How I got my first freelance project in web development—2025

It's 2025; everyone wants to be a freelancer, which has led to fierce competition, and landing jobs has become tougher, especially for the new freelancers. Not only that, but the AI evolution has also decreased the chances of getting projects.
So to get your first project, you should follow a unique strategy that will set you apart from the competition. I will be sharing with you how I got my first freelance client in web development and the mistakes I made that you should avoid so that landing the first project actually feels easy.

It took me more than 2 months to figure out that my freelance profile isn't set up correctly. Here are the profile mistakes I made that many beginners make and how you can avoid them:

Initially I used to treat it like my social profiles, with the same kind of profile picture, but in freelance platforms you actually have to represent yourself as a professional, where a profile picture plays a key role. As shown below, you can see how the freelance profile should look.

Your professional details should be neat and aligned with your expertise, which a lot of freelancers ignore or don’t care about. The majority of the new freelancers include random stuff in their profiles, which I was also a part of. Fix those issues ASAP, and they should be according to the domain of your expertise. The professional details include:

This is the most important part of your profile; you should add it carefully, as this is in bold and part of the profile where the client looks initially.

The bio should include your expertise in the particular domain and the core details about yourself.

Your portfolio should be filled with the projects that you have done earlier. So the client gets a clear idea about your work and your professionalism.
The image is showing you an example of how your profile should look so you don’t make the mistake that the beginners often make.

If you’re facing a challenge in creating your profile, let me help you out with this. Our AI-powered profile generation tool helps freelancers to create their profiles. Click here to explore that.

This is a commonly used approach, even by experienced freelancers. But as a new freelancer, avoid prewritten templates and copy-pasting. The client wants the personalized profile most of the time.
The content of your bid should be tailored to what the client wants from you; experienced freelancers may still succeed in landing projects with templates because of their reputation.
You should always prefer writing your bid content yourself. If you feel your writing style isn’t good enough, you can use our tool to generate bid content. New users get 10 free proposal generations. Click here to generate yours.

If you are in a freelance market and don’t have a portfolio site, that can cost you many projects. When you get a client’s message, the first thing they ask for is your portfolio site. If you don’t have one, they may remove you from consideration immediately.
No matter if you are a web developer or a graphic designer, you should always have your portfolio site. Nowadays portfolio sites are very affordable to create if you don’t know how to code yourself.
If you want, I can help you to create your professional-looking portfolio site; you can contact me via my portfolio site's contact form here: hazimbhat.site/contact.

Sometimes we see a project worth $200+ and it aligns with our domain, and we think that we’re the perfect fit. But the problem is that even if we have the skills, we’re competing with freelancers who have stronger reputations on a particular platform.
So you should always bid on the project whose budget is very low in your initial phase to build a reputation on the platform.

As a beginner freelancer, be on multiple platforms; when I started, I was only on the freelancer platform for many months. I later realized that to increase your chances, you have to be on many platforms.

These are just some of the platforms; there are many others that can help you get clients. Join as many as possible to maximize your chances of getting the projects.

In the initial stage when I was just starting freelancing, I got my first message after a month of starting. However, I wasn’t active and checked my mail a day later and lost that client because they had already hired a different freelancer.
After that it took me 5 months more just to get that first project. So you should always keep track of the projects you apply for and be quick in responding to the client.

If anyone at any point is telling you to go offsite, like on Telegram or any other site, you should avoid such people and report them, as they mainly are scammers who try to take advantage of you by offering fake projects.

If you want to learn more about this topic, you can consider reading our post on that topic, “Freelance Client Red Flags: How to Spot and Avoid Bad Projects.” Read here

This was a post on how I got my first project in the freelance world and the mistakes I made during it, which you can avoid to get your first project in web development and in other domains very easily.
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