Start making more money as a designer!

This ain't a magic trick, its going to take time! Trust the process!

Author

Asaad Mahmood
February 01, 2024

Hello fam! 🥷

Let’s dive in today into what you actually need to do to earn more money as a designer or a developer! NOT EASY! BUT WORTH IT!

Things we’ll be covering:

  • 🚀 Land your first client on Upwork!

  • 🤔 Starting UX in 2024?

  • 💵 How to earn more as a freelancer

  • 😱 How to start getting leads? Tips from the DesignJoy course

  • 🙌 Insights from Nick from Baked.design

🚀 Land your first client on Upwork!

⚡️ An amazing resource for Freelancers!

🖤 Dark Websites Collection and Templates

😱 How to start getting leads? Learnings from the DesignJoy course and from following him

Here are some of the things Bret from DesignJoy did to scale his solopreneur business to over a million dollars per year!

I took Bret’s course, and here are the highlights of the most important section (getting leads).

  1. He launched his site at Product Hunt, it Hit top 4, got 35000 unique visits, and gave his business a boost. Publications picked it up, and emails and socials picked it up, and that's pretty much it.
    In my opinion, this won’t work for us, because now productised services are very common, he used the lack of such a service as a boost to get all that attention.

    If you want to launch at Product Hunt, you better do something unique to sell your services, or focus on the other options.

  2. Leaned into communities like Indiehacker, facebook groups, slack communities for productized services. (People needed help from him to build their own businesses from these communities).
    Do join these communities to learn from others like you.

  3. Posted his design page on Landing page inspiration sites. (got a lot of traffic from them), but the page needs to be good.
    I’ve started to do this too, and it does bring traffic, but I haven’t secured a client yet from there.

  4. Created few micro resources (scribbles), so create various products that link to your site as well and give cross traffic.
    You can also create other assets like Framer templates, Webflow templates, UI kits, Figma Design Kits, etc to bring traffic to yourself.

  5. Twitter following, and the build in public stuff (most of his traffic now comes from here).
    A lot of other service creators and designers are actually using Twitter as their primary source of leads, while some rely on LinkedIn. Do not sleep on these platforms!

  6. Outbound to people looking for services particularly (from job boards)

  7. Ads (Youtube, google, facebok)
    He doesn’t do this but mentioned people have had success with this!

🙌 Insights from Nick from Baked.design

  1. Building Your Own Brand: Work on creating a strong personal image. People like to connect with a person, not just a company. Show your work and ideas regularly.

  2. Providing Unique Help: Stand out from other designers by offering something different, like giving helpful feedback on designs. This builds a good network and makes you different.

  3. Smart Pricing: Start with low prices for your design work to get customers. As more people know you, increase your prices. This helps make more money over time.

  4. Getting Customers Naturally: Use a specific online platform (X) to find customers without paying for ads. This way brought in many new customers and a lot of money.

  5. Turning Leads into Sales: Make sure to turn potential customers into actual customers. Do this well by talking to them directly and keeping in touch with those who need more time.

  6. Focus on Constant Improvement: Rather than setting specific goals, concentrate on getting better all the time in things like brand building and getting new customers.

  7. Expand Your Offerings: Don’t just stick to one service. Start with simple, affordable design services and then add more products like design kits. This helps grow your business and bring in more customers.

🎯 Tools to keep on using

Figma - For UX, UI and Web+Mobile Design
Webflow - For website/landing page creation
Framer - The new Figma+webflow!
Eagle - Organize all your reference images in one place
Todoist - Manage your personal tasks

Thanks for reading! Ideally I’ve provided you value in this newsletter. If I have, feel free to share it with a friend. You can find me here.

Until next time!
Asaad

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