Find More Illustration Clients

1. Introduction: Hello there. Welcome to this video course on finding Illustration clients for your freelance business. I'm excited to share what I've learned with you. I've scoured the Internet and illustration books and talked to lots of illustrators to see what works for them. Every freelancer does things their own way, but I've identified six key frameworks that most illustrators seem to fit into. And for a bit of fun and to make them more memorable, I've given these six frameworks to different personalities, the networker, the grinder, the socialite, the builder the collaborator, and the specialist. We'll explore each one of these in detail with lots of practical tips, and you can see which one or which combination of these frameworks you resonate with the most. You've probably tried parts from each already, but I hope to be able to offer you some guidance on how you can go deeper into any one of them, try these different hats on and find out what works for you. I've also added some bonus chapters at the end, so make sure you check those out too. Let's find some clients. Before we get into breaking down these frameworks, you know as well as I do that finding regular paying clients as a freelancer is hard. No surprise there. If it were easy, you wouldn't be watching this course. Freelance illustration is competitive, and the demand for something like illustration goes in peaks and troughs. There are all kinds of economic, political, and technological factors that affect how much our clients want to hire illustrators. And illustration is a luxury for our clients. If their budgets get cut, for whatever reason, illustration is often the first thing to go. Are no quick fixes in here. Watching this course isn't going to get you clients overnight, but it will give you ideas and processes you can apply straightaway. If you can be consistent and patient over the long term, then you will have more opportunities in your career. It is really hard to stay motivated long term if you don't get any interest from clients. So you've got to find the joy in the process. Otherwise, you may find yourself wanting to quit. But hopefully, if you're serious about making it as a freelance illustrator, you love your art and you love the creative process. If you can also learn to love this part of the job, you'll be unstoppable. I'm a bit of a doc, and my personality means I like thinking about systems and processes and working out efficiencies and scheduling things precisely. I can make a game out of very boring and repetitive tasks, but I know not everyone is like that. So you've got to find your own ways to make this fun for yourself. Learning new skills can be fun, especially if you can apply it and see direct results. Interacting with other creatives and talking about this process can be fun, too, if you share tips and build up a bit of a support network. Keeping your expectations low is also going to take the pressure off. If your goal is to get ten clients in the next three months, a lot of that is out of your control and may lead to disappointment. But if your goal is to find one new potential client to contact every day for three months and send them an email, introducing yourself and your work, that is absolutely doable without taking up too much time. That's 90 potential clients that you can keep in touch with long term. We've also got to be honest about our own skills. Is your style and portfolio good enough for clients to want to hire you? Well, the best way to find out is to try and find some clients. If you discover that you're not getting any interest after a few months, maybe that means you've got some more work to do on your portfolio. Yeah, that's disappointing, but it's also useful feedback. If you're not ready, you're not ready, but don't think you have to wait around until you are ready to try and find some clients. The earlier you can get that feedback, the better. If you make what we're going to talk about a part of your daily routine, while also continuing to work on your skills and your ideas and your presentation, you're going to be consistently moving in the right direction. If your first contact with the client doesn't go anywhere, big whoop. The next time you get in touch with them, you'll have a whole bunch of new and improved work to show them. If you continue along that path, eventually, you'll prove to that client and to yourself that you've got the drive and the commitment to make it. It might take a while, but if you're constantly improving and making lots of new work and you can show that client something they want, they will hire you. All of these frameworks require active effort and learning. When I started out, I would post my work online and sit back waiting passively for a client to find me. That doesn't work. As a freelancer, the creative part is only half the job. Selling your skills and making sure the right people see it is maybe a less appealing part of the job, but it's a skill just like learning a new bit of software or creative technique, and it's a skill you can get really good at and learn to enjoy. So if you're ready, let's go. 2. The Networker: The first framework for finding clients is the networker. The networker, as the name suggests, relies on a personal network. They start small and maybe they find whatever work they can get in their hometown or local area. They look through the contacts in their phone or on social media, and they get in touch to say, Hey, I'm an illustrator, and I wondered if you know anyone who might be looking for some creative work doing. Now, if that in itself makes your palms sweat, I feel you. I've tended to be fairly secretive about projects and goals all through my life because then if I fail, nobody really needs to know, and I fail a hell of a lot. When you reach out to people you know, you are being vulnerable and asking for help. But you know what people love to do? They love to help people they know. Helping you makes them feel good. It's just a question. They can say no, but more than likely they will give it some serious thought and try their best to help you out and give you a leg up in your new career. Working locally with small businesses and friends and family is definitely not the end goal, but it's a start. If you can start making some money from creative work quickly, even if it's not the kind of work you dream of doing, it will help you stay motivated. It will keep your skills sharp, and it might mean you don't need to get a regular old boring day job to pay your bills. So let's take a look at some of the ways you can start as a networker. You can target local businesses, bars, shops, cafes, graphic designers, marketing agencies, possibly other freelancers, local events, even local bands. See if you can get involved in local art fairs to sell some prints. You may be lucky enough to live in a place that has a decent creative scene and you can attend some creative meet ups and tell people about the kind of work that you do. If not, you might try a more general business networking event. I can't promise there'll be much there for you, but a lot of the local business owners will be there, so you never know it's at least a good opportunity to make yourself known in your town. Think about any nonprofit organizations in your local area. Maybe they can't afford to pay you. But if you felt like getting involved in your local community and donating your skill to a charity in exchange for some referrals to real paying clients, it might be worth a shot. If you work in a studio space with other like minded creatives, you might find some opportunities there. If a guy in your studio is really busy with work, he might recommend you to his clients if he doesn't have time to do the job. Do whatever freelance work you can get your hands on. Make some connections, see if some of the local shops or cafes want to sell your prints to become a big fish in a small pond and ask for referrals whenever you do a good job for someone and see if they'll write a testimonial for you. You'll focus on developing strong personal relationships with local clients and collaborators. You'll become known in your community as the go to Illustrator, and maybe sometimes graphic designer or photographer or whatever else you might end up doing. I did lots of graphic design jobs. I photographed a wedding, I designed posters for events. I even had an exhibition