How to Become a Six Figure Freelance Graphic Designer

Posted in: Guru's | June 18th, 2008

Page from the Book of Kells: Folio 114v, Decorated text. Tunc dicit illis

Wow. My last post on Battlestar Galactica is by far the most popular post I’ve ever written. Thanks for the comments and kind words. Obviously, a lot of people are still worked up about the BSG final. I’ve got some new ideas and theories as to what might be going, which I’ll publish in my next post (perhaps later tonight, time permitting). We’ll have to see.

Anyway, this next post is a guest post written by Aaron Abber. I think it’s an interesting article on how you can make money online as a graphic designer. If you’re interested in ways to make some extra money online, you might want to sign up for his newsletter. You can get to it by clicking on the link on the upper left. Here’s the article:

A couple of my subscribers wanted to know how they can make some money selling graphics. Being the overachieving giver I am, I decided to show them how not to make just a few cents, but to…

“Earn $100,000 or more Per Year”

Earning big bucks in any business requires some of the same features:

A Way to Attract Potential Customers
An Incentive (or Two) to Get them to Subscribe
A Product to Sell Them
An Effective Sales Process

Let’s break these down for the freelance graphic designer…

“Who is the Potential Customer?”

Most “creative” types are not marketing types. That’s OK ’cause and effective business needs both and it is much easier to learn marketing than it is to learn how to be artistically creative. The first thing someone who wants to be a freelancer needs to do is consider who buys products from freelance graphics people.

The Starter Small Business Website

Small businesses understand they need to have sharp graphics on their sites and have a small budget to get it done. Typically they are spending as little as possible to get a banner or logo made. $100 per graphic or logo is probably the limit, meaning you have to attract 300-500 new customers a year (since some of them will buy multiple times) in oder to make $100K.

The Secure Small Business Website

This can be a solid money maker. They have a bigger budget and can see the value of a $400.00 logo. The owner doesn’t want to spend the time trying to create the graphics himself so he is more than willing to get a long-term relationship with a freelance graphic designer. They are still “mom and pop” run, but have the budget to pay you.

“Target the Biggest Mom and Pop Store in Each Niche”

In almost every market niche there are a few websites that dominate the niche. Make a list of the top five or so with contact information. Then visit their sites. See how you could improve the graphic design of those particular sites.

Then contact the owners, offering to do a site redesign free.

“Add Them to Your Portfolio”

Tell them you want only three things from them:

First, you want to be able to add them to your portfolio.

Second, you want to have a link on their main page pointing back to your developer site.

Third, an acknowledgment from them on their site saying you did the redesign.

This accomplishes several things for you. It gives you instant credibility. “If so-and-so used him, he must be good.” It gives you traffic from the link back. It helps your search position by placing a solid keyword phrase on the high PR main pages of authority sites. It provides an instant, high value, testimonial.

“Create a Seductive Hot Resource”

At your site you want to offer your visitors a free download to get them on your RSS and email lists. As a graphic designer you want your download to be something related to how your services will benefit them. It needs to have a compelling, benefit laden title and a professional looking cover.

Page one of the ebook will be the cover. On page two have coupons or other incentives to return to your site and get a service at a deep discount. Don’t make it free, but make it so cheap that any serious prospect just can’t resist. This will move them from the prospect into the customer category.

“Remind Your Subscribers About the Coupons”

Every week when you publish a new newsletter, remind your subscribers about the coupons and encourage them to redeem them with you. Point out what a great value they are.

Over time more and more of your subscribers will be moving from prospects to customers.

“Add a High-End Product/Service”

High end products are key to making big money in almost any market niche and graphic design is no different. It is much easier to get 10 people to pay $10,000.00 each than to get 10,000 people to pay $10 each.

So once you have the infrastructure built to do the above, add a high-end product. This could be a complete site redesign or some other service. You want it to be able to create for you at least $1,000.00 in profit if you pay someone else to do the work for you, even if at first you complete the service yourself.

“Hire Out the Work”

Imagine Ray Kroc, the founder of McDonalds, had tried to make every hamburger himself. He would have lived and died owning one small hamburger stand–and probably worked himself to death there.

Scalability refers to your business having the ability to handle higher and higher numbers of customers while not sacrificing quality. While at first you will be providing graphic design services personally, over time you will want to have more and more people doing the actual work for you while you focus on marketing, high-dollar product creation and servicing only your high dollar customers.

As you run your business and are providing services yourself, document the “steps” that would be required for a reasonably skilled graphic designer to duplicate your efforts. Then hire virtual employees to do those tasks. It is easier than it sounds and will make you tons of money.

“Now Go Do It”

One of the toughest parts of any business is just going out and putting into action the things you already know you can do. It’s scary. It’s sometimes risky (though not as much as we pretend in our minds.)

But when we do it an amazing thing happens: We make money.

“Coming Tomorrow…”

Have you seen those cool “page peel” ads on high end sites? Tomorrow I am going to continue in the spirit of giving by giving you a free page peel script.

You’ll want to stop by and grab it.

This article is a guest post by Aaron Abber of FullTiltBlogging.com.
I am a part of Aaron’s mentoring program where he is teaching me and
others how to make
money blogging. Go visit the site now and grab his
free report “How to Retire on 200 Visitors a Day”.