Freelancer and avid blogger Chris Spooner tells us how he built up his online presence and improved his freelancing prospects…

Tell us about your background?

My career in the design industry started after I graduated from my university course. I managed to luckily land the first job I applied for at a small local design studio. I worked as a Graphic/Web Designer for two years before deciding to head into the world of self employment, by this time my blog had reached a level where it was bringing in revenue and client work. I’ve been loving the freedom of freelancing since and have recently been able to cut back on client work to concentrate on working purely as a fulltime blogger.

Your blogs, Spoon Graphics and Line 25 have been hugely successful. You started with your Spoon Graphics blog, what inspired you to start this up?

Back in 2006-2007 I remember seeing sites such as Smashing Magazine and Bittbox spring up. I enjoyed reading their articles and tutorials and found the freebies they were giving away really handy. Having learnt many of my design skills via tutorials I wanted to give back somehow, so I combined this with an urge to play around with the WordPress application and created a simple blog on the sub domain of my portfolio. I began posting the odd tutorial and my posts soon started bringing in traffic. Over the past 4+ years the blog has simply grown and grown into what it is today.

Did you have a clear focus of want you wanted to achieve with the blog?

I never expected to achieve anything from it, it was purely just to experiment and get to grips with WordPress, while hopefully helping other designers out by learning Illustrator and sharing vector graphics and Photoshop brushes. It wasn’t until I started gaining exposure in the community and landing client work that I realised what a valuable asset it was becoming.

How did word of your blog spread, did you do much in the way of promoting it?

I’ve never spent a single penny on promoting my blog with ads of any kind. It has all been through the word spreading via social media and my links being submitted to tutorial websites such as Good-Tutorials.com and Pixel2Life.com. As more blogs sprang up I found my site being featured in ‘top 10 lists’ which really helped the site grow.

Back then, how much time were you spending on the blog?

When I first started I was working my 9-5 job, writing blog topics and working on the odd freelance project, so my days were pretty busy! I then moved onto just freelancing and blog work and finally onto just blog work. I should have loads of time to spare but it seems to have vanished somehow! Maybe I’m just spending more time on more in-depth tutorials nowadays? …Or just procrastinating more!

You offer all of your tutorial designs as freebies to your users, what made you decide to do this?

Even though I studied right to degree level I learnt most of the skills I now use on a daily basis by following tutorials. I left college knowing how to build websites in tables, then realised everyone was moving over to CSS based layouts. All my HTML/CSS knowledge and much of my Illustrator knowledge has all stemmed from the teachings of other designers as free tutorials. So with this in mind I’ve always enjoyed sharing what I know to others, so they can learn and put the tips and techniques into practice to create cool stuff themselves.

I’m pretty sure every designer out there has Googled how to do a particular task and found a tutorial that has helped them out.

How did the blog enable you to start freelancing?

The additional exposure in the design community really helped out. Many people referred to me as an Illustrator or logo design ‘expert’ so I was being associated with those kind of topics. This meant that clients were finding me during their searches and getting in touch to ask if I was available to work on their projects. When I went into self employment my blog was in the early stages of bringing in its own revenue. This was a great help in that it provided me with a safety net of money that covered my basic outgoings. It turned out my first month of freelancing easily surpassed my wages from my previous employment, so I was pretty lucky!

How has your blog helped you to find work as freelancer?

Whenever a tutorial goes out on a particular topic it spreads around the Twittersphere. Often people who are associated with the design industry will see it and bring me to their attention. These types of client are often the best as they understand the usual nightmares of typical client work so the projects often go really smoothly, without any facepalm requirements like a blue text on a green background.

Once a post is buried into the archives it becomes more and more visible to search engines. Often,  I’ll get logo enquiries from clients who Googled logo design and found my logo design tutorials. A blog post about logo design will get much higher search engine rankings than if you targeted your logo design portfolio specifically for those keywords.

After Spoon Graphics you started Line25, what’s the difference between the two?

Blog.SpoonGraphics has always been my place to post graphic design and illustrative tutorials and articles. As I became more competent with web design I wanted to post more web design topics, but I didn’t want to suddenly switch the focus of my blog. The idea I came up with was to simply start a new one. This second time round allowed me to put all the things I’d learnt from developing B.SG into practice on Line25 and it seemed to work out. Line25 has actually surpassed the number of subscribers Blog.SpoonGraphics has, although it’s daily traffic is much lower, probably because of its lower age.

How do you fit running your blogs in with your freelance workload?

Having been a blogger for 4+ years now creating blog content has become pretty routine. As soon as I realised the benefits it was providing I made a point of setting aside time to concentrate on writing articles and tutorials. Without my blogs I wouldn’t have client projects, so my blogs always come first.

What advice would you give to anyone that wants to increase their online presence, be it through a blog or social networking sites, to improve their freelancing prospects?

Simply enjoy designing stuff to fulfill your creative passion. Designing things just to please yourself is always much more fun than designing for other people, so use a blog to document your experimentation. What seems to have worked for me is sharing everything I know and the new things I learn. Casually networking with like-minded people on Twitter helps build connections that can help you land new projects.

A great example is an old tutorial I wrote about skateboard deck design. I had fun creating a deck design simply because it interested me, I had no prior experience and it wasn’t the type of job I’d land as a client project. The post proved popular and was shared and retweeted. Someone from a merchandising company came across the post by following a link someone had posted. He liked the design and got in touch to ask if I’d be interested in designing a skateboard deck, t-shirt and hoodie design for the Fall Out Boy album launch. This is something that never would have happened if it wasn’t for me just playing around and sharing the techniques on my blog.

What has been the hardest part of establishing your presence online?

I’m worried that things are starting to become more difficult nowadays as the blogging scene seems to be losing its momentum. A few of the popular blogs that sprung up during the 2007 boom like mine have faded out, and recent backlashes from some designers against ‘design blogs’ and ‘list posts’ I think have made newer designers think reading blogs like mine is something you shouldn’t do.

So basically the hardest part has always been whether you take on board other people’s opinions about what you’re doing. On one hand I get emails every day thanking me for sharing tips etc, on the other hand I’m criticised (not always personally) for filling the industry with ‘zombie designers’ who only know how to follow step-by-step guides and not think for themselves.

Another difficult factor of establishing yourself is getting the snowball rolling. Once it starts gaining speed it becomes easier, but that first year or so is a time when you really need to be passionate about what you’re doing. If you’re passionate about something and you’re having fun it doesn’t matter if you’re not earning money from it and spending all night working on something. Just doing it as a hobby is good enough.

Follow Chris on Twitter.