I like your site the most! My wife is a graphic designer and I can tell you have an eye for design. Everything flows nicely. Might want to take that route instead of the logo design. A friend of mine makes a decent living at $150/hr doing graphic design.
Does your friend have any advice on making a living with graphic design?
She actually taught me the ropes on how to start my own remote business, so I can give you some pointers!
For eduction (to get brought up to speed):
- She used TeamTreeHouse.com. She learned a lot of what she applied in her business there
- Udemy is also a good one and can find cheap courses there... but I'd start with treehouse.
For software:
- She uses Divi (from Elegant Themes, which is a WordPress plugin) and makes most (if not all) of her clients' sites that way. It's super easy (I'm an accountant, and have used it for my own site). Very flexible and allows you to make beautiful & highly functional websites pretty quickly.
To get clients:
- I have used UpWork mostly in the past, but there are a lot of new options out there. Stay away from Fiverr because thats the low dollar option for people. Anyone serious about building a nice website for their business is most likely going to go to another Freelancer platform to find talent. Just google "freelance jobs" or variations of that search and you'll get a good current list.
After that, you just have to be able to accept payments. Paypal is always a super easy way to do it. I'd also suggest requesting a paypal business debit card from them...so you can spend your money immediately (if need be) and/or withdraw it from an ATM the second it hits your PayPal account.
All in all, it takes a little bit of work to get your first client....but after that it seems to snowball into more business than most can handle (at least that's the way it has worked for a lot of freelancers I know).
My biggest bits of advice:
1) Set your price to be something you're happy making. If you lowball yourself too much, you're going to hate the gigs you get because you'll be underpaid.
2) Don't get frustrated if you're not getting gigs at first. It's normal. If you price yourself at a $$ amount you want to make, then you're going to automatically be exclude 90-95% of the clients out there who are looking for cheap solutions. This is ok! Those clients are usually super tight on cash and slow pay their freelancers. If you hold out for the ones that can afford you, they often pay almost instantly, and also send repeat work to you. I have accounting clients that I've been working with for years now. In the beginning, I'd send out 100 proposals for gigs I saw posted, and maybe hear back from 3 of them. 1 would bite, and I'd end up making $20k a year off them. Get a couple of those clients on board and you have a legit business.
Tools I use:
- Google Drive
- Drop box
- Zoom (always video conference when talking to clients if you can. Builds a good relationship!)
- Xero (for accounting software)
- PayPal
- Skype
- Adobe Creative Cloud (for editing or filling in pdf forms)
- Hellosign (to have people sign documents electronically)
- Hellofax (to fax docs electronically)
- Wordable (heard this is good software to post google docs to Wordpress for blog posts)
Everything on this list (except for Adobe) has free subscriptions with some limitations...so you can get all this for free and be 100% remote!
Last year, my wife, son, 2 dogs and I traveled around the USA for 11 months while I worked remotely from my cell phone personal hot spot. Pretty nice life!
You can check out my accounting website at
www.TheMadOnesAccounting.com (disclaimer, I'm no web designer and made this myself. I used Divi, but my site is not a good representation of the power of that plugin). You can also see some photos from my family wandering around the USA in the "About us" section.
All in all, i'd never go back to working a regular 9-5 ever again. I make my own hours, don't have to ask permission to travel or vacation. My clients request meetings with me (instead of demanding I show up like most bosses), and I get to write off a lot of expenses as business expenses while I'm traveling because I can always try to get new business in different cities I visit. There are limitations to what you can write off accounting-wise, but all in all it's a really good life.