of my own paintings in a local bar. You start small, make a good impression, then that circle grows as people refer you to other people who may be in need of your services. Your network will grow quite organically over time, and so will your portfolio. Then you can actively start looking further afield. Maybe you expand into a nearby big city and see what you can get there. You'll have all these glowing testimonials on your website and a portfolio full of real client work. Even if some of the work isn't exactly what you want to do long term, you're getting closer and closer to your goal while being paid to be a creative freelancer. Networkers portfolio will probably look like a real mixed bag at the start. But over time, it will find a focus as they get busier and start saying no to some projects that they're not that interested in. There are a few downsides to working locally and with friends and family. The first one is the people you ask may not exactly understand what you're trying to achieve. So when they connect you with their friend Jim from the golf club, who owns a printing company, and Jim asks if you can do layouts for graphic design projects, obviously, it's not exactly what you wanted, but it is broadly related to the kind of work you want to do more so than working in a supermarket anyway. It's paid work. It may mean you have to learn a few new skills, and it probably won't be the most interesting work at first, but at least it's directionally correct. This is how I started. One of my first paid freelance jobs was laying out the text for some pub menus, not very interesting, but it beat working in that pub as a barman, which is what I was doing previously. Then maybe occasionally, Jim gets a project in that does actually require some illustrations. Or maybe he knows Maggie, who runs a web design studio, and they need someone who can illustrate some icons or header images. Jim is going to recommend you to Maggie and maybe Maggie will recommend you to Todd, who runs the local event listings magazine, and so on. If you're brand new in the creative industries, take whatever work you can get, even if it's not exactly what you want to do long term because you'll gain experience and add related skills to your tool belt, and you'll begin to build a network. If you do a good job for someone, ask if there's anyone else that they can recommend you to. They'll be happy to do it. Another downside to consider is, if you're working with friends and family, it can potentially put a strain on that relationship if something goes wrong or if you don't feel like they're paying you enough or they're making too many changes. So be very careful of working with people who are too close to you. The third downside is that you'll likely outgrow these local clients quite quickly if you're ambitious. And if they gave you your first paid freelance projects, you may feel indebted to them in some they gave you a shot, and you want to thank them for that, of course. But as you grow and expand your network and level up your skills, you'll set your sights on bigger and better things. And if you continue to work for low paying local clients, it can hold you back from advancing in your career. A friend of mine used to illustrate gig posters for our local music venue. He was friends with the owner, and he made some great work for them for initially very low prices, maybe 50 pounds for each one. This was like 15 years ago. And that was a nice little earner for him when he was brand new. But he was ambitious, and he started working with magazines who maybe paid 300 pounds for an illustration, and a couple of years later, he found an agent and started working on bigger and better projects. Eventually, those poster projects weren't worth his time, and the venue couldn't afford to pay him anymore because it was a local pub in a small town. When he did finally start saying no to them, it caused a bit of a falling out. The truth is, he did the work they're paying him for. They got a great deal, whether they realized it or not. He got a nice regular project while he was finding his feet as a freelancer. It was a good partnership for both of them for a while. Until it wasn't. Maybe they could have been more supportive of him advancing in his illustration career, but they don't understand our industry. It's not their fault. When emotions and personal feelings are involved, it can get a little bit murky. But these first clients are stepping stones and opportunities for you to improve and to get paid, even if it's just a little bit of money. Don't hold yourself back from your ambitions and don't let anybody guilt trip you into holding yourself back. When it's time to move on, move on. But also try not to blame anyone or hold grudges if clients are a little bit bitter when you outgrow. It's not their fault. It's a compliment, really. It shows that they want to keep working with you and that you're going to be hard to replace. So the networker builds up trust and a good reputation with a small network, then asks for referrals and expands until they're in a position where they've got the credibility and experience to go for the jobs they really want. It's nice to be a big fish in a small pond for a while, but make sure you're still taking an active role in seeking out the bigger and better clients that you really want to work for and developing the kinds of work that you do want for your portfolio on the side. 3. The Grinder: The next framework is the one that I outlined in my book. It's probably the most common for a freelance illustrator, and it requires a lot of patience, research, and resilience. It's a grind. The grinder starts out by developing the first version of their illustration portfolio and getting it online quite quickly. Then their focus gradually moves towards researching clients. They find the companies that hire illustrators from all over the world. They find the names of the people who work at those companies, usually art directors or art buyers or maybe designers, people in the creative department, basically. Then they find the contact details for those people with some online research, and they send them an introductory email. See the bonus lessons for more specific tips on emailing clients. Unlike the networker, who has all those warm referrals and recommendations, the grinder is doing cold outreach to people they don't know, so they're not likely to get many replies initially. They haven't built up any trust or familiarity with these clients yet. So these clients see an email from an illustrator who they don't know and have never heard of chances of them responding and hiring you is low at first, but the grinder has an organized system where they add all these potential clients to a spreadsheet or something like that, and they know the first couple of emails aren't likely to get a positive response, but they contact these clients every few months regularly to show them new work. Over time, this process builds up that familiarity. Maybe it's the sixth or the seventh email, two years later, where the art director sees your latest update and thinks yeah, I've got a project for this artist. They remember your name and they've seen the progress you've made with your work, and finally, the stars aligned. You've built up some familiarity by showing up in inbox regularly, not so regularly that it's annoying, but not so infrequently that they forget who you are. Every three to four months is about right. Clearly, this is going to take some time. But the advantage of doing it this way is that the illustrator is seeking out the kinds of clients they actually want to work with, and they're not having to do different kinds of projects they're not really interested in. However, it does probably mean they'll need a day job to pay rent and pay bills while they're slowly establishing themselves with these clients. Consistency is essential with this method. If you only send an art director one or two emails, then give up, you'll never reach that point where you become familiar to the client and they begin to see evidence that you are dedicated and constantly improve. If you're sending the same old work each time you follow up with a client, they're seeing the opposite. You're not showing them that you've leveled up your skills since the last time they saw your work. So if you're a grinder, you'll be doing a lot of research to add new potential