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Self-motivation and finding clients as a freelance designer

Posted on Saturday, April 7th, 2007 under freelance, web design news by Dustin Brewer.

There are only a few types of people that can ultimately do freelance, and I don’t just mean freelance as the only source of income- even freelance as a part time source of income can be a difficult task for some people. The biggest problem is being self motivated and finding clients, these two are the life and soul of freelance though and they have to be done otherwise you aren’t going to make any money.The first step to being self motivated is discovering how to focus, finding that time during the day when you can focus only on designing what you need to have designed(or written). I have also found that is it helpful to have some nice caffeinated drinks available to give you some energy. However, I typically will do most of my design work late at night after everyone is asleep and can’t bother you. This is the time for me that I can get down to the meat of things and properly design a web site or print work.

Being self motivated is the main component of being a freelance designer because you have to motivate yourself to go out and find the clients in the same way you motivate yourself to be creative. There are of course books available to those that would like them that have creativity exercises. You can find a couple of really great ones that I use on my top 10 design books for designers post that I did last week. Using creativity exercises are usually excellent at getting me in to that design mood where I am able to just toss out design after design that I don’t have a lot of time during the day to take care of easily.

During the day it is best to focus on the business aspects of design rather then the actual design process, for me at least. Although there are a lot of times when a client calls you up the day of his deadline and asks you to design him something but you get to charge extra for those jobs. Of course my self motivation isn’t the same self motivation methods that most people will use it is just how I go about things. The primary points is to just find the perfect time of day, or perfect atmosphere that allows for your creativity to flourish. Having a nice drink whether it be soda, tea, coffee or alcoholic always helps as well.

Finding clients can be a chore if you don’t have a lot of prior connections, the best way to go about this is to ask your existing clients for referrals once you have completed their projects. You don’t want to hound them about these things obviously but you want to ask subtly but make it apparent that you expect them to refer people to you. Through the referral process you should typically get several referrals out of every client which can help to grow your business exponentially as long as you take care of each client ensuring that you are staying within their budget, deadline and meeting their expectations of the finished project.

A good method is to give out 5-10 business cards to each client and ask them to just give them to friends, family and associates and let them know about what you do. Typically they will give out a good portion of them and the cards should start circulating within that clients industry quite well to generate more return business. It is my opinion that the best kind of advertising for any business is word of mouth. As long as you are keeping your clients happy you should be able to generate more and more business off of just word of mouth then typically any other advertising medium.

Whether you are doing graphic design or web design these methods for finding design clients should work beautifully. I will expand more on it in the future with other articles more specific to freelance and finding clients but these basic principles can help you to ensure that you are successful and don’t have to eat Ramen as a freelance web designer or freelance graphic designer. Hopefully.

2 Responses to “Self-motivation and finding clients as a freelance designer”

1. Web Design Business says:

   July 25, 2008 at 4:16 pm

   What is the biggest challenge you face as a web designer?

   Reply
2. strato says:

   January 18, 2009 at 4:42 pm

   thanks lot for your tips. I have start my freelance job.

   Reply