Tag: Clients

19 Mar

How To Get Web Design Clients Fast (Part 1)

by TBSCategories: News

Starting a web design business isn’t difficult. There’s a low barrier to entry, and almost anyone with some kind of design skill can start an agency. But if we’ve learned one thing, it’s that building a successful design business takes more than just web design chops. Whether you’re a freelancer or a full-scale web design company, you’ll encounter the same problems.

In this two-part series, we’ll share the agency growth lessons we’ve learned. In this first part, we break down the pricing model that’s worked best for us and explain how to leverage it in your business. In the next article, we’ll share proven sales techniques you can use as you scale.

Most web designers started freelancing or taking on agency clients because they love design. But if you’ve created a design agency, you know the artistic work often gets put to the side. Instead of working on creative projects, you spend your time on business structure issues and pricing models. Client hassles take up your day. And you’re continually selling just to keep your roster full.

The truth is that to run a successful web design firm, you need to take on the mindset of a business owner. And that’s very different than just designing. Now, you have to juggle client work and growth tasks — you’re either overloaded with work or selling hard to pay next months’ rent.

That dangerous feast-and-famine cycle is what puts a lot of hardworking, creative entrepreneurs out of business. They’re overwhelmed with client work, then rushing to sell, and again and again. That kind of stress will make anyone think about getting a day job!

As we grew our successful web design agency, we learned that this cycle is just the symptom of a fractured business model. To run a successful business, you need a steady stream of recurring income. This model lets you design while not stressing all the time or worrying about where your next client will come from.

And to do that, you need to shift how you think about design — from a product to a service. In this two-part series, we’ll explain how to use this model to profitably grow your web design business.

Recurring Revenue: The Solution For A Profitable Web Design Business

Once you start thinking about your work as an ongoing service, everything changes. Instead of one-off sales with inconsistent cash flow and constant selling, you’ll be generating income each month with minimal maintenance work, like site refreshes and seasonal updates. And instead of a big project taking all your time, you’ll be able to sign on new clients quickly.

The basis of a service model is recurring payments, where the money comes in without us needing to land a big client or rush to finish up a project. And that stable source of revenue leaves plenty of time to find new clients to keep our pipeline full.

As you grow, you’ll want to focus on one metric: monthly recurring revenue, or MRR. Recurring revenue is like a subscription for your website services, and it’s money you can count on every month.

MRR makes sense because, as a business owner, most costs are billed monthly. You have rent, salaries, electricity, phone, internet, and other expenses that repeat each month. All you’re doing is aligning your income to your costs. Doesn’t that make more sense?

The first step to earning on this scheme is to find your breakeven number. That’s the amount you need to make each month to cover your expenses. First, calculate your one-off and recurring fixed costs. These are expenses like computers, software subscriptions, and salaries. For example, let’s say you’re a one-person agency and you spend $ 500 on software and equipment each month.

Next, you’ll want to add up the variable expenses that increase with each website, like a hosting plan, security, distribution, and taxes. That amount is how much each site will cost you to keep for a month. Maybe in your case, hosting each website for a client will cost $ 10 per month.

If you sell website hosting, maintenance, and updating services at $ 60 per month, you’ll earn $ 50 in profit per site. To meet your goal of $ 500, you only need 10 clients to pay your business expenses. What’s neat about this model is that profit is up to you. Every extra client after your breakeven number is profit—and it’s up to you how much you want to make!

You don’t have to transition your agency or freelance business all at once. You can gradually add MRR clients alongside your big projects until the recurring revenue is enough to support you —making this an attractive model for existing designers looking to break away from the feast-and-famine cycle and start earning a steady income.

This service model is a mindset shift, to be sure, but it’s a smarter way of doing business. To succeed, start thinking in terms of a recurring service — not a one-and-done product.

How To Find The Perfect Pricing Tiers For Your Design Services

There’s a science to pricing your services correctly, and it’s very different from how you might quote a larger project. Here’s the structure we use that helps us grow as fast as possible.

Think of the price point that your target market could afford. (We’ll talk more about target markets in the next section). When you create your pricing, it’s a good idea to have more than one tier. Have at least two options: a basic plan and another package with more features. Different customers have different budgets, and you want prices that are attractive to everyone. We’ve done well with three plans priced at $ 30, $ 50, and $ 100 USD per month.

Each package starts with the initial website creation and ongoing services, such as seasonal changes or site updates. To differentiate your premium tiers, add advanced features like more storage, faster updates, extra subpages, detailed traffic statistics, multilingual support, and more. Just remember, you want to be profitable on all your tiers. Make sure the services provided in each one still work out to the profitability you want. Don’t give away free work!

We also recommend charging an upfront design fee of around $ 500 USD for all tiers in addition to your monthly recurring payment. This fee ensures potential customers are serious and keeps you from losing too much money if a customer quits after just a few months.

We also recommend against ever charging web design agency services by the hour—if that’s how you do it now, consider changing your pricing method. As a designer, your goal is to get faster at designing great websites, and you shouldn’t be punished for this! For example, we developed the website builder Sitejet for our team. It cut our design time by 70%—but we still get paid the same. Our pricing scheme rewards us for efficiency, so we’re always trying to design great sites in less time.

The final strategy for pricing is to keep experimenting. Some customers will want extra services, so test out new pricing tiers as you see fit. Don’t be afraid to try something new!

How To Find The Right Kind Of Customers To Grow Your Business

It’s exciting to scale a business—but the scary part is finding those first few MRR clients, especially if you’ve only ever done one-off projects before. These are the strategies we’ve learned you can use to build up your business and keep it growing.

The first step is to create a unique brand voice, which may be different from the one you have now. Your voice for MRR clients depends a bit on the type of customers you’d like to attract. But in general, you’ll want to sell yourself as an affordable full-service website design agency. You’ll be selling to smaller businesses, focusing on excellent services at a price small and medium businesses (SMBs) can afford.

The key to great marketing is to show how a website leads to more sales. When you work in the web development business, it’s easy to focus on the technical details behind the sites you create, but that’s a mistake. Don’t talk about a custom theme or better UX design. Instead, talk about getting featured on search engines or attracting customers who expect a modern website. We’ll cover this more in the second part of this article series.

We’ve mentioned a few times that you should only look to SMBs at first. But why?

There are a few reasons SMBs are the best place to start. First, SMBs bring in recurring revenue that most big clients can’t offer. Bigger clients expect a lot of work, but most local businesses will be happy to pay $ 50-100 USD per month for small changes like seasonal announcements. These only take a few minutes for you, which is why a lot of small sites usually result in more revenue than a few big projects.

Second, small sites allow you to develop a portfolio quickly, which is helpful when you’re just starting to serve small businesses. If you’re designing new sites every week—instead of every few months—you’ll be able to show off your skills faster, which means it’ll be even easier to find new clients.

And finally, small sites bring security. You’ve probably heard horror stories of designers or agencies with one or two clients. One quits for whatever reason and leaves the designers broke and desperate. The bigger your clients, the less you can afford to lose them, and the riskier your business model becomes.

