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Let's talk work and where to find it.
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There are many ways for a freelance web designer to find work.
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The very first and obvious option which is online platforms like freelancer.com and obviously
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Upwork.com. Or locally in the city where you live and networking with people in the industry, or
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networking with the startups, going to the tech conferences. Making friends with other successful web
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designers, who can send work towards your way. Because what often happens with web designers is
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that they get fully booked. Because, you know, one designer can only do one website at a time, right?
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You cannot do 10, 20 websites simultaneously.
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So good designers very easily get booked. And what happens is then they send work to their friends or some
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other people that they would recommend to their clients and so on.
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Also LinkedIn and regular job boards, like ZipRecruiter. There are more than enough ways to
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find work. And if you Google this, you'll find more and more options.
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The question is which one of these options is the perfect place for you to look work. Things like your
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current skill, your personality or experience, where you live, the city that you live.
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All of those things will determine which one of these options is going to be the perfect fit for you,
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at this stage.
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I can't tell you which one is going to work the best for you,
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no one can. But the best approach is to just pick one at a time and just go through the list.
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In this video, I'm going to talk about the online platforms and finding work on online platforms.
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I'll give you a general overview of the biggest ones.
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There are many of these.
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There is Upwork.
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There is Fiverr, there is freelancer.com, PeoplePerHour, Toptal and so on.
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The list is endless.
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And if you google it, you're gonna find more and more.
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And every year obviously more and more of these platforms will pop up, as competition changes. As some
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of them fall out of their top place, anotherone will replace them, or new ones come up.
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First Upwork.
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This is where I found my success. I found enough work on Upwork to be busy full time. Upwork is huge.
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It's a public company, meaning it's trading on stock exchange.
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I think it's the first freelancing platform to go public.
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It was created out of the merger of Elance and oDesk.
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Jobs are plentiful here, which means competition is rampant.
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I have a dedicated video on Upwork and how to be successful on it.
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So, we will cover it in detail there. I'll teach you some strategies on how to be successful and some common
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mistakes to avoid.
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Another big place for freelance jobs is freelancer.com.
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I haven't worked on freelancer, but I have used it to hire freelancers.
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I have a feeling that Upwork clients pay a bit more than freelancer clients and that might be because
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of the way these two platforms target their clients.
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As you can see on the home page they have these examples of mobile app design and website design and their
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prices.
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Those are very low prices, so it seems like they want to excite clients how cheap they can get something.
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Which is bad news for freelancers.
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But don't worry about this.
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As the saying goes, if you pay peanuts you get monkeys.
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Soon enough clients will learn this and they will intentionally choose higher prices. Because low price
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will get them low quality result.
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This list gets updated constantly.
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It shows open jobs.
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These are jobs that you can still bid on.
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This is already pretty good, but you'll see that it's lower number than Upwork.
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Which at this moment has more than 70 000 open jobs. To search for web design jobs, you can search with
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keywords, which I think searches through the title and the description of the job.
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But a better way to search is to select a skill from the filters.
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That's much better.
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Of course, not all of this is going to be a fit for you.
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These keywords and skills are all selected by clients. What they consider website design is not
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always going to be correct.
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So that's a short overview of freelancer. Then we have Fiverr, which is slightly different than the first
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two. On Upwork and Freelancer clients post jobs and freelancers bid. But on Fiverr freelancers post services
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and clients buy them directly.
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For example, this freelancer here says he will design a responsive Webflow website for 200$.
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And he offers 3 different packages: basic, standard and premium.
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I quite like this service based approach and Fiverr.
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I've actually done my first freelancing on Fiverr.
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This was a while ago, I did resume designs for 5$. Back then on Fiverr, that's the price you could
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only charge - five bucks. And offer some upgrades. But as a base price for every service that was listed
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there, was five bucks.
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Hence the name Fiverr.
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They've changed their approach since then and now you can price your services whatever you want.
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I've often hired freelancers on Fiverr to do a quick and small jobs of translation and video editing
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and things like that. As a client,
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it's great to just buy a service that is like a complete finished product.
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No negotiations and all that buy, send details,
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wait a couple of days for results and done. To be successful on Fiverr,
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you have to make money on volume.
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The whole thing is arranged for that.
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There aren't much meetings with clients or negotiations.
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You get the details.
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Deliver a result.
