Clippings.me – Free Online Writing Portfolios
As a freelance writer, you’ll of course want to have a portfolio of your published clips and writing samples to show prospects. Sending them as email attachments works, but I don’t think I have to make a case for having all those on a site, publicly available online, for prospects to access themselves however they want (read online? download?) and whenever they desire. Do I even need to mention the possible accidental prospects who may stumble across your online portfolio and have their interest piqued? I didn’t think so.
Thing is, maybe you’re not a Web designer, and/or the notion of fiddling around with building and maintaining a site just isn’t something that rocks your boat. Fair enough. Then you’ll want to take a look at this.
Clippings.me takes care of that online portfolio thing for you. Easily, attractively, and for free too!
It’s not just for writers either. I don’t see why other freelancers and professions can’t take advantage of its simple approach to building themselves what can essentially be a digital resume.
Just create a free account, write up a description of who you are and what you do, then start adding clips and links. That’s basically all there is to it.
You won’t get bogged down by Web design issues and decisions to deal with—they have the one simple online portfolio design for you to use and… that’s it. Told you you won’t get bogged down. That the design isn’t fugly and is intuitively functional for both you and visitors make the service a no-brainer, frankly.
When you’re done, which really shouldn’t take you long considering the process isn’t all that different from setting up those simple profiles on social media platforms, just share its unique address with your prospects as needed. Done!
To put it to work, all you have to remember is your portfolio’s unique address. Here, for example, is the link to the test portfolio I created. Your online portfolio will have a similar-looking link:
https://clippings.me/eldonsarte
To demonstrate some of the different things you can add as clips, in this test portfolio of mine, the first three clips are PDFs of some stuff I’ve written. I uploaded those PDF files (which means Clippings.me stores and hosts those files on their server for free). The last three are links to some of my articles/posts off-site (here on Wordpreneur, to be exact). Just like the PDFs, you can also add other media files, like videos.
Do note that you can have an image with each clip—Clippings.me picks them up automatically when you link to external content; for other content (like the uploaded PDFs), the images can be added manually. I just opted not to show any images to see how well the clips are presented without them. Looks great as far as I’m concerned!
The free tier limits you to 10 clips and links total. To add more (an unlimited amount more), you’ll need to upgrade to a premium account. There are more premium benefits, of course, like the ability to use custom domain names and remove any Clippings.me branding (you can see it on my test portfolio).
Your call if you need premium. I’m fine with the free tier’s max of 10 clips, and the Clippings.me address format and branding. I may actually just turn that sample portfolio into a real one for my use, because why the heck not?
