Web Designer needs marketing ideas

Lets start here, if this statement were true.. then you wouldn't be making this post.. so NO, the package is NOT selling on its own.

Stay at home and do nothing.. but seriously you literally have to get your prices in front of more people, that's the only way. Start at one end of a business district in your community, and go from door to door to the other end


Again.. its so perfect your not selling any


So your saying the competition isn't building sites because they cost more than you.. so no sites in your community are being built?

no sales from craigslist.. but sales from chamber events.. and no sales from cold emailing... You have to stop with the whoa is me cycle, and go where there has been success. The work you pulled from the chamber.. have you asked your clients for referals?

Great portfolio and an unreasonably low price sounds to me to be more accurate.

With the advice above.. pound pavement and get in front of your potential clients, along with increasing your price to match the experience you can display with your portfolio sounds like a good place to start. become active today in your future.. sitting at home and whining because you are scared of getting out... will lead you to a path of broke... the only sales that you mention in this post is from going to chamber events.. something you say you are not good at.. you got sales from doing this correct? more than any of the other avenues you have tried correct? then maybe your not so bad at it.

Raise your prices.. go in with your head held high and let your portfolio justify the expense. Business owner cant afford NOT TO have a web site. The ones that see the value, WILL PAY.

Thank you for your post. This is some great advice that I will definitely try.

What I meant by the price basically sells itself is that when I actually get the potential client on the phone I do not have to do a lot of selling. They see the portfolio and the quality of the work and the low price and it helps me sell to those people I actually talk to. I have a high rate of making sales to those people I actually talk to on the phone or in email.

I have been doing websites for clients for over 7 years. I have gotten most of my work from Craigslist over the years. From people responding to my posts but that is hit or miss because often Craigslist deletes my posts. It is quite hard to keep posts up in enough cities to get a decent amount of business from it. If I could post in lots of cities without getting so many deleted posts I would probably have quite a bit of work from it.

I did this thing with the chamber that lets you pay a fee to send a flyer to their email list. I did this three times and got three clients from it so it paid for itself. I will continue to do that but I want to get enough volume to make this a bigger business. I do not really like doing sales in person and have tried networking in the past with very little success. I do not want to sound like I am whining it just is not my strong point.

I get a somewhat decent amount of referrals from previous clients. Do you think I should offer like a $100 commission to past clients that refer new clients to me. My price is already low. Right under five hundred but I can afford to pay that to people that refer new clients to me because the websites do not really take much time. Would offering a referral reward like that be helpful in your opinion to incentivize those people to try to refer people to me?

For my price. I did try raising my prices significantly. I actually used to sell most of my websites for half the price I charge now. I even did a few in the 1000 to 2000 range but when you get in that price range you are competing with the bigger firms that spend a ton more in advertising so I figured I could take my price to a lower amount to help compete better. I did not get enough work with that much higher price so I figured I would go for quantity instead. I do not do much seo work. I tend to install the tools and let the clients do that themselves. I feel like there are more than enough people selling seo and I wanted to go for the low budget customers that could not afford to pay the higher prices most firms charge. Sure the big firms get good business but they have teams of developers and pour a lot more time into their projects than I do. I actually outrank the other firms from nearby bigger cities in my hometown in search results and compete pretty well in search results for the cities they are in. But that has not turned into much business.

Like you recommended I will try the networking events again. I will try most anything at this point because I really want this to be successful. Thanks again and I would love to hear more tips and feedback from anyone else that has ideas that they think may help.

Sorry, been a little busy...

1. Do you have any B2B clients? e.g. Accountant, Web hosting, Printer, Secretarial Services? If so, would they be prepared to send out a special offer to their customers? Far more effective than cold calling.

2. Can you partner up with SEO, PPC, Copywriters, etc and share customers?

3. Create a free giveaway - report or digital course - which you can offer to other B2B businesses as a freebie for their customers. Here's a couple of examples written by a Marketing Consultant and given away by an Accountant.

Zippyshare.com - Attracting-New-Clients.7z
(if you have trouble downloading from zippy, PM an email address and I'll email them across)

Notice the customised introduction including an endorsement of the Marketing Consultant by the Accountant. Notice his website address at the bottom of each page. Notice the offer on the last page in the A4 version.

Again, this type of marketing is far more effective than cold calling because you're getting an endorsement from someone the recipients already trust.

Also the marketing tips in those freebie books are effective and worth following up for your own business...

4. Referrals. Get comfortable asking for referrals. Get Bill Cates' book. IMHO referrals are by far the best way to get customers.

That's all I have time for right now...

Thank you for the great ideas and input animal. For the B2B clients. I have actually been thinking about something along those lines. I did not think to ask them to contact their clients. How would I go about asking that? Feels like asking for a favor and I don't know how they would take it. I have been thinking about offering my previous clients a $100.00 referral commission to refer new clients to me for my $499.00 package or higher. Do you think that would be a good idea? I also am thinking about contacting more B2B businesses like accountants etc. and offering that same deal. Give them an incentive to send me clients.

