Personal websites function as a convenient tool for displaying recent work, testimonials, and telling individual stories. On another note, resume, alone, isn’t enough to identify the potential and competitiveness of the candidate.
Readers, who want to polish their portfolio website to get substantially hot leads, can inherit ideas and elements from professionals doing notably well with their online lead generation.
Recently, I came across one of Tom May's posts, which highlighted some of the 2017's best portfolios trends. Though we are reaching towards the end of 2019, these trends are still the best options in terms of effective UI, conversion ratio, and search visibility.
Will is a London-based photographer who has been featured in magazines, newspapers, and exhibitions worldwide. He presented his work in an eye-catching manner. Though he was not SEO obsessed and I guess, he doesn’t need of this – He wants to showcase his best work to the world.
This post (Creative Bloq's one) made me think about how freelancers can showcase their expertise, credibility, and their best work to their potential customers. Most of the freelancers are aware of Upwork, Freelancer, 99 Design, and other portals, which are great to get started with their freelancing career. Not to mention, some of the agencies, only rely on these platforms, which shouldn’t be the case, for long-term survival. We need to digest this theory that not all businesses hire professionals through these platforms. So, if this is the case, being an activist only on freelancing portals will never allow you to knock the door of potentially larger clients.
Experts agree, there’re countless ways to reach out to new businesses. One of my friends, Richard Barker, is a professional SEO/web designer, and he is pretty much active on Upwork. But besides Upwork, he also runs a great marketing blog (covering a diversity of topics) along with his portfolio website. He is in the branding business, so he finds joy in writing for him too.
So, he actively blogs on his sites, because -
- It gives him joy and a good feel.
- It capacitates him to make new industry connections. The best side is – he gets new contracts, out of it, most of the time.
Is it a Necessity to Build a Freelancer Portfolio Website?
YES, if you want potential customers to locate you! While the web is already full of thousands of freelancers worldwide, it’s absolutely a rigid market, and getting lots of eyeballs on your work is quite a challenge. Remaining isolated in this overly crowded market depends on lots of elements, and impressive UI/UX is one of the most important ingredients.
A few reasons to consider it:
- Seriousness – Personal websites hosted on your domain (with your name) seem highly professional. It shows you’re a tech-savvy and are here for long-term commitments.
- Transparency – Clients can see your previous work through it and can decide whether you can be a real asset to them.
- A Road to Become an Influencer – If you blog regularly or update the website with interesting news, people might be interested in subscribing to you, and thus, you can grow your email list.
- SEO Ready – You can easily build the knowledge of SEO and Google's core algorithms, including the theory of EAT. What is keyword difficulty? How to rank for competitive as well as easy keywords? White Hat SEO tactics. Meta Tags, ALT tags on images, the load time of the site, rich media content addition, and allowing users comment – all will be possible on your portfolio website.
- With affiliate links, you can additionally generate regular passive income. Though affiliation is a long-term process, marketers have embraced it to earn incredibly high.
How to make a portfolio website from the start?
Dance with Kailee knew they needed a website to tell the world about their mission, what people can get from it, and update people about their upcoming classes. They didn’t have coding knowledge. They bought the domain name and used SITE123 to create the website on their own.
Here is what you need to do:
- Purchase the domain name and a hosting plan.
- Plan out the hierarchy of web pages – Home, About, Portfolio, Blog, and Contact.
- Prepare Graphics, Images, Screenshots, and/or Videos.
- Choose the website builder (if you don’t want to hire a professional designer) or the HTML template, or the WordPress theme (free or premium).
- Configure the website.
- Don’t miss optimization – SEO is the key to get improved visibility of your website.
- Start social media marketing. Reddit, Contently, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and Quora are great platforms to get a start. Connections matter and that’s what you need to work for.
How Can You Put Everything on the Board?
Design – Designing side of the website is important in every aspect: Your SERP rankings, your website’s readability (make sure you use a pleasing font, size, and visuals), your visitors’ experience, and thus conversion, indeed.
Several studies have proven the fact that design is something which brings visitors trust, your credibility, and keeps SEO efforts alive.
Previously, I’ve talked enough about the relevance of responsiveness to the result of the ranking. With the immense user-base growth on smartphones and tablets, you can’t ignore cashing-in mobile users, and it’s mandatory to optimize your website on different resolutions and let your work be recognized by a multitude of users.
SEO – Pay close attention to the volume of keywords you’re covering on your website. Localization v/s Globalization understanding will help you out deciding your ideal clientele and overall online marketing success. Several times, you can leverage the power of maps and local optimization to get better visibility on the web. While you can build credibility globally, just like Kristy Hines or Aleyda Solis did with their websites.
There are many other advanced SEO configurations aside keyword mapping – Metadata optimization, speeding up your targeted pages, compressing images, utilizing best-suited plugins, linking-in-and-out authority resources, and lots more.
Content Architecture – Plan and then structure your Home, About, Contact, and Portfolio Page. Home is the best place to show your work – that’s the basis of this website, simple as that. Some minor things which are easy to implement but can do a lot more for you:
a) Show your real identity – Your name, profile image, Social media links, and your real clients.
b) Reviews matter a lot – Put the real words from your clients – either text testimonials or videos. Though text testimonials can appear somewhere fake so video testimonials or real-time case studies are the better approaches to show the experiences of your previous clients.
c) Leverage the power of numbers – Users do not treat websites as most of the marketers think. Visitors are not bots; they are humans. And they feel morose just going through your content. Numbers and statistics keep your web pages alive for them – How many projects have you successfully completed? How many social media posts have you uploaded? What’s your average client review rating? The answers to all these questions are digits, and this small portion of your web page appear significantly most alluring.
d) Free Give Away – Most of the bloggers and marketers use it; this acts as a secret weapon for their lead generation, email marketing, and social media conversation. If you don’t have anything to offer to your readers – they’ll probably not subscribe to you and will not engage with you. Create awesome resources according to your industry and build your email list as a procedure for collecting their emails to circulate the free resource.
Over to You
Two things are pretty sure – first, you don’t want to go for another 9 to 5 job; second, you want to grab awesome clients to work with. So I can interpret that you’re ready to invest your time, your resources, and your full energy to be succeeded. That’s what this entire procedure needs – your devotion and full efforts. Start building your portfolio website and set the benchmarks your own. This small website could be the single cannon for the foundation of your online business model. Best of luck!
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