clients to your spreadsheet. Again, set some achievable goals. Maybe you try and add one new potential client to the list every workday and send one email every workday. That only needs to take 30 minutes. After six months, you might have a couple of hundred people on your list that you can send periodic updates to, and that list is only going to grow. I recommend you space out these introductory emails and make it part of your regular workday rather than setting aside one day per month to send 50 emails. Aside from the fact that it would be a very boring day, if you do that, it builds up into this mountain of a task that you need to do every month. As I said, you probably won't get many replies at first. So if you send 50 emails in one day and don't get a single reply, that would be a pretty huge emotional blow. But if it's just one or two emails a day, it's not a big deal. It's just part of your daily routine. For your research, there are lots of ways you can find potential clients, and there are lots of potential clients to find. Here are some ideas. Go into a bookshop and look through the magazines and make a list of the ones you'd like to work for. They may have the art director's name listed in the front of the magazine in their mask head. Depending on where you live, this approach may limit you to local magazines, but it's a start. Look at the books in the bookshop that have illustrated covers and make a list of the names of the publishers so you can look them up online later. Look at who other illustrators have worked for. Find some illustrators who are working on the kinds of projects you'd like to work on. A lot of the time, they'll list the names of the clients and companies they made those illustrations for on their portfolio, add them to your list. If you want to work for packaging design agencies or web design agencies, for example, Google packaging design agency or web design agency and narrow it down by adding the name of a city, Amsterdam or San Francisco or Manchester. And you'll get a long list of the best agencies in those cities. Not all of them will be using illustration, but with a quick browser their websites, you can get a sense of which ones might be good prospects. There will be loads of clients you've never heard of. So you can do things like looking on Wikipedia for a list of UK publishers, for example, or the top magazines by circulation. Again, not all of them will be hiring illustrators, but you start with a long list and narrow it down by looking at what they make and seeing if what you make could be a good fit for them. If not, take them off the list. Once you've got a list of company names, you move on to the next stage, finding contact details for the appropriate people in those organizations. Look at the names of art directors for these companies on LinkedIn or just Google it, make a note of their name in your spreadsheet. It comes to finding email addresses, sometimes they're listed on the website, which is nice and easy. Sometimes they're harder to find. But you can usually find an email address for the company on the website. Maybe it's just the general Inquiries email. So maybe you see that the email ends with at client.com. You could then type into Google the art director's name plus at client.com, and this can unearth email addresses that are hidden away on their website. Or you can guess. Most email addresses follow similar naming conventions. For a small company, it might simply be first name at client.com. For a bigger company, it might be first name dot last name at client.com or first initial dot last name at client.com, or first name dot last initial at client.com. Maybe there's a dot, maybe there's a dash, maybe there's nothing. Try out different combinations. You could send five emails to the same person trying to guess their email address, but they'll only receive the one that's correct. Sometimes you're simply not going to be able to find or guess the email address, but you can try calling up the company and asking for the art director's email address and use the art director's name that you found in your research. It might not work, but it's worth a shot. If the receptionist asks who you are or why you need it, tell them you're an illustrator. Art directors work with illustrators. What could be more normal than that? So the grinder is aiming for the clients they want straightaway. It's going to take a while to build up familiarity from cold outreach like this, but they're organized and consistent with their effort. They're regularly adding new potential clients to their list and adding them into their rotation of people to contact each week. Ideally, they'll do a little bit every day rather than leaving it all to one day per month. They're always adding new things to their portfolio and improving their skills, and potential clients can see evidence of that with every contact. They keep going until they find their first client, their third client, and their 30th client. And they basically keep up this kind of outreach all the time. 4. The Socialite: Framework number three is the socialite. This is someone who gets really, really good at social media. They learn everything they can about social media marketing. They post a variety of different kinds of content on a regular schedule, not just images of their work. Here's an example of an illustrator who's done incredibly well on Instagram. You don't get this many followers without taking the time to learn how social media works. It's not just about posting your own work. It's a whole other skill set, a skill set that you can learn just about anywhere. There are three profiles that you can follow on social media that give away a ton of value. And here's a clue, those profiles grow so big because they give away so much value and useful information. There are also thousands of courses that you can choose from. Basically, pick someone who you think is doing a good job on social media and whose output you resonate with and buy their course. Instagram was the go to platform for Illustrators because it's image based. They've sort of screwed us over a little bit in recent years, but you can still grow on there if you learn what works and what gets shared. You're not creating for the algorithm, you're creating content that real people will want to share with others, and that's how you grow. Typically, what gets shared is content that brings up feelings, good or bad. Facts, that's educational content, showing people what you do and how you do it and fun fun stuff that people just want to share with their friends. Three Fs, feelings, facts and fun. You don't need to sign up on all the platforms at once, though. Better to learn and test your skills on one thoroughly and see what works well. Then take what works and translate it for another platform. YouTube is my primary focus, and previously, I'd been trying to grow on Instagram, too. The thinking was I could simply cut down my longer form videos into reels for Instagram and they'd grow just as fast. But while long form videos and short form video share some things, you still need a hook and a compelling thumbnail and a good description, and you want people to watch to the end. Short form video is more intense and condensed, and there are different rules you need to learn to grow there effectively. Now I'm still keeping my primary focus as long form YouTube videos, but I'm adding in a different kind of short form content on threads. I post short, useful threads. It's very quick and it's a way for me to test content ideas rapidly. If something flops, no big deal. But if something takes off and I get a lot of attention for it, I might consider expanding that short form content into a blog post or a newsletter or a long form video or even a course. I'm not a socialite. I don't really like social media that much, but I am coming to appreciate how useful it can be for testing out ideas quite quickly to give me feedback on what I should invest my time in for longer form content. It's also obviously a great way to connect with people. So for you, this could mean putting out a series of sketches onto your Instagram stories and asking people which one they want to see you develop into a full illustration. You've got to lean into that social aspect of it, too, and come into other people's posts, ask them questions, to encourage not only engagement, but also real relationships with