That’s why we recommend smaller clients, but a lot of them. If an agency with giant clients loses one or two, it can lead to bankruptcy. But if a handful of our clients canceled in one day, it would barely hurt our business. This helped us early on. In just a few months after using the MRR business model, we already had around 50 clients. That steady income let us hire more designers and keep growing the agency.

How To Pick The Best Client Niche For You

The very first MRR client is always the most challenging—where do you look? You might be tempted to visit freelance marketplaces or randomly contact every local business, but don’t! The answer is more straightforward than you might expect. You just need to choose a single vertical or industry to start with. Once you’ve excelled at one niche, you can move to others. Using this strategy, we approached various sectors and are now servicing over 70 different verticals.

Having a narrow niche makes it easier to sell to a prospective customer. For example, let’s say you’re trying to acquire a construction client. The best way to get them interested is to show them another construction website, especially if it’s one with a similar color scheme and branding. Sticking with similar businesses makes this easy.

You’ll also develop skills and a reputation serving this vertical. For example, if you’ve created websites for ten hair salons in your local area, you’ll quickly become the go-to designer for salon owners.

Being the “go-to designer” in a niche will bring in free referrals since local business owners are always looking for peer recommendations.

How should you choose a vertical? Well, start by thinking of areas where you already have experience or references. Ask yourself these questions to find a good match for your expertise and skillset:

“What industries have you worked with before?”

What businesses do you know about?”

“What types of businesses have you worked in before, if any?”

“What local businesses do you know about or use often?”

“What interests do you have in common with various local businesses?”

An easy way to enter a niche is to study the clients you’re already serving. If you helped a corporate cosmetics company, local salons could be an easy fit. But it doesn’t just have to be design experience. If you had a part-time restaurant job in college, love clothes and fashion, or always recommend the same barber to friends, you might have a great starting place.

Once you have this vertical, you’ll want to create buyer personas and target everything towards them. Spend some time planning out exactly who your ideal customers are. Think carefully about what the owners care about, what their days look like, and how a website will help them grow their business.

Do some market research to learn more about your target persona. Searching online is easy, but you can get better information by calling those types of businesses or meeting some business owners. As you gather more information, you can use it to reach more business owners in the same vertical.

As you grow, you can repeat this process to expand into more and more verticals.

How To Find Great Clients

As you find more clients, it’s easy to say yes to everyone. But to stay profitable, you need to focus on your strengths and only take on clients that will help you reach your goals.

First, you want to make sure every client is happy to pay your prices. The tiers help keep you flexible for different budgets, but if a client tries to bargain down your price, it’s a red flag. It’ll be stressful to work with them once you sign them on, and they’re probably not worth the effort. Also look out for clients who ask for special favors since extra work will eat away at your profits.

Note: Of course, if enough clients ask for a specific service, you can consider creating a new tier or adding the feature to an existing package at a fair price. But don’t make special deals with individual clients.

As we mentioned earlier, you should also avoid the temptation of big-ticket projects. While the number seems big, you’ll earn more with smaller websites. It sounds counterintuitive that small sites would make more, but it all comes back to the magic of recurring revenue.

For example, let’s say a potential client asks you to create a sophisticated portal website for $ 10.000 USD. But in the same amount of time, you could build 15 simpler sites. Those smaller sites would generate $ 7.500 USD in setup fees and $ 750 in MRR. After a year, you would have earned almost twice as much from smaller sites than the big project!

You also need to say no if a client asks you to help with other related services, like content marketing or social media. Unless these services are part of your agency growth plan, focus only on website design. The time you spend building a content strategy or promoting on Facebook is time you could be earning more recurring revenue with web design.

A great solution here is to partner with other agencies or freelancers that specialize in these services. If someone asks for a logo or an ad campaign, you can refer them to your colleague, and in turn, they can mention you when their clients ask for website designs.

One of the easiest ways to get more MRR clients for your web design service is word-of-mouth marketing. Your original customers have put their trust in you, and you need to reward that trust with incredible customer service and attention to detail. You can even showcase the sites you develop for them and (with their permission) list them as references to help potential customers make a decision.

Treat your early customers well, provide prompt and friendly service, and you’ll keep them for years to come.

But not only are strong client relationships important for referrals, they also help keep you profitable! The most time-intensive part of your job is finding new clients and designing their site. Every month a client happily pays you, the more profit you make off the original sale.

What We’ve Learned About Growing A Web Design Business

Running a web design agency isn’t easy. Our sincere hope is that some of the things that work for our team will work for you as well. Our agency has been going strong for years now, and the business still runs on the same principles we used when we started. What we’ve shared above is enough to get you started, but it’s only the beginning!

As you grow, you’ll learn strategies that help you become more efficient and identify areas where you can improve. To give you an example: We focused a lot on process efficiency and built our design and management tool Sitejet to reduce the creation time per website by 70% and optimized all customer interaction processes (e.g., feedback management) for more effortless communication. It’s created to help designers grow their business and give back time for what you love: being creative.

Design skills are essential to making a living in the design world. But to succeed, you also need plenty of hard work and a willingness to experiment until you get it right. Start with the right mindset, and you’ll be amazed at what you can build.

In this first part of our series, we’ve explained the basics of finding your first few MRR clients. But to keep growing, you need scalable sales to bring in a steady stream of high-quality clients. That’s what we’ll cover next: the step-by-step methods we’ve learned to scale an agency quickly.

Stay tuned!

Articles on Smashing Magazine — For Web Designers And Developers

19 Mar

How To Get Web Design Clients Fast (Part 1)

by TBSCategories: News

Starting a web design business isn’t difficult. There’s a low barrier to entry, and almost anyone with some kind of design skill can start an agency. But if we’ve learned one thing, it’s that building a successful design business takes more than just web design chops. Whether you’re a freelancer or a full-scale web design company, you’ll encounter the same problems.

In this two-part series, we’ll share the agency growth lessons we’ve learned. In this first part, we break down the pricing model that’s worked best for us and explain how to leverage it in your business. In the next article, we’ll share proven sales techniques you can use as you scale.

Most web designers started freelancing or taking on agency clients because they love design. But if you’ve created a design agency, you know the artistic work often gets put to the side. Instead of working on creative projects, you spend your time on business structure issues and pricing models. Client hassles take up your day. And you’re continually selling just to keep your roster full.

The truth is that to run a successful web design firm, you need to take on the mindset of a business owner. And that’s very different than just designing. Now, you have to juggle client work and growth tasks — you’re either overloaded with work or selling hard to pay next months’ rent.

That dangerous feast-and-famine cycle is what puts a lot of hardworking, creative entrepreneurs out of business. They’re overwhelmed with client work, then rushing to sell, and again and again. That kind of stress will make anyone think about getting a day job!

As we grew our successful web design agency, we learned that this cycle is just the symptom of a fractured business model. To run a successful business, you need a steady stream of recurring income. This model lets you design while not stressing all the time or worrying about where your next client will come from.

