Ugh, another notification. What superfluous piece of information needed my undying attention this time? A new spammy sales email? Another app desperately trying to capture my attention? Oh wait, no…

“It’s a Twitter DM”. A young designer (like me) who I’d connected with on Dribbble had reached out to me. We started talking about general designer stuff, workflow/process, client communication over the *quadrillion* different timezones, typical workhours, yada yada.

Then he said something that really caught my attention.

Ouch.

I felt like Thor himself had slammed me over the head with Mjölnir.

But then, after some reflection, I realised this is probably something we’ve all experienced to some extent. How many of us have been through periods of weeks or months where work was slow and hard to come by? I bet the majority of us at some point in our careers, especially during the early days.

Imagine you’ve thrown off the shackles of typical full-time work, only to be plunged into the deep, dark depths of zero opportunity. No work, no income, and all with looming rent and bills to pay. It really destroys a person’s self-esteem and you start to believe that maybe you’re just not good enough. Welcome to the downward spiral.

But, wait, it’s not all doom and gloom. We work on the Internet, right? Surely with the entire developed world as our potential audience, we can successfully reach at least some of them? When you’re in the situation it can be hard to see this, it’s like you’re walking through the woods with a blindfold on.

Assuming you’re good enough to offer your skill for money, how do you go about securing more clients?
Wait. It’s important at this point that we reaffirm the basics for ourselves: we’re not a designer or a developer or a whatever. We are a business. We are a product, we need marketing and sales, we need to communicate with our customers, we need to provide value to our customers, we need to have a ‘unique selling point’. This means, for most of us, we can’t just sit there in Sketch or Photoshop and expect people to be lining up for our services.

We need to hustle.

So, get your creative marketing hats on, and just like trying to solve our customer’s problems, let’s solve our own. I’m going to cover a few tried and tested marketing tactics you can use to get more clients. I’ll be using the example of a designer looking for work to provide specific examples and situations.

Share your knowledge and experience

Let’s start simple. Businesses large and small want to hire skilled people who’ll bring value to the end product or service. Looking at the role of a UI/UX designer example, your client is hiring you for your ability to research, internalise and produce clear, appropriate designs that facilitate an ‘enjoyable’ experience for the end user.

How do they know that you can do that? Well, they could try evaluate the logic behind your static Dribbble shots, but that’s not easy or accurate. You need to explicitly present and explain your decisions and rationale. Try producing case studies for past work that run through the considerations and decisions per individual project.

Alternately, you could demonstrate deep topical understanding through writing and publishing articles (whether on your own blog or as guest posts). Chances are you don’t have much of an audience, so doing a mix of guest posting on established blogs and publishing on your own blog (and syndicating to places like Medium) will help you build said audience.

Redesign your own portfolio

We all produce portfolios, but a lot of the time, we let them age and fail to keep them up-to-date and relevant. Think about giving your portfolio a refresh. Try to include a mix of live examples of work, case studies, and screenshots. Explain your decisions and demonstrate the context which you were designing for.

If you’re proud of the end result, submit it to CSS galleries to get some exposure to it. Hey, if it’s awesome enough, it could even win an award *cough*.

Networking

You hear this practically everywhere, but it works. Get out there and network with your target customer. Attend business/entrepreneurial events, hack weekends, meetups. Talk to people about their endeavours, offer small favours to get your foot in the door. It’s all about the value you provide to the relevant people.

Pro-bono

Uh oh, I said the dirty word. Yes, working for free, but I’m referring to a specific context. Andrew Wilkinson explains that in the early days of Metalab in 2007, he reached out to Ricky Van Veen of College Humor (they had mutual friends) and offered to redesign his blog for free. In return, he would get direct referrals from Ricky and I assume, a credit link on the site’s footer. This deal alone helped Andrew generate roughly over $500K in referral business.

Doing strategic favours for people who have audiences that you can leverage, favour for favour, can work wonders. A good place to start might be to take a look at the sites and content you digest daily. Take a look at the YouTube channels you’re a fan of and see if they need their site redesigned for free. This would probably work well with people who have moderately sized audiences and that you can connect with through a mutual friend – although a cold email could just be as effective.

Educate

Think of the struggles the kind of people who would hire you go through. What do entrepreneurs, developers or enterprise people have trouble dealing with that’s linked to what you provide. I know a lot of founders and entrepreneurs don’t really understand design and what it really means for their startup. In light of this, Wells Riley, a designer who now resides in Silicon Valley set out to educate tech startups in particular what design actually is.

Well’s content was shared out throughout the startup world, and has lead to many opportunities for him I’m sure. It’s all about helping, educating and supporting each other towards our goals. Do this, and the opportunities will come.

There’s also a bit to be said about mindset. Don’t expect to receive without giving. You need to demonstrate your value for people to see it. Be selfless, be interested in others, be genuine. It’s about them and their business or product, not you and your work.