image via Unsplash
The first step in your freelancing career is to have an online home base. You’ll want to create a strong portfolio that has (at least) the following elements:
- Testimonials from clients
- A list of your specialties
- Examples of your past work
- An easy way to contact you
- For bonus points (and more traditional clients), a link to your LinkedIn profile or a downloadable resume
We’ll go over each of these in turn. In the meantime, if you want to look at my portfolio site, you can see it here as an example.
Your previous work and specialties
You don’t just want to *talk * about your previous work, you want to show it. Whether that’s linking to previously published writing, a previously coded website, or showing off your designs, it’s important to give potential clients something to look at.
If you don’t have any previous client work to show, or aren’t able to showcase work from your current job for some reason, make your own work to show. If you’re a writer, write something and publish it on Medium so you can link to it. Design something just so your portfolio isn’t just white space sitting around on the web.
Make sure to include information about your specialties, too. For example, my specialty is long-form B2B web content. If you’re a designer, it might be typography or logo design. If you’re a developer, you might specialize in Rails. Add in an easy to scan bullet-pointed “specialties” list that’s impossible for potential clients to miss on the front page of your portfolio site.
Client testimonials
If at all possible, you need to include testimonials from your past clients. But if you’re just getting started, you might not have any of those. Don’t fret, though — you’ve got a few options here:
Option #1: Get testimonials or references from current or past coworkers
Depending on how supportive your current work environment is, you may have the option of asking your current coworkers (or even your boss) to provide references that testify to the quality of your work (and your other good qualities as a worker-person). You can also reach out to past employers or coworkers, or anyone you’ve collaborated with on a project that involves the skill-set you’re marketing yourself for.
Option #2: Get those testimonials from clients
If you’ve dabbled in freelancing before (or you’re getting ready to enter into round two of freelancing, as I did mid-2014), just reach out to the people you worked with and ask them if they’d be willing to say a few words about your work together for your portfolio site. If they said something particularly great in the middle of the project or after it wrapped, take their quote and modify it a little bit so that it’ll work in the new testimonial context, then email them and ask if they mind you quoting them. Being able to say “yes” or “no” in an email is a lot quicker than having to write up a testimonial from scratch, and it’ll let you get those good words up and live ASAP.
You can also do work either at a discounted rate or pro-bono, specifically with the idea of getting testimonials and having work to add to your portfolio. I wouldn’t recommend working for a business in that capacity — business owners who are looking for cheap or free work are often demanding micro-managers and make for awful clients. Instead, ask around among your friends to see if someone needs work you can do. Or look for a nonprofit whose mission you can get behind and see if they need any work.
The idea of doing free or discounted work for testimonials or portfolio purposes is a very contentious one in the freelance community, and for good reason. Cheapskates who only care about their bottom line (and not you making a living) abound. In general, if someone approaches you actively seeking free or cheap work and they’re promising you “exposure” as a form of payment, write them off. On the other hand, if you approach someone (or an organization) because you’re excited about the idea of working together, the project can be fulfilling in other ways, and sometimes it’s worth it — especially if you’re just starting out.
I’m not going to strongly recommend one path or the other. Whatever you’re comfortable with and whatever suits your situation best, that’s the way to go.
Either way, your testimonials and your work samples need to be very easily visible on the site. If you go with a one-page theme, make sure to have those towards the top. If you go with a multi-page design, make sure that there are links to both in the menu bar and that they’re clearly labelled.
Make it easy for them to contact you
This is easy to overlook at the beginning, because you’ll be actively reaching out to people and pitching them on working with you, so they’ll already have your contact information. However, once you start getting referrals and have people coming to your site via other means (social media marketing, for example), it’s important for potential clients to be able to get in touch without hunting for your contact information. Most of the options referenced above have contact form widgets or plugins easily available. Pop one at the bottom of your site and in your site sidebar.
Creating your site
If you’re a developer or super techy person, you’ve probably got this covered — you might already have a site set up that you can use. If not, here’s a few options to get you up and running quickly:
Strikingly is specifically intended to create quick landing pages that would work well for a portfolio site. For eight bucks a month (billed yearly, $12/month if billed monthly), you can easily build a mobile-responsive website.
Squarespace is similar to Strikingly, in that they manage the hosting and provide you with design options, with the goal being to get you up and running as fast as possible. Their paid plans start around $8/month, too.
If you’re familiar with it, self-hosted WordPress is a great option. If you’re not familiar with it, you might spend too much time screwing around with the settings and tweaking things. My portfolio site is set up on WordPress. I’ve been using it since 2008, so it only took 2–3 hours to set the whole thing up, from buying the domain to configuring the theme to putting in the content.
Look for “one page” or “resume” WordPress themes to use. WooThemes is one good source, I’ve used them before and been happy with the product, and ThemeForest is another option. There are plenty of free theme options in the WordPress directory as well, but make sure to check user reviews — sometimes “free” themes have the cost of being buggy or having malicious code in them, and they’re often outdated, as well.
For the love of all things good and holy, do not let your portfolio site URL end in .strikingly.com or .wordpress.com or .squarespace.com. It makes you look amateurish. If you are absolutely 100% moths-in-my-pockets-broke-as-a-joke, then upgrade to a paid plan that allows for custom domains ASAP.
A solid portfolio makes you look far more professional than someone who just has a resume that they include in an email or that directs people to their LinkedIn site. The temptation to spend endless hours tweaking and refining it will be strong, but try to keep it as simple as possible — your goal should be to hit the ground running. You can perfect your portfolio later, after you have more clients and a good idea of what’s working and what’s not with your current portfolio. Right now, you need to get a portfolio site live that shows people who you are and what you can do for them.
This post is an excerpt from Zero to Freelancer, a book-in-progress. To stay in the loop & find out when it’s released, sign up for email updates at Bombchelle or This Week in Freelancing.
