A bit of shameless self promotion – How to get business for your freelance graphic design services

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This URL is about to be deactivated – you can read this post and more on my new url!

http://www.bubblegumkitten.com/blog/2009/08/a-bit-of-shameless-self-promotion-how-to-get-business-for-your-freelance-graphic-design-services/

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I hate to use the phrase, but in these ‘credit crunch’ times self promotion for freelancers has by necessity become quite competitive. The best way to gain business, in my opinion, is via referrals, and I have always worked using this basis. If I do great work and stay in touch with my clients, they will suggest me to people they know and give good references. And ideally I would gain all my business by this method. The best clients are those who are engaged with your ideas, trust your work and have spoken to someone who they know who has given a glowing review.

However, everyone’s budgets are tight and spending in some areas of marketing and advertising has decreased or at least moved to another channel. I have seen some companies taking as much work away from agencies and moving it in-house in order to try to produce the same amount of work for less overhead. I have seen clients halve budgets for departments I have generally worked with for their company. I have also seen companies who used to do a lot of direct mail and resisted methods such as email marketing starting to swap over. They have done the maths and see that for them it can be much cheaper and that the material created can often be tweaked and reused for a much lower cost per send. That isn’t to say that people have stopped using print. It is just an example of how some marketing departments are changing the way they spend their budgets to stretch their pennies further. And shifts like these affect the freelance world, in fact they affect every graphic designer’s job. More and more companies are looking for designers with design and also AS or CSS skills than ever before, I would go so far as to say that although great print designers are still in high demand, there are less slots for them to fill compared to online designers or those with a mix of skill sets.

This has been making my job very varied, and really quite interesting, I have always been a bit of a hybrid designer. I learnt to code HTML at 16, just for fun, from a SAMS teach yourself book. I learnt Photoshop at the same time to use for my art studies at school as digital art as part of mixed media pieces or for illustrations really interested me. It was this that led me into my path as a graphic designer in the first place. I always had an understanding of a mix of areas which I have always found useful when designing as it allows me to have an understanding of how my design decision affect the development team who have to build the site, or the printers who have to make my designs real. This is all good stuff you think, but I would say that even with a good knowledge of illustration, print and branding design 70% of my work falls under the online marketing and advertising bracket…

Read the rest of this article here: http://www.bubblegumkitten.com/blog/2009/08/a-bit-of-shameless-self-promotion-how-to-get-business-for-your-freelance-graphic-design-services/

Links:
My portfolio of design work
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~ by bubblegumkitten on August 20, 2009.