If you work as a freelance web designer for any length of time, you’ll quickly notice that your income can fluctuate wildly from month to month. One month you have almost more work than you can handle and the checks start rolling in. The next month all the projects you had finish up and you hope there’s enough in the bank to cover your expenses because you don’t have any thing coming in.

You may be one of the few who are paid a retainer by some of your more affluent clients to be available just in case anything comes up. Personally, that seems a lot like being an employee, but it works for some people. The most likely scenario, though, is that you are paid in full after you complete any project. I haven’t met many freelancers in any industry who can easily translate their personal service into a revenue stream that pays them money each month.

Does that mean you give up and resign yourself to enduring the financial roller coaster of wild swings in sales from month to month? No, or at least you shouldn’t feel like that’s the only option.

I noticed as I was starting out that many of the clients I did design work for didn’t know an awful lot about where a website lives. In many cases they had already discovered and accepted that having a website meant a very modest ongoing cost. Some were familiar with the term hosting, but probably couldn’t define the process.

What usually happened is they would ask me what they needed to do to get the domain name they had registered to point to the site I had designed. I made the mistake for a while of giving them a brief explanation of DNS, hosting, and recommended a host with which they could get started.

These people were not uber geeks like me. Configuring a web host was not particularly interesting for them and was not a skill they were likely to use again anytime soon. They had businesses, lives, and families.

I (eventually!) recognized that what they really wanted was for things to just be taken care of. They already expected to pay someone an ongoing fee for their website. Since I had already established a good relationship, there’s no reason that person shouldn’t be me. I began to say that I could configure and host their website, and I started receiving regular monthly revenue.

I should point out that I am not a hardware guy. I’ve had jobs before where I was expected to feed and water a server, and that life is not for me. What I can do with a great deal of ease is to be a hosting reseller. Most hosting businesses allow you to purchase space on their server and then sell it off in pieces. As a reseller, I’m not responsible for buying extremely expensive servers, installing updates, maintaining a secure physical location for the machines, paying for a T1 connection, or many of the other tasks associated with hosting that curdle my blood. Everything I do is through a web interface. I add new websites, modify databases, and control DNS records all from the comfort of my browser.

Now instead of a being the guy who took the money and ran when I finished the design, I’m still involved with my client. I send them regular invoices and can ask how things are going with the site. In many cases this results in landing more design work. There were a few additional pages the client wanted but just never remembered to get in touch with me about. A regular invoice for web hosting is a reminder that they have access to a great web designer, me. More often than not when I contact someone I’ve done work for before, they’ve got additional ideas of things they’d like to add to their site.

filed under: Running a Business