And to do that, you need to shift how you think about design — from a product to a service. In this two-part series, we’ll explain how to use this model to profitably grow your web design business.

Recurring Revenue: The Solution For A Profitable Web Design Business

Once you start thinking about your work as an ongoing service, everything changes. Instead of one-off sales with inconsistent cash flow and constant selling, you’ll be generating income each month with minimal maintenance work, like site refreshes and seasonal updates. And instead of a big project taking all your time, you’ll be able to sign on new clients quickly.

The basis of a service model is recurring payments, where the money comes in without us needing to land a big client or rush to finish up a project. And that stable source of revenue leaves plenty of time to find new clients to keep our pipeline full.

As you grow, you’ll want to focus on one metric: monthly recurring revenue, or MRR. Recurring revenue is like a subscription for your website services, and it’s money you can count on every month.

MRR makes sense because, as a business owner, most costs are billed monthly. You have rent, salaries, electricity, phone, internet, and other expenses that repeat each month. All you’re doing is aligning your income to your costs. Doesn’t that make more sense?

The first step to earning on this scheme is to find your breakeven number. That’s the amount you need to make each month to cover your expenses. First, calculate your one-off and recurring fixed costs. These are expenses like computers, software subscriptions, and salaries. For example, let’s say you’re a one-person agency and you spend $ 500 on software and equipment each month.

Next, you’ll want to add up the variable expenses that increase with each website, like a hosting plan, security, distribution, and taxes. That amount is how much each site will cost you to keep for a month. Maybe in your case, hosting each website for a client will cost $ 10 per month.

If you sell website hosting, maintenance, and updating services at $ 60 per month, you’ll earn $ 50 in profit per site. To meet your goal of $ 500, you only need 10 clients to pay your business expenses. What’s neat about this model is that profit is up to you. Every extra client after your breakeven number is profit—and it’s up to you how much you want to make!

You don’t have to transition your agency or freelance business all at once. You can gradually add MRR clients alongside your big projects until the recurring revenue is enough to support you —making this an attractive model for existing designers looking to break away from the feast-and-famine cycle and start earning a steady income.

This service model is a mindset shift, to be sure, but it’s a smarter way of doing business. To succeed, start thinking in terms of a recurring service — not a one-and-done product.

How To Find The Perfect Pricing Tiers For Your Design Services

There’s a science to pricing your services correctly, and it’s very different from how you might quote a larger project. Here’s the structure we use that helps us grow as fast as possible.

Think of the price point that your target market could afford. (We’ll talk more about target markets in the next section). When you create your pricing, it’s a good idea to have more than one tier. Have at least two options: a basic plan and another package with more features. Different customers have different budgets, and you want prices that are attractive to everyone. We’ve done well with three plans priced at $ 30, $ 50, and $ 100 USD per month.

Each package starts with the initial website creation and ongoing services, such as seasonal changes or site updates. To differentiate your premium tiers, add advanced features like more storage, faster updates, extra subpages, detailed traffic statistics, multilingual support, and more. Just remember, you want to be profitable on all your tiers. Make sure the services provided in each one still work out to the profitability you want. Don’t give away free work!

We also recommend charging an upfront design fee of around $ 500 USD for all tiers in addition to your monthly recurring payment. This fee ensures potential customers are serious and keeps you from losing too much money if a customer quits after just a few months.

We also recommend against ever charging web design agency services by the hour—if that’s how you do it now, consider changing your pricing method. As a designer, your goal is to get faster at designing great websites, and you shouldn’t be punished for this! For example, we developed the website builder Sitejet for our team. It cut our design time by 70%—but we still get paid the same. Our pricing scheme rewards us for efficiency, so we’re always trying to design great sites in less time.

The final strategy for pricing is to keep experimenting. Some customers will want extra services, so test out new pricing tiers as you see fit. Don’t be afraid to try something new!

How To Find The Right Kind Of Customers To Grow Your Business

It’s exciting to scale a business—but the scary part is finding those first few MRR clients, especially if you’ve only ever done one-off projects before. These are the strategies we’ve learned you can use to build up your business and keep it growing.

The first step is to create a unique brand voice, which may be different from the one you have now. Your voice for MRR clients depends a bit on the type of customers you’d like to attract. But in general, you’ll want to sell yourself as an affordable full-service website design agency. You’ll be selling to smaller businesses, focusing on excellent services at a price small and medium businesses (SMBs) can afford.

The key to great marketing is to show how a website leads to more sales. When you work in the web development business, it’s easy to focus on the technical details behind the sites you create, but that’s a mistake. Don’t talk about a custom theme or better UX design. Instead, talk about getting featured on search engines or attracting customers who expect a modern website. We’ll cover this more in the second part of this article series.

We’ve mentioned a few times that you should only look to SMBs at first. But why?

There are a few reasons SMBs are the best place to start. First, SMBs bring in recurring revenue that most big clients can’t offer. Bigger clients expect a lot of work, but most local businesses will be happy to pay $ 50-100 USD per month for small changes like seasonal announcements. These only take a few minutes for you, which is why a lot of small sites usually result in more revenue than a few big projects.

Second, small sites allow you to develop a portfolio quickly, which is helpful when you’re just starting to serve small businesses. If you’re designing new sites every week—instead of every few months—you’ll be able to show off your skills faster, which means it’ll be even easier to find new clients.

And finally, small sites bring security. You’ve probably heard horror stories of designers or agencies with one or two clients. One quits for whatever reason and leaves the designers broke and desperate. The bigger your clients, the less you can afford to lose them, and the riskier your business model becomes.

That’s why we recommend smaller clients, but a lot of them. If an agency with giant clients loses one or two, it can lead to bankruptcy. But if a handful of our clients canceled in one day, it would barely hurt our business. This helped us early on. In just a few months after using the MRR business model, we already had around 50 clients. That steady income let us hire more designers and keep growing the agency.

How To Pick The Best Client Niche For You

The very first MRR client is always the most challenging—where do you look? You might be tempted to visit freelance marketplaces or randomly contact every local business, but don’t! The answer is more straightforward than you might expect. You just need to choose a single vertical or industry to start with. Once you’ve excelled at one niche, you can move to others. Using this strategy, we approached various sectors and are now servicing over 70 different verticals.

Having a narrow niche makes it easier to sell to a prospective customer. For example, let’s say you’re trying to acquire a construction client. The best way to get them interested is to show them another construction website, especially if it’s one with a similar color scheme and branding. Sticking with similar businesses makes this easy.

You’ll also develop skills and a reputation serving this vertical. For example, if you’ve created websites for ten hair salons in your local area, you’ll quickly become the go-to designer for salon owners.

Being the “go-to designer” in a niche will bring in free referrals since local business owners are always looking for peer recommendations.

How should you choose a vertical? Well, start by thinking of areas where you already have experience or references. Ask yourself these questions to find a good match for your expertise and skillset:

“What industries have you worked with before?”

