Video Notes:

*** I use real clients of mine to teach you, don’t ever contact any of the clients I share. Thanks***

Today you'll learn how to pick the best clients to work with. This isn’t an exact list that you have to follow 100%. It is my guidelines and more of a “wish list” that I look for when doing portfolio work. Use what I show you but also go with your instinct too.

1) Work with businesses that have an already established, successful business.

When doing portfolio work you don’t have the time or the resources to be dealing with a business that is unsure of what they want or who they can help. If they don’t have a clearly defined market, customer, and value offering it makes your job as a web designer very hard.

When picking who to work with look for a business that is already doing well. Look for things like raving customers, a great product or service, a large market share/niched business, steady market demand etc.

You want to make a great website for a great business. Sounds obvious, but so many people start off trying to help small struggling businesses to get going. This is okay IF YOU ARE GETTING PAID to do so but for portfolio work its not ideal. You don’t have the time, experience, or budget for jobs like that till later.

So pick a winner who can win even more by having a great website.

2) Look for a business that has a network (or authority) you can use

Celebrity endorsements work for a reason.

“9 out of 10 doctors approve of...” also works for a reason.

People look to those they respect when deciding how to act. What that means to us is if we work with businesses that are well respected in a certain area/niche/industry we gain a lot of trust and authority also.

Since you are doing portfolio work anyway, aim for the best businesses you can get. By working with the best, you will help your sales later - more warm leads, more referrals, better cold selling, and you just generally appear like a much more established web design business.

So use the trust, authority, respect and “brand name” of others to boost yourself quickly.

3) Work with a business that has “easy to make look great” assets (content).

The portfolio stage is all about boosting your perceived skills as much as possible. We want to have several sites that look great, for great businesses, getting great results.

A huge part of any site is the content - the images, videos, graphics, text etc.

By being smart, we can pick businesses that already have a lot of great content. They just don’t have a website to show it off yet. OR it wouldn’t be hard to find/create great content.

Think of the combined impact of working with a great business, that people know and respect, and also already have an easy way to get great content.

When picking who to contact, keep in mind the assets/content - is this a business that will be easy to look amazing?

As we progress in the course, I will give you real examples as to all of these points and how I use them myself when building my new portfolio.