Strategies on how to showcase your portfolio and impress potential clients as a freelancer

11 min readJul 18, 2024

Introduction

As freelancers, we are often asked to present a portfolio of our previous projects and works. Prospective clients usually ask for this because they want to build trust in your work by reviewing your previous projects. This is a prime opportunity to convert a client and seal the deal. A lot of new freelancers are usually caught off guard and not ready with their portfolio when these are requested. If you are this type of person, then this article is for you. There are so many options available to us depending on how much time we have and our skill level. In this article I will describe most of the options available, some tips and personal preferences, and some suggestions on how to get started.

General strategies for content presentation

1. Understand your target audience

The first key step in creating an impressive freelance portfolio is understanding who your target audience and ideal clients are. Get very clear on the types of businesses, organizations, and individuals that you want to attract. Conduct research to gain insights into their pain points and objectives. Knowing your audience inside and out will allow you to tailor and showcase your skills in a way that aligns with their needs and interests.

2. Curate Your Best Work

Be highly selective about the projects and work samples you showcase. Focus on including only your strongest, most impressive work that aligns with your target clients’ needs. For visual work samples like design projects, ensure the examples are visually stunning and error-free. For written samples, choose ones that exhibit excellent writing, formatting, and content. Be ruthless in the editing process — sometimes you may need to leave out projects you worked hard on if they don’t showcase your current abilities in the best light. The goal is to feature your absolute best work and the projects that got the best results for your clients.

3. Personalize Your Portfolio

Personalizing your portfolio is key to making it engaging and memorable for potential clients. Share a bit of your unique story, background, personality, and values to connect with clients on a deeper level. Use visuals that capture your personality — photos, illustrations, color schemes, etc. that reflect your brand identity. Be authentic and passionate when showcasing your work. Clients will connect more if they feel your enthusiasm.

4. Highlight your contribution to projects

Provide ample context and details for each project you feature in your portfolio so that potential clients can fully understand and appreciate the scope and complexity of your work. Take the time to thoroughly explain your specific role, the process you followed, the challenges you faced, and how you overcame obstacles to deliver successful results. Some key elements to include in your project descriptions:

The goal — What was the purpose or objective for a project?

Your role — Were you the lead designer, developer, writer etc? Outline your responsibilities.

The process — Step-by-step, how did you approach executing this project?

Problems solved — What were some key difficulties or roadblocks? How did you solve them?

Key achievements — What were the end results? How did the project meet or exceed expectations? What value did you deliver?

Tools and skills used — Demonstrate the specific technical expertise, software, or capabilities leveraged.

5. Include client testimonials

Client testimonials and recommendations are a powerful way to showcase your professionalism, work quality, and ability to satisfy customers. Select positive feedback from past clients and feature their endorsements prominently. Some important strategies;

Ask satisfied clients if you can use their feedback. It is important to get their permission to share any reviews publicly.
Choose testimonials that highlight your key skills and expertise and align them with the services you want to promote.
Feature detailed, authentic testimonials. Avoid generic, vague praise. Include specific examples of work you delivered.
Curate testimonials from a diverse range of clients. Different perspectives build more trust and credibility.
Credit each client with their name, title, and company. Listing sources lends legitimacy.
Refresh your testimonials regularly. Showcase recent positive feedback on an ongoing basis.

6. Optimize for Search Engines (SEO)

To maximise the visibility and reach of your freelance portfolio, it’s important to optimise it for search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc. Conduct keyword research to identify relevant words and phrases that potential clients might use to search for your services. Incorporate these keywords naturally into your content to improve on your SEO performance. Optimise your design for mobile with responsive designs and fast load times to further enhance SEO performance. Here is an SEO checklist by Semrush that can help you to quickly assess your portfolio’s SEO optimizations.

7. Keep your portfolio up to date

Continuously update your portfolio with new and relevant projects. Aim to refresh your portfolio every 3–6 months. Add 2–3 of your latest and best projects to showcase your progress. For each new addition, write a detailed project summary explaining the client, objectives, process, and results. Remove any old samples that are no longer relevant. For example, interface designs from 5 years ago that don’t reflect current technology. New projects prove you’re active, in-demand, and expanding your capabilities which builds client confidence in your skills.

Tools you can use to create your portfolio

There are a myriad of tools you can use to create a shareable portfolio to share with your potential clients and I will be discussing some of the popular and effective options available. Please choose the right platform based on your skills, budget, and how much time you want to spend creating the portfolio.

1. Google slides, Canva, or essentially any PowerPoint software.

Oh yes! you can create an interactive portfolio using Google Slides. It is especially handy when you have a low budget and are short of time to create a portfolio website. To get started with Google Slides;

Open Google Slides and create a new presentation
Browse the template gallery and pick an appealing template
Customize the colors, fonts, and layouts to match your brand and personal preferences.
Organize your content into a clear structure using headings and subheadings.
Use high-quality images and videos to showcase your work
Add contact information and clear call-to-action(CTA) throughout your slides.
Keep the design clean, consistent, and visually appealing.

If you are presenting your portfolio to a freelance client, you may want to focus more on your projects than your personal information, whereas if you are applying for a job, you may want to place equal focus on your personal information as well.

Other similar tools include Canva, Microsoft PowerPoint

2. Notion

Notion is a versatile all-in-one workspace that can be used to create a dynamic and interactive portfolio. It has a customisable layout and an intuitive design. It is definitely one of my favourite tools. You can use Notion’s database and page features to curate and display your work effectively. You can combine text, images, video and interactive elements to create a visually appealing and immersive experience that highlights your expertise and creativity.

