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One of the easiest and quickest ways to accomplish the three things every web designer wants more of is to submit your portfolio site, or designs you have made, to CSS galleries. What are these three things?

1. High Trust/PR Backlinks
2. More Visitors
3. More Clients (as a result of more visitors)

I know I find CSS galleries a big source of inspiration, but they can also be a great place to score some free advertising for your business. I have one friend who does no advertising for his design company, and lives just from referrerals and clients that found him from CSS galleries. In case you didn’t see the obvious advantages of the three things gallery submission accomplishes, here they are.

1. High Trust/PR Backlinks - In case you’ve been living under a stone for the past 3 years, having a backlink to your site on another site that has a lot of trust with Google, and/or high PR, is a good thing. This helps out your site with PR and ranking in the SERP’s.

2. More Visitors - I almost don’t want to say the advantages of this, they’re that obvious. People will see your beautiful designs, and click them and be taken to your site. More visitors = more money from ads, but more importantly clients, which leads to our last point.

3. More Clients - If your designs are good (and of course they are), people will want to know who designed them. They’ll seek you out, and if they need a design, you’ve just gained another client. Of course not everyone that visits your site will become a client, but you’d be surprised how many clients can be gained this way. Oh, and did I mention that these clients are gained through free advertising?

And now you ask, Josh, how do I submit my sites to lots and lots of CSS galleries? Well, simple: you do two things.

The wonderful people over at CSS Insert have created an extremely useful service for designers. You just fill out a simple form with details of your site or design you want to submit, and they send it to over 20 top CSS galleries. They email you who they submitted it to, so you can either a) be lazy and stop here, or b) find out who they didn’t submit to, and then go and submit there yourself. Just go to Google and search for “css gallery,” and find sites that they haven’t submitted to and then manually submit your site. For those of you that want to know before hand, here are the sites they submit to, 26 in all.

• CSS Green
• CSS Elite
• Showcase
• Net Cocktail
• CSS Website
• Best Web Gallery
• Creative Pakistan
• Screenfluent
• CSS Liquid
• CSS Tux
• CSS Princess
• CSS Love
• CSS Thesis
• CSS Hazard
• Darkeye
• Web Design Archive
• Web Creme
• Defrost
• Refresh
• CSS Collection
• Net Culture
• Screenlicious
• CSS Remix
• CSS Mania
• CSS Bloom
• Unmatched Style

So there ya go. Now get busy and start submitting, and enjoy the benefits as they start to roll in

Unless you are an established design agency, you could probably use some more clients. One of the most cost effective methods, that will still deliver results, is to employ guerrilla marketing tactics. Basically guerrilla marketing is “unconventional marketing intended to get maximum results from minimal resources.” Just like guerrilla warfare, see? Here are a few links to some more information about guerrilla marketing or specific methods that companies have used.

http://timeontarget.blogspot.com/2007/02/guerrilla-marketing.html
http://www.gettingthewordout.com/blog/?p=35
http://www.entrepreneur.com/marketing/marketingideas/guerrillamarketingcolumnistallautenslager/article172286.html
http://gaygamer.net/2007/02/rockstars_employs_graffiti_in.html

We’re going to look at one specific tactic that you can use to get your name and brand a ton of exposure for relatively little money. This method can be used for literally any type of business or promotion, it doesn’t matter if you are a design agency, restaurant, or book store.

Stickers

I know this may sound like a silly, almost childish method of advertising, but it can be very effective, both with cost and reach. I live about 15 minutes from the downtown blocks of a major US city. Thousands of people each day walk the streets there, and hundreds of these are potential customers.

Now, the obvious method to reach them would be to buy advertisement on buildings, bill boards, etc., but the cost of this can quickly ramp up, and people have grown used to the usual ad spots in their building/city. Using stickers can be an extremely cost effective, “outside the box” solution to advertising in a city.

You can easily find an online provider who can print high quality stickers for you, and the prices are very fair. You can get a few thousand vinyl stickers that are great for outdoor use for a few hundred bucks. If you don’t care about vinyl, you can get nearly double the amount for the same price.

