Keywords for Finding Creative Freelancers

If you sell products (e.g. tutorials, Photoshop brushes, UI kits, or stock vector graphics)  to fellow creative professionals, one way to find them is through online searches.

A straightforward search for e.g. “freelance graphic designer” will return a lot of results. However, far from everything since your fellow creatives tend to label themselves in all kind of ways.

Proven Keywords for Finding Freelancers

Look at the table below! These are my hard-proven keywords for I used to find my first 1,000  freelance graphic designers, illustrators, and web designers. I perfected this keyword list during 6 months of trial-and-error searches. Now these keywords constantly return quality results.

I use these keywords to discover interesting creative freelancers on Twitter, but you can use them for all kind of searches

This is the general principle for how to put together the search expressions:

First use a profession (or several) from the left column, such as “illustrator,” and combine it with the freelance qualifiers in the second column to wield out employed creatives. An example:

(“logo designer” OR “identity designer”) AND ( “enquiry” OR “enquiries” OR “call me”)

Use my keywords as a start. Add other professional fields you want to target, e.g “photographer” or “art director”, and subtract the freelance qualifiers if you target both self-employed and employed creatives.

Keywords for Finding Creative Freelancers

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