Whatever type of freelancing that you are doing - ghostwriting, web-site design, designing wordpress themes, etc. - you MUST get a website up and running to showcase your work.

There’s no doubting the fact that most of your work will involve the internet at some point, whether it;s for research purposes, getting work from freelance sites or writing copy or articles for websites, so you absolutely MUST get a website to show prospective clients what you can do.

If you have no clients at all yet, you can just write a few articles and show them on your site as examples of your work.

On the other hand you could offer to work for free or for a nominal fee on elance.com, get afreelancer.com or one of the other sites where freelancers offer and request work to build up your portfolio.

If the client you write for likes your work he’s much more likely to use you again. I’ll say again though - a website with samples is a must.

It is going to be much harder, if not impossible, to convince a client to buy from you if they can’t see the quality of what you will be selling them.

So it’s easy to say ‘get a website’, and if you have web design skills then you’re sorted, but chances are you’re just a writer, and most aspiring writers don’t have a spare five or six hundred dollars or pounds lying around to pay for a site to be designed for you.

But there’s good news -

That is absolutely no problem at all these days.
There are numerous free website and blog options available for those who lack a website, and you don’t need to have any design skills either.

Ideally, you want to have your own domain name, and have it hosted on a website hosting service.
It costs about $8-$10 a year to get your own domain name, and you can get register a domain name within minutes from numerous com-panies, such as www.godaddy.com or www.1and1.com or www.namecheap.com.

Many of those companies have cheap website hosting services avail-able for anywhere from $5 to $10 a month, and they will provide free “site builder” templates along with the hosting. Hostgator is one com-pany that provides the free sitebuilder services.

Godaddy and Homestead.com are another couple of hosting compa-nies that provide a free “site builder” service.

They provide templates that you can choose from and customize to an extent; with some of them you can upload your own pictures or artwork.

The only downside is that if you decide to go with a different hosting company, you would have to redesign your new website from scratch.

There are also some companies that provide hosting and a website design free, but you do not get your own domain name with it. www.weebly.com, for instance, provides website templates and al-lows you to host your website there for free. Your website name would have the word “weebly” in it, so it would be something like www.freelancewriter.weebly.com. They provide some additional services for a fee.
www.blinkweb.com has similar services to www.weebly.com.

You can also create a blog and host it for free at www.blogspot.com, www.wordpress.com, and many other free blog hosting services.

The downside is that you don’t own the blog. In theory the blogging company can shut it down at any time, although there’s really no reason for them to as long as you make sure that you don’t violate their terms of service.

You own the written content on the site, but if you decide to move the blog, site, etc. elsewhere, you will have to transfer it all yourself, and you would want to keep a backup copy of all the site’s content.
You can also create a free “lens” on www.squidoo.com - a “lens” is basically a webpage - or a free hubpage at www.hubpages.com to showcase your services.

Or, you can use wordpress themes - there are tens of thousands of free themes available on the net - and have a wordpress blog hosted on your own domain.

This does take a little bit of technical knowledge; you have to down-load a program called an “FTP” program - file transfer protocol - and drag files from your computer to your host’s server.

You can also hire someone to do this for you.