here's how to do this so first of all it's best to do it one-on-one and by one-on-one I don't mean that you physically need to be in the room with them I know that were specifically right now where some of us are on lockdown quarantine that kind of stuff but what I mean here is I see sometimes people publish like a general Facebook post hey people I'm available for hire please hire me now the thing is when you publish something like this it's very impersonal and when I see this even if I like this person I feel like because he said it to 300 people it's not my responsibility right now to answer him or help him out but when you talk to somebody one-on-one and it can be one-on-one you know in a message okay in a Facebook message what's up message whatever you can talk to them immediately that they're in a conversation with you so they have to reply okay now specifically during this time of we're recording this lockdown 2020 coronavirus you know you need to be empathetic because a lot of people are going through tough times right now so it's not just like about help me me me me me give me work and that kind of stuff maybe they have their own problems so try to be empathetic but one thing is you don't need to start with small talk okay you don't need to so how are you doing these days and what's going on and it's kind of like for like 30 minutes and then at the end of the call you're like by the way I'm doing design freelance now do you know do you want to hire me do you have something because then it kind of gives people the the feeling that you were fake up until now just because you wanted to ask something and people don't like this okay so you you know these are people that I already like you and trust you you can hit them up and say assuming that you're in a good relationship with them you're gonna look good I need some help do you have something for me and people appreciate that people don't mind people like you know people that like you and want to help you they don't mind that you ask them for help but at least you're not trying to you know them or go you know lie to them or something like that now the next thing is if they can't if they don't have anything they need help with ask them for introduction if they have somebody that's working or that might need or in some kind of an industry they might be hiring ask hey can you introduce me to that person maybe he needs help maybe I can help them out somewhere so intros are very very helpful now whatever they tell you always you know be grateful thanks for you know thanks for keeping me in mind yeah just just be grateful because remember first of all these are people that you know are in your network so basically you you also care about them so you don't want to be kind of a jerk but this is this is a long long-term game right we are trying to get clients immediately but these people might not have something right now maybe they have something next months where in three months it's good that they know that you're even in business for this kind of work so you want to be on the good side now I know that reaching out to people is hard but as I said these are people that know you that like you that want to help you okay so they would love to talk to you even if they can't help you they would love to try okay so don't feel bad about this just do this and again I'm telling you from the results that you know the group of people I did this presentation to these people were sending like whatsapp messages and Facebook messengers and that was the biggest biggest lead generator for them versus you know going on other platforms and all of that kind of stuff because think about this you know at least few hundred people you know besides your family your friends everybody that you went to school with you know everybody that you're in a community with if you've worked you have past employees in different you know co-workers all that kind of stuff so there's a actually a lot of people you can start really hustle on this thing so I remind you the reason that you're probably not doing this is because you're afraid of people rejecting you you're afraid of people thinking oh he will he doesn't have a work right now he's a beggar he's whatever I don't know if you're being afraid of people judging you you need to put this aside and you need to do whatever it takes to get started okay again you're gonna do this in a friendly way in a good way but don't be afraid or discouraged by people telling you no I'm not gonna tell my whole internship story right now I think but you know there's probably a video on it on my youtube channel when I applied to internship I got rejected 60 times before I got accepted into an internship a lot of times it's just you know a numbers game you need to put out those numbers and start hitting it's not like oh I talked to three people I talked to five people nobody needs work right now start you know putting in putting work and contacting a lot of people okay so the only way you're actually going to do this if is if you're gonna consider this some kind of a task that's part of your work to do and the way to do this is put time in your calendar and actually start doing it okay every day not just one day a week every day be in contact with people talk to people now once you've exhausted this you can consider moving into the second step which is freelancer what's website so you can open up a profile on up work or you know there's remote work website I have a video on my youtube on that or a5 or freelancer comm or something like that that's kind of a second step now mind you this is way harder because those there you're competing with the whole world and you have no advantage at this point now you can still do this and you can still win you can still make money and you can still get started by this is actually harder okay so I really highly recommend you really exhaust option number one which is start hustling your personal network before you dive into the freelancing websites okay because there's probably way more opportunity over there let's talk a little bit about confidence because I'm pretty sure that you might find this a little bit either overwhelming or scary or something like that okay so I don't know if you feel like me I'm watching I like skateboarding because I used to skateboard as a kid and every time I see this I'm like how the hell do they have like the guts to do this this looks so scary okay which is maybe what you're feeling when I'm telling you to go talk to so many people and all that kind of stuff and pricing and selling and all of that stuff but the truth is nobody really starts like this okay this is how most people start you start really