Providing a service on the web freelance can be a great source of additional income for anyone with the skills to put together eye catching graphic designs. This can be as simple as creating e-covers, headers, and banners in the evenings and on weekends.

The best part about providing this type of service freelance is that you can get started for little or no cost at all with all the free resources available in this field. Let’s look at a quick overview of what you need to have to get started making money working as a freelance graphic designer today.

If you’re going to be providing graphics for clients the first thing you’ll need is, of course, a graphics editing program. Don’t panic, this is not going to cost you hundreds of dollars. In fact, it’s not going to cost you anything at all. You can download one of many open source graphic editing programs such as Gimp, Paint.net, or Inkscape and start creating eye catching web graphics right away.

If you’ve already got Paint Shop Pro, Photoshop, or Fireworks installed on your computer than you’re a step ahead of the game with some top quality programs. However, do realize that these expensive programs are not a requirement. Some of the best converting sales and banner graphics on the web were created using open source software like Gimp.

The second thing you’ll want to have is a website to display your portfolio. While you can use a free site like WordPress.com or Blogger.com in this case I do recommend spending the money to get your own domain. It will cost you about 10 dollars per year for the domain name itself and you can get reasonably priced hosting fro around 8 dollars a month. A small price to pay to have a professional website to send clients through and show off your design work.

So, at this point we’ve spent about 20 dollars and we’re ready to go out and get some clients! Do a few practice images first and add them to your portfolio if you don’t already have examples of your work. Create e-covers for imaginary products, banners and buttons for your own site, anything that would need a graphic even if you have to make something up. In the graphic design business examples sell the service, so it helps to have any visual representation that you can provide.

Social media is a great way to find your first few clients. Get chatty on Twitter, forums, and Facebook. Tell people about the services you’re offering and setup an introductory special pricing package. You’ll have regular clients in no time at all and your weekends will be full of creative projects. You may just have to give up that boring old day job.

Is freelance graphic design the career path for you? Find out now! Grab your free resources and check out current freelance graphic design job leads today at http://www.squidoo.com/BecomeAGraphicDesigner

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