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: Selling Web Design Services BlogHow To Become A Project Management Super Hero
We’re very pleased to announce our latest book, The Principles of Project Management, by Meri Williams…
These days, project management skills aren’t linked to a job title — they’re essential for anyone who’s responsible for delivering an outcome within a specific budget and time frame.
This might mean that, as a freelancer, you’re delivering a site to a client on time. Or that, as a team leader, ensuring that a design/development team delivers its part of a broader project perfectly to specifications.
In just about any role, your project management skills can make the difference between becoming a superhero or super-villain!
Author Meri Williams has done a fantastic job of explaining concepts that everyone can apply to their projects. She shows you that project management isn’t rocket science, and that you don’t need to do the PMP exam to be a project management superhero!
Download the sample chapter and check it out for yourself.
For more details or to order, visit the book’s sales page.
Web Design Business Kit 2.0
It’s hard to believe it’s been 3-years since the release of Brendon Sinclair’s “The Web Design Business Kit”, with it’s 14-pounds of glory and retro-orange cover design.
Since then, we’ve amassed 18 pages of customer reviews, and many more emails, from all corners of the planet. Among these, were many suggestions for a 2nd edition, as well as more than a few questions asking for advice.
With this in mind, early this year we commenced work on updating the kit to answer the most common questions, and provide the most requested documents (contracts!). After many months of work, and more than a few late nights for Brendon Sinclair (the author), we’re happy to announce “The Web Design Business Kit 2.0″.
What’s new in the 2nd edition?
Four New Chapters:
- Outsourcing For Great Profits
- Delight Your Clients
- Dealing With Those Pesky Clients
- Business Legalities
Five new lawyer-written contracts:
- Design Contract
- Hosting Contract
- Support Contract
- Ongoing Marketing Contract
- Confidentiality Contract
… and of course, 509-pages of advice on finding, selling, and keeping clients, 182 pages of time-tested documents, and a CDROM containing all the documents & spreadsheets in editable format.
Download your free sample chapters here.
Thanks and goodbye to all!
After over two years writing this blog at Sitepoint, it is time to move on.
First, I think I’ve covered most of what I can say in blog format in past entries. It is time for some “new blood” to provide new ideas for you.
Second, my own professional practice is evolving, and I’m focused on some new product/service ideas and target markets. So I need to invest my time accordingly.
I want to thank all of you and especially the great people at Sitepoint for this wonderful opportunity. It has been a true pleasure, and Sitepoint is a fantastic organization!
Finally, here is the bottom line:
1. Make business development a priority. Less qualified/talented people who market do better financially than more qualified/talented people who don’t.
2. Develop a powerful, compelling marketing message that attracts prospects to come to you.
3. Focus your marketing on a target market.
4. Get visible in low cost, high impact ways, preferably by educating your marketplace about the problems they face and how to solve them.
5. Think big. We have one go-round in life as far as we know, so don’t waste it on small thinking.
6. Do what you love, and if you can find a way to get well-paid for …
So is third-party web design a dead business?
Many of your comments to the last blog were quite depressing. Most of you made one of two points:
1. Web design for clients doesn’t pay well. The only way to make money in this business is by designing your own sites and making money that way.
2. Most clients want a lot but won’t pay.
If that’s true, then there is no reason for web designers to do anything other than design for themselves.
But I don’t think it is true at all. I have always thought that most people think way too small.
I think one can design great web sites for their own purposes, and also get out there and market your knowledge and wisdom at a high price to firms and clients that will pay big bucks for the results you can get. If you don’t have all of the knowledge, you can partner up with others who do and provide a complete solution.
If I am wrong, and you are trying to market to clients who want a lot and won’t pay, get the heck out of this business! There are plenty of other ways to make an excellent living, and web design can be a hobby for you.
Otherwise, some …
A client tells me about why he has rejected a bunch of web designers/developers
An enterpreneur contacted me by phone today. He has a terrific, proprietary and exclusive product with lots of market potential that he wants to sell via the Internet.
He explained that he had talked to a bunch of web designers — at all price ranges — and refused to work with any of them. None of them could provide a cogent point of view about how to design sites that converted visitors to customers — besides the usual talk about professional-looking designs.
