First, your work needs to be of stellar quality (or good enough to impress the clients you’re after).
Most independent designers’ work seems to come from referrals and word-of-mouth. When starting out, though, that’s not going to work.
I’ve spent 40 years in this field, but a recession meant the agencies weren’t hiring after graduating from design school. I spent a couple of years on my own doing freelance work. I called up all the ad agencies and told them I was available for freelance assignments. The work was sporadic, but it paid OK. I also made lots of good longer-term industry contacts by doing it. I also looked through local magazines and found ads from local businesses that I was sure I could improve. I’d sometimes walk into their places of business, ask to speak to the owners, then make a pitch to them. Surprisingly, this worked about a third of the time. Sometimes when I’d buy something at a small store, I’d ask to speak to the owner and make the same sort of pitch.
Add all this up, and I began getting calls from people needing work.
After those couple of years, I got a real job. Every few years, I switched jobs. I also maintained a small freelance side business where I made additional contacts.
A couple of years ago, I ended up on my own again, but I was in a position where I could leverage all the clients and contacts I had made over the years. It started out slowly, and I sometimes resorted to doing work for clients on UpWork. A couple of them turned out to be great clients who I’m regularly working directly with today.
I guess what I’m saying is that finding clients is a lot of work and that the work builds on itself over time. I don’t know of any easy, quick or fail-proof way into it.
However, I think the most surefire way to start is to do what most designers absolutely hate — contacting people you’d like to do work for and asking them about it. This can mean cold calling or, better still, doing the research before contacting them with personalized messages about how you can help them, how you’d love to work with them, and whether you can meet them at their convenience.
There are also various civic organizations where you can meet business owners. There’s volunteer work to build up portfolios and make contacts. Direct mail still works if you personalize it specifically to a real person and their real situation.
Unfortunately, all this stuff involves what most introverted graphic designers (like me) hate to do. For a sales personality, it’s pretty easy since it doesn’t phase them if 19 out of 20 contacts don’t pan out or hang up on them. A 95% failure rate at making successful contacts seems pretty dismal and is the kind of thing that would have most designers shaking in their shoes, throwing up in the bathroom, and hiding under the covers at night. For a salesperson, it’s business as usual, and that one person out of 20 who bites means work and money, which is all that matters. So even assuming a 95% failure rate at landing new clients, all it really means is having to contact 100 leads to get five viable clients, which can turn into ten or 20 over time.
As I said, it’s hard work, but it’s doable if you have a thick skin, persistence, and the design and marketing talent to back it up.