Okay, so this is gonna be about guessing work. And I'm going to introduce you to a few ideas of how you can find clients. As a web designer, running a web design business. Let's get going. So getting clients and work for your web design company will of course mean the difference between success and failure for the business. Now, this is such a huge topic, I'm only going to go into the basics in this lecture, put most of your effort into developing your own site.

This is incredibly important. building and maintaining websites is a time consuming business. But at least the time and effort you put into your own site will benefit you and you're alone. So just for Remember that your site is more important than your Twitter account. It's more important your Facebook page, it's your site, nobody can change it, nobody can take it away from you. So that's where you should put most of your effort.

Now a lot of people ask me about the design work sites like behance, oDesk, Elance. And all of those, if you wish, by all means, spend a little time on them, create a profile, put some examples of your work, but I don't concentrate on these places. In fact, I spend most of my time hiring people on oDesk and Elance than I do getting work from these places. He will not make money from that sort of place in comparison with getting clients from your website. But why would potential clients contact you from your website? Because you have a great looking portfolio?

Well, possibly, but the main reason why clients will end up on your site is because you need to write high quality content on there about what it is you do rice about anything you can possibly think of, in your area of expertise, generally, and specifically, even take the time to research into related areas you don't know much about now, but hope to in the future. There is nothing quite so educational than writing a tutorial, people will start to arrive at your site from search engines see that you know what you're talking about and higher. It's far better to have clients going to you than to go cap in hand to potential clients. And let me show you a bit about what I mean here. Here is some Google Analytics for my site from the last month. And I've written everything I can think of about web design and graphic design.

You wouldn't believe how many little things you can write about. The more you write, the more ideas you get for writing better and better blog posts. So one of the things I've written about is how much graphic designers and web designers should charge. And that's a topic that everyone wants to know about. Everyone likes to talk about it. Not a lot of people like to write about it.

But I've written about it. And it's created a lot of traffic. Look at the organic traffic I've received from Google. As a result of that article. How much do graphic designers charge? How much do graphic designers charge for flyers for poster design for business card design?

How much does a graphic designer charge you get the picture? Now some of the people who are keying this into Google, by all means they are graphic designers, and they aren't potential clients. But we don't know some of them are potential clients. I know because I had a client contact me in this way before I asked them after they pay me thousands and thousands of dollars in fees for various design work done for them. And I asked them what they keyed in and they said it was something like how much does a freelance Web Designer charge or something like that. And they ended up on my site and they thought this guy knows what he's talking about.

And they hired me, as I say, thousands and thousands of dollars worth of business. There's more hair, graphic design, price quotes, graphic design related questions, graphic design, search terms, graphic design, hourly charge cost estimates, these are all other articles that are attracting the right sort of customer or visitor to my website. Some of them will be wrong, it doesn't matter. They can come and have a look at the site. But some of them will be clients, freelance web designers, and they've spent four minutes 20 seconds on the site. I could go on and on and on.

This is just the last month but it's been like this for three or four years or even longer than that because I've written a lot of blog posts. Every blog post you write creates more people coming and finding your size from searches like this. So that's the main idea of blogs. But of course, ask me questions. If there's something you don't understand about it. I will be coming back to this later.

But some more ideas here, put your USP, your unique selling point skills and services on your business stationery and emails. So for example, I have marketing materials design, print, rebounding, HTML, email, search, engine optimization, web design, development, hosting, and maintenance, etc. So anyone who receives mail from me will get this in the signature of the email, and they'll know I don't just do web design. So you can put this on your invoices, your business cards, letter heads, everywhere. If it's a good client, and they ask you for a job that you cannot do, say yes, find someone to do the job and charge the client little more than you paid for it. Okay, so you can use Elance and oDesk and other bidding sites to find people who can do this job for you.

It's not A great way to do everything you can outsource the 50% or so that you don't know how to do this way you get a new client, have a new contact and new guy that you meet through the bidding sites, and learn a bit more about how to do this work that you didn't know. And you get the job, you get a bit of money. The best clients are the ones you already have. Some clients came to me with tiny jobs, and they ended up using me to rebrand their company. I this is how it happened a couple of times. Again, this has been where they've been great clients in the first place.

So they've been part of a large organization. So by saying this, I don't mean do all manner of jobs from rock bottom prices. It never ceases to amaze me how much work I get from people that I've already worked for, or from recommendations from people that I've worked for, and formed partnerships and alliances with other web designers. We spoke about this in the last lecture. Continually keeping content With other designers, illustrators and developers, etc. And don't be afraid to ask anyone for advice.

Whether you do it through social media or in person, it doesn't matter. So some things you can do is upload visuals and ask for other people's comments on design forums help people when you hear them asking for advice, or they're on design forums or on social media like Twitter, and always answer every email as long as it's not spam. And this is a great way to pick up your contacts within the web design industry. designers are very keen on Twitter. And there are some excellent LinkedIn groups. Plus I find forums very helpful.