really small where the pain of falling down is really really low okay so there's the risk is actually lower right here when you start like this okay so this is how you're gonna build your confidence you're gonna start small okay you're not gonna try to do everything negotiate value pricing charge five figures and you know do all that kind of stuff be a consultant you're gonna start small you're gonna do it again and again remember that swipe left swipe right that ninja practice stuff you're gonna succeed with the small step and then you're gonna start you know gaining confidence because you're gonna have a track record of successes it's gonna give you the confidence to try take bigger risk and do bigger things okay now you might be thinking okay I'm going to talk to a lot of people and they're gonna say yes and they will say yes if you talk to enough people somebody say okay yeah I need something how much do you charge for this don't worry about it for now as I've mentioned on Thursday we're gonna have another another workshop we're gonna talk about pricing and all of that but for now just start hustling just start getting the leads if you have something if you have the problem of you don't know how to charge you're in a good position because that means somebody's interested in working with you okay so that's a good thing to have it's a good problem to have okay so here are the action items and these are the things that I want you to do this week first of all start creating daily doesn't matter if you do it as a fun project doesn't mean it doesn't matter if you're helping other people other but you want to be creating you want to build that muscle of creation and also putting yourself out there then get a website up again shouldn't take you more than three hours so assuming let's say you're starting from scratch you don't have any works and you don't have a website well if you're gonna start creating daily in three to five days you're gonna have three to five works okay so by next week you should be able to put your website up then you're gonna start talking to your network everyday put it in your calendar and in case that exhausted itself you can start building on project but believe this as a kind of a last case scenario now I'm telling you two weeks ago I did this presentation people were getting in the first week fifteen leads that's crazy but they've put in the work they've send like I think I think that woman told me she send like 400 messages or something like that but she really put in the work but she got a client within one week so you need to put in the work but you're gonna see some results alright I hope that was helpful for you let's jump now into some Q&A all right all right all right I love it that we have like 450 people in the room I'm excited for this alright so I'll start diving into some questions here let me see if Alex my friend put in some questions for me did you did you did you do two all right let's see okay so how question from PI rekey how does a person like me 17 years old go about getting their first client dude I just told you exactly how I got my first client when I was 17 so you're right now probably I'm assuming you're somewhere in school start you know telling all your friends that this is what you're doing start doing stuff for your friends probably all your friends have social media probably all your friends need some kind of a cool graphic to share some cool design maybe they need personal website whatever start doing stuff for them all these people have parents some of these parents have businesses so start doing exactly what like I did and you're gonna be you're gonna be on your way right Aleksandra I'm 20 years old I don't know if I should show my picture on a website because I don't want clients to think I'm inexperienced what should I do hey Alexander but you are inexperienced it's okay you don't need to lie to anybody that's completely that's completely fine look you're not gonna fool anybody okay somebody that's going to hire you will know that they're hiring somebody inexperienced why would somebody hire somebody that's inexperienced you need to think about this and you need to twist this around to your advantage why do people hire inexperienced people why one because they are cheaper okay two because they are willing to learn and hustle harder than people who are experienced okay three they're willing to work harder crazier maybe hours maybe hustle more maybe I don't know but new people like inexperienced people hustle harder and you need to switch this around and think about you need to tell people I'm just getting started but I will do my best to make sure that you are winning because of this and at the end of the day they're gonna be in touch with you right they're gonna talk to you they're gonna figure out how old are you so you don't to lie to anybody you need to be up front and you need to own it and you need to use it to your advantage why do people hire young people because they know technology better than old people you know I don't know maybe they suck with technology maybe they don't even know what Instagram is what YouTube is what tick tock is what building a website is because they're old you're young you know but ok duck what personal domain name to take if your name is taken well first of all you can be creative about this right now there's a lot of domains like dot design dot whatever all kinds of things maybe you can add a dash maybe you can add some words maybe you can one thing that I saw that is creative and if you add the real before your name ok so think about if my domain was the real Ron Siegel dot-com that means I'm so famous that people are trying to you know impersonate me so this is the real one the original so you know be creative around it it doesn't but by the way shorter should be shorter and clearer should be your goal so think about how to use your name but how to do it in a way that's going to be memorable and easy for you to say in either for them to write share cold email is a good idea to get client look it it is possible but it's hard and think about this what what does what does cold mean it means you're reaching out to somebody who doesn't know who you are who doesn't like you and who doesn't trust you so now you need to overcome all these obstacles it's just going to be very very very hard now it's possible to do it there's a professional way to do it and you can do it however it's very very very hard why would you want to start with the very very very hard things start with the easy things all right Enrique where to start to get clients outside of your home country I have a portfolio I have projects and so on I so