I did this back in 2007 to kickstart my freelance career. Find local businesses with the worst websites compared to their competition. This works great for no

I did this back in 2007 to kickstart my freelance career. Find local businesses with the worst websites compared to their competition. This works great for non-chain restaurants, hair salons, small law firms, etc. Here's an example of a restaurant down the street from my house that has a terrible website: http://gwrestaurant.com/ http://gwrestaurant.com/. Just go ahead and redesign it without even contacting them. The existing site will already have enough content to work with. The work will go quickly because there is no client to slow things down. Then you go into the business and talk to the manager and tell them you are a local web designer and you are building a portfolio, and you redesigned their site already (I would bring a laptop and show them over a wireless connection...now you could use an iPad). I would then offer to sell them the website for a small fee ($250-$500 + $25/mo hosting). I did this for a few dozen local businesses over a 6 month period before I started getting much bigger contracts ($5000-$8000+). Usually I could close the deal on the first try, but for businesses who don't buy, you can easily swap out the content, and sell it to a competitor.