An online portfolio is the digital representation of your business and the services it provides. It is the first point of contact between you and new customers and showcases your work in the best possible light.
This makes it a vital part of the marketing efforts for any small or medium business, or sole trader.
The advice given to small businesses on marketing yourself to potential customers normally focuses on active marking, cold-calling, prospect emailing, and how to deliver the perfect elevator pitch.
This advice often glosses over the importance of passive marketing. After all, you can only send a certain number of emails per day, while the number of prospective customers who can view your portfolio is theoretically unlimited.
According to Y Combinator, a company that offers startup funding, only around 7% of new startups go on to succeed. So, if you want your business to avoid being part of the 93% of companies that fail, you need to get the word out about your products or services as fast and effectively as possible.
To help out, we’ve put together this guide on how to set up an online portfolio.
Choose the Right Hosting Platform
Not all portfolio hosting platforms are created equal and not all businesses need the same portfolio. Before you start curating what needs to go into your portfolio, you need to make sure the hosting service you are using is the right one for you.
Think of it like picking out the land you plan to build your house on before you decide what color the walls are going to be.
If you are a web developer, keen to show off your website crafting skills, then you’ll want a portfolio service that offers designers the flexibility to make a website that looks the way they want it to and shows off their abilities. Creating your portfolio on a website customizer like PageCloud would be ideal.
If you are creating a shop to sell items and want to move away from platforms like Amazon, Etsy, or eBay, then you’ll need an electronic point of sale program, or EPOS, so your customers can actually buy things. Shopify is one of the most widely used eCommerce and point of sale platforms.
If you need a lot of moving images or hi-rez photos for you portfolio, which is especially important if you are a photographer or are recording your screen for vlogs or Twitch Streaming, then an image-forward platform like Squarespace is ideal.
Create a Story
People love a good story, so the best way to emphasize the quality of your work is to make a story from it. Providing the bare bones of your last commission isn’t interesting, no matter how successful it was.
When putting together your portfolio, try to spin each success into a narrative. You don’t have to go overboard, no-one wants to read a novella, but a few paragraphs to provide context can go a long way.
Testimonials Are Key
Humans are a social species and we are normally happier with our choices if they are ratified by others. It’s why Yelp is so popular and why your Netflix choices can be reviewed.
If a customer is happy with your work, then they will normally be happy to provide you with a short testimonial that highlights how you went above and beyond to complete the task they set you or to provide them with the goods they needed.
These testimonials are a gold mine; make them front and centre to you portfolio so prospective clients who aren’t 100% convinced by your work can be won over by other people’s positive descriptions of it.
Promote Yourself, but Bring the Customer in Too
A good portfolio should mostly be about telling the customer why you are the answer to their prayers, but part of that is acknowledging that any working arrangement is a partnership.
Portfolios work best when they aren’t just a constant brag about how amazing you are, but instead form a narrative about how your exceptional skills or services can solve the customer’s problem, which is the most important thing to them.