Monday, May 16, 2011

Why You Should Build Your Freelance Career on Your Own Domain

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Credit: Yuri Arcurs on Photodune

I’ve exchanged business cards with plenty of freelancers. There’s one thing that strikes me over and over again, though: a freelancer may have an incredibly well designed business card that lists a link to some random portfolio site that the freelancer in question has set up a profile on.

It’s an easy way to get a website up: fill out a short form, upload a couple of images and you’re ready to go. But listing such portfolio sites on your business card, or as the main point of contact for seeing your work, can be dangerous to your freelancing career. Instead, it’s important to purchase your own domain name and use that.

The Danger of Not Having Your Own Domain Name

Sometimes things happen ? things that can leave you with a thousand business cards listing a link to a portfolio site that doesn’t even exist anymore. When you don’t control the link that you use to connect with clients, if anything ever happens to that platform, you may have all the people you’ve connected with in the past trying to find you at a place that’s disappeared off the web entirely. That’s a dangerous position to be in.

Having a domain name of your own, even if it just redirects to that portfolio profile you’ve set up, gives you much more control over the situation. If a site goes down, you can quickly redirect your domain name somewhere else, even if it’s just to another portfolio site. The same goes for an email address based off of your domain name.

Control is the name of the game: there’s a reason that big businesses buy up domain names that include all sorts of variations on the company’s actual name. As a freelancer, it may not be necessary to pick up every variation on your own name, but having at least a domain name associated with your freelance business is important if you want to control how easily clients and other contacts can find you. And it’s worth remembering that it’s probably going to be easier to find a domain name today than it will be down the road. It’s gotten somewhat difficult to find short .com addresses, and as more and more businesses build an online presence, it’s only going to get harder.

Don’t Let Cost Stop You

The biggest objection to setting up a freelancer’s website is money, followed closely by time ? and time really is money in this situation, considering how easily you can pay another freelancer to set up a site. But cost shouldn’t be the biggest factor for freelancers: it should be the potential return on your investment. Considering that you can do the bare basics of buying a domain name and redirecting it to some free site you’ve set up somewhere for about $10 per year, it’s hard to argue that you can’t afford a website at all.

But there’s a bigger question at stake: how much can a website earn you over time? Just the fact that you have a website can communicate all sorts of information to a prospective client: a website sends the message that you’re serious about your business and you will handle projects professionally. Whether or not you can be a professional without a website is unimportant ? many clients will subconsciously judge you on the basis of your website. That means that your website can be key in converting potential clients into actual clients ? making it a matter of whether or not your site is providing you with a valuable return on your investment, rather than just a question of how much it will cost you up front.

Photo credit: Some rights reserved by Yuri Arcurs.

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