The type of clients I have typically have low budgets and I do not know how many customers I can refer to businesses to partner with but I can offer them the referral payment instead.

I have been curious about mailing lists. I do not understand how growing a mailing list would work for a web designer. For web design it is mostly a one time payment. There is sometimes more work in the future but not something I would think people would want to be signed up to a list for plus once I work with them why would they want to buy another website from me so I do not know how mailing them later would bring in more sales. How would a web designer that does not do much ongoing maintenance or seo work build a mailing list? What could I offer on a monthly basis that would make people want to sign up? I see the report you linked and that could be something that may work though that looks like it is more for marketing professionals while I simply build websites. What kind of things could I have a list for that I can give tips on? Thanks!

Hi TwoPointZero,

I should give a disclaimer first that I work for RankLeads.com, so I'm at least a little bit partial to paid leads. But I did build up a 6 Mil a year web design and SEO agency from the ground up before this, and I have a lot of experience with various different lead types, both paid and free.

To market without spending any money:
Your best leads are going to be the ones that you get through referrals. If you're low on business right now I would contact the people that you've build sites for and ask them if they have any needs or if they know anyone who does.
Don't give up on Craigslist or other local classified sites. Figure out what's going on and keep them going. Next steps are to start reaching out via phone, email and social media to local companies and start forming relationships. The larger your network of friends, family, and business associates is, the busier you'll stay. The tough part is that doing all of the things that you need to do on the marketing end is a full time job in itself.

Paid leads and advertisements
Free marketing can only take you so far. If you want to really grow you'll have to start going out on a limb a little bit more.
Pay per click is really expensive but can start bringing traffic to your site right away and if people like what they see, they'll call. PPC is generally the fastest way to start getting interested people to your site.
Buying leads from lead generation companies such as ours can be really good if you take the leads seriously and nurture them well, or a complete waste of money if you don't. What I mean by that is that you have to follow up really well and not just give up after leaving a couple of voicemails. The same could be said for any other lead type as well, but it becomes more evident in paid leads than it is with referrals.
Striking up relationships with SEO companies, marketing companies, consultants, etc... and giving them a cut of each sale works well also. In my experience, the cut needs to be around 20% to really keep them interested in referring business to you.
If you don't like doing marketing on your own, or don't have the time, or you want to grow your business larger than a 1 or 2 man show, then you can hire people in-house to do marketing for you, or hire outside consultants to do it. This is always kind of a crap shoot. If you get the right person or right company, you're golden, but it's pretty hard to find.

The most important thing is to always keep moving. Keep trying new things and solving marketing problems. You really want to have several good sources for sales leads. If you rely on just 1 or 2, they'll fail on you at some point and put your business in real jeopardy.

Thank you for the input and ideas Leadsupply. I will definitely give this some thought and see what may work for me. I like the idea of contacting companies to offer them a referral payment for referring people to me. I have thought of buying leads from companies like the one you mentioned though they often require purchasing a large amount of leads up front before trying them out. I would like to find one where I can buy maybe 3 leads to try and then if that works out I can see buying a large number of leads on an ongoing basis.

Thank you for your help. That is a great idea. Tell the referrer that I will deliver a quality product to help the referrals that buy a website from me to where the referrer feels it is a service to the referrals. I will think about things I can offer instead of cash. I do try to sell hosting to customers. I typically do a few months free then offer the option to renew for a fee. I will look into working out partnerships with b2b companies that can help increase profits. Thanks again!

Here's Ewan's web developer Ad

http://www.warriorforum.com/offline-...5k-2-days.html

Read the whole thread...

Also about pricing. Have Gold, silver and bronze pricing. Typically a percentage will go for the gold and your average sale price goes up...

Thank you very much for this info. I have read the entire post you linked and it is very interesting. I do quite a bit of advertising on craigslist. This is something I will try out to see how well it works for me. For the three levels of pricing. That is very interesting as well. I have actually thought of doing something like that. You think I should post that pricing on my website or in the quote I email clients and in advertisements? I had thought about putting it on my website but then if I have a client with a bigger budget that wants something more if the client looks on my website then sees the prices in the three tiers they may not want to pay more. I think you may mean in my advertisements and quotes but wanted to confirm. Thanks again for all your help. This is outstanding information and I am sure it will be a huge help to me.

Pick up the phone, dial businesses numbers, and pitch them. You'll have more work then you can ever handle. I didn't read your post but if your looking for more work this is the answer so I don't need to read it.

I do like the idea of building a list animal and then offering services like that to my web design clients. I just never thought that as a web designer I would have something to email out to people that would make people want to join a list. You either need a website or you don't. I figured people would not want to sign up for a list by a web designer. I need to expand my services beyond mainly just web design so I appeal to a broader audience. I will try the pricing tiers and see how it works out. I may do it on a page not linked in my menu first to see how it does before publishing it on the main site. The custom tier quotes option does help with those with bigger budgets so I definitely like that idea.

I have my phone set up in my office and plan to give cold calling a try next week before I bring in an employee. If I could figure out how to post more craigslist ads without so many getting deleted I probably would have all the business I could handle because this low budget price works perfectly on there.