Freelance graphic designing is one of the best ways to make money online. Every business needs a quality graphic designer to market their company or brand to be competitive in the market. Therefore. As a Freelance Graphic designer, you have lots of opportunities to get work in some way or other. However, sometimes it can be a bit of a challenge to find a stable and dependable source of earnings as a beginner or during a global crisis. This article will talk about How to get work as a freelance graphic designer.

Here at money game strong, we already discussed about marketing yourself as a Freelance Graphic designer  and Top 10 Freelancing Websites for graphic designers but in this article, we will talk about other ways of finding new clients.

Finding Freelance Graphic Design Work

Instagram

More than 1 Billion people use Instagram, and it’s a great way to generate leads. It is a great way to promote yourself and get in front of many potential clients.

By posting and creating an audience on Instagram, you can increase your chances of getting noticed and increasing your authority in new clients’ eyes. Many people use Instagram as a way of promoting their services.

Getting design clients on Instagram is not just about posting with hashtags and waiting for clients to find you. There are three essential steps that you can do to find clients without waiting around for those hearts, comments, or DMs.

Instead of waiting for clients to come automatically and searching for how to get work as a freelance graphic designer, you can do something proactive about it. Especially when you are running dry on client work and want to see some influx of new work quickly.

Find a Hashtag

Your ideal client would use a hashtag on their post so. For Example, we will say #healthcoach. So, After going there, you can go to recent and go into their account and follow them.

You should like their posts. Come down to their old post and write some comments about what you like. Go deeper and write a longer comment. Be specific about what they are sharing.

If they have a story, watch it. Because people look at which people are watching their story and you can comment about it and reply to them with something nice about it.

Evaluate their brand

Another great way of getting leads on Instagram is to evaluate different brands and let them know about how you can improve their website design or other designs etc.

See if it is up to standards. Do you see if something can be improved about it or if you do brand identity, do they have a cohesive look?

Is there anything that is not looking up to the standards, and you think you can improve them. Make sure to note all these things down.

Send Them A Message

With your findings on their brand, send them a message. Start by telling them something about their brand and their business, and say something regarding what you like about their brand.

Be specific about a post that they shared and was helpful to you, and then let them know what they can do to improve and how you can help them get more clients and improve their brand identity.

Let them know how they can improve their reach by following your specific strategy. If they have an email on their account or their site, make sure to reach out there. This can improve the chances of getting your message reviewed.

On Average, it takes reaching out to about seven people to get one to respond. So if you did this outreach action to fourteen people per day, you should be getting about two responses daily.

You mustn’t copy/paste the same things repeatedly as this is going first off to get flagged as spam to Instagram, and they are going to be much less likely to respond to you.

Make sure to tailor the message according to the person you send the message to. Through in some personal element that is truly genuine and you don’t want to be lying. Write anything that makes them more willing to respond.

If they respond and are engaged in the conversation, you can also ask them about what they are struggling with within their business and get them to answer in that way. Then if this is something that your designs can help them resolve, you can relate that back to your service. They want their business to be successful, and your service as a designer allows them to remove those struggles.

Join Online Communities

Another great way of creating leads is joining communities that require quality graphic designers to keep their businesses up and running. Choose an industry you love to work on and gear your whole messaging towards it. Find out the industry’s common problems that your design services can solve.

For Example, you can join Amazon Community. So those people who sell at amazon as a new entrepreneurs, you can speak with them. You can try to understand what problems they are facing in their business. Mostly they face issues in getting loyal customers that buy their products and then increasing their sales. So you can gear all your messaging towards how you can solve this problem.

You can give their brands a cohesive brand identity with great infographics for their listing. You can let them know what they lack in their work instead of how good you are as a graphic designer. Because bragging about yourself can give them an impression that you only care about yourself and not about solving their problems and helping their brand grow.

Interact in these communities without the intention of selling. Help people by showing them how you care about their business success. Write them personalized messages. Let them know how they are essential. You will start getting clients this way, and those clients will come back again and again.

These clients are more likely to refer you because of your honesty and ability to solve their problems. These communities love to help each other, and they would refer your services to other people.

Business is about exchanging something valuable to help others, so if you are going to talk about money, you will come across that you want money. You need to understand the other person and see how your services can solve their business problems.

Get Recurring Clients

The best way to get consistent freelance graphic design work is to use the power of your existing clients. According to small business trends, 80% of your current income comes from 20% of your existing clients.

This can include them referring your service to someone else or coming back to get something new done from you. One must never disregard getting new clients into your business, but serving those you have above expectations should be your number one priority.

Just increasing the retention rate of the clients coming back by 5% can increase your income by 25%. This is why it should be your ultimate priority in your business. Having clients that keep coming back can solve your trouble of “How to get work as a freelance graphic designer”. Following are some essential points to get recurring clients.

Speed and Professionalism

An essential aspect of getting recurring clients is your speed and professionalism. That’s everything with clients. This starts from the time the client hires you to the onboarding process. Any meetings you have around their project through to the way you present the projects need to set the standards of how it is to work with you right from the start.

If you are sloppy in your onboarding process and maybe you have sent them about fifty emails to collect data and take one week to answer their mail, the client won’t feel good. That’s where a customer relationship management software like dubsado can really help you streamline your onboarding process.

This can help you send only one email with your contract, invoice, and your onboarding form, and it all gets stored in one place in dubsado under that client’s name.

Having your email doesn’t cost more than $5 per month. That is less than the cost of Netflix. Having just a Gmail address-based mail makes you appear not as professional, and these little things can make a difference in your perceived value to clients.

Another important aspect is to deliver the designs faster than expected. So if you know a project will take you seven days, give yourself padding and add an extra two days to provide the timeline for the client. Then deliver before the deadline, and you will gain even more trust with the client.

Never let an email go past 24 hours with a client. Always find a way to answer and gain their trust even further that you are reliable and there to help them.

Quality of work

Deliver each project as it were to be displayed under your portfolio.
So take care and pride in every design client you work with. There will be the rare clients who want you to do a design exactly their way, and you don’t like how it looks. At this moment, it’s your job to guide the client with the best examples that you can.

Make sure to price your work enough to allow the necessary time to give your all to the projects. When a client feels you do a great job, they will want to come back with you naturally and talk about you to others.

Your design’s work speaks for itself, and it will attract more of the type of work you want to get. New clients will come by to see your past work. So, each design that you put out into the world is a little representation of how awesome of a designer you are.

You can also add a bonus design that the client at the end of the project wasn’t expecting. So, for example, on an identity project, adding a different design template that they can use in their business or extra stock imagery can make a significant difference. Over-delivering is a fantastic tactic.

Create an attractive brand for yourself

It means taking time to create your brand personality. Your messaging, brand personality & brand identity are all geared towards an exact type of audience.

When you take pride in your brand and your content, you make it personalized for a specific type of industry. Past clients within that niche will want to be a part of your brand and share it with others.

They will take pride in working with you and will enjoy seeing future tips you put out. It helps you to remain top of mind to them so that when they need more design work, they will of course come back. To market yourself, you can follow our detailed article on how to market yourself as a freelance graphic designer. 

By following all the information given above, you can easily find high-paying clients and earn a lot of money as a freelance graphic designer. This is how to get work as a freelance graphic designer . Don’t forget to read our article about the Top 10 Freelancing Websites for Graphic Designers. You can also follow our 12 Steps to Becoming a successful freelance graphic designer.  

We have also written detailed articles on how much do freelance graphic designers earn and worth of freelance graphic design industry in 2022

If you are a beginner looking to learn graphic dsigner, then we recommend you check out our article regarding Top 5 Best Platforms to Learn Graphic Designing.