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Building Sites For Offline Clients?

by Ty Maier
5 replies
Hello,

I am from Savannah, GA. I want to start tapping into my local market and start building websites for local companies. In the past week I have randomly gotten my first two websites to build. I did the first one for $250. The second was a hair salon. I offered them a regular site for $300 or for $600 I would give them a site that could accept appointments online. They chose to pay $600.

I want to really grab this by the horns and go al out. I see a lot of opportunities. I drove just 1 1/2 miles away from my house today and on the way I counted 89 running offline businesses.

I smell opportunity.

Does anyone with experience have any tips to offer? Such as how much to charge to build the site? And how much to charge for hosting? Tough questions.

Anything would be greatly appreciated. Thanks warriors!

Ty Maier
#building #clients #offline #sites
  • Profile picture of the author KenJ
    You are not charging enough for website design.

    You are not selling your customers websites. At least I hope not.

    You are selling them on the basis of getting them new customers and reducing their advertising costs because most people now use the internet to find what they want.

    This is not hard to do.
    Once you have demonstrated to your customer how you make them money with new leads they will pay you handsomely.

    This all assumes that you really can do what you say you can do.
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    • Profile picture of the author Jesus Perez
      Originally Posted by kenj View Post

      You are not charging enough for website design.
      Agreed. I don't start simple offline projects for less than $1k.
      Signature

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      • Profile picture of the author JohnMcCabe
        One thing to keep in mind is the lifetime value of a client.

        If all you want to do is build one-off websites, you need to charge enough to pay for your marketing.

        I "sold" my first website 12 years ago for $400/year. I host the site and I maintain it. Most years, the maintenance involves updating the copyright date, sending an invoice and cashing the check - about 30 minutes per year. That "underpriced" website has been worth about $4,800 dollars to me so far. And that doesn't include extra projects over the years...

        Enough of those simple, low-maintenance sites on the books and you have a nice source of cash flow while you look for the big payday projects.

        I'm not disagreeing with the other posters - you should be getting value for your time, effort and expertise in line with the value you provide. I'm just offering another way to look at it.
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  • Profile picture of the author Kenster
    In general I like to have the initial cost decently low to get them on the hook but not too low to make it seem like you have no idea what you are doing. The great thing about building web sites for offline clients (assuming you are doing smal businesses like hair salons) is that the recurring revenue stream is effortless. You charge a moderate hosting and maintenance charge which will add up and most small businesses dont update their sites often and when they do its something very small and BAM thats another small fee.

    When I started in IM I got 50 local/semi local clients and now I dont do a thing except the occasional update and make a few grand a year. Nothing much but you can easily scale it up big time though.
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  • Profile picture of the author Kenster
    And yes I forgot to mention, you can approach it like kenj mentioned and almost be a partner with your client. This involves more work but you can charge a heck of a lot more when you start bringing them leads, tracking the leads, and then going to them and showing them the business your site is bringing them.

    The approach I took was offering small businesses just a branding site. Literally nothing fancy at all, just a page to make the small business look more reputable!
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