people. Lift other people up with your generous likes and engagement and be curious and friendly and free with your advice if people want it. And you'll become familiar to lots of new people as someone who is helpful, thoughtful, and generous with praise, and they'll reciprocate. Your goal as an illustrator with social media is primarily to find paid work. You'll be posting a lot of your own work, of course, but 100% self promotion isn't that interesting. You have to offer content that is useful, informative, fun, and that people want to share with their network. For an illustrator with a lot of followers, a large part of their following is going to be other illustrators, maybe 90% or more. If you only share your own illustrations, sure, they might hit the like button, but there's no reason for them to share it with their network, meaning the interaction ends with that like. It's a dead end. If you can provide something in your content that your followers will want to share with their followers and their followers may want to share with their followers, then it's potentially never ending, and your opportunity to grow is enormous. We're not posting on social media for the algorithm. We're posting for real people who will find our content valuable and sharable. This is why artists who are making cute and funny, but commercially pointless illustrations on Instagram can grow quite quickly. They're making fun little doodles and cartoons that people, not just illustrators, like to share. Not recommending you become one of those people because they aren't commercial illustrators. They're a different kind of artist. And frankly, I don't think there's much money in it unless you get super famous and get a book deal or sell prints, et cetera. But see what you can learn from the way they do things. What would one of your followers really want to share with their followers? It's probably not one of your finished illustrations, but it might be a post or a video with some useful tips or one where you share your experience of working with a particular client or a walk through of how you made something. Lot of this stuff won't be directly interesting to your potential clients, but they only make up a small part of your following, you've got to cater to the majority of your following if you want to grow and be shared. You might be thinking, well, this is irrelevant if potential clients aren't going to be interested. But you know what happens next? The more followers you have, and it doesn't matter who those followers are, the easier it becomes for someone else to follow you. If I go to a social profile or a YouTube channel and see that they've got 100,000 subscribers, I don't think too much about whether or not I want to follow them. If 100,000 people are already following them, I'll give them the benefit of the doubt and follow them too and then see if their content is any good. But if I watch a YouTube video that I do find interesting and useful, but I see the person only has 400 subscribers, I actually might not subscribe because they haven't got enough social proof. None of this is logical or even a conscious thought process, but a low follow account suggests overall low quality, even if the video I just watched was genuinely interesting. The more you have, the easier it is to get more, which means it will be very difficult to grow at first, but over time, it only gets easier. You can think about it like a rocket launching into space. It takes tons of fuel and energy and effort to get it off the ground. But the higher it gets, the less fuel it needs as the pull of gravity becomes less. So if you've got 1,000 Instagram followers and 5% of those are clients, that's only 50 clients. But if you've got 100,000 followers and 5% of those are clients, that's 5,000 potential clients. If you think you don't know enough to be useful to people, think about what you wanted to know two years ago. Teach yourself from a couple of years ago. You don't need to be an expert to help someone or to offer them some encouragement. So the social it has a whole other skill set to learn in social media marketing, but that information is widely and freely available. It takes practice, experimentation, and consistency. Social ites are generous in helping other people out with their advice and their engagement with other profiles on social media. They like interacting with other creatives and being sociable. They probably don't start out being comfortable on camera, who does, but they practice because they think it's worth it. But honestly, you don't need to show your face. You can just show your hands working on something, or you can record a time lapse video and maybe add a voiceover or even just some text. Look at your favorite illustrators or any kind of creatives online and find their most popular reels and posts. Copy what they've made using your work and your style to see if it makes a difference to your engagement. 5. The Builder: Next, we're looking at the builder. These people may not be primarily focused on working with clients on commissions. They're working on building up assets and products that they can sell to earn a living, some active, some passive, things like prints, greetings cards, or wrapping paper, any kind of gifty art market type products. Digital products like brush packs or packaged up textures and things like that. They might make images to sell on stock websites. They might make courses for other illustrators to learn there's lots of people building these products and selling them or licensing them, and no doubt as a side effect, they get the occasional freelance commissions, too, if they're any good. But what works for selling prints, for example, doesn't necessarily translate to being a good choice for a commissioned project. A print can be art for art's sake. If it looks good and people like it, they will buy it. Commercial illustration often needs to do more than simply look good, but you can still make a healthy living from going this route. A lot of these artists are going to art fairs and markets around the country to meet people and sell to potential customers. They probably also have a focus on building up an online following social media, newsletter, et cetera, because if you don't meet people in real life or build up a following online, you've got nobody to sell to. So there's probably got to be an element of the socialite in here too. If an artist doesn't have a big following yet and wants to sell their products, they can sell to other people's audiences. When you pay for a stall at an illustration fair, you pay for the access to the people who come to that fair. They may not know you when they enter, but hopefully by the time they leave, you've introduced yourself and added them to your mailing list and given them a business card or added them on social media and brought them into your own audience. Teaching on skill share is another good example of this. You have to split the revenue with the platform, but you get access to all their users. And if your class is good, again, hopefully these people will seek you out and follow you directly. Selling your digital products on a platform like Design Cuts or Gum Road would be another example. The platform takes a cut, but you get access to their audience. Gaining access to other people's audiences is a great way to get started and a great way to grow. And the goal should be to convert those people over to your direct audience where you can reach them directly. An email newsletter is a great way to do that. Social is second best because it's pretty unreliable and you don't control how many of your followers actually see your work. A email is direct. So here are a few tips on how to be an effective builder, and this describes what I'm trying to do for myself in many ways. So I've done a lot of research on this and made a lot of mistakes along the way and learned from those mistakes. The focus is on building an audience. This means offering something of value to people for free over the long term. Value can mean different things to different people. In my case, it's interesting educational insights into the illustration industry. In your case, it might be beautiful artwork and images that people resonate with and want to share with their friends on social. Might mean initially making a free product that people can use, and maybe that's simply a wallpaper for someone's phone. It