So you’ve designed a nifty, eye catching sticker with your companies brand and URL on it, now what do you do? Simple: go and canvas your city putting them up. Here is the tricky part. Think about where you’re placing them. Stickers in obvious locations, while they may get more exposure, will quickly be scrubbed, or removed by a cleaning crew. You may trade off the time they’ll be seen for the amount of viewers, and that’s fine, but also look for more creative areas to place your stickers, where people can still see them, but they will be less likely to be scrubbed.

A word about legality. I am in no way responsible for any trouble you may find yourself in. Check the laws of your city before you go pasting your sticker everywhere. Obviously placing 10 stickers right outside your city hall would be a bad idea, but there are plenty of places you can stick them and be fine. Use your discretion when placing stickers. Having even a few hundred stickers around town will definitely result in increased traffic to your site. You can even test this and track the results by having the URL on the sticker lead to a unique landing page.

The possibilities are only limited by your own imagination. That’s the beauty of guerrilla marketing.

This is the first post in a series, or rather, a category of post’s that will be a re-occurring feature of Tutorialaday.com. Basically every post in the Cashing In category will be about a specific niche in which I feel there is a wide open market for design. That is, a niche where you, being a designer, or owner of a design company, can quickly set yourself up to target that niche and offer design to companies related to it. So, enough with the introductions, here is the first niche.

Viral Marketing

This is by no means a brand new marketing strategy, but business are starting to look at viral marketing as a good supplement if not replacement to traditional methods of advertising. What does this mean for the designer? Take a look at these stats, from Marketing Sherpa:

Top viral marketing tactics used by business to consumer marketers in the US

• 91% - encouraging email forwarding
• 80% - tell a friend boxes on websites
• 69% - online games, quizzes, and polls
• 54% - cool microsites
• 47% - offering e-cards
• 46% - video clips
• 29% - audio clips

Now, I don’t know how you view these, but I see a goldmine of design opportunities. I have not yet ran across a design company specializing in viral marketing design techniques, yet alone a company specializing in any one of those methods. Sure it might take some great sales pitches and convincing demo’s to sell a client on viral marketing, but the payoff would be well worth it, especially for the experience gained in designing for viral marketing.

After you get a few jobs that are specific to viral marketing, perhaps you should open up a site dedicated solely to design solutions for viral marketing campaigns. There is so much opportunity here. If you are already an established web design company, think of your current client list, and then think of how viral marketing could benefit them. I’m sure not all of them are ready for a viral marketing campaign, but you are sure to find some. The market is definitely there, it’s up to you to go out and seize the opportunity.

Technorati Profile

As a freelance web designer, usually most of your work will be conducted over email, fax, phone, etc. Personally most of the clients I have done work for aren’t even in the same state as me. With established sites such as Digital Point, Web Hosting Talk, and Sitepoint, and even Craigslist it has become very easy for a freelancer to find work online, especially when first starting out. While there is nothing wrong with doing remote work, there are many advantages of finding and working with local clients.

Advantages In Advertising To Local Clients

While it’s true you have a much wider reach with advertising your design services online, you can be just as effective in advertising locally offline, and often for less money than it would cost you to advertise online. Here are some methods, listed with their advantages, to offline local advertising,

• Local bulletin boards - Believe it or not, the local bulletin board in your library/church/townhall/Starbucks etc. can be a very good way to spread the word about your design services. It costs you nothing to put up a flyer or ad, and you’d be surprised how many people actually will read them.

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Perhaps one of the hardest skills to learn when freelancing in web design is how to fairly and effectively price your services. A project quote can either sell a client, or turn them away. Here are some guidelines on how to develop a web design pricing guide. A lot of people have different methods for coming up with their prices, but this is just to get you started. This guide only deals with charging per project. There are other ways of charging clients, but per project is the easiest and perhaps the most widespread method of pricing.

1. Determining Your Hourly Wage

This is by far the most important part of developing a pricing guide. You will always start with your hourly wage, so it’s critical to get it right from the start. It’s pretty simple to come up with your hourly wage. The formula looks a little something like this.

(Expenses + Salary) ÷ Hours Worked Per Year = Hourly Wage

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