Paid online advertising

DanSilva

Member
What do you guys think about using AdWords or Facebook adds in order to promote you as a freelancer or your company? Have somebody experience with this things?
 
AdWords can work well if you can target the right keywords (and afford to stay on top if it's competitive), the key is ensuring the page you direct people to will convert. Facebook, wouldn't even bother, it's a consumer platform. Same with Instagram.
 
Agree with that. Adwords can work really well but you need to put a lot of effort in if you want to reap the rewards. The good news is that Google has published a lot of great tutorials and advice on how to optimise your campaign. However, to succeed you need dedicated landing pages. Ideally one for each ad group. If you don’t do this all your money will be wasted.
 
In average with a decent online marketing campaign and a decent website and portfolio how much I will pay for a viewer who convert into a client?
 
It all depends on your adwords. They could cost you 50p/click or £50/click or somewhere in between.

You need to calculate how much you can afford to spend on marketing for each project. A £5000 project could carry a marketing budget of £1000, A £50 project might end up costing more to market than the profit you make.

There are no rules, every campaign is different. Only you will know how much you can afford. But a good figure to begin with would be 50% of how much you want to earn each day. As you refine the campaign and get more targeted this figure will reduce.

Your big problem is the competition. There are thousands of freelancers all fighting for some very thin slices of the cake.
 
If you pay 400$ for one client using AdWords and he wants to buy a logo design that cost 400$ you basically earn nothing. Whatever if he like your work, he will come again for something else or he will recommend you to other people.
 
Or maybe not. There is very little loyalty for freelancers. And referrals don’t come around that often. But you may be lucky.

On the other hand there are loads of freelancers offering logo design. So you may struggle to even get your adverts seen.

Do you have a website? Have you started building landing pages? If not it’s something you will need to do, you can’t just use your existing pages.
 
I gave you just an example with the logo design...I am not really into that necessarily. For the moment I just try to build a great portfolio and learn web design and UI...
I am thinking to start like a company, not like a freelancer. Do you think this will increase my loyalty?
Also do you think is worth it to hire somebody to deal with the online marketing or to learn myself at a basic level?
 
Too many different things in that post. This is a graphic design forum so the assumption was that you were looking for graphic design work. If you want to learn web design and UI then it's a whole new discussion. Web design is a different skill set and you need a different approach to marketing. How good are you at HTML/CSS, PHP and JS? If they aren't something you live and breath then web design maybe isn't the right field for you.

However....

Starting a company won't improve loyalty. Hiring someone won't help unless you have something to market. I ask again: do you have a website where you can showcase and promote your services?
 
I just started to learn the basics of CSS and HTML, but I learn pretty fast. I don't know if it is exactly a good fit for me... I just try to discover on which design niche to focus on. I observe the web designers are better paid and the UI/UX industry is growing.
I don't have for the moment a site. What is the point? I need to make a new portfolio and have some money to invest in marketing before to start anything.
I just try to analyze if I will start my own business how hard will be to succeed, currently, my number 1 focus is to get some professional experience on a job and work part time like a freelancer.
 
I don't have for the moment a site. What is the point?
Because it's the place where you can experiment and display your skills. When you bid for work the first thing prospective clients will want to see are examples of your work. And the best place to do this in on a website you built yourself.
 
the first thing prospective clients will want to see are examples of your work.

Yes, the problem is that, I don't have clients or methods available to obtain them yet...haha...or very much work to show them(like, I have some pieces, but there are not at professional level, I make them just for fun)...look this is my actual portfolio(if you can name in this way) https://www.flickr.com/photos/162501564@N04/albums/72157665746145188 ...almost everything I've worked so far. . . what do you think?
 
You should have a portfolio that's focussed on what you want to get hired to do. If it's logos, just show logos, if it's books, show books. Don't pad it out with illustrations or photography, nobody is going to hire you to do those and you just dilute the portfolio as a whole.

If you pay 400$ for one client using AdWords and he wants to buy a logo design that cost 400$ you basically earn nothing. Whatever if he like your work, he will come again for something else or he will recommend you to other people.

I understand the concept you're getting at – spending money to make money – but if you're spending £400 on marketing a service you only charge £400 for then something is seriously wrong with you pricing. Unless you're selling that same service to 10 other clients at the same time it should be obvious it's not a good investment.

Going freelance requires a lot of experience and a certain level of quality that's expected from clients. I was lucky enough to be freelance straight from university, but that's only because I had a regular client. I wouldn't recommend anyone attempts to go freelance without already having clients and a body or work built up. It's stressful, you need to understand so many other aspects of running a business besides just how to design, and if you work for other design studios, a lot of the work you produce you won't be allowed to display publicly so you need to produce work outside of those contracts so your portfolio is up to date.
 
A graphic designer I used to know (he's a builder now) spent more time marketing and dealing with clients than he ever did actually doing graphic design. A two hour job would often take a whole day because he had to write emails, talk on the phone, get approval, get the cash and of course find the client in the first place.
 
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