could also be a blog where you share tips and techniques for a specific art style, whatever you can do to entertain, educate or inform a bunch of people who are like you. Focus isn't on selling. Once you've got a product to sell, you've got to sell it and market it, of course. But if every post you write or email you send is trying to get people to give you money, even if what you're selling is really good and useful, it's going to be a turn off for your audience. You've got to build up trust first, so people want to buy from you. If somebody has never heard of you and the first contact they get from you is a sales pitch, that's not a good first impression. But if somebody sends them a link to one of your posts and then they see you're providing great content regularly and they watch you for a while, they'll come to appreciate you and value you being in their digital life. When you do have a product to sell, they're more likely to want to support you for one thing, and they'll think, if the free stuff is this good, then the paid product must be really good. You start by building, make a load of illustrations and share them online, share your tips and techniques for painting or whatever your art style is, brighten people's day and make them feel like they made the right choice in following you. When you've started making good progress in building a following, take notice of what that following is asking you about or complimenting you on. This will give you some good clues in what a good product might be. If they're not asking you questions, ask them what they want you to make. Maybe you could post a few of your popular images and do an online vote for which one people would like to see you make into a print for your shop. Then you've tested the idea and you'll know which one is likely to sell better. In that case, you've got the artwork ready to go. But let's say you want to make something that's going to require a lot more time and effort, something like a video course. The worst thing you can do is just shut yourself away for a couple of months and write the script, film the video, design the accompanying PDFs, and edit it without getting some feedback from your audience first. If you do it that way, you risk launching the product that nobody has asked for, and it turns out that nobody really wants it, and it doesn't sell. I've done that, and it's a real bummer, trust me. Even if the product is really good and you've worked really hard on it, and you're really proud of it, if nobody wants it, it won't sell. I had a short conversation with Chris Doe, the host of the future podcast and YouTube channel, an incredible business set up specifically to help creatives achieve their goals. He gave me a step by step plan for launching a product. Here it is. Find out what your audience wants, whether that's a print, they want to hang on their wall or some information that will help them do what they're trying to do. This means you know that it's something people actually want. Ask people to register their interest on a simple waiting list. This gives you a better idea of how many people actually want it. Offer people a discount if they preorder it. You haven't made the product yet at this point. If you get a decent amount of preorders, you can go ahead and make it, confident that these people and probably more people are actually willing to pay for it. Then you make the product, deliver it to your preorders, and ask for some reviews, testimonials or feedback. Then you use those reviews for your official launch. This gives you some credibility and social proof. So for my last video course on pricing Illustrations, I put a vote out on social media. I'm going to make a course. What do you want the most? And I gave them three options. They voted. It was pretty close between pricing and getting clients. That's why I'm making this course now. I then advertised a pricing workshop to my audience and sold tickets through Eventbrite. I got these payments upfront before I had made anything. The workshop was pretty long, but I made some slides and talked to people through it. I did three workshops over three weeks. After every one, I was able to get some feedback and improve the delivery for the week after. This really helped improve the product. Then I put out a waiting list for people to register their interest in buying the course. If I hadn't got more than 50 people on the list, I wouldn't have made it. I think I got 54 in the end. Then I wrote the script, filmed the videos. I used the money I'd made from the workshops to pay an editor and an animator to make the course really good. Then I offered a discount for pre orders and probably sold about 25 of those. Then I launched it confident that it was a great course and that it would be really useful for people. I also had a load of reviews and testimonials from the people who attended the workshop. Without that process of iteration, the course wouldn't be as good as it is. I also couldn't have afforded to pay an animator to make it look good had I not done that workshop stage. A portion of your profits from your first product should go into developing your second product and so on. I started doing some portfolio reviews. The money I made from that went into making my first course on developing a portfolio, which is very basic, no animation and simple editing that I could do myself. That's on Skillshare. The money from that went into paying an editor to work with me on my book. Some of the funds from the book went into me building an illustration community and developing a pricing calculator. And then I worked on the pricing costs using the process that I just outlined, and that course is paying for the development of this course. And hopefully this course will pay for me to build more useful things down the road. So the builder gives a lot of value away for free initially, and in return, builds an audience of supporters and fans. They can then sell products to those fans, and they know the products they're selling are what those people actually want. This isn't going to be for everyone. It probably suits people who have a lot of experience or expertise in a particular style or technique, but it can lead to a steady stream of passive income. That grows over time as your audience grows and you add more great products. It's an extremely slow start. I started my YouTube channel and my first free product in 2020, and I didn't make any money from that or other products until late in 2022 when my first course launched on Skillshare. But now I get a nice little bonus every month from the hard work I've put in over the years, book sales, course sales, portfolio reviews, the community that I run, the occasional speaking event, and YouTube ad revenue. It's not a huge amount, but it's mostly passive income at this point. So if you want to be a builder, think about what you can give away for free now and build an audience doing that. And then, over time, you can get to know what your audience wants to know, and you can build some products that you can then sell to that audience. 6. The Collaborator: Next, we've got the collaborator, which shares a lot with the networker in that they'll have a focus on building a network, but different in that the focus is on building a network of other creatives and you guessed it, collaborating with them. We're joining forces with other creatives, such as graphic designers, writers, or animators to create larger collaborative projects. This probably suits an illustrator who has a range of skills, someone who's more of a generalist than a specialist, but depending on your style, it could work either way. Since we focused on starting local with the networker, we'll talk about this in a more digital network sense, though both ways can work. Look for freelance creatives who are in complimentary fields, web designers, graphic designers, app developers, animators, and motion designers, marketing consultants, event planners, content creators, video editors, podcast producers, self publishers, and writing groups, rather than going for big companies, like the grinder is doing, the collaborator is reaching out to other freelancers and maybe some smaller studios. All these people could need an illustrator at some point in their day to day work. And if you can send a friendly greeting and make yourself known to them, you can become part of their professional network. This