web development company

web development company

hello everyone ray Delvecchio here and let me ask you two quick questions before we begin do you have experience building websites and have you made your first dollar with that skill because if you answered yes to both there's a good chance that you're bitten by the entrepreneurial bug I can tell you that's exactly how I felt when I built my first website for a client he was a local contractor that did work for my dad my dad mentioned to him that I built websites and this was before I did this as a business it was more of a hobby at that point and I ended up making about $100 per hour on the project it was a basic website that cost $500 and I remember we planned a meeting on Saturday morning and being a procrastinator I built it starting about 10:00 p.m. on Friday night I finished about 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning and the next day I was in his office and he viewed the site he liked it and he gave me a check for $500 at that point you realize how much control you have over your income when you're working for yourself versus getting a job that's salary based and even if you haven't

web development company

made money with web design you know I doubt your goal is to become a charity once you have above average skill you deserve to put cash in your pocket when you're helping someone else but that task can seem a little bit daunting if you want to take it to the next level you have to become more strategic to turn your skills into consistent income month after month so that's why I want to discuss with you what to consider when developing your web design business plan I'll start this out with a quote from a guy that I like a lot and that's James Altucher he was an advisor for a staffing company I think it was a multi-million maybe even a billion dollar staffing company that works with a lot of the bigger companies to find employees and his analysis of the job market was this zero sectors are moving toward more full-time workers everything's being cut back moved toward outsourcing or hiring temp workers and I think this is especially true when it comes to online services you know when you're doing websites digital marketing social media these are things that every business needs but most small to medium-sized businesses don't have a full-time position for this skill set and that's the good news for you you can fill the void for some of these companies especially ones that are local in your community and once you get your foot in the door you can expand the services or products that you offer to grow your business organically over time the first step to your web design business plan should be identifying your target market who do you want to work with and the number one mistake that I see made by myself and a lot of other people that get started is they want to market themselves to every type of business and that's the wrong way to go about it because if you're doing that then you're not appealing to the specific needs of one particular business type so the best piece of advice that I can give is pick a niche or an industry that you're interested in and that you'd like to work with if you don't have any clients right now consider offering your services for free or a reduced cost to build your portfolio and to get a recommendation you want to start with your local community because those are gonna be the people that you can meet with in person and I can tell you without a doubt meeting in person is a huge huge added value to a small business owner versus them going with a big company and they have an 800 number to call and they have no idea who's gonna be on the other end of the customer support so that's a really powerful selling point and you can also build trust if you find somebody that has shared values or shared interests you know whether you're interested in a certain sport whether you went to the same college maybe you're both health fanatics or maybe you're both craft beer lovers you know these little things seem very minor but in the end it could be the difference between a person opening an email and responding to you and ignoring your email as a sales email and just throwing it right in the trash and then once you get experience working with a business owner or somebody in a particular industry you'll start to identify the traits of the good clients and the bad clients and what you want to do is target clones of your best client and this is another reason why sticking with one business industry is a good idea because when you get results for a client in one industry and then you go to the next client and tell them hey you know I worked for a roofer and I got him 10 more roof replacement jobs which added 100 and dollars in profit that's a lot more of a compelling argument than saying I got this website 100 more website visitors because that really doesn't mean anything when it's such a general statistic there's literally hundreds of business types that you could potentially work with but here's a few examples for you kitchen

web development company

remodeling dance studios restaurants tree service and auto repair and I'm definitely a believer that the home service industry is a big one because there are generally high end jobs you know most of the jobs are about a thousand dollars to maybe ten thousand or even twenty or thirty if you're talking about you know a big remodel like kitchen remodeling basement remodeling bathroom remodeling and the other types of businesses that I think work well are those that have recurring customers so obviously a kitchen remodeling customer is probably never going to use the same kitchen remodeler again they may refer them but something like a dance studio or yoga studio they may have weekly classes and so if you get them business today you know it may not be a ton of money up front but if they have a customer for the next five years then growing that month after month is really really going to benefit them and this is obviously true with restaurants I mean they have such small margins that they live and die by recurring customers once you're comfortable with your target market that's when it's time to take a look at the competitive landscape you know who exists in this space already and I love looking at local websites and other business websites to see who built them because you