What businesses do you know about?”

“What types of businesses have you worked in before, if any?”

“What local businesses do you know about or use often?”

“What interests do you have in common with various local businesses?”

An easy way to enter a niche is to study the clients you’re already serving. If you helped a corporate cosmetics company, local salons could be an easy fit. But it doesn’t just have to be design experience. If you had a part-time restaurant job in college, love clothes and fashion, or always recommend the same barber to friends, you might have a great starting place.

Once you have this vertical, you’ll want to create buyer personas and target everything towards them. Spend some time planning out exactly who your ideal customers are. Think carefully about what the owners care about, what their days look like, and how a website will help them grow their business.

Do some market research to learn more about your target persona. Searching online is easy, but you can get better information by calling those types of businesses or meeting some business owners. As you gather more information, you can use it to reach more business owners in the same vertical.

As you grow, you can repeat this process to expand into more and more verticals.

How To Find Great Clients

As you find more clients, it’s easy to say yes to everyone. But to stay profitable, you need to focus on your strengths and only take on clients that will help you reach your goals.

First, you want to make sure every client is happy to pay your prices. The tiers help keep you flexible for different budgets, but if a client tries to bargain down your price, it’s a red flag. It’ll be stressful to work with them once you sign them on, and they’re probably not worth the effort. Also look out for clients who ask for special favors since extra work will eat away at your profits.

Note: Of course, if enough clients ask for a specific service, you can consider creating a new tier or adding the feature to an existing package at a fair price. But don’t make special deals with individual clients.

As we mentioned earlier, you should also avoid the temptation of big-ticket projects. While the number seems big, you’ll earn more with smaller websites. It sounds counterintuitive that small sites would make more, but it all comes back to the magic of recurring revenue.

For example, let’s say a potential client asks you to create a sophisticated portal website for $ 10.000 USD. But in the same amount of time, you could build 15 simpler sites. Those smaller sites would generate $ 7.500 USD in setup fees and $ 750 in MRR. After a year, you would have earned almost twice as much from smaller sites than the big project!

You also need to say no if a client asks you to help with other related services, like content marketing or social media. Unless these services are part of your agency growth plan, focus only on website design. The time you spend building a content strategy or promoting on Facebook is time you could be earning more recurring revenue with web design.

A great solution here is to partner with other agencies or freelancers that specialize in these services. If someone asks for a logo or an ad campaign, you can refer them to your colleague, and in turn, they can mention you when their clients ask for website designs.

One of the easiest ways to get more MRR clients for your web design service is word-of-mouth marketing. Your original customers have put their trust in you, and you need to reward that trust with incredible customer service and attention to detail. You can even showcase the sites you develop for them and (with their permission) list them as references to help potential customers make a decision.

Treat your early customers well, provide prompt and friendly service, and you’ll keep them for years to come.

But not only are strong client relationships important for referrals, they also help keep you profitable! The most time-intensive part of your job is finding new clients and designing their site. Every month a client happily pays you, the more profit you make off the original sale.

What We’ve Learned About Growing A Web Design Business

Running a web design agency isn’t easy. Our sincere hope is that some of the things that work for our team will work for you as well. Our agency has been going strong for years now, and the business still runs on the same principles we used when we started. What we’ve shared above is enough to get you started, but it’s only the beginning!

As you grow, you’ll learn strategies that help you become more efficient and identify areas where you can improve. To give you an example: We focused a lot on process efficiency and built our design and management tool Sitejet to reduce the creation time per website by 70% and optimized all customer interaction processes (e.g., feedback management) for more effortless communication. It’s created to help designers grow their business and give back time for what you love: being creative.

Design skills are essential to making a living in the design world. But to succeed, you also need plenty of hard work and a willingness to experiment until you get it right. Start with the right mindset, and you’ll be amazed at what you can build.

In this first part of our series, we’ve explained the basics of finding your first few MRR clients. But to keep growing, you need scalable sales to bring in a steady stream of high-quality clients. That’s what we’ll cover next: the step-by-step methods we’ve learned to scale an agency quickly.

Stay tuned!

Articles on Smashing Magazine — For Web Designers And Developers

18 Mar

How To Get Web Design Clients Fast (Part 1)

by TBSCategories: News

Starting a web design business isn’t difficult. There’s a low barrier to entry, and almost anyone with some kind of design skill can start an agency. But if we’ve learned one thing, it’s that building a successful design business takes more than just web design chops. Whether you’re a freelancer or a full-scale web design company, you’ll encounter the same problems.

In this two-part series, we’ll share the agency growth lessons we’ve learned. In this first part, we break down the pricing model that’s worked best for us and explain how to leverage it in your business. In the next article, we’ll share proven sales techniques you can use as you scale.

Most web designers started freelancing or taking on agency clients because they love design. But if you’ve created a design agency, you know the artistic work often gets put to the side. Instead of working on creative projects, you spend your time on business structure issues and pricing models. Client hassles take up your day. And you’re continually selling just to keep your roster full.

The truth is that to run a successful web design firm, you need to take on the mindset of a business owner. And that’s very different than just designing. Now, you have to juggle client work and growth tasks — you’re either overloaded with work or selling hard to pay next months’ rent.

That dangerous feast-and-famine cycle is what puts a lot of hardworking, creative entrepreneurs out of business. They’re overwhelmed with client work, then rushing to sell, and again and again. That kind of stress will make anyone think about getting a day job!

As we grew our successful web design agency, we learned that this cycle is just the symptom of a fractured business model. To run a successful business, you need a steady stream of recurring income. This model lets you design while not stressing all the time or worrying about where your next client will come from.

And to do that, you need to shift how you think about design — from a product to a service. In this two-part series, we’ll explain how to use this model to profitably grow your web design business.

Recurring Revenue: The Solution For A Profitable Web Design Business

Once you start thinking about your work as an ongoing service, everything changes. Instead of one-off sales with inconsistent cash flow and constant selling, you’ll be generating income each month with minimal maintenance work, like site refreshes and seasonal updates. And instead of a big project taking all your time, you’ll be able to sign on new clients quickly.

The basis of a service model is recurring payments, where the money comes in without us needing to land a big client or rush to finish up a project. And that stable source of revenue leaves plenty of time to find new clients to keep our pipeline full.

As you grow, you’ll want to focus on one metric: monthly recurring revenue, or MRR. Recurring revenue is like a subscription for your website services, and it’s money you can count on every month.

MRR makes sense because, as a business owner, most costs are billed monthly. You have rent, salaries, electricity, phone, internet, and other expenses that repeat each month. All you’re doing is aligning your income to your costs. Doesn’t that make more sense?

The first step to earning on this scheme is to find your breakeven number. That’s the amount you need to make each month to cover your expenses. First, calculate your one-off and recurring fixed costs. These are expenses like computers, software subscriptions, and salaries. For example, let’s say you’re a one-person agency and you spend $ 500 on software and equipment each month.