Here's a few examples of forums like the aesthetica design forum, and designers talk for example, I've also got some more forums in related areas, like sight point and Warrior Forum, and you can search on Twitter, Facebook, and look for These forums on web design jobs in your area, are not saying you should find clients or jobs this way. But if you engage with these forums, you'll meet other designers and set up good relationships. And sometimes you may even meet clients as well. But engaging with other web designers and professionals on these places will teach you lots and can introduce you to people you can do business with. But there's no substitute for meeting potential clients face to face. See if there are any business groups or mastermind meetings in your area, especially with marketers, and marketers always need designers.

So you can try meetup.com or BSI to find them. So this is, I would say, probably the second most common way I found clients. The first way is through my website, blogging, and the clients coming to me from Google. And so sighs but the second way after that is just people I've met. Because of face to face contact somebody you've met in real life, you always remember them is 10 times better than a contact of someone you've met online. So stop at nothing to meet business people in your area.

And I've spoken to many web designers who literally have found business from knocking at doors, going around the local area, local small businesses and asking them do they want a website, this is great thing to do, because if you end up working for them, they'll tell their friends and you'll get more clients and they'll be in the local area as well. And some people like to work for people locally. But as I say, everything starts and finishes with your website. You should be working on it and improving it almost every day. As you probably know by now, I would usually use WordPress to power a website because it comes With pretty good SEO straight out of the blocks, there are some essential SEO actions which you need to perform on a WordPress installation. And these are basic things like putting your keywords in the site title, headings, and URLs, creating a sitemap registering it on Google Webmaster Tools, writing meta description on old tags for images.

And following web standards. You should also follow some basic rules to optimize your pages for keywords. Now, keywords are very important. What are keywords? keywords are what people key into Google when they're looking for something. And so a chosen keyword for you would be web designer blank and blank would be the city you live in.

So you target people who are typing in web design or London or web designer Denver, something like that. Now, the way you used to do this was to call your website web designer London and get links with web design. On a London as the anchor text pointing towards your homepage, now, you've got to be very careful with this. And in fact, only have a couple of links pointing to your homepage with these keywords in them. Because Google recently with the penguin one and two updates, stomp down on this excessive use of anchor text. So when you do have control over the anchor text to your site, then make sure a you bury it and be you make it the same as the domain of your website and see have a few that say web designer, Denver, but this isn't as good advice as it used to be.

Don't worry too much about the anchor text of links that come into your site. Just worry about creating great content in your blog, and that will get the natural links coming in anyway. And it's also good practice to have links pointing to your internal pages, as well as your home page. But again, if If you're blogging, then the links will naturally come into your internal pages anyway. So I cannot overstate the importance of blogging blog as much as you can, writing relevant quality articles of at least 500 words, but maybe 1000 1500 2000, something like that as often as possible. And don't forget to put the keywords in the titles of the posts.

And by that, I mean, how much does a freelance web designer charge that would be an example of great keywords in the title of a post, which will help attract people looking for that subject through Google to your site. And for your portfolio, less is more. So just show you my portfolio. If you hover over there, I have a few different categories. And then if you click on it, there are just a few logos, little things like that. And there's also links Here to the other sections of the portfolio, which are web design.

Again, web design only have a few websites there. And obviously, if you click on them, they go to the website. And I also have a section for logo design and print design. And that's it. Less is more. So present your work samples in the best and fastest way to the visitor imaginable.

Always choose less work samples rather than more, it's better to see five fantastic websites rather than 55. Ordinary ones. Most potential clients will actually only spend an average of six seconds on your portfolio page. So just make the first six seconds count above will stand out from the crowd. Be creative, and break the mold. Always try to offer something different from everyone else.

And to do this, your design and development skills need to be as good as they possibly can. In addition to the forums, I met And earlier, there are several free resources on the internet where you can discover fantastic tutorials and inspiration. And here are a few links for those. The internet is your friend, a web designer only needs to look on the web for inspiration and great teaching. And it's usually for free. So if you're just starting out, whether you've been working as a designer for years, or you've just left college, you can enter the freelance world with zero risk.

As I said earlier, there's nothing to stop you being a freelance web designer, if you have a full time job because you can just work from home on your home computer, in the evenings and weekends in your spare time. You can start by creating and improving your own website. This is fundamentally important, as I've explained, write valuable content that's indexed by the search engines. Of course, don't leave a steady job to go freelancing with no clients. Do it step by step like I did. Little by little, you get more and more clients that you work in your spare time and then one day you can make the plans make the big break, be full time running a web design business.

Okay, thank you.