I asked the same question before but the thread went off the topic. So thought to make a new thread To All webmasters & web designers... How do you get your clients. What method works best for you to fetch new clients. Do you use craiglist like free ad platform or do you use Adwords or whats you best method which works out?
How do you most web designers get clients? They design and have a portfolio - also some sell on forums.
If you have great design skills go to 99designs.com and check contest section http://99designs.com/contests Make designs there and maybe those companies will use your work in future. Some contest holders say in their brief that they have future work also. big design site also http://www.designcrowd.com/ And like forgottencreature said, porfolio will help a lot hopefully this helped
Advertise portfolio on forums to begin with, and when high quality (if high quality) then start to build a customer base and attract higher paying customers.
Hm... I rarely ever try to have customers from forums, mainly because they want things cheap and it isn't worth my time. I used to cold call businesses when I needed money. I haven't done any SEO work really with my web design site, and I still have people coming to me for projects and a lot of word of mouth referrals. I recommend cold calling for a week, and you'll have enough projects to keep you busy, then you will get a lot of referrals probably.