again I will say it's in a way similar to share question it is possible right now you know you have the internet you have access to everybody on LinkedIn on Facebook on Instagram on everything so you can start building relationship and you can start reaching out to people and you can start getting yourself known and liked and trust by people from other countries however this takes time and this is a little bit more advanced and I want you to focus on if you already have clients if you're already making money move forward to the advanced of getting clients from other country but if you're if you still don't have clients in your own country from your own Network if you're not building portfolio pieces if you're not building confidence don't don't jump straight to the advanced level all right Thiago how to get energy to do things sending a new email or anything is just tiring and painful I'm a good designer and just tired of the profession I don't know why I lost interest I love creating things but work became so boring hmm that's tough Thiago look I don't have a good answer I feel like you should do things that give you energy and if you're you don't have energy maybe that's not something that you should be doing I think that's the truth I think you should look for things that give you energy you don't do things to get energy to do things that you don't want to be I mean of course every life every you know if you're a professional you're not gonna love doing everything that you're doing okay there's gonna be some that you'll have to take care of that he sucks that you hate doing but ideally you want to have your life sorted out in the way that at least 70 80 percent of your work is you enjoy doing it and then you have to do like 20% of crap but it it should be something like that to do how will ok Nixon how will covet situation affect the freelance now and coming time first of all I hate doing predictions because everything nobody knows anything but what you can know is that looks like the world is going to a very like heavy economic recession so everybody is going to be impacted now obviously and I think this is true for almost anything first of all it's bad for everybody it's bad for me it's bad for everybody and that sucks however in every situation I choose to look at the opportunities and in this case there are going to be a lot of opportunities for freelancers because one people are not gonna want to hire somebody full-time because it's expensive so they'll use a freelancer instead of hiring somebody for their team second people used to work with big agencies to charge a lot of money they have less money now so they're gonna hire freelancers instead of agencies so I do hope that you know you'll be able to enjoy some of these benefits if you position yourself right but uhm yeah times are tough for everyone all right Alex Ron I have a problem because I live in a small city so I don't have anyone who is interested in that what would be your approach Alex I wonder I mean you say you live in a small city in and there's no anyone interested in that what is that I mean that is building website that is designing logos of doing graphic design I mean in every city there's businesses and businesses always need some sort of design service so I find it difficult to believe nobody needs anything but it's true that in a small city my question is because you're living in a small city is your network smaller do you know less people do you still went to school you still have you know past job experience so maybe coworkers you still have your family may be part of your family lives outside of that small city so you still have a personal Network I would ask if your personal network is actually smaller than that of somebody else I don't know all right you did you do to do Daniel how do do you get passive income at the start Daniel there is no such thing as passive income people it's an internet lie there is no such thing as passive income everything is tons of intensive work I mean there is I'll say with a caveat there is maybe half a percentage of people that you know do something let's say create a template or something and it just somebody decides you know to promote it and they just you know it's like hitting the lottery it's not gonna happen for most people and it's it's like very very high risk there is everything else if you want to create a template and people to buy it you'll have to market it like hell and so there is no passive income everything in life takes active effort so yeah that's it all right last question before I'm hitting it off Abigail do you have any tips for on communicating to potential clients I get you have to go out there and talk to people but I don't want to sound really pushy so yeah we talked about I think I've mentioned this right now you don't have to be really pushy you just have to talk to the people that you know right now and say hey look um here's what I'm doing can I help you with anything right now or you know if you already know what they're doing and you think you can help you can say do you need help with that or maybe you know somebody else that can you know use that kind of a thing right now you know specifically as we're recording this a lot of businesses are moving from offline to online so they will need a new website they might need somebody to help them run social media all that kind of stuff so you don't have to be pushy you need to offer help and yeah gonna hopefully provide value to people who need help all right everybody I think I'm about to call it off for today we had almost one hour and I hope you had a good time I hope you had a good time next session I remind you to take action on everything that we talked about today next session coming up in two days on Thursday so make sure you're there put a reminder hit that Bell button subscribe all that other stuff and I will see you on the next session we're going to talk about pricing negotiation all of that stuff stay tuned it's going to be super amazing stream as well thank you for showing up thank you for sticking up until the end you're the best I love you bye bye

Channel: Flux Academy

Views: 54,654

Keywords: freelance, how to freelance, get started with freelancing, freelancing for begginers, intro to freelancing, freelance design, how to become a freelance designer, freelance web design, freelance web developer, how to start freelancing, become a freelancer, how to find clients, how to make money freelancing, how to get freelance clients, start freelancing, how to start freelancing graphic design, how to become a freelancer for beginners

Id: 9wLs3aDzLd4

Length: 54min 3sec (3243 seconds)

Published: Tue May 12 2020