Maybe you are fresh our of school and have finally finished your online portfolio. You are ready to start working as a freelance designer. But, “Houston we have a problem.” You don’t have any leads to potential clients and your overhead cannot sustain advertising at the moment. Well, fortunately, there is a free option for new designers to find potential client leads online… Craigslist. This was a great tool me in the beginning. But, with all things free, you have to understand the pros and cons of the service and how to make it best work for you.
Why should I post an ad or search Craigslist’s job boards?
First and foremost, the service is absolutely free for you to use. And this is incredibly important if you are just starting out. There is no other service available that has the type of potential reach that Craigslist has that will not affect your operating cost. In fact, according to a recent report
The site serves over nine billion page views per month, putting it in 47th place overall among web sites world wide, ninth place overall among web sites in the United States (per Alexa.com on August 21, 2008), to over thirty million unique visitors. With over thirty million new classified advertisements each month, Craigslist is the leading classifieds service in any medium. The site receives over two million new job listings each month, making it one of the top job boards in the world.
Where else can you get free advertising with these types of potential impressions? This alone should be reason enough to add this to your arsenal of free options to find client leads.
All that glitters, ain’t gold
Now you’ve decided to create an account for yourself and post your ad in your local Services » Creative or Services » Computer section of the site, where you will find the majority of graphic and web designer posts. The first thing you will notice is that you are not alone. There are literally hundreds of posts daily from like-minded designers, so understand from the start that you are not entering virgin territory. You will definitely be one of many, so keep this in mind when you create your post. You want something that will make your ad stand out over all of the other submissions. Be concise with your content and try to avoid “hyping” your services. Your portfolio will do that for you, so a brief overview of what you do, an image and a link back to your portfolio should be sufficient.
Also know that Craigslist places a limitation on how many posts you can create over one week. Your post will be active over the week and will expire on the seventh day. Once your ad expires, you simply log back into your account and repost the previous ad. And you can even change the content if you think the previous ad was ineffective.
Are these people serious?
Remember how we stressed that this service is free? Well, that is also going to mean that you are going to run into posts from people that are, for the lack of a better word, ludicrous. Unfortunately, the following post is not uncommon.
I have a new clothing line that will be hitting stores very soon. It will mainly be an urban clothing line but we will cover a wide veriety of fashion. The clothing line is called [obscured] and we need a logo. There are no guide lines to what we are looking for. Give me your best and most creative ideas. The chosen logo will be paid $100 dollars. If there are any other designs that I would like to use that will not be our company logo, I am willing to pay $25 per designs.
More times than not, you are going to find these types of ads. Craigslist is filled to the brim with “bargain shopppers” and you will have to accept their existence and simply ignore the ad. And, though we personally find the “flame” responses to be humorous, we also think they are not necessary. You should conserve your energy and direct it at finding viable clients and hope that no designer worth their salt will respond to these types of ads.
What does this all mean to me?
Well, and we cannot stress this enough, if you are new and looking for clients, you cannot ignore this as a powerful tool. It is not, by any stretch of the imagination, going to be your primary source of client leads. But, if it is not one of the things you are doing regularly, then you are doing yourself a disservice. Place an ad or two in your local Craigslist for a month and see what happens. Track the click through traffic using Google Analytics and see just how many people actually came from Craigslist to your site.
Also, answer the posts that you think are viable for you. Just know that there is a great chance that they may go unanswered. This is not necessarily a statement about your work or skill set. Posts requesting services usually generate an overwhelming amount of responses, most of which do not fit what the potential client is looking for. But, this should never be a deterrent for you answering an ad. Remember that clients are not going to seek you out until you have established yourself so you must do everything possible to grow your business.
@Lisa I agree with you. Nothing can replace the personal touch of meeting potential clients face to face. And, it is difficult to determine who, on Craigslist, is a potentially valid client or not. There are some definite disadvantages to the service. But, with that said, I think that it offers new freelance designers a unique (and free) opportunity to begin to build a client base for themselves at the onset of their career. Maybe you can share some ways you were able to find clients when you began?
My only problem with Craigslist, especially in Atlanta, where I live, is that the majority of the ads are poorly written with typo, punctuation, and grammatical errors and that they aren’t fully detailed enough. Sometimes these things mean that the client and/or employer is a fake or they can mean scam. I believe it’s safer to approach businesses or individuals in person and hand them your business cards, depending on where you live, rather dealing with people online.