Promoting yourself as a designer

Hello this is my first front page post and I hope you can apply my thoughts and research to your career or hobby. I am a young designer but hope to bring a new perspectives to creativebits. There are many ways of promoting yourself and your services whether in print or on the internet. I am going to look at the different methods of doing this...

Word of Mouth

This is the advertising strategy that everyone loves designers especially, no effort needed. When you print and design someone business cards, throw in some of your own! Networking can help your word of mouth promotion, make sure everyone knows what you do friends, family, neighbors, local businesses, and former clients (Make sure they know the whole range of services).

Online Communities

Join a local business forum or branch worldwide and reach out and join a worldwide forum. Things like your local town/city/villages website eg www.stradbroke.org.uk. Or if you specialize in a certain area, a service related website eg www.wordlab.com/wordboard. Other online communities where you can meet other designers like www.meetup.com.

Website

If you don't have a website you had better get one! Your clients will expect you to have a web presence and most of my clients come to me by way of my website. 90/95% of my clients will come to me via my website and almost 100% of my clients will come from outside even the uk!

Direct Mail

Target the naive market you want to target and send them a postcard, flyer or brochure about you and what you do. I haven't done a direct mail piece but some friends send them every five years and get a reasonable amount of attention from them.

Online Directories

Make use of directories! What more could you want they are free mostly and will display your link for usually a small banner ad. So what you could do is make a page of these banner ads and hide it away. They are an easy way to get your name and contact information out there to possible clients... and there are so many.

Competitions

Getting your name known will increase your web chatter among other designs and it will spread like wildfire. The main part of my advertising budget goes towards the fee's of these things. Having your artwork honored and being printed in design books will allow you to brag in your publications and allow clients to look in these books and say "Hey I like that designer lets contact him I've got some work I need doing".

Press Releases

Another major method of advertising and marketing yourself is a press release or newsletter style updates email. Make a list of clients, editors and community editors and email them about your business advertising offers, design awards and other stuff similar.

Charity Work

Now I bet your thinking what do i get out of it...everybody does. You will get more out of charity work most of the time than normal work apart from the monitory factor. You should get all the credit on the pieces being produced for the organization. You also have the opportunity to meet people business leaders and people in the community for who serve the company. Free Work for Profit ventures is a big NO! Telling a company you will work for free will encourage the fact that your work is worthless not priceless.

Paid Print advertising

Humm not a fan of this one but but some companies and designers swear by it. I don't do any paid printing advertising but it would include things like yellow pages and local village/town magazine. The quality of the advert is usually crappy and it has a limited audience.

Cold Calling

"The process of approaching a potential customer without any previous introduction or contact with a view to selling to them. Cold calling is usually conducted by telephone or in person." Google Define
This is at the bottom of my list, I do not enjoy cold calling. Over the time i have been a designer I have received no clients at all by doing this and it makes you seem rather desperate.

I hope this helps you sell yourself I'm not telling you to go out and buy a billboard for your business but these little things can lead up to a large image and presence of your business.