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start to notice a lot of trends you know the big players are the digital agencies that do custom designs and they do custom marketing campaigns and I mean it can cost ten or twenty thousand dollars to do a really big marketing campaign or to do a really custom website then you have the other big players like GoDaddy or Wix where they have like a template system or drag-and-drop system where you can build your own website and it's super cheap you know might be 20 to 30 bucks a month and then when it comes to the small guys you're gonna have websites that you can tell were developed by probably like a family member or someone that obviously did it for free or a super super low cost and then you have people that work for themselves that are independent contractors that do you know small to mid-level jobs and they make a good living so I think that's ultimately where you want to fall into you know unless you are eyeing up a job at a digital agency you want to be a small guy but that offers a high end service so you don't want to offer a service like GoDaddy that is the bottom of the barrel you want to really emphasize the personal service and the local aspect of your business and I guarantee you that if you focus on one particular industry you're gonna find other local businesses that are doing exactly what you want to do I mean I can tell you for example I do a lot of work with the home service industry so I can name you know four or five local companies that work with the home service industry exclusively I can name four or five companies that work with that industry nationwide and I can also point out dozens and dozens of websites in that industry that are built by the cheap services like a GoDaddy website builder you definitely don't want to sell in the lowest price because if you do that then you're really making yourself a commodity and you're not building enough profit to actually give a personalized service and to take an hour or two to help a client when they really need it in fact here's something that I had a lot of trouble believing at first and frankly I'm still kind of wrapping my head around the idea that the world is really big and there's enough to go around between you and your competitors as I mentioned there's dozens and dozens of website industries and within those industries there's dozens and dozens of businesses that are successful there's also a lot of failures in there but there's a lot of the pie to go around so stay positive and aggressive because it doesn't take that many clients when you're doing this on a monthly basis to generate recurring income you know if you're charging $100 $200 or $300 a month that adds up really quickly when you get a handful of clients and that will really build your motivation more than anything next up you want to think about your solution and how you're gonna go about building designing and managing client websites and how that's gonna make you stand out from your competitors the nice thing about a web design business is that the startup costs are low my expenses are somewhere around $1,500 a year so it literally takes one or two clients to pay for that and then it's mostly profit after that and the biggest expense is gonna be your time and if you've seen any my other YouTube videos you'll know that I love WordPress I'm a huge advocate of WordPress to build websites but I'm also a realist and I realized that there's other options out there so I'm not gonna sit here and say that WordPress is the only answer but it's definitely the only one that I'm gonna recommend and a lot of people ask me what theme I use and the theme that I've selected is called I themes builder it's really a framework that has multiple child themes available so I think there's somewhere around 80 child themes that you can choose from under the eye themes builder framework and I selected this many years ago and throughout that time I've developed my process to the point where I can build a website really quickly and I know how to edit pretty much anything within that theme so I don't want to install a new theme every website that I build and have to relearn the settings for all these different themes and I advise you to do the same thing you know if you're just starting out you might want to check out I themes they're one of my favorite companies but there's plenty of other paid themes out there and there's plenty of other free themes out there that you can use to get started and you can go about charging in a variety of ways so you can either go for bigger jobs that are gonna involve contracts you know I think you're I really don't think you want to do a contract unless it's multi-thousand dollar project because I've had issues doing smaller projects with a contract and people flaked out and when it's such a small amount you're not gonna get a lawyer involved for you know an eight hundred dollar project so what I've settled on is a monthly charge I think that's the best way to go about it you know you set up the website and then you maintain the website for a monthly charge and maybe offering other services to justify that monthly charge and if you're just getting started out you might want to look for hourly work you know that's that's how I started but I realized pretty early on that number one when you're doing our hourly work you're going to get better and better over time and you're going to do things faster so you shouldn't be compensated less for that and the other thing is that from the clients perspective when they're getting charged per hour there they're not gonna want you to spend ten or fifteen hours on a project because the bottom line if the project was that big you should give them a project price so they're there they know what they're gonna pay at the end so I definitely recommend against hourly work unless you're just getting started out and looking to build your resume a little bit but the one thing that I