relationship goes both ways, and you might need to offer something first to get the ball rolling. Let's say you have a friend who wants a website setting up or maybe they're self publishing a book and they need someone to help lay it out. Maybe you know someone who's getting married and they need some stationary design. Because you are in the creative industry and you have a good creative eye, you could use this as an opportunity to introduce your friend to a graphic designer or a web designer or an editor. In doing that, you are sending this other creative freelancer a lead, and that is a great first impression to make. Then you can go on to say that you think their work is great and strike up a conversation and let them know that you're an illustrator and if they're ever in need of some illustration work doing, to give you a call. That would be ideal. You're not always going to be able to send them a lead, obviously, but you can still strike up a conversation and make it known that you're available. Reaching out to big established companies to get a reply is quite difficult. But reaching out to other ambitious creatives is a bit more of a level playing field. You have a skill that they may need in the future, and you may need their skills, too. For example, you want to add some animation to your portfolio, but you don't know how to do it. Well, new animators also want to build up their portfolio. You could propose working on a project together. You both benefit from each other's skills. And I've seen this example work very well in the past. Let's look at some of the other freelancers on the list. Smaller web design or graphic design companies or freelancers will most likely need illustrations for their projects at some point in the future. You being in their network makes their lives easier and could potentially lead to paid work for you. When you're dealing with newer freelancers, they're still working their way up the ladder, too. So projects might not be particularly well paid, but it is real work. App developers would be similar, but they may have even less creative skills if they're working on more of the back end technical aspects. Apps need icons and header images and illustrations and all kinds of things, and maybe someone to do a bit of the front end design work. You could be that person. Freelance marketing consultants pride themselves on their network. Often they'll be hired for a project, and they'll be recommending creatives they know to their clients. If the client needs some landing page illustrations, they'll be happy to meet a skilled illustrator like you. Event planners could be weddings, or it could be more corporate events. Lots of local firms need visuals for presentations and invites and animations for awards ceremonies and things like that, too. Content creators like me and thousands of other wannabes want to make their videos look great. Can you help with that? If not you, maybe having a video editor or an animator in your network means you can recommend those people and maybe you and the animator team up to create some nice looking animations for that content creator. Freelance podcast producers are, I guess, a relatively new career. Podcast need covers and social media content, Illustrated podcast covers won't always be appropriate, but sometimes they are. Writers who are self publishing their books need your help. Maybe they need a graphic designers help, too. Now, if you already know one of those in your network, there's an opportunity for you to team up on something. You are putting yourself in the center of a web of young, ambitious freelancers who could all have the opportunity to work on projects together and be stronger and more effective if someone could be the bond that ties them together. Not every project will need you, but if you're the leader of this collaborative network, when illustration is needed, you'll be the first call. So to initially find and connect with these people, you want to go where they hang out online or in real life. Maybe the freelance marketing consultant is more of a Twitter or X person. The event planner may be attending more local in person networking events. Most towns have a business center or co working spaces that host these kinds of things. You can find a bunch of freelance animators and designers by looking on social media or upwork or fiber and finding the names of some good ones. You can make a profile on redsy.com. That's where writers go to hire editors and designers and illustrators. As a dynamite tip, if you're interested in getting into publishing and working with Indie authors, join a writing group. I joined a writing group when I was writing my book, and there were about 100 people in that community all working on their books. When they get to the end of that writing process, you know who they'll need? A graphic designer, an illustrator, maybe an audio editor for the audio book. I bet your freelance podcast producer could help with that. They may also want help marketing the book and help making some social media content. Go where your potential clients are. No need to be salesy. Just let people know what you do and that you have a network of people who can do all these other skills, and you'll become a very useful part of that community. So the collaborator is bringing people together and acting as a hub for other creatives. They'll be working on projects with people from their network, people they know and trust, and together, they'll all be better off for having a professional network full of skilled creative people that they can recommend each other to. You may not always be needed for a project, but there is an opportunity for you to make a little finder's fee on bringing a project to the people in your network. There's also the opportunity for you to more formally team up with a couple of people and start your own little agency, offering everything under one roof. The more I'm talking about this, the more appealing it sounds. I think I want to do this. Obviously, this is going to take time, just like any of the other frameworks, and it requires you to be fairly bold in your introductions and to be sociable and to enjoy teamwork, too. But a lot of this can work just fine through emails and DMs initially. 7. The Specialist: The last framework is potentially the hardest to achieve and will definitely take the longest. The specialist positions themselves as the go to expert in a specific niche, and that niche could be in their technique or style. Maybe they're a commercial oil painter or they do etching or some other older traditional media that's a pretty rare skill these days. There's plenty of people oil painting, but not many of them are commercial artists. Maybe they're like doodleman who made an insane career out of what is probably what he was doodling on his school math book 20 years ago. Maybe they're a watercolor botanical painter who has a meticulous and scientific attention to detail, or maybe they found a new spin on botanical painting like Katie Scott, one of my favorites. Maybe they're a lettering artist and calligrapher like Seb Lester, who blew up on social media by simply demonstrating his incredible skills. They could be an awesome screen printer like Michael Motorcycle, or they're like Rob Ryan, whose gifts and products were all over art galleries and bookshops for years. Maybe they're a manga artist. What I wouldn't give to find a really good manga illustrator who does commercial work, the demand is consistently high. Or they add a new twist to traditional drawing like Daniel Hosego, another one of my favorites. Love artists like this. All my favorite illustrators are true masters of their craft. They've spent decades honing their skills, and when I look at their work, I can see it and I can feel it, and I appreciate it much more. I told you it was going to take a long time. The niche could also be in the kinds of clients they work with or the area of the industry that they work in. Maybe they're a specialist in packaging design or book cover design, or they do movie posters. They could be a character designer for games. I know one guy who seems to specialize in designing weapons for computer games, which is so crazy and specific and pretty cool, actually. Could also be specialist in children's books or conceptual editorial illustrations. They could be known for a really striking minimal style like Noma bar for iconic