Listen closely, as I’ve repeated this message too many times: You have a wonderful opportunity to dominate your market by providing a full, complete online ecommerce solution to your clients. This includes having a solution, and being able to describe it, in plain English that includes:
- How to attract people to the site in honest, proven ways (SEO that isn’t the usual rip off service at over $900 per month)
- Tested navigation flows that convert visitors to customers
- Proven marketing copy and materials that are compelling
- Tracking tools to test, refine, and expand what works
- Partnerships with top ecommerce companies
- Documented methodology for generating sales on the web — backed up with actual case studies and results.
Not all of you …
The beauty of “re-purposing”
You may have noticed a transition in my advice over the past 2 and 1/2 years. The shift has been from talking about selling services to selling repeatable programs and products in addition to services. That way, you are building something of sustainable value, and making something once to sell it thousands of times.
In my case, I now design web-based programs and sell information via the web. I don’t have an advertising model, but rather sell information to targeted niche audiences. In 8 months of building, I now have 6 cash-flow generating sites (and a few duds, too).
Anyway, just because a product or site is a dud doesn’t mean that you can’t turn lemons into lemonade, and that’s the purpose of this blog.
Here are two examples:
1. I created a site that sold book reviews to parents. It bombed. But I had 22 wonderfully written book reviews/summaries. So I started marketing those on another site I have that caters to parents. They now sell as a bundled group of reviews, not as a subscription. Results are positive. A bomb has turned into at least a marginal success.
2. I’ve done some research on my marketing books, testing a variety of prices. During …
How’s your retirement looking?
My understanding is that there are lots of young people who visit Sitepoint, people in their teens and twenties.
I hope that you save 20-50% of every dollar you earn.
It may seem hard with rent and food — but it only gets harder later on.
If you start saving now and investing wisely, you may be able to retire long before your colleagues.
I won’t bore you with a lecture about how money compounds, and how $1 saved in your twenties can be worth lots more than $1 saved when you are 40 or 50. You know that.
Why do we work? Lots of reasons. But work is about how we use our life energy, and what we do with that energy. If you want to be able to choose whether you work or not someday, please start saving up now — in a big way. It takes discipline and commitment, but is worth doing.
Please read the classic book Your Money or Your Life if you want to learn a new way to think about money. Read also The Automatic Millionaire, so you can see the powerful effects of saving.
I’m lucky in that I saved enough money early on and made some smart …
Okay, let’s see if anyone’s been reading this blog: Reader challenge
We’ve been interacting for about 2 years or more now. Some of you are newcomers to this blog and some of you have been here from the start.
So at this point, it is my expectation that if I ask you to answer a business challenge, you should be able to answer it for me. Here goes:
What advice would you give to a web developer/designer who is looking out at his business pipeline over the next six months and sees that business will likely dry up in about 3 months?
What are the top 1 to 5 marketing activities you think would help this person recharge his pipeline?
Looking forward to your answers….
Results of your Marketing Survey are here!
http://www.sitepoint.com/examples/downtobusiness/SmallBusinessSurvey06.pdf
The above URL will let you download the Sitepoint Small Business Survey of 2006. Thanks to Sitepoint again for setting this up with me. Let me know your interpretation of the results, and here are some of my observations:
1. The survey respondents are 86% men. Let’s get more women into this field!
2. Respondents are all over the map in terms of years in business. But 61% have been in business for 3 years or more. Despite this experience, 49% are generating less than $50,000 in revenue and 71% are generating less than $100,000. There is lots of opportunity to increase revenues for those who want to! Note that 17% of respondents say that their firm generates over $200,000 in revenue. Why not you?
3. About half of respondents put in 5 hours or less per month for marketing. That may help explain why about half of respondents are earning less than $50,000. YOU HAVE TO MAKE MARKETING A PRIORITY IF YOU WANT TO EARN BIG DOLLARS.
4. Related to the above responses, about 35% of you are somewhat or very comfortable with marketing and sales. That means the majority of you have an opportunity to keep learning about marketing by reading (via …
Please participate in a benchmarking survey of web design/developer marketing practices
The good people at SitePoint have been kind enough to indulge my request to conduct a marketing benchmarking survey of SitePoint readers. It is not scientific, it is a bit biased, and it may not even be comprehensive — but it does have lots of great questions for your to compare yourself to others, and should be of interest to anyone reading this blog.
The link follows. I’d sure be grateful if everyone reading this can take a few moments to click the link below and complete the survey. Then I will compile results and report back to you. I’ll share my interpretations of the data, and you can share yours.
Marketing Benchmarking Survey
Thanks — and look for some results soon!
And thanks again to SitePoint for making this possible.
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