recommend for every website that you build is to make sure that you're tracking client results with Google Analytics Google Analytics is a piece of code that you're gonna put on your website and it's going to track all the visitors to the website but the other thing that I tend to do for every Google Analytics installation is set up events and goals so I usually set up an event for when somebody submits a contact form and when somebody clicks the phone number so you want to make sure that you're tracking leads for your client and in that way you can actually show them a report each month not just on the website traffic but how many people are interacting with the website contacting them through the email form and calling them and then you can use these statistics when you're pitching your services to the next round of clients now there's bound to be a natural evolution from when you come up with the idea for your business to a year or two down the road when you're managing clients and you're gonna realize that they have other problems and once again this is this is when you're going to realize why it's important to specialize in an industry because every industry has unique problems whether they're computer problems internet problems marketing problems or just

webdevelopmentcompany

communication people problems so you can insert yourself into these problems and offer solutions and this is specifically why I like the monthly packages versus doing one-time work because if you're charging a thousand bucks for a website and then you try are you $10 a month for hosting you're not gonna make a lot of money you're gonna you're gonna constantly need new clients but if you charge a little bit less or maybe even the same for setup and then charge a monthly cost you're gonna build a relationship with your clients and then you could potentially upsell them with other other services down the road versus always needing new ones coming in and in my view I think websites are such a great introduction to marketing you know websites are one side to online marketing and there's so many other aspects to putting together a marketing campaign like advertisements I mean there's paid ad platforms on Google Facebook Bing Instagram so there's plenty of places to get attention once you get some leads you can send email newsletters you can do email marketing and to do email marketing you're probably gonna need to write articles or come up with content you might want to put together graphics there might be video production so you might want to do an advertisement on YouTube or just put a video on the homepage of the website so that the person visiting the website can get a real feel for the person who runs the business and then obviously there's code there's ecommerce there's business reputation management so with that I'm specifically thinking about review websites and generating positive reviews online and then there's SEO so you can get your website ranked higher in Google and a big part of that is link building it's getting links from other websites either local websites or industry websites to your clients website there's so many different avenues and I think it's a really bad idea to pigeonhole yourself and say that you're just a website designer but you're not involved with any of these other marketing things because you might not be getting good at them now but the website is the perfect medium to learn all these other skills and that's why you need to invest in education you know you you have to constantly be curious and you have to want to learn all these other areas you know you don't have to learn every single one of these but at least dig into a few of them and see how you can put your spin on them and potentially offer them as services down the road and I think this is the most important part of dealing with clients you want to over-deliver and I don't mean technical skill because clients rarely care about top level technical skill and one example of this is I was just browsing maybe a week or two ago I think it was the Chamber of Commerce it was some type of local organization there was a guy on there who it was a part of this networking group and he did IT and internet marketing but then I viewed a few of the websites that he built and he was not a web designer nor an expert you know coder he was literally building Squarespace websites for clients probably charging them double or quadruple whatever he was paying and he was just using very drag-and-drop software so that's a great example of the entrepreneurial spirit you know rising above your thoughts about how good you need to be to charge money for your service the most important thing with over-delivering is is sticking to your word you know be on time if you say you're gonna do something by a certain date do it and send it over to them be organized you know I keep all my clients files everything that my client ever sends me I keep in Dropbox and if they ever need it down the road I'm gonna have it and I've had that happen a few times where somebody was looking for a file from a year or two ago they had no idea where it was in their computer and I had it on mine I just sent it over to them and on top of that you want to over communicate so you know check in with their clients follow up with them if you have any questions ask them you know it started dialogue and that that's what's gonna build your relationship and that's what's gonna build the trust more than anything and this is especially true if you do something wrong you know don't try and hide it be open with your mistake you're gonna find that most clients are gonna value that honesty a lot more than you doing the right thing every single time it's okay to not be right all the time as long as you're upfront about it and you communicate with them how you're going to change it in the future and I said this early in the video I'll say it again the in-person aspect the local aspect is going to be the biggest sales point you have if you don't have a ton of experience where with people because those in-person meetings are gonna add tremendous value they're gonna build an immense amount of trust and I can tell you that if you're willing to meet in person there is a much better chance that you're going to close a sale on the spot versus doing it over the phone or through email it goes without saying that if you want to