advertising campaigns. Maybe they're a fashion illustrator or a medical illustrator or a storyboarder. Maybe they're infographics or maybe they're a political cartoonist. Niching down doesn't mean you lose out. It means you can come to be the first choice for any client who wants what you do, but you've got to be really sure that's the thing you want to dedicate your life's work to. You become the expert in that thing, and clients come to you for your expertise, and they pay you exceptionally well because you're the only one who can do what you do to the level you do it at. That sounds pretty awesome to me, but it comes at a high price, decades of hard work. So if you want to go this direction, the first step is to identify a niche market with a demand for your skills. Let's use packaging as an example. Illustrated packaging is a pretty safe bet. I can't see that going anywhere anytime soon. Then you would learn everything you can about packaging design, read books, take courses, do your own research, and keep up to date with trends. You want to know more about packaging design than any art director who lands in your inbox. And you would work consistently towards that singular goal, learning all the skills and software that is required and more some of the things you'll be learning won't be illustration. You'll probably learn in design for layouts, maybe you'll get into typography and logo design, too. You'll learn all about premium printing techniques like embossing and foiling and whatever else. You might not be concentrating on a single style in this case, but rather practicing a range of styles that your clients want. It certainly doesn't mean you have to wait decades to start making money. You won't start out to master, but on your journey there, you will still be able to work on all kinds of great projects. That will be essential to build up your reputation and your network of contacts in the packaging industry. So the specialist is special, outstanding, exceptional and well respected. It takes a long time to get there, but you earn this title by dedicating yourself to a craft in such a single minded way that no one else can hold a torch to you. Have you heard the 10,000 hour rule? That's how long it takes to be an expert in something? How good could you be after 50,000 hours? 8. Wrapping up: So, here we are. Lots of ideas, none of them easy or quick. If you want to succeed in any of these frameworks, your creative skills have got to be well practiced and sharp and you have to keep improving and evolving over the course of many years. I've been inspired right in this course, and I felt really excited thinking about how these paths could play out. So I hope you felt inspired by one or a combination of some of these frameworks, and it's given you some ideas of how you want to develop your career. Truth is, there will be a lot of crossover in most freelance careers. But remember these personas as you put your work out there into the world and seek your fortune. I'd really appreciate it if you could click the link below and let me know what you thought to this course. Your feedback will help me make more useful things in the future. Thank you for trusting me to help you navigate the illustration industry. I believe in you. See you next time. 9. Bonus lesson: How to email a client: This is probably the most common question I get. How do I email clients? When Illustrators are ready to start introducing themselves to clients by email, I see many of them get too wrapped up in their own head. They want it to be perfect. It's first impression, after all. They don't want to mess up anything and ruin their chances of being hired. Understandable, but also unnecessary. See plenty of other illustrators applying to the agency who don't give it enough thought. Frankly, they send lazy emails that won't ever get a response. My thinking on this is that you actually get a lot of chances to make a good first impression with cold emails like this. If you send a bad one, it either won't be looked at or it'll be forgotten by the agent or art director you sent it to pretty much instantly. They only remember the good ones. So if you've sent out emails in the past and you haven't got a reply or maybe you've made a mistake, like forgetting to add a link to the website or something like that, don't let it put you off trying again. There's nothing to be embarrassed about. Most of the emails you send won't get a reply, and there's a lot of good reasons for that. The art director could be off sick or on holiday. They might like your work, save it somewhere, and not bother to respond. They might not have a suitable project for you at the time. They might hate your work. That is possible, but it's unlikely. Either the work is right for them or it isn't. And if it's not right for them now, that doesn't mean it won't be in the future when you've had a bit more practice. The most likely scenario is that the art director is simply too busy to respond to all the emails they get from illustrators. They would probably love to reply and give you some feedback and help you they're busy. So when you send an email to a client, think about what they actually need to know, and it's a pretty short list. By far, the most important thing they need to know is if your work is any good. So including examples of your work is really the primary goal of this email. And if your email doesn't have any examples of your illustration work in it, then it's a waste of time. They're not going to go searching for your name or your website. So include a few images in the email itself. No massive file sizes or layered files. Just a couple of JPEGs are perfect. Commercial illustration is often used by clients to attract attention to their brands or products, so you should be using it to attract attention for yourself. Don't add download links to your emails. Don't add zip files. They are barriers between the art director and your work. A PDF is okay. If you find yourself sending an email with individual Google Drive links to 20 separate images, just stop. No one is going to take the time to look at those. In terms of what you write, you want to send them a friendly introduction to you and your work. You don't need to be overly formal, but you should be professional. Art directors have limited time, so keep the email short and sweet. Tell them who you are, where you are, what you do, and why you're getting in touch. Who where, what, and why? You can do this in three or four lines. The why in this list might seem unnecessary, as sending your illustration work to an art director is pretty self explanatory. But this is an opportunity for you to ask for what you want, whether that's a job or some feedback or whatever else. Ask the question, something like, do you have any opportunities coming up that my work could be for? You don't ask, you don't get, give the art director something to respond to. If there's no question, the email doesn't require an answer. It doesn't guarantee anything, but it may help your chances of getting a reply. And any small tweaks we can make to increase how many replies we get is worth trying. Attach a couple of images of your best work that's appropriate for this particular client. The images are what will catch their eye first, not a block of text. Include a link to your portfolio in case they want to see more. You should also add in some keywords about your style and the kinds of work that you do or you'd like to do. For example, I'm an editorial illustrator focusing on conceptual ideas. My illustration style is vector based and uses bold colors and character designs. I work on a lot of finance and science subjects. Whatever it is that describes your work, you want to add these keywords. So if the art director is ever browsing through their inbox, looking for an illustrator, they can type in Illustrator, finance, conceptual, and your email will show up in that search. If you don't get a reply to your first introductory email, after a week or so, you can send a follow up and just simply say, Hello, I hope you had a chance to look at my portfolio. If there's anything I can help out with, let me know. I'd love to work with you. It's not pushy. It's not going to annoy anyone, but it could prompt a reply. Two emails is better than one. If you still don't get a reply, that's okay. Set a reminder to yourself to send them another email with some new work in