How to Build Your Portfolio
As a freelancer, building your portfolio is as difficult as you want to make it. It can be easy or hard. If you want to just put together a bunch of paid works, it will take a while for lack of a portfolio. Clients want to see an extensive portfolio of high quality work. Just start doing whatever it is you plan to do as a freelancer for yourself and put all the quality work that results from it into a portfolio. Focus on putting your portfolio online. Often, a freelance project site (like iFreelance) will allow you to upload your works to your own portfolio that they provide and is easily accessible. You might also consider getting a half decent website designed for yourself just for the professional impression it gives, especially in the overly competitive day and age we are in. If you cannot design a website, consider hiring a freelancer to design it for you. (See our Affiliates page for recommended freelancers.) Put your portfolio up on the site and always keep updating it with new work, especially with names of clients and locations of where they can view the work published for reference.
If you are an aspiring writer, just start writing things. Start a blog and write in it everyday about the widest variety of topics as possible and reference it in your portfolio. Write a few articles of different sizes and hold onto them so you can send them to prospective clients. Pick all sorts of topics, straying away from picking a side on controversial topics, and just start writing. Post all your works to your portfolio and reference any project buyers of current or future written works and the locations where your works can be read.
If you are an aspiring web designer, design a few websites, either just for portfolio purposes or for people who can use them. You may need to give a few people some free designs first before going for paid gigs. Design a few web designs with random text and upload them as secondary pages on your site or post screenshots instead. Remember to keep adding screenshots of the sites you create for different project buyers and reference buyers and the URLs where your work can be found.
If you are a photographer, just start taking pictures and uploading them to a web space, preferably one with an appropriate landing page prospective clients can go to. Anybody who puts together a decent webpage for your portfolio can create a relatively attractive gallery where you can showcase all your work in a concise manner. You may consider a place like DeviantArt or iFreelance, which is a good place to put your work, but you will definitely want to get yourself an actual webpage too. In the day and age we are in of constant competitiveness in freelancing, it is very important to seem as professional as humanly possible.
You probably get the idea. Start building the work for your portfolio as soon as possible, paid or unpaid, hired or made up. Put all of your work on a website or other professional style portfolio. Go everywhere you can think of to get hired and show them your portfolio. For ideas, check out our Affiliates page to see how the freelancers we work with have put their websites and portfolios together.
