Introduction
With these tips for freelance graphic designers, you’ll learn how you can earn money as a beginner graphic designer from freelancing without any hurdles. When you want to freelance and earn money through graphic design, Many designers and freelancers struggle at the start of their freelance journey because of some crucial steps/tips they don’t know. This affects their client work, dealing with clients, payouts, and many more things.
So, I am going to share with you 5 important tips that a freelance graphic designer must know in the beginning. So take a cup of coffee/chai and begin with our first tip.
Tips for freelance Graphic Designers
Diversify
Graphic Design is a vast category that includes various categories as I discussed in my previous blog. So in the beginning you’ll have to pick one or maybe two types of graphic design that you may like and start working on your skills along with social presence.
Remember to pick a parent category/type such as branding, packaging, social media designing, motion design, etc so that you’ll have much more stuff to explore.
Please do not pick any category just because you feel like it will increase your earnings. Do what your heart says, just enjoy and sharpen your skills in the beginning. You can earn more with any category but first, you’ll need to get the best at it.
While freelancing sometimes you may not get your targeted clients, but might get clients that may need something related to your work. Lemme explain it with an example.
Suppose you’re doing thumbnail design (which is pretty popular these days) and you get a client who wants somebody to design a banner, thumbnails, and some posters for its YouTube channel.
Now, Thumbnail designing is a very micro niche category or type. What you can do is you can provide full YouTube-related services from YouTube logos, banners, community posts, and thumbnails. And target clients based on these services with which you’ll get a chance to work on everything for a client’s YouTube channel instead of just a thumbnail.
This was a very basic example but I hope you understood what I wanted to explain.
Ultimately you need to smartly diversify your skills to increase your client work along with your freelance earnings.
Also, read – How to become a graphic designer
Time Management
Time is your most important asset and managing it can be very stressful when you’re into freelancing. Freelance is an on-and-off game. Somedays it will be almost zero work and some days it will be a hell lot of work. So you’ll have to be mentally prepared for both situations.
So when you have plenty of clients and a lot of work at the same time, you’ll have to manage each project smartly. To do so firstly you need to know an approximate time duration that will take you to complete one project. I know it may take more or less time but you should know an approximate time for a particular project. This will help you to plan your day accordingly and manage your projects based on the time it will take to complete.
Completing deadlines of a project is the most important thing in freelancing. It can make or break your relations with clients.
Whenever you go for closing any client, you’ll have to specify a particular time duration that a project will take to complete. And it shouldn’t take more than your specified time. As they say, the first impression is the last, So you’ll have to take care of this thing and that’s why managing your time is important. It will become so crucial when you have two or more than two clients at a time. Freelancers should take care of their time and schedule their time accordingly.
In my career, There’s not a single time that my client got stuck due to me or my work. That is one of the main reasons why my clients are loyal to me and have a healthy relationship with me.
Eventually, If a client approaches you for your services he will expect you to do your work in a good manner and he should not need to micro-manage you like reminding deadlines, repeating briefs again and again. These are very annoying things from a client’s perspective. As a freelancer, you would want to make your client’s life easier not hard right? And that’s how you’ll be able to retain and attract more clients by managing their projects and taking care of the deadlines.
Strong Connections
Having good connections with your clients and fellow designers is very important. In every business connections and relationships play the most crucial role in deals.
For freelancers, it just plays the role of the most important pillar of the building because good connections bring more clients and more opportunities. At a certain stage of freelancing, One cannot always reach out to new clients because if you are not retaining your clients and you’re not getting any referrals from current clients then there’s a big problem in how you handle your clients and the work.
Having good connections with your clients can be difficult for an introvert because I am also an introvert but this is a part of the job. Listing some points that you can follow for better connections.
- Be good at what you do
- Be more professional
- Talk in a friendly manner
- Try to wish people on certain occasions
- Don’t ghost
- Talk about their day to start a conversation (Don’t ask too much or cross any line, Just little questions about their family, health, or their day can be a good start)
Apart from just work, One can follow these points to build a nice and healthy connection.
Am I stressing more about connections because I’ve experienced this in my career and it helped me a lot when it comes to getting new clients. I have one client who got me 3 monthly clients and 4 to 5 freelance clients, just because of our good connection. So you can understand how great a single connection can be in your journey.
A freelancer who reaches out every day for new clients will understand how difficult it can be to get deals done with clients. The craziest thing is that referral clients are the easiest clients to deal with because the one who referred you has already done 50% of your job to convince them.
Respect every client
Let’s assume you have two clients one is a high-ticket client and the other one is a low-ticket client or has small work for you. Would you treat both of them equally in terms of work quality?
You would probably answer yes
But if you have many good high-ticket clients and you got approached by a client who needs a graphic that will cost 10 to 20 dollars would you bother to treat that client in a good manner?
You will say what is the problem with this because every client has their value right?
But I’ve seen many designers who don’t bother to respect every client. By not respecting I mean not delivering up-to-the-mark quality work, ghosting your client, and not communicating well enough with your client.
You may have great design skills but these things play a crucial role in freelancing for retaining clients and for good connections.
Payments
Freelancing is a business in which you are everything of your business and you’ll have to care of everything from targeting clients to handling them and getting everything done. Payments are the most important part of freelancing because, after all, you’re freelancing for the money not for charity right?
Your job is not done until you receive the complete payment for your work.
Now why am I stressing about this thing more because there is not a single experienced freelancer who doesn’t get scammed or stuck their money due to clients.
That’s why you should be disciplined with your payments and for that what you can do is take 50% upfront and the rest of the amount after the project or you can do 50% upfront and 25% after the first blueprint of the project and rest of the amount during the final delivery of the project.
You can also create contracts/agreements for your services and they should include all the payment terms.
And you should follow these terms every time even if you are working with a client or a friend or a friend of your friend, Ha ha.
Conclusion
If you are a beginner and if you’ll follow or just have these things in mind while working with your clients. Trust me these tips will help you a lot in your journey.
Hope you enjoyed reading this article.
And if you have any suggestions or queries in mind feel free to ask me in the comments.