Three pieces is enough
Genuinely. Three well-presented projects outperform twenty thumbnails, because a client reads two and decides. More work doesn't increase confidence past a certain point; it just increases the chance they land on something irrelevant to them.
Make all three look like the work you want, not the work you've happened to do. If you want to write for fintech companies and your only samples are travel blogs, your portfolio is actively arguing against you.
What each piece contains
Four short sections, half a page total:
The problem. One or two sentences about the business situation, not the brief. "Their pricing page converted at under 1%" beats "client wanted a new pricing page."
What you did. The decisions, briefly. Why this structure, why this colour system, why you cut the third section. Clients hire judgement; this is the only place they can see yours.
The result. A number if you have one. If you don't — and with self-initiated work you won't — say what changed and why it matters. "Cut the signup flow from five screens to two" is a legitimate result.
The artefact. The actual thing. Screenshot, link, embed, PDF.
No clients yet? Make the work anyway
Self-initiated work counts, provided you present it honestly. Rebuild a real company's landing page and explain what you changed. Write the onboarding email sequence a local gym obviously doesn't have. Edit a two-minute cut of a podcast that's only ever released audio.
Choose businesses in the niche you're targeting. Done well, this is better than a paid project for an unrelated industry, because it proves you understand that buyer's world. And occasionally it produces a client directly — sending someone an unrequested improvement to their own site is the highest-response cold pitch there is. See freelance cold email for how to send it without sounding presumptuous.
Where to put it
Anywhere fast and linkable. A one-page site, a Notion page, Behance or Dribbble for visual work, GitHub plus a written README for developers. Don't spend three weeks building a custom portfolio site before you've had a client — that's step-four work being done at step two, and it's the most common way beginners stall. Starting from scratch covers the right order.
Whatever you use, it must load fast, work on a phone, and show your contact method without scrolling.
Keep it moving
Add a piece after every project worth showing, and remove the weakest one each time so the total stays around five. As your rates rise, older cheap work quietly undermines the new price — the connection between portfolio and pricing is covered in moving upmarket.
Then point everything at it. Every proposal, every profile on the platforms, every LinkedIn message. A portfolio only earns when it's linked.