achieve something you're gonna want to create a specific goal with a deadline and this is something a lot of people do broadly they have these really big ideas but they don't specify the steps to get there you have to really have a concrete vision of what you want to accomplish you know everyone's got unique circumstances maybe you have a full-time job and your goal is simply to create $5,000 extra each year so it's easier for you and your family to pay your mortgage or maybe you're just out of college you don't have a job you have a lot of time and you want to pursue this full-time you know that's pretty much the situation that I was in I was living at home with my parents I was saving money and I got an engineering degree but I did not really want to get an engineering job because I didn't like the idea of working for someone else you know I had a lot of interests and frankly I was really curious about a lot of things so I wanted to pursue my curiosity not you know other people's agendas and I think curiosity that'll take you very far one thing I want to note is that you have to value process over results because especially with sales it's a numbers game you're gonna get turned down a lot and if you are not laser focused on following through with your process to reach your goals and you're getting too caught up with the results of getting turned down or maybe in a week or two go by and you don't have any responses to a sales email or to your pitch that can be very disheartening and that's especially true if you're an introvert like I am it's it takes a lot of energy to reach out to so many people and if you're an extrovert this should be a lot easier for you but my guess is that most people to get into Web Design are the types of people that like to be on a computer with headphones in where King for themselves and they don't want necessarily want to be handling phone calls and sending out 50 emails doing all these kind of things but the bottom line is if you want to achieve your goals of making more money you kind of need to step out of your bounds and follow a process that's gonna make you uncomfortable and I think the best way to do this is to create your packages you know create your services how much you're going to charge the work that you need to do and figure out how many clients it's going to take to reach your financial goals you definitely want to have some type of accounting software to do this you know that's gonna show you your expenses your income it's gonna make it way easier when tax season rolls around and you'll also look more professional if you're going to send a client a branded invoice from one of these programs so the one that I started with years ago was called wave accounting and they've since rebranded to I think either just wave or wave apps I really like them I ended up transitioning to QuickBooks but that was for a separate reason which has nothing to do with the web design business so I would recommend that you check out wave and another popular option that I've heard of over and over again but I've never used personally as fresh books either of those should be good to get you started and I don't want to specifically get into the details of setting up a business because that can vary from state to state but I will say that you'll probably want to set up an LLC it's usually a good idea to create business accounts so I have a business checking account savings account and a business credit card and anything that I spent money on I use those accounts versus my personal ones and since I don't have a job since this is my job I have to send in estimated tax payments every quarter so I would imagine that's a federal thing that you would have to do as well it's probably a little bit easier if you have a full-time job and this is just supplemental income that you can claim on your tax form at the end of the year but I definitely advise that you look into your state regulations and you might want to use a service such as Legal Zoom last but certainly not least is your sales strategy so how do you plan to reach the clients that you're going to target and I would say this is probably the hardest thing that you're gonna have to deal with this is a lot more nuanced than building a website you know building a website and learning how to do that is relatively easy in the grand scheme of things but finding the right people to sell that website - and then crafting your sales message or your marketing plan that's a lot more difficult and that brings me to a quote that I think about from the guy at the beginning of this video James Altucher he mentioned something either in one of his books or a video that I watched him in he said that until you're at 10 million dollars in sales you have to be the main salesperson for your business I can tell you that I tried to outsource this I tried to recruit friends and family that either didn't have a job or wanted to make supplemental income to sell websites for me and I was pretty much just looking to offload this part of my business and it was a complete failure because number one they're not as interested in websites as you are number two they don't know enough so you have to spend a lot of time teaching them to get them up to speed and number three once they hit failure they're gonna stop you know whereas this is your baby so if you hit a few failure points you're gonna push through them but they realize that you know they could just go out and get a job and make money that way and if they're not inherently motivated by sales commission it's gonna be a failure for you so I think this is something you have to dig into and do yourself and as I mentioned before you want to make it quantifiable you know if you're gonna send emails try and quantify it say you want to send twenty or thirty a day and do that for an extended period of time and if it stops working then change to a new method but you have to plan for a lot as I said before you have to plan for a lot of failure you have to plan for a lot of rejection before you start seeing some successes and I think the best way to do this is to create scripts so you don't necessarily have to follow a script to a tee when you're talking to somebody but it's a good idea to create a few email scripts a few scripts over the phone and maybe some questions that you can ask people when you're trying to pitch them and you'll