Next, you’ll want to add up the variable expenses that increase with each website, like a hosting plan, security, distribution, and taxes. That amount is how much each site will cost you to keep for a month. Maybe in your case, hosting each website for a client will cost $ 10 per month.

If you sell website hosting, maintenance, and updating services at $ 60 per month, you’ll earn $ 50 in profit per site. To meet your goal of $ 500, you only need 10 clients to pay your business expenses. What’s neat about this model is that profit is up to you. Every extra client after your breakeven number is profit—and it’s up to you how much you want to make!

You don’t have to transition your agency or freelance business all at once. You can gradually add MRR clients alongside your big projects until the recurring revenue is enough to support you —making this an attractive model for existing designers looking to break away from the feast-and-famine cycle and start earning a steady income.

This service model is a mindset shift, to be sure, but it’s a smarter way of doing business. To succeed, start thinking in terms of a recurring service — not a one-and-done product.

How To Find The Perfect Pricing Tiers For Your Design Services

There’s a science to pricing your services correctly, and it’s very different from how you might quote a larger project. Here’s the structure we use that helps us grow as fast as possible.

Think of the price point that your target market could afford. (We’ll talk more about target markets in the next section). When you create your pricing, it’s a good idea to have more than one tier. Have at least two options: a basic plan and another package with more features. Different customers have different budgets, and you want prices that are attractive to everyone. We’ve done well with three plans priced at $ 30, $ 50, and $ 100 USD per month.

Each package starts with the initial website creation and ongoing services, such as seasonal changes or site updates. To differentiate your premium tiers, add advanced features like more storage, faster updates, extra subpages, detailed traffic statistics, multilingual support, and more. Just remember, you want to be profitable on all your tiers. Make sure the services provided in each one still work out to the profitability you want. Don’t give away free work!

We also recommend charging an upfront design fee of around $ 500 USD for all tiers in addition to your monthly recurring payment. This fee ensures potential customers are serious and keeps you from losing too much money if a customer quits after just a few months.

We also recommend against ever charging web design agency services by the hour—if that’s how you do it now, consider changing your pricing method. As a designer, your goal is to get faster at designing great websites, and you shouldn’t be punished for this! For example, we developed the website builder Sitejet for our team. It cut our design time by 70%—but we still get paid the same. Our pricing scheme rewards us for efficiency, so we’re always trying to design great sites in less time.

The final strategy for pricing is to keep experimenting. Some customers will want extra services, so test out new pricing tiers as you see fit. Don’t be afraid to try something new!

How To Find The Right Kind Of Customers To Grow Your Business

It’s exciting to scale a business—but the scary part is finding those first few MRR clients, especially if you’ve only ever done one-off projects before. These are the strategies we’ve learned you can use to build up your business and keep it growing.

The first step is to create a unique brand voice, which may be different from the one you have now. Your voice for MRR clients depends a bit on the type of customers you’d like to attract. But in general, you’ll want to sell yourself as an affordable full-service website design agency. You’ll be selling to smaller businesses, focusing on excellent services at a price small and medium businesses (SMBs) can afford.

The key to great marketing is to show how a website leads to more sales. When you work in the web development business, it’s easy to focus on the technical details behind the sites you create, but that’s a mistake. Don’t talk about a custom theme or better UX design. Instead, talk about getting featured on search engines or attracting customers who expect a modern website. We’ll cover this more in the second part of this article series.

We’ve mentioned a few times that you should only look to SMBs at first. But why?

There are a few reasons SMBs are the best place to start. First, SMBs bring in recurring revenue that most big clients can’t offer. Bigger clients expect a lot of work, but most local businesses will be happy to pay $ 50-100 USD per month for small changes like seasonal announcements. These only take a few minutes for you, which is why a lot of small sites usually result in more revenue than a few big projects.

Second, small sites allow you to develop a portfolio quickly, which is helpful when you’re just starting to serve small businesses. If you’re designing new sites every week—instead of every few months—you’ll be able to show off your skills faster, which means it’ll be even easier to find new clients.

And finally, small sites bring security. You’ve probably heard horror stories of designers or agencies with one or two clients. One quits for whatever reason and leaves the designers broke and desperate. The bigger your clients, the less you can afford to lose them, and the riskier your business model becomes.

That’s why we recommend smaller clients, but a lot of them. If an agency with giant clients loses one or two, it can lead to bankruptcy. But if a handful of our clients canceled in one day, it would barely hurt our business. This helped us early on. In just a few months after using the MRR business model, we already had around 50 clients. That steady income let us hire more designers and keep growing the agency.

How To Pick The Best Client Niche For You

The very first MRR client is always the most challenging—where do you look? You might be tempted to visit freelance marketplaces or randomly contact every local business, but don’t! The answer is more straightforward than you might expect. You just need to choose a single vertical or industry to start with. Once you’ve excelled at one niche, you can move to others. Using this strategy, we approached various sectors and are now servicing over 70 different verticals.

Having a narrow niche makes it easier to sell to a prospective customer. For example, let’s say you’re trying to acquire a construction client. The best way to get them interested is to show them another construction website, especially if it’s one with a similar color scheme and branding. Sticking with similar businesses makes this easy.

You’ll also develop skills and a reputation serving this vertical. For example, if you’ve created websites for ten hair salons in your local area, you’ll quickly become the go-to designer for salon owners.

Being the “go-to designer” in a niche will bring in free referrals since local business owners are always looking for peer recommendations.

How should you choose a vertical? Well, start by thinking of areas where you already have experience or references. Ask yourself these questions to find a good match for your expertise and skillset:

“What industries have you worked with before?”

What businesses do you know about?”

“What types of businesses have you worked in before, if any?”

“What local businesses do you know about or use often?”

“What interests do you have in common with various local businesses?”

An easy way to enter a niche is to study the clients you’re already serving. If you helped a corporate cosmetics company, local salons could be an easy fit. But it doesn’t just have to be design experience. If you had a part-time restaurant job in college, love clothes and fashion, or always recommend the same barber to friends, you might have a great starting place.

Once you have this vertical, you’ll want to create buyer personas and target everything towards them. Spend some time planning out exactly who your ideal customers are. Think carefully about what the owners care about, what their days look like, and how a website will help them grow their business.

Do some market research to learn more about your target persona. Searching online is easy, but you can get better information by calling those types of businesses or meeting some business owners. As you gather more information, you can use it to reach more business owners in the same vertical.

As you grow, you can repeat this process to expand into more and more verticals.

How To Find Great Clients

As you find more clients, it’s easy to say yes to everyone. But to stay profitable, you need to focus on your strengths and only take on clients that will help you reach your goals.

First, you want to make sure every client is happy to pay your prices. The tiers help keep you flexible for different budgets, but if a client tries to bargain down your price, it’s a red flag. It’ll be stressful to work with them once you sign them on, and they’re probably not worth the effort. Also look out for clients who ask for special favors since extra work will eat away at your profits.

Note: Of course, if enough clients ask for a specific service, you can consider creating a new tier or adding the feature to an existing package at a fair price. But don’t make special deals with individual clients.

