Resourceful Designer

I'm not a fan of offering discounts for design services and I'm not alone. In preparing for this episode, I read articles on the pros and cons of offering design discounts. Most of them said it was a bad idea. The reason is offering a discount lessens the perceived value of your brand.

There are many ways to attract international design clients. You could travel the world and talk to people about your business. You could start an international marketing campaign. You could become an SEO wizard and draw clients from around the globe. Or, you can do what I did and give something away for free.

The impressions you leave on your clients determine their willingness to work with you in the future. When good impressions outweigh bad impressions clients will want to do business with you again. So how do you ensure you are making good impressions while dealing with your clients? 

Value-based pricing is a way to not only get paid for your time and expenses but a way to get paid for the value of the services and products you provide to your clients. Over time, your designs will generate revenue for your clients, your prices should reflect that value.

When it comes to your business, everything you do and everything you don’t do tells your clients how they should feel about you and your business. Being a great designer isn’t enough to garner client loyalty. There are plenty of great designers out there. So why should someone choose you over any of them?

At one point or another, every designer wonders what it would be like to become a freelance designer. But freelancing isn't for everyone. Here are 5 things you should consider before you quit your 9-5 job to become a freelancer.

It requires many hats to run a successful home-based design business. One of those hats is a salesperson. As every good salesperson knows, one of the most important parts of the sales process is the follow-up. Master the follow-up and your business has a better chance of success.

Building a successful design business isn’t easy. It takes skill, it takes time and it takes effort, a lot of effort. Think of your design business’s success as a journey. One where you strive every day to make progress towards that next level of success.

Isolation is one of the major concerns when running a home-based design business. Spending day after day, week after week having minimal contact with other people can take its toll on some people. That's why working from home is not for everyone.

A big mistake people make on To-Do lists is mixing projects with tasks. A To-Do list should only contain tasks, items that require only one thing to complete them. Projects should be on a completely separate list. By separating the tasks from the projects, you make it much easier on yourself.

It's a given, you want your design business to succeed. In order to accomplish that, you need to find opportunities to grow. Some of those opportunities take time and money and are well worth the effort. But some opportunities to grow are so small and simple that they are often overlooked. On this episode of the podcast, I share five such opportunities you can implement today to help grow your design business.

As a designer, you know how much work goes into acquiring new design clients. However, you also need to put some effort into retaining your existing design clients or they may be taken away from you. Here are some tips to help you.

There’s a lot more to running a successful design business than just being a good designer. In fact, being a good designer may be the least important thing for your design business.

To celebrate this 100 episodes milestone, I want to do something a bit different and share with you what being a graphic designer means to me. Please listen to the episode to get the full story.

A "Shop Local" campaign is quite common in smaller communities. Especially those near large metropolitan areas. The purpose of these campaigns is to encourage people to support local businesses by shopping in their hometown. But how do they affect your design business?