You majored in web design in college because you heard it was a high-demand field. Plus, you’re pretty good at it and you find true joy in creating something spectacular.

But, now that you’ve graduated and entered your own practice, you’re wondering where all this “demand” is. You’ve started questioning your talents and aren’t sure if this was the right career choice. Is your lack of clientele a reflection on your skills as a web designer?

In most cases, no, it’s not. It takes time - sometimes years - and a lot of marketing to build your practice. You know what else it takes? Confidence.

Confidence also comes with time, but you can speed up the process with the following tips.

1. Raise Your Rates

I know what you’re thinking. How can raise my rates to boost my confidence? Won’t it only turn clients away?

In a sense, it will turn clients away, but only the ones you don’t want to be working with anyway. You know, the ones who undervalue your work and make you feel like crap.

Raising your rates will open doors to a whole new target audience for your business.

When you work at dirt cheap rates, you’re sending one message to potential clients: “I don’t put value into my own work.”

Not only that, but if you’re finding gigs at bidding sites where you under quote everyone else, you’re bound to be dealing with clients who don’t care about your work as much as the low-cost price they’re getting for it.

Tell me: How are you supposed to appreciate your own work when the clients you’re working for don’t care about the quality?

That’s where raising your rates can save your confidence. Not only are you now saying that you value your work, but the higher-paying clients you attract will appreciate it, too.

2. Set Aside Time to Market

There’s a link between marketing and confidence that can make your entire practice fall apart. Without confidence, you tend to market less. Without marketing, you lose confidence.

That’s because as you market less, you reach fewer potential clients. Going back to the question at the beginning of this post, your lack of clientele may have nothing to do with your talents as a web designer but more to do with your marketing efforts. Without letting people know you’re available for work, how will you ever attract new clients?

So instead of spending all your work time on your skills, set aside a good two hours daily for marketing tasks alone. Engaging on social media, guest posting, and performing cold-calls are just a few marketing tactics you can start with.

3. Engage With Other Designers

It may seem like a waste of your time to network with other designers. After all, you should be spending your time networking with clients, right? Not always. Especially when your confidence comes into question.

Networking with people like yourself does several things that can boost your confidence.

• It opens the doors to new ideas and techniques you can use to improve your skills.
• It allows you to get feedback about your skills from people who are perhaps more knowledgeable than you.
• It can lead to new clients through referrals.

Engage with them on web design blogs , forums, and social media.

4. Revamp Your Website

As you revamp your business website, you do several things that can boost your confidence. First of all, it gives you a chance to review your past accomplishments, such as when reworking your portfolio page . Plus, revamping your testimonials page gives you a good look at compliments people have given you in the past.

Not only this but with a few tweaks here and there, particularly in your home page copy and your site’s design, you can attract more clients, which is sure to be a confidence booster. If you don’t have a private website set up yet, it’s time to get on that so you have a shop front to wow potential clients with.

5. Apply For Challenging Gigs

There are lots of factors that can affect your confidence. One of them is failing to adequately challenge yourself. After all, how can you get better at what you do if you’re never pushing yourself forward?

When you see a new gig advertised, that little self-doubting part of your brain may be saying, “I can’t apply to that. I don’t have the right skills. They’d never hire me.”

But let me ask you this: Would it hurt to try? Yes, there will be rejections in your career, but when you apply to gigs you’re unsure of, you automatically increase your chances of landing that gig. And when you do, it feels fantastic!

Mark Zuckerberg once said, “The biggest risk is not taking any risk… In a world that’s changing really quickly, the only strategy that is guaranteed to fail is not taking risks.”

Are you lacking confidence? Tell us what’s holding you back in the comment section below.