As we mentioned earlier, you should also avoid the temptation of big-ticket projects. While the number seems big, you’ll earn more with smaller websites. It sounds counterintuitive that small sites would make more, but it all comes back to the magic of recurring revenue.

For example, let’s say a potential client asks you to create a sophisticated portal website for $ 10.000 USD. But in the same amount of time, you could build 15 simpler sites. Those smaller sites would generate $ 7.500 USD in setup fees and $ 750 in MRR. After a year, you would have earned almost twice as much from smaller sites than the big project!

You also need to say no if a client asks you to help with other related services, like content marketing or social media. Unless these services are part of your agency growth plan, focus only on website design. The time you spend building a content strategy or promoting on Facebook is time you could be earning more recurring revenue with web design.

A great solution here is to partner with other agencies or freelancers that specialize in these services. If someone asks for a logo or an ad campaign, you can refer them to your colleague, and in turn, they can mention you when their clients ask for website designs.

One of the easiest ways to get more MRR clients for your web design service is word-of-mouth marketing. Your original customers have put their trust in you, and you need to reward that trust with incredible customer service and attention to detail. You can even showcase the sites you develop for them and (with their permission) list them as references to help potential customers make a decision.

Treat your early customers well, provide prompt and friendly service, and you’ll keep them for years to come.

But not only are strong client relationships important for referrals, they also help keep you profitable! The most time-intensive part of your job is finding new clients and designing their site. Every month a client happily pays you, the more profit you make off the original sale.

What We’ve Learned About Growing A Web Design Business

Running a web design agency isn’t easy. Our sincere hope is that some of the things that work for our team will work for you as well. Our agency has been going strong for years now, and the business still runs on the same principles we used when we started. What we’ve shared above is enough to get you started, but it’s only the beginning!

As you grow, you’ll learn strategies that help you become more efficient and identify areas where you can improve. To give you an example: We focused a lot on process efficiency and built our design and management tool Sitejet to reduce the creation time per website by 70% and optimized all customer interaction processes (e.g., feedback management) for more effortless communication. It’s created to help designers grow their business and give back time for what you love: being creative.

Design skills are essential to making a living in the design world. But to succeed, you also need plenty of hard work and a willingness to experiment until you get it right. Start with the right mindset, and you’ll be amazed at what you can build.

In this first part of our series, we’ve explained the basics of finding your first few MRR clients. But to keep growing, you need scalable sales to bring in a steady stream of high-quality clients. That’s what we’ll cover next: the step-by-step methods we’ve learned to scale an agency quickly.

Stay tuned!

Articles on Smashing Magazine — For Web Designers And Developers

18 Mar

How To Get Web Design Clients Fast (Part 1)

by TBSCategories: News

Starting a web design business isn’t difficult. There’s a low barrier to entry, and almost anyone with some kind of design skill can start an agency. But if we’ve learned one thing, it’s that building a successful design business takes more than just web design chops. Whether you’re a freelancer or a full-scale web design company, you’ll encounter the same problems.

In this two-part series, we’ll share the agency growth lessons we’ve learned. In this first part, we break down the pricing model that’s worked best for us and explain how to leverage it in your business. In the next article, we’ll share proven sales techniques you can use as you scale.

Most web designers started freelancing or taking on agency clients because they love design. But if you’ve created a design agency, you know the artistic work often gets put to the side. Instead of working on creative projects, you spend your time on business structure issues and pricing models. Client hassles take up your day. And you’re continually selling just to keep your roster full.

The truth is that to run a successful web design firm, you need to take on the mindset of a business owner. And that’s very different than just designing. Now, you have to juggle client work and growth tasks — you’re either overloaded with work or selling hard to pay next months’ rent.

That dangerous feast-and-famine cycle is what puts a lot of hardworking, creative entrepreneurs out of business. They’re overwhelmed with client work, then rushing to sell, and again and again. That kind of stress will make anyone think about getting a day job!

As we grew our successful web design agency, we learned that this cycle is just the symptom of a fractured business model. To run a successful business, you need a steady stream of recurring income. This model lets you design while not stressing all the time or worrying about where your next client will come from.

And to do that, you need to shift how you think about design — from a product to a service. In this two-part series, we’ll explain how to use this model to profitably grow your web design business.

Recurring Revenue: The Solution For A Profitable Web Design Business

Once you start thinking about your work as an ongoing service, everything changes. Instead of one-off sales with inconsistent cash flow and constant selling, you’ll be generating income each month with minimal maintenance work, like site refreshes and seasonal updates. And instead of a big project taking all your time, you’ll be able to sign on new clients quickly.

The basis of a service model is recurring payments, where the money comes in without us needing to land a big client or rush to finish up a project. And that stable source of revenue leaves plenty of time to find new clients to keep our pipeline full.

As you grow, you’ll want to focus on one metric: monthly recurring revenue, or MRR. Recurring revenue is like a subscription for your website services, and it’s money you can count on every month.

MRR makes sense because, as a business owner, most costs are billed monthly. You have rent, salaries, electricity, phone, internet, and other expenses that repeat each month. All you’re doing is aligning your income to your costs. Doesn’t that make more sense?

The first step to earning on this scheme is to find your breakeven number. That’s the amount you need to make each month to cover your expenses. First, calculate your one-off and recurring fixed costs. These are expenses like computers, software subscriptions, and salaries. For example, let’s say you’re a one-person agency and you spend $ 500 on software and equipment each month.

Next, you’ll want to add up the variable expenses that increase with each website, like a hosting plan, security, distribution, and taxes. That amount is how much each site will cost you to keep for a month. Maybe in your case, hosting each website for a client will cost $ 10 per month.

If you sell website hosting, maintenance, and updating services at $ 60 per month, you’ll earn $ 50 in profit per site. To meet your goal of $ 500, you only need 10 clients to pay your business expenses. What’s neat about this model is that profit is up to you. Every extra client after your breakeven number is profit—and it’s up to you how much you want to make!

You don’t have to transition your agency or freelance business all at once. You can gradually add MRR clients alongside your big projects until the recurring revenue is enough to support you —making this an attractive model for existing designers looking to break away from the feast-and-famine cycle and start earning a steady income.

This service model is a mindset shift, to be sure, but it’s a smarter way of doing business. To succeed, start thinking in terms of a recurring service — not a one-and-done product.

How To Find The Perfect Pricing Tiers For Your Design Services

There’s a science to pricing your services correctly, and it’s very different from how you might quote a larger project. Here’s the structure we use that helps us grow as fast as possible.

Think of the price point that your target market could afford. (We’ll talk more about target markets in the next section). When you create your pricing, it’s a good idea to have more than one tier. Have at least two options: a basic plan and another package with more features. Different customers have different budgets, and you want prices that are attractive to everyone. We’ve done well with three plans priced at $ 30, $ 50, and $ 100 USD per month.

