Three Ways a Portfolio Website Benefits Your Business

The most important tool that you have to market your work is a portfolio website. With a portfolio website, potential clients from around the world can review your work, get to know your personality, and understand your services at their convenience.

There are three main goals of a successful portfolio website. First, it should help present your work in the best possible way while marketing explaining your services in a clear manner. Second, the website should enable you to get to know your customers and site visitors. And, third, it should act as a hub for all of your online and offline marketing activities. Let’s dive into the benefits of each of these three things in greater detail:

Attract the Right Clients

With the right artwork selection, branding, and marketing message, your ideal clients—the clients who you would LOVE to work with—will visit your portfolio website and feel at home. Your ideal client will immediately recognize themselves in your description, clearly understand your services, and feel confident that you are the perfect designer for their business. In my experience, most clients are not looking for a faceless, nameless brand to develop patterns and prepare work for production. Most clients are looking for a partner they can trust and work with for years to come.

Know Your Customers

One of the key benefits of having a portfolio website is that it allows you to have more direct contact with potential clients and visitors to your site. Free tools such as Google Analytics allow you to see where your website visitors are coming from, how they are finding you, and what parts of your website they are spending the most time on. If you have a password protected portfolio on your website, having clients fill out a brief password application offers you a wealth of information, such as what clients are drawn to your work, what pattern styles they are looking for, and what you can do to make their lives a little easier. Take advantage of this opportunity!

Your Marketing Hub

With so many different ways to sell and market your work, including online networks such as LinkedIn and physical networks, such as attending a print show or a conference, it’s imperative to make your website your marketing hub—the one place potential clients can go to learn more about you whether you are online or offline. Always direct people to your website! It’s the one area of your business that you have complete control over because your online portfolio is your home.  It gives you the chance to tell your story. Furthermore, potential clients can find all the social media links they may need on your website.

Make Sure You Are Maximizing Your Potential

A portfolio website is so much more than a website where you present your work. Your website is your chance to tell your story and welcome new contacts and clients to your world. As you consider your next portfolio website redesign consider how you can develop a more inviting environment to new clients, how you can clearly explain your services, and how you can make their life a little bit easier. It’s a great business building strategy and wonderful way to develop lasting relationships with clients you LOVE!

Don’t know what you need to include in your portfolio website? Download our free Portfolio Website Checklist!

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  1. Hi Michele.

    I’m just beginning to build a portfolio and took the Sellable Sketch course which was a great place to start.
    I wanted to thank you for all the free advice you put out there–it’s invaluable–not to mention all the great classes
    you offer. I will definitely be back to take more classes soon.

    Best Wishes!

    Debbie

  2. hi michelle,

    i always get discouraged when i think of an online business specially in design since its not safe from theft. sometimes u don’t even get to know who copied your design and where he used it. in that case copyright wont work. i read, there are some protections like reducing size/resolution or disabling right click, water mark and password protection etc but i don’t find them very useful because i feel if someone wants to steal your design, he can still do it by taking its photograph with a camera or by drawing it on sketchbook by hand..its scary to see your hard work stolen..

    so as an owner of an online design business, how do u deal with this issue?

    don’t you ever get your designs stolen or copied?

  3. Which website tools do you recommend to make your portfolio?
    I have tried wordpress but it seems a bit complicated…. I know there are definitely other sites that might be more useful to set up your portfolio on?

  4. Thank you so much for what you do! I’m taking a hard look at my website after reading your posts.

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