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Done.
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Next job.
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Even sets specific delivery dates, which you have to meet,
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after you have all of the info and assets from the client.
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So if I were to create a web design service here.
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Here is probably what I would do
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personally. I would say I'll build a website for a specific type of business. For example, a website for
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freelancers, or a portfolio website or accountants etc. I'd create many such gigs.
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That's what it's called here.
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The gig. Then I'd create a couple of templates or just use templates from Webflow's marketplace.
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There are a lot of beautiful templates sold on Webflow and there are even pretty great free templates.
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I would count the template cost in the total price.
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Maybe use free templates for basic pricing and then have payed templates under premium pricing.
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And then, when people would buy my gig, I would have them choose which template they want. And offer
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color, type or other customizations based on their brand.
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This way, clients know upfront what they are getting. No discussion on designs. And I don't have to design
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and build an entire website from scratch.
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I'm grossly simplifying the process here, of course, I could make an entire course just on this.
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Keep in mind, that you'd be creating a complete readymade service for your clients.
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You'll need to put a lot of thought into it, to create a really nice package. And will take some trial
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and error until you get it right.
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As a matter of fact, this is exactly what I was doing with resume designs.
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I was giving them about 5 resume templates to choose from, they would choose it, then I would fill in
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their details and done.
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No one ever had any complaint about the design. Because they knew what they were getting upfront.
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Peopleperhour is sort of a mix between Fiverr and Upwork.
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Clients can find freelancers directly by searching for specific skills, and then reviewing profiles of
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freelancers, and getting in touch directly.
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Also, they can post projects just like Upwork and Freelancer and get proposals from freelancers. And just
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like Fiverr, you can post services here.
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They call it offers, on Fiverr it's called a gig.
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I have used Peopleperhour both as a freelancer and as a client.
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I did some resume designs here, back in those days. And I've hired web designers and web developers several
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times in here.
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Toptal is a freelancing site that has quite a different approach than others.
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This site is going to be a bit early for you in your career, but I'm still going to throw in here, so
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you know what's out there.
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Toptal has a very rigorous selection process for freelancers.
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They do interviews, challenges, portfolio reviews, before they accept you on the platform.
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They want a top talent in there. Hence the name Toptal. As they claim only 3% of applicants
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are selected.
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So consider Toptal,
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once you have excelled in your skills.
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This, of course, means that clients who look for freelancers on this site are looking for a premium service
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and they are not afraid to pay accordingly.
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So, as you can see, even on online platforms there are places to find high paid work.
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If you want more sites, Forbes has listed 79 sites to get freelance jobs.
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Go get your head spinning. Link in the resources. Overall,
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possibilities are endless online, but competition is fierce as well. Because there are a lot of web designers
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out there, it's the entire world competing for their services. But don't get discouraged.
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In reality, most of the web designers and most of the talent that is applying for jobs and that are on
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these platforms they are terrible.
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They are not even mediocre.
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They are below mediocre. Clients actually struggle finding good talent as well.
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Often my clients, when they come to me and I'm busy and I'm no maybe fully booked and I don't have any
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capacity to take new projects.
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They ask me, "Okay,
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then do you know anybody else that you could recommend, because you know we went on this site and we
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couldn't find anybody". Because there is just so much competition and there is just so much kind of noise
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going on out there, that finding the talent for them is a bit difficult.
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And the thing with this platform is that, because anybody can join, and it's open to the world, and world
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is frickin big.
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You have so many people join in without even having any skill at all. Like people will claim that they
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are web designers and they will do anything, even before they took a web design course.
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Alright. If you can imagine, like any kid or anybody comes here and they think, you know, " Oh I'm gonna make
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a lot of money online". And they started like, "Well I'll do web design, I just install a square space site
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for somebody, or I just learn how to install a WordPress theme and now I'm a web designer or a web developer".
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Right?
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For someone like you, who has put so much work into it and let's be honest this course was quite huge.
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So, if you put work and if you are working on it, if you are taking this seriously, then you will be unstoppable.
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And if you provide good service, and you deliver good service, and with polish and process that you have
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already set. Having a great website, showing portfolios and some other tips and tricks, that I'm gonna
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teach you later on in this part of the course, you're gonna be miles ahead of the competition who are
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just messing around there, not knowing what they are doing in reality. And they are just random people
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around the world.