Some key features of using Notion for your portfolio:

Notion offers portfolio templates to get you started quickly. You can find templates here.
Easily embed media like images, videos, PDFs etc. to illustrate your work visually.
Add clear call-to-actions (CTAs) like “Hire me” buttons to encourage clients to reach out.
Customize the cover image, page colors and fonts to reflect your personal brand.
Use headers, subheaders and bullet points to structure your content in an organized way.
Advanced: You can create individual database entries for each project you want to showcase, including details like project name, description, technologies used and outcomes. You can then use this database to dynamically update your portfolio page whenever you add a new project.
You can link project entries to dedicated pages where you can provide detailed descriptions of each project.

💡Tip : In the top right-hand corner, you can click the Share button to publish your portfolio page to the web and then share the link with any potential clients.

3. Website builders like Wordpress, Wix, SquareSpace, Webflow, Bubble, Framer, etc.

There are numerous website builders on the market, including no code options which are great for beginners or non-developers who want to build their own websites. Website builders like Wix and WordPress provide a drag and drop interface which makes crafting a professional website a breeze for almost anyone. They also have numerous templates and plugins options to get started with. Webflow is low code option which allows you to build using the drag and drop interface but also to write custom code to realize more advanced features.

I recommend starting with a template to get up and running quickly. Here’s why templates are useful:

Fast start — Skip designing and get straight to showcasing your work.
Variety and choice — There are templates for almost every style and profession, from clean and minimal to bold and creative. Choose what best represents your brand.
Customization ease — Templates are very customizable, allowing you to easily swap colors, fonts and images to make it your own.
Built in features — Many templates include pre-built functionality like contact forms, animations, etc which saves time.

When using a website builder, focus on showcasing your best work with clear calls-to-action and descriptions. There are both free and paid templates available. Explore different options to find the best template for your needs, design preferences and budget.

💡Tip: Always take a mobile-first approach when designing your portfolio site. Most templates offer responsiveness out of the box.

4. Using design communities like Dribbble, Behance, etc.

Content management systems like Behance and Dribble are especially useful for designers to showcase and share their work. These platforms offer increased exposure and discoverability for creators. Behance allows designers to create project pages to showcase work in detail. The platform makes it easy to get discovered by potential clients and collaborators. Users can mark their profiles as “Available for Hire” to indicate openness for new projects.

Behance also has a Job Board which helps freelancers to get jobs.

Dribbble also operates similarly to behance and is considered one of the best platforms to gain exposure in the design community. Dribbble profiles rank high in search egine results due to the platform’s domain authority. Sharing work on Dribbble makes it easy for potential clients and collaborators to find you.

The key benefits of using these platforms include:

Showcasing work to a large audience of hiring managers, clients and collaborators
Increased exposure through built-in discoverability features
Ability to demonstrate availability for hire or collaborations
Credibility of being part of an established creative community
High search ranking for portfolios due to platform domain authority
Easy sharing of work via profile links

5. Create a custom website

Building a custom website is particularly useful for software developers as it allows you to practice your coding skills, improve your design skills and demonstrate your expertise to clients directly through the quality of your portfolio site.

There are many frameworks and technologies to choose from when building a custom website, such as ReactJS, NextJS, Svelte, Vue, Angular, etc. I chose to build my personal website using Django and Bootsrap mainly because I wanted to learn the technologies. And I can now say that I’m proficient in them. As an Android developer, building my own portfolio site from scratch was great practice and allowed me to explore the web frameworks I was interested in. I was particularly interested in Django for my backend because it is a Python framework and I want to work with LangChain in the future. Learning Django was like killing two birds with one stone, because I got myself a portfolio site and also paved the way to building web-based autonomous agents in the future.

When starting to build your own portfolio site, start by choosing a tech stack or framework that you want to learn or are already proficient in, depending on your goals. Look at other developer portfolios for design inspiration on how best to present yourself. Use a tool like Figma to gather design inspiration and then start building your site.

Don’t be afraid to iterate on the design, getting feedback from others and refining the portfolio until you’re completely satisfied. Reach out to people to get feedback from an outside perspective, then improve the site further.

Here are some portfolio sites that inspired my own design choices while i was working on my personal website

Yves : https://yvesloy.com/

Design Tide: https://www.designtide.co/

Lamine Mbacke: https://laminembacke.com/

You can check out my personal website that i built using Django and BootStrap here: https://www.jordanmungujakisa.com/

6. Github

As a developer, your GitHub profile is a great way to showcase your expertise through the projects you have worked on. Here are some best practices for customising your GitHub as a portfolio:

Pin your best projects — Curate your profile by pinning high-quality repositories that demonstrate your skills and experience. Choose projects that are well-documented, solve a real problem, and are relevant to the type of projects you want to work on.
Write great READMEs — Each pinned repository should have a well-written README file that explains what the project is, how it works, the technologies used, and installation/usage instructions. This will allow visitors to quickly understand your work.
Link to live projects — Where possible, include links in your READMEs to live, deployed versions of your projects that people can actually try out.
Use GitHub Pages to host your site for free — You can host static websites directly from a GitHub repository using GitHub Pages. GitHub Pages allows you to host your portfolio for free.

I used HTML, CSS and JavaScript to create a stylish CV/resume for myself. I hosted it on github pages for free and it got me 2 job interviews. My intention was to improve my CSS skills and building my CV offered an interesting and functional way to do this.

Conclusion

Creating a portfolio to showcase your work is an important step in building your professional brand, especially as a freelancer or creative. Done correctly, it allows you to demonstrate your skills and experience to potential clients and employers. Today, having a strong online presence is critical to success as a freelancer. A well-designed portfolio showcases your talents and attracts clients to you. Take the time to create one using the strategies outlined here — it will pay off in the form of more work, I promise! And thank you for reading!

I wish you the best on your freelance journey :)

Stay happy! ✌
Tschüss 🤓