How to Convert a Portfolio into Opportunities

A portfolio does very little on its own. It is a place to send people, and it works in proportion to how often you send people there.

The first month

• Tell the twenty people who already know you. Not a broadcast post; twenty individual messages saying what changed and what you are looking for.
• Add the link everywhere it belongs. Email signature, every profile, the talk you gave last year.
• Write one piece of the thinking behind a project. Not a case study — the argument underneath it.

The months after

The habit that compounds is publishing the work as you finish it, rather than in an annual burst. A site updated six times a year reads as a practice. A site updated once reads as a job hunt.

The best time to add a project is the week it shipped, while you still remember why you made the decisions you made.

What actually generates the inbound

For me, in order: referrals from past clients, a single well-read article, and search traffic for one narrow phrase. None of the three came from the portfolio itself. All three ended at it.

That is the right way round. The site is where a conversation lands, not where it starts.