We’re in the home stretch now, five weeks of the course down and only one more to go.
This week continued the pattern from last week of focusing more on the business side of freelance prompt engineering than the skill itself. My ever-faithful professor walked me through how to get my name out there as I’m starting out, from where to actually market myself, how to write a post and outreach messages, and building my portfolio to use as marketing. This seemed easy to me, so I jumped right in with the assignment, where I was tasked to do all of that for my own:
1. Create a simple marketing post directly for my audience
2. Write a short outreach message that’s more personable for direct clients
3. Assemble a sample output that I can share and present
4. The always-present reflection of transitioning from my previous projects to marketing myself
The marketing post was pretty easy, since I’m my own target audience. I shared where I was coming from, what inspired me to start this process, and laid out in simple terms what students would be getting from the final product and how it benefits them. The outreach message was also straightforward, especially since I could just build off of the marketing post. I condensed it and made it more personable, sharing my story with how I’ve used the workflow for myself and how it’s helped me.
Things got really interesting in the sample output. I decided that I wanted this to be an attention-grabbing poster, showing the full process with some quick examples. I started by opening up Google Drawings to design this myself, then quickly remembered that I am not, in fact, a graphic designer. I ended up creating a mini workflow of my own to design this poster.
I started by asking ChatGPT to inspire me and give me a basic outline for what would work well for this. I took this blurb, modified it, and gave it to Canva’s AI templates, but it couldn’t change the details. I gave the template that I liked the most to Claude and told it what I wanted to change. It natively created a new poster based in HTML, giving me exactly what I wanted. I was able to look at this poster, see something that I wanted to change, and tell Claude exactly what that was and it would get what I pictured, more or less.
After a lot of fine-tuning to get this poster how I wanted it, which involved some changes to my original vision, I had a poster that I was proud of and ready to share that accurately and simply showcased what I was offering. More than that, I also had the foundation for a workflow that I can use in the future for more freelancing. I don’t fully know what it’s used for, and it would require much more hands-on babysitting than the workflow I’ve already created, but I can already tell that it’ll be useful.
Once this poster was done, I assembled it together with the marketing post and outreach message and submitted it for my week’s project to ChatGPT. Not only had I accomplished what my professor required of me, but I had also gone above and beyond to increase my learning and prepare me for my future in freelancing. This taught me not just to prompt better, but to pitch better, too.
As I begin to look forward to the end of this course and look back on what it’s taught me, I think the most important part is showcased in this coincidental discovery. Learning, especially with AI, takes time and practice, but once you know one skill, everything else builds on top of that. If I hadn’t learned how to be specific on the front end with AI models, than trying to design the template through Canva and the poster with Claude would not have ended well. If just browsing the internet nowadays hadn’t taught me to look carefully to see if something is real or AI-generated, I wouldn’t have checked for errors in the poster. The same skill stack will let me refine client deliverables and keep improving my services. All of this comes together to help me grow my brand and my knowledge, encouraging me as I look forward.
Next week, the final lesson, gets into the nitty-gritty of finding clients, including putting together a Fiverr profile for freelancing.
Final score: 19/20, both my marketing post and outreach message were too long. Again, I think it’s just nit-picky at this point.
If you want to see my full work, including the original prompts, results, and final essay, I’ve linked the Google Doc here.
Boston Dato 
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