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New freelance illustrator looking for some advice.

Hello community! I'm new on here, and new to freelancing. I would love some constructive feedback and advice regarding my online profile and website. Lastly, how can I start getting clients outside of just cold emails? Any advice would be highly appreciated!!

Website: https://arfakhan.com
LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/arfa-khan
Behance: https://behance.net/arfakhan
Arfa Khan
Arfa Khan
Freelance Illustrator

Replies2

  • Arfa Khan
    Arfa Khan
    Freelance Illustrator
    @Brian Grant Thank you for your in-depth reponse, it has some really good advice and it's given me good directions to consider. I'll be sure to keep all of this in mind as I go forward. Again, highly appreciated!
  • Brian Grant
    Brian Grant
    Creative director
    Hello Arfa,

    Your work looks good and you obviously have a lot of talent.

    The market right now is incredibly competitive and you will need to find a way to stand out from all of the other talented illustrators that are competing for roles.

    Cold-outreach is really hard especially when you do not see results quickly. Success rates are typically less than 1% so that could be a very long grind.

    You could try a warm outreach strategy, this would be to contact your existence network of people in your contacts, which is typically over 250 people.

    A great resource for getting leads is the book ‘$100M LEADS’ by Alex Hormozi, It is the best thing out right now on getting noticed.

    The other best route is to build a brand / reputation and you should be on a social media platform like Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, Linkedin or YouTube because your clients are there with money to spend.

    If you do not have money to advertise, the only other thing you have is time and you would need to work on promoting your work in addition to creating the work. Yes, it will mean that you will have to work longer hours and this is an investment in yourself.

    There are ways to save time by batching content, breaking down projects, showing process work, creating short reels, etc. A little research will show you how to get that done.

    Unfortunately the chances of just posting something and have high quality clients just stumble on your work is very rare.

    Before you freak out with the amount of work required it would make sense to create a strategy of the platform that you think will give you the best chance, or create small tests and view the analytic results and use the platform that works best for you.

    It will take some time unless you go viral, and you should be active and aim to put content up at least a few times a week for a while to be favoured by the algorithms.

    Yes, it does mean more work and lots of people complain about this. But then what is a better alternative? Those people who do nothing and complain are not the people who are having success in the market now.
    You have to take action and do everything in your power to make things happen, and eventually things will happen.

    When your reputation grows enough, then work will find you.

    Keep going, look at what is working and do more of it, and stop what is not working.

    Good luck.

    Bri.

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