Each package starts with the initial website creation and ongoing services, such as seasonal changes or site updates. To differentiate your premium tiers, add advanced features like more storage, faster updates, extra subpages, detailed traffic statistics, multilingual support, and more. Just remember, you want to be profitable on all your tiers. Make sure the services provided in each one still work out to the profitability you want. Don’t give away free work!

We also recommend charging an upfront design fee of around $ 500 USD for all tiers in addition to your monthly recurring payment. This fee ensures potential customers are serious and keeps you from losing too much money if a customer quits after just a few months.

We also recommend against ever charging web design agency services by the hour—if that’s how you do it now, consider changing your pricing method. As a designer, your goal is to get faster at designing great websites, and you shouldn’t be punished for this! For example, we developed the website builder Sitejet for our team. It cut our design time by 70%—but we still get paid the same. Our pricing scheme rewards us for efficiency, so we’re always trying to design great sites in less time.

The final strategy for pricing is to keep experimenting. Some customers will want extra services, so test out new pricing tiers as you see fit. Don’t be afraid to try something new!

How To Find The Right Kind Of Customers To Grow Your Business

It’s exciting to scale a business—but the scary part is finding those first few MRR clients, especially if you’ve only ever done one-off projects before. These are the strategies we’ve learned you can use to build up your business and keep it growing.

The first step is to create a unique brand voice, which may be different from the one you have now. Your voice for MRR clients depends a bit on the type of customers you’d like to attract. But in general, you’ll want to sell yourself as an affordable full-service website design agency. You’ll be selling to smaller businesses, focusing on excellent services at a price small and medium businesses (SMBs) can afford.

The key to great marketing is to show how a website leads to more sales. When you work in the web development business, it’s easy to focus on the technical details behind the sites you create, but that’s a mistake. Don’t talk about a custom theme or better UX design. Instead, talk about getting featured on search engines or attracting customers who expect a modern website. We’ll cover this more in the second part of this article series.

We’ve mentioned a few times that you should only look to SMBs at first. But why?

There are a few reasons SMBs are the best place to start. First, SMBs bring in recurring revenue that most big clients can’t offer. Bigger clients expect a lot of work, but most local businesses will be happy to pay $ 50-100 USD per month for small changes like seasonal announcements. These only take a few minutes for you, which is why a lot of small sites usually result in more revenue than a few big projects.

Second, small sites allow you to develop a portfolio quickly, which is helpful when you’re just starting to serve small businesses. If you’re designing new sites every week—instead of every few months—you’ll be able to show off your skills faster, which means it’ll be even easier to find new clients.

And finally, small sites bring security. You’ve probably heard horror stories of designers or agencies with one or two clients. One quits for whatever reason and leaves the designers broke and desperate. The bigger your clients, the less you can afford to lose them, and the riskier your business model becomes.

That’s why we recommend smaller clients, but a lot of them. If an agency with giant clients loses one or two, it can lead to bankruptcy. But if a handful of our clients canceled in one day, it would barely hurt our business. This helped us early on. In just a few months after using the MRR business model, we already had around 50 clients. That steady income let us hire more designers and keep growing the agency.

How To Pick The Best Client Niche For You

The very first MRR client is always the most challenging—where do you look? You might be tempted to visit freelance marketplaces or randomly contact every local business, but don’t! The answer is more straightforward than you might expect. You just need to choose a single vertical or industry to start with. Once you’ve excelled at one niche, you can move to others. Using this strategy, we approached various sectors and are now servicing over 70 different verticals.

Having a narrow niche makes it easier to sell to a prospective customer. For example, let’s say you’re trying to acquire a construction client. The best way to get them interested is to show them another construction website, especially if it’s one with a similar color scheme and branding. Sticking with similar businesses makes this easy.

You’ll also develop skills and a reputation serving this vertical. For example, if you’ve created websites for ten hair salons in your local area, you’ll quickly become the go-to designer for salon owners.

Being the “go-to designer” in a niche will bring in free referrals since local business owners are always looking for peer recommendations.

How should you choose a vertical? Well, start by thinking of areas where you already have experience or references. Ask yourself these questions to find a good match for your expertise and skillset:

“What industries have you worked with before?”

What businesses do you know about?”

“What types of businesses have you worked in before, if any?”

“What local businesses do you know about or use often?”

“What interests do you have in common with various local businesses?”

An easy way to enter a niche is to study the clients you’re already serving. If you helped a corporate cosmetics company, local salons could be an easy fit. But it doesn’t just have to be design experience. If you had a part-time restaurant job in college, love clothes and fashion, or always recommend the same barber to friends, you might have a great starting place.

Once you have this vertical, you’ll want to create buyer personas and target everything towards them. Spend some time planning out exactly who your ideal customers are. Think carefully about what the owners care about, what their days look like, and how a website will help them grow their business.

Do some market research to learn more about your target persona. Searching online is easy, but you can get better information by calling those types of businesses or meeting some business owners. As you gather more information, you can use it to reach more business owners in the same vertical.

As you grow, you can repeat this process to expand into more and more verticals.

How To Find Great Clients

As you find more clients, it’s easy to say yes to everyone. But to stay profitable, you need to focus on your strengths and only take on clients that will help you reach your goals.

First, you want to make sure every client is happy to pay your prices. The tiers help keep you flexible for different budgets, but if a client tries to bargain down your price, it’s a red flag. It’ll be stressful to work with them once you sign them on, and they’re probably not worth the effort. Also look out for clients who ask for special favors since extra work will eat away at your profits.

Note: Of course, if enough clients ask for a specific service, you can consider creating a new tier or adding the feature to an existing package at a fair price. But don’t make special deals with individual clients.

As we mentioned earlier, you should also avoid the temptation of big-ticket projects. While the number seems big, you’ll earn more with smaller websites. It sounds counterintuitive that small sites would make more, but it all comes back to the magic of recurring revenue.

For example, let’s say a potential client asks you to create a sophisticated portal website for $ 10.000 USD. But in the same amount of time, you could build 15 simpler sites. Those smaller sites would generate $ 7.500 USD in setup fees and $ 750 in MRR. After a year, you would have earned almost twice as much from smaller sites than the big project!

You also need to say no if a client asks you to help with other related services, like content marketing or social media. Unless these services are part of your agency growth plan, focus only on website design. The time you spend building a content strategy or promoting on Facebook is time you could be earning more recurring revenue with web design.

A great solution here is to partner with other agencies or freelancers that specialize in these services. If someone asks for a logo or an ad campaign, you can refer them to your colleague, and in turn, they can mention you when their clients ask for website designs.

One of the easiest ways to get more MRR clients for your web design service is word-of-mouth marketing. Your original customers have put their trust in you, and you need to reward that trust with incredible customer service and attention to detail. You can even showcase the sites you develop for them and (with their permission) list them as references to help potential customers make a decision.

Treat your early customers well, provide prompt and friendly service, and you’ll keep them for years to come.

But not only are strong client relationships important for referrals, they also help keep you profitable! The most time-intensive part of your job is finding new clients and designing their site. Every month a client happily pays you, the more profit you make off the original sale.

