If you are just starting up, You have to sell your work. People will want to see your work straight away, it must have that "wow" factor. To make you stand out from the rest, make sure your work you put on your site and also the work for your clients is flawless. It will take months to build a reputation minutes to destroy it.

On your site content is King, the more quality content the better. Because of the line of work you wish to compete in is very much graphic based you need to ensure you have a healthy mix of quality work and good keyword rich text. You need to think of yourself as a proffesional company. Avoid using I try using We, tell the customer what you can do. Sow the seeds of thought in there head.

Remember the images you use must be in the correct format, ie GIf or JPG to ensure your page loads fast. any longer than a couple of seconds for the page to display, your customer has gone else where.