three months. The first email you send to a client probably won't get a reply, no matter how good it is. The chances of you sending your work to an art director at exactly the time they are looking for an illustrator with your skills and style is tiny. It can happen, but that's down to look, and it's not a repeatable system. This is why it's important to reset your expectations and think about what the goal really is. The goal of the email outreach isn't to send one email. It's to keep in touch with clients long term so you can build up some familiarity and trust with them. The first email you send isn't the important one. The important one might be the fifth or the sixth email you send to that client, which might be a couple of years into the future when the art director does have the perfect project for your style and skills. And if you've been sending them great new work every few months, you'll always be fresh in their mind. 10. Bonus lesson: Self Promotion: I used to receive a lot of printed promotional items from illustrators, everything from postcards and stickers to expensive prints and t shirts. So I'd like, and I'd pin the postcards up on a wall, but to be honest, most of them ended up in the bin. If I didn't like style, I'm not going to keep it. These kinds of things can be a serious expense for a new illustrator. They take a long time to design and print and post. And since COVID, lots of people are working from home, so there's no guarantee the person you send it to will actually receive if your work is untested and you aren't making money from illustration yet, don't waste your time and money on making these things. Email is a much quicker and cheaper way to introduce yourself to clients. Yes, it's less impactful, but it's also lower risk. Once you're established and you're working regularly and you've got some money in the bank, yeah, make some cool things to post out to clients. But maybe the things you post are more like thank you gifts for your existing clients, and they're things that the art director can keep on their wall or desk that will remind them of you in the future. You already know they like your work, so it's much less likely to end up in the bin. 11. Bonus lesson: Illustration directories: It's here. It's here. You've probably come across different services and products that claim to be able to find you client, the directory of Illustration and the workbook and Book. There are others. These seem like a shortcut. And when used as part of a marketing strategy by an experienced illustrator whose work is already popular and has been validated by the market, they can be an effective source of leads and clients, but they're also expensive. If you're a beginner and you've got no clients of your own yet, you don't really know if your work is good enough to attract clients. It hasn't been validated yet. It might be good enough, but chances are if you're just starting out, you still have a bit of work to do. So if you pay $1,000 or whatever to appear in one of these books or online directories, without already knowing that your work is good enough, you run the risk of wasting your money. I've done it. I couldn't really afford it, but I thought it was an investment, but it wasn't because my work wasn't good enough. If you're putting your work alongside hundreds of other illustrators, you have to be really sure that you're going to stand out or that you have something unique to offer. And I don't think you can be sure until you've put the work in to find your own clients and you have some evidence that what you're doing is working. I recommend you avoid these services when you're a beginner. They're too expensive and more than likely will be a waste of money. Once you get a bit further along in your career and your work is in demand and you've got some money in the bank account to spend on marketing, go ahead and try it out because it could work really well then. It's not a shortcut for beginners. It's a professional service for established professionals. Agency access is a list of clients that you can buy, and I've heard good things. But again, it's an expense you probably don't want to pay for before you know you definitely have a real shot of landing some of the clients on the list. The Association of Illustrators sells lists of clients for illustrators to contact in different fields, editorial, publishing, and advertising, I think. It's a great resource and a relatively cheap one. This is probably a good one for newer artists, but be aware if you buy them, so have lots of other new illustrators. These clients will be inundated with emails from artists, more so than other clients who you could find yourself. You can try it for not much money, but be aware there will be a lot of competition for whatever projects these clients have. 12. Bonus lesson: Diversifying your portfolio: You may have an idea of which part of the industry you want to work in, like children's books, and that's fine. But if you only show work that's appropriate for children's books, no other kind of client will consider hiring you. Niching down and specializing too early can make your life as a freelancer incredibly difficult. You're only giving yourself one chance to find work in a specific area of the industry. I believe it's better to have a portfolio with a broad appeal to lots of different kinds of clients at the beginning, so you have more chances to find paid freelance work quicker. Then once you're getting regular work and you have some options, you can start being a bit more picky and narrowing down your projects to the ones that you're most interested in. There's nothing wrong with having a dream client or a niche that you want to get into, but wouldn't you rather be paid to illustrate things that don't quite fit into that box along the way to that goal? Stop thinking about your ideal client for now and think about how you can make yourself ideal for lots of different kinds of clients. There are two things you can do to increase the opportunities that are available to you as a new illustrator, subjects and formats. Apply your style to lots of different subjects, subjects that will appeal to clients from different industries. Children's characters are one, travel, animals, beauty, food and drink, technology, maps, architecture, characters. I think we do characters, finance, science, portraits. This is a very wide range. So you're not going to be all that interested in. But if you've got a couple of examples of each of these subjects in your portfolio, you are ticking a lot of boxes and you have something to offer a very wide range of clients, you'll have more chances of finding your first paid project. Then you can think about formats, things like, advertising, packaging, and publishing. They are descriptions of formats or different ways that illustration is used. Adding a mix of different formats when you're putting your portfolio together. Under the editorial category, you can have all those different subjects, same with advertising and book covers. A book cover could be about food, travel, romance, finance, science, psychology, whatever. You've got your list of subjects, and maybe some of them you'll illustrate as a book cover format. Maybe you think animals, travel and science are going to work for book covers. Book covers are pretty recognizable, similar shapes most of the time with space for the title text and the author name. Then you think, Okay, I'll make illustrations that look like advertisements for technology, finance, and, like, health and wellness theme. They could be social media ads or print ads, or you might see them on the subway or billboards. For editorial, you could do food portraits and maps. That could be the cover of a magazine, a double page feature inside, or a smaller spot illustration. So not only are you presenting a wide range of subjects that clients are looking for, you're also showing different kinds of clients from editorial, publishing and advertising that you can work in the ways that they need. If you show a range of subjects in a variety of formats, then you'll be able to work in lots of different industries. Over time, you'll probably discover you don't like doing certain projects like finance or technology, for example, and you can phase them out. Once you get in regular paid work, you have more freedom to choose your ideal path. At the start, any work is better than no work.