At the beginning of the year I wrote a post about thinking of your web design service as a product. In that case I was talking mostly about how this approach makes pricing your service easier. That’s all true, but I think I stumbled upon another benefit: it’s a lot easier to sell.
I recently started a new blog, Make Your Web Site Count, that targets small business owners with web sites. The focus of the posts are helping non-technical people get the most out of their web sites. Sometimes I do that by discussing features they could add to their site. Sometimes I talk about strategies to get more traffic to their web site. In some instances I just post a case study of a project that I’ve recently worked on to help give business owners an idea of what is possible for their sites.
Now the writing style is definitely targeted towards an audience that doesn’t have a lot of experience with the web, but the material covered includes lots of little gems you could share with your own clients.
You might have heard the holy grail of entrepreneurship is to have multiple streams of income. The idea is that if any of those revenue sources dry up, you won’t take much of a financial hit because you’ve got money coming from other sources. That is 100% true, but there’s a dark underbelly to managing many revenue sources that sometimes gets overlooked.
You have a lot of information locked up in your skull. Think about it. How often do you come across a web site and think to yourself the person in charge of this could make it 500% better if they just made a few simple changes? That’s unique information that you have and they don’t. It’s valuable. You should give it to them for free.
It seems I hear a lot of stories about workaholic entrepreneurs. They spend 80 hours a week working on their business, and the few hours left over each week goes to their friends and family. I’m the exact opposite. I think.
When I was first starting this company, I wasn’t really sure what I was doing. I had the technical chops to build web sites, but I didn’t know much about running a business. Sales? Budgeting? I was just proud that I had completed the paperwork so that the state of Indiana recognized me as a business.
As a web developer you have the necessary set of skills to create HTML email formats. I was never that crazy about them because creating a design that will be effective in all major email clients is even more taxing than creating one for the major web browsers. You really have to keep the styling pretty vanilla.
Not too long ago I took a training course for business owners. The focus was on intelligently developing relationships with other business owners with whom you can refer business back and forth. The key to making this work is to appropriately feed and water these relationships. If you take the right actions, you can have very profitable relationships.
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