Upselling web design clients to monthly maintenance

That's not what he's saying.

Now it makes a alot more sense.

He is building them free websites, having them host with hostgator (he as the affiliate) and hostgator pays 125 upfront (as long as you get over a certain amount of sales per month)

So he is basically making 125 for the site and making nothing each month on the hosting.

Since this is the case yeah go ahead and sell them SEO...and at least charge SOMETHING for the site, $199 bucks or jeez even $99...then you'll make $224, as long as your not outsourcing anything 5 sales a week and you can atleast make a living income.

Most people would say charge full price, I can see you don't want to do that you want to make it super easy to sell and I get that so IF I were you, what I would do is do $199 for the site, include in with that package a guaranteed first page ranking on google for their major keyword like "plumber springfield pa"

Outsource that to mattlaclear or octavyo ($99 and $75 respectively, you get a time guarantee of 90 days with octavyo but get to do the seo using 5 keywords with mattlaclear)

So you just sold a website, got $249 (using octavyo) or $225 (mattlaclear) and you can give them a taste of your "internet marketing skill" so that way in 3 months when you get them the first page ranking ( or much shorter) you can have the bullets you need to sell them a 500-1000 per month SEO package.

Hope that helps.

Thanks for your comments

The way I see it, I'm not undervaluing myself, as I'm building a targeted list of offline clients, which I'll then be able to market to pretty much for ever with all my other services. If I can do 100 sites in the next 3-4 months, which is kind of the minimum of my goal actually - I'll have 100 clients, and if I can get 15-20 of those that are good to work with, who want ongoing services such as SEO for just 100-200 quid per month, I can easily have a pretty nice recurring income of £2500-£4000 per month (this would be underestimating the potential in my opinion), on top of that, I'll be making $12,500 if not more off the front end, as I will definitely hit that higher commission rate, and should actually be able to get $150 or even more per signup (Hostgator and most other decent hosts will pay you higher if you're bringing the numbers, and ask)

Also, because I'll be getting more clients than I would if I was asking for money upfront, I can ditch the bad clients that are a pain in the ass (I've already ditched one just yesterday, right after building his site - He was a total pain in the ass from day 1, so I just quoted him ridiculous prices for the SEO he wanted, as I didn't want to deal with him - he kept telling me one thing then changing his mind and getting impatient with me - knob!)

So, while I do see the point that it's important not to undervalue my knowledge and skills, I really think I'm creating a solid business here, and it'll pay off. That being said, I do need to be aware of the whole cheap skate avoidance issue, I don't want to be working with annoying freebie seekers (but as I said, with loads of clients, I can pick and choose)

Thanks for your comment though, much appreciate your thoughts

Nick

Here's my 2 cents. I've built a offline business twice now and I will tell you the first time I did it wrong. I was making a little over $5k a month from giving people free websites and then charging them at least $50 a month for hosting.

Most of my money come in with up-selling for SEO and other services after they were my client.

If I did this all over again I would never do it this way again. Cheap clients don't equal good clients. Not to mention cheap client always work you to death. Clients who pay me well always end up being less headaches.

Now I do a similar model, but raised my prices and find it easier to sell the websites.

I sell websites both in the US and oversea's.

I sell websites for a large sum $1500-3000 or I get them on monthly retainers. During the meetings I show them the monthly prices and one time charge.

9/10 they go for the monthly package. I'm still tweaking it, but we signed up 10 people already in the last month and just started promoting it on our website. We first told people about it to test the market.

One client liked the package so much she decided to do it for all 4 businesses.

So we offer 3 main packages and then we offer custom packages.

Package 1: $97

Custom website, logo, graphics and up to 1hr of updates for $97 a month.

Package 2: $147

Same as package 1, up to 5 hours of updates, but Facebook Fan Page and unlimited phone support

Package 3: $247

Same as package 2, and includes unlimited updates.

We also create custom packages for people who need tons of graphic design work, videos, etc...

I find it much easier to sell sites for $97 a month. People questioned me a lot on why it's so cheap or if it was a scam when I was doing it for free or $50.

I also ran into the problem of these cheap clients giving me more headaches then any of the clients who paid me well.

I can tell you from experience-- you don't want to be a offline consultant to every business. I had more trouble up selling cheap clients because they didn't see the value in what I was doing. You want clients who see the value in marketing online, but going about it the wrong way.

If you sell the benefits and educate them on how you can help your business there is no reason to give sites away for free to get your foot in the door.

I offer monthly backups, guarantee them that if the site ever goes down it's my responsibility to fix it ASAP.

Now I should mention how I sell them on this service is I provide a free mockup. We email, cold call, and network to get meetings.

Most people don't know they want a new shiny website. Most realize they have a crappy website, but they don't actively seek out a new web designer to fix it for them.

However, if you show them how much better there website can look it's much easier to sell them. Once they see it, they want it.

We are still tweaking our close rate, but I sold 3 of the $147 packages and 2 of the $97 packages in the first week.

Now to really make this profitable cold calling will be your friend. I'm not actively marketing this in the states yet, but it's rather popular in the Philippines so far.

I'm not saying my method is better, but I know I'm much happier now not dealing with cheap clients that waste my time.

Good point. I do have the Bower Formula report. The main difference between the WSO I referenced and what the OP is probably following:

The Bower Formula does give away a professional website but charges a small monthly hosting fee and actually collects the hosting fee directly from the customer over the phone via credit card or check by phone processing.

Whereas the Offline Doorbuster WSO does also offer a free website design but it doesn't suggest charging for monthly hosting rather it refers the customer to hostgator via an affiliate link and collect an affiliate commissioon for doing so.

There's a very slight difference between the two but both are quite simple to scale up into a profitable business.