get a feel naturally for how they're responding and how you have to alter your pitch over time to grab somebody's attention I keep going back to the local aspect because local networking groups are an easy way to find business owners in a variety of industries and to get your first jobs with them you know be active in your community and then it's really hard to close somebody on the first contact so you have to follow up you don't have to be hounding them over a period of weeks but check in every now and then continue to give them helpful information continue to ask questions and see if there's anything else that you can do and once you get a feel that they really do want your service but there's something holding them back that's when you can push a little bit harder because you know they're not going to respond negatively you know if somebody shows no interest and then you push hard they're probably gonna dislike you by the end but you know if they've been thinking about this for months and months you're actually helping them out by pushing them to make a decision going back to the script side of things you're gonna you're gonna hear the same objections over and over again and you'll figure out a way to navigate around these objections to get them to either say yes or no because it may be is is really the last thing that you want from somebody yeah I'd rather get an O than a maybe here's just a few more points that we kind of discussed already and that's you know ask lots of questions develop a client questionnaire because you're gonna ask pretty much the same questions especially if you're dealing with one industry always take notes you know I take notes literally every single time I'm on the phone with a client whether it's a potential client whether it's a current client I always take notes and I always keep those notes somewhere that I can refer to them in the future and this has helped out a lot because you're gonna have the most success with a client when you're both working together and without a doubt my most successful clients are the ones that they actually come up with ideas and I can help them out with it my least successful clients are the ones that think I'm gonna do everything and they don't have to do anything and they don't see results and they're wondering why and the more you talk with somebody the easier it is to determine what their biggest pain points are so this is a human issue you know there's there's obviously pain points specific to an industry but every person is gonna be good at some things and bad at some things and if you can figure out what they're bad at and what takes them the most time and then help them with that that's how you can customize your solution and customize your pitch from person to person and I'll end with this that's the business is art plus science there's no tutorial that you can take to become great at business you only get great at business through experience because it involves a lot of creativity a lot of human interaction and humans are the biggest variable in business but there is a science side of it and that's the quantifiable approach it's figuring out exactly how to build a website how long it takes you how many people you need to reach out to how many people it's going to take to reach your goals and you have to combine the two because it's rare to be good at everything definitely at the beginning you're not going to be good at everything from the beginning and even as you grow and become better you're still not going to be good at everything but you'll realize how to counteract your weaknesses potentially outsource some of the things that you're not good at and you're gonna get much better with the more time and experience you have that's all I got for this video but I really recommend that you check out my website which is website profit course com from there you can download a giveaway that I have called the 15 tools to start your web design business and these are the ones that I use all the time I mentioned some of them on this video so head over there I'll include a link in the description below and on this video probably in the top right corner and if you really want to fast-track your success you can get every detail of my business plan I'm giving away every piece of how I've built my web design business and that includes a screencast of the best ways to find new clients you're going to see the exact monthly packages that I offer and how I generate recurring income by only adding clients that are will to pay monthly I have a sales goal spreadsheet so you can see exactly how much money you'll make month after month and you can edit it so say you want to add two or three new clients a month that's your goal you'll see exactly how much money you're gonna make at the end of one year two years three years you can put in any credit card processing fees or operating costs and you'll see your net profit and there's so much more included I have a PDF that gives you a hundred plus potential business industries I'll show you 12 examples of successful Web Design companies that I've come across and that I've modeled a lot of my services after you'll get the perfect client checklist and this is what I've determined is my perfect client you'll get all my email outreach and follow-up scripts you'll get the common rebuttal script there's a business card design template Ally list spreadsheet template a local business directory checklist and a sales letter template and I'm planning to add even more in the coming months the next thing that I have in mind to add to the web design business plan is tutorials on how to set up advertising campaigns on Google AdWords and on Facebook because that's the way that you can drive targeted traffic to your clients websites before the site is established organically in Google so if you're interested in that I really recommend that you check it out and order it today because once I add the new tutorials I'm likely going to increase the price so if you want to get the best price and lock in any future updates make sure you grab a copy of it now that link is also going to be in the description below I really appreciate you taking the time to watch this give this video a thumbs up if you liked it and don't forget to subscribe to my channel for more wordpress tutorials and web design business videos thanks everyone have a great day