by skysnap » 07 Nov 2016, 14:56 
Image Credit: Stocksnap (Free license)
Freelance Clients
These type of clients come from word of mouth or referral. And here you have to keep them for regular work. Most of these clients are going to work with you face to face or through offline means. Offline clients may not be high paying unless you have a big portfolio. If you are just starting or have minimal portfolio, then you have to work harder to retain such clients. Your reputation depends on their word of mouth recommendation. So utmost care should be taken while handling such clients.
Upwork & Freelncer
These two sites are alternative sources of your graphic design client search. Upwork is one of the popular site for landing regular client work. Freelancer is another site that may land you more clients over a period of time. These two are not the only sites that you can work with. There are plenty of other sites that you can join in order to find freelance client work. These sites have clients of varying type paying from few dollars to hundread of dollars for designs.
Fiverr
Extremely low paid website for the graphic designers. However the designer often makes money from the revisions. You'll find that there are lot of bad buyers out there. And if they don't like your design then they may cancel the project. And you will have some cancellation ratio of your designs which affect your ranking. So you have to minimize the rejection. Make sure to have decent number of revisions. You have to also focus on making the design attractive enough to avoid rejection. If possible try to offer quality output on this site for low cost. This will give you a lot of work and repeat clients. Some of the people have quit their jobs after working daily on fiverr. It takes time but definitely doable.
99designs
This is one of the popular website for logo, T-shirt and other type of designers. Here the buyer posts his requirements and expected project output. And you have to post the design prototype. If the buyer selects the design from you then you get paid. Here the designs start from 99$ onwards. Most of the projects on the site are priced as high as 499$ onwards. This makes this site high in demand for both buyers and sellers. Compared to other spec work designer website, the competition and quality of designs is very high here. So you can guess the cost paid to sellers is higher too.
How much can you make?
Depending on your portfolio and website you're working for, the amount will vary. Some designers make anywhere from 5$ to 3000$ per gig. Some of the designers also make on hourly basis. However the graphic design job requires a lot of revisions for designs. And for this reason many clients don't want hourly paid designers. This is one reason many business owners are moving to gig based designer sites like fiverr.
Conclusion
At the end the amount of effort you can take and your designs will be judged by the clients. Some clients will be too much judgmental but you should not be discouraged by this. And you should continue to focus on the quality. This will help you get consistent customer and earn some good money.