What We’ve Learned About Growing A Web Design Business

Running a web design agency isn’t easy. Our sincere hope is that some of the things that work for our team will work for you as well. Our agency has been going strong for years now, and the business still runs on the same principles we used when we started. What we’ve shared above is enough to get you started, but it’s only the beginning!

As you grow, you’ll learn strategies that help you become more efficient and identify areas where you can improve. To give you an example: We focused a lot on process efficiency and built our design and management tool Sitejet to reduce the creation time per website by 70% and optimized all customer interaction processes (e.g., feedback management) for more effortless communication. It’s created to help designers grow their business and give back time for what you love: being creative.

Design skills are essential to making a living in the design world. But to succeed, you also need plenty of hard work and a willingness to experiment until you get it right. Start with the right mindset, and you’ll be amazed at what you can build.

In this first part of our series, we’ve explained the basics of finding your first few MRR clients. But to keep growing, you need scalable sales to bring in a steady stream of high-quality clients. That’s what we’ll cover next: the step-by-step methods we’ve learned to scale an agency quickly.

Stay tuned!

Articles on Smashing Magazine — For Web Designers And Developers

18 Mar

How To Get Web Design Clients Fast (Part 1)

by TBSCategories: News

Starting a web design business isn’t difficult. There’s a low barrier to entry, and almost anyone with some kind of design skill can start an agency. But if we’ve learned one thing, it’s that building a successful design business takes more than just web design chops. Whether you’re a freelancer or a full-scale web design company, you’ll encounter the same problems.

In this two-part series, we’ll share the agency growth lessons we’ve learned. In this first part, we break down the pricing model that’s worked best for us and explain how to leverage it in your business. In the next article, we’ll share proven sales techniques you can use as you scale.

Most web designers started freelancing or taking on agency clients because they love design. But if you’ve created a design agency, you know the artistic work often gets put to the side. Instead of working on creative projects, you spend your time on business structure issues and pricing models. Client hassles take up your day. And you’re continually selling just to keep your roster full.

The truth is that to run a successful web design firm, you need to take on the mindset of a business owner. And that’s very different than just designing. Now, you have to juggle client work and growth tasks — you’re either overloaded with work or selling hard to pay next months’ rent.

That dangerous feast-and-famine cycle is what puts a lot of hardworking, creative entrepreneurs out of business. They’re overwhelmed with client work, then rushing to sell, and again and again. That kind of stress will make anyone think about getting a day job!

As we grew our successful web design agency, we learned that this cycle is just the symptom of a fractured business model. To run a successful business, you need a steady stream of recurring income. This model lets you design while not stressing all the time or worrying about where your next client will come from.

And to do that, you need to shift how you think about design — from a product to a service. In this two-part series, we’ll explain how to use this model to profitably grow your web design business.

Recurring Revenue: The Solution For A Profitable Web Design Business

Once you start thinking about your work as an ongoing service, everything changes. Instead of one-off sales with inconsistent cash flow and constant selling, you’ll be generating income each month with minimal maintenance work, like site refreshes and seasonal updates. And instead of a big project taking all your time, you’ll be able to sign on new clients quickly.

The basis of a service model is recurring payments, where the money comes in without us needing to land a big client or rush to finish up a project. And that stable source of revenue leaves plenty of time to find new clients to keep our pipeline full.

As you grow, you’ll want to focus on one metric: monthly recurring revenue, or MRR. Recurring revenue is like a subscription for your website services, and it’s money you can count on every month.

MRR makes sense because, as a business owner, most costs are billed monthly. You have rent, salaries, electricity, phone, internet, and other expenses that repeat each month. All you’re doing is aligning your income to your costs. Doesn’t that make more sense?

The first step to earning on this scheme is to find your breakeven number. That’s the amount you need to make each month to cover your expenses. First, calculate your one-off and recurring fixed costs. These are expenses like computers, software subscriptions, and salaries. For example, let’s say you’re a one-person agency and you spend $ 500 on software and equipment each month.

Next, you’ll want to add up the variable expenses that increase with each website, like a hosting plan, security, distribution, and taxes. That amount is how much each site will cost you to keep for a month. Maybe in your case, hosting each website for a client will cost $ 10 per month.

If you sell website hosting, maintenance, and updating services at $ 60 per month, you’ll earn $ 50 in profit per site. To meet your goal of $ 500, you only need 10 clients to pay your business expenses. What’s neat about this model is that profit is up to you. Every extra client after your breakeven number is profit—and it’s up to you how much you want to make!

You don’t have to transition your agency or freelance business all at once. You can gradually add MRR clients alongside your big projects until the recurring revenue is enough to support you —making this an attractive model for existing designers looking to break away from the feast-and-famine cycle and start earning a steady income.

This service model is a mindset shift, to be sure, but it’s a smarter way of doing business. To succeed, start thinking in terms of a recurring service — not a one-and-done product.

How To Find The Perfect Pricing Tiers For Your Design Services

There’s a science to pricing your services correctly, and it’s very different from how you might quote a larger project. Here’s the structure we use that helps us grow as fast as possible.

Think of the price point that your target market could afford. (We’ll talk more about target markets in the next section). When you create your pricing, it’s a good idea to have more than one tier. Have at least two options: a basic plan and another package with more features. Different customers have different budgets, and you want prices that are attractive to everyone. We’ve done well with three plans priced at $ 30, $ 50, and $ 100 USD per month.

Each package starts with the initial website creation and ongoing services, such as seasonal changes or site updates. To differentiate your premium tiers, add advanced features like more storage, faster updates, extra subpages, detailed traffic statistics, multilingual support, and more. Just remember, you want to be profitable on all your tiers. Make sure the services provided in each one still work out to the profitability you want. Don’t give away free work!

We also recommend charging an upfront design fee of around $ 500 USD for all tiers in addition to your monthly recurring payment. This fee ensures potential customers are serious and keeps you from losing too much money if a customer quits after just a few months.

We also recommend against ever charging web design agency services by the hour—if that’s how you do it now, consider changing your pricing method. As a designer, your goal is to get faster at designing great websites, and you shouldn’t be punished for this! For example, we developed the website builder Sitejet for our team. It cut our design time by 70%—but we still get paid the same. Our pricing scheme rewards us for efficiency, so we’re always trying to design great sites in less time.

The final strategy for pricing is to keep experimenting. Some customers will want extra services, so test out new pricing tiers as you see fit. Don’t be afraid to try something new!

How To Find The Right Kind Of Customers To Grow Your Business

It’s exciting to scale a business—but the scary part is finding those first few MRR clients, especially if you’ve only ever done one-off projects before. These are the strategies we’ve learned you can use to build up your business and keep it growing.

The first step is to create a unique brand voice, which may be different from the one you have now. Your voice for MRR clients depends a bit on the type of customers you’d like to attract. But in general, you’ll want to sell yourself as an affordable full-service website design agency. You’ll be selling