In these tough economic times, those freelancing or who recently lost their full time jobs may have a difficult time finding new jobs. This section will help to provide information on jobs and also give tips on marketing, mailing lists, enewsletters, postcards and other printed promo materials. I encourage all hard core graphic artists who really want to find work to market themselves in any of the following ways versus bidding on small meaningless jobs on the internet on sites like e-lance.com. I was taught that pounding the pavement is the best way to go - you get the best results for high-valued and high-paying jobs.
Although the jobs are becoming more demanding with the need to know how to handle html, Flash, write javascript amongst being an expert in the entire Adobe CS3 or 4 design programs, there are believe it or not still an abundance of jobs available- especially for graphic designers. I see about a dozen of them weekly on sites like:
http://www.indeed.com and www.craigslist.com
Indeed is the motherload of all full-time to part-time job search sites including entries from Monster, Hotjobs, NY Jobs, Talent Zoo, etc. etc.
Just plug in the discipline you want in the area your looking for. Have indeed.com send you a daily or weekly list of jobs that interest you to your email inbox. Reply to them and you are on your way to landing that new job.
Craiglist offers some legit jobs but watch out for the shady ones. Illustrators can sometimes find good gigs there.
Register with agencies such as http://www.creativegroup.com/ and http://www.cgrseven.com
When I had an agent with CGR7 a couple years ago, he gave me several leads in editorial design every week. I never went on any interviews because at the same time, I was getting very busy working in restaurant graphics for over 15 places. I created my own niche, which supplied me with constant work for the past 3 years. There has hardly been more than a couple of weeks when I didn't have work freelancing. Niche marketing can be very profitable and to your advantage. I'll talk more about this later. Also search on AIGA.org
Then of course, go back to your alma mater and search through the career office. You never know what jobs you can find. I recommend this more for those who've just graduated, however, there can also be jobs on occasion for professionals at any level.
Then there are mailing lists which you can use to target your marketing with either printed promotionals or e-postcard or e-newsletter. Some places online where you can buy lists are at Adbase.com and AgencyAccess.com.
The lists consists of thousands of names and contact information including websites, addresses (mailing and email) and telephone numbers from the head in charge to all the assistants and lower level managers. Companies are drawn from ad agencies, magazines, book publishers, design studios, TV and movie industry, and on and on. You can find other mailing lists from many other online sources for any industry. Pick one or two and learn to specialize in that field. These lists can be costly. They start at about $300 for one-time usage of a limited amount of contacts or over $1,000 for an unlimited annual usage- probably the best deal. Considering that you can earn tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars using these lists, they really would be worth it. Both Adbase and Agency Access offer the lists as labels and the ability to send out email promos. And they use a wonderful database set-up to manage everything you do with stats on all responses.
For more marketing tips, contact Ilise Benun at www.marketing-mentor.com/html/tips.html
Hope this helps. Would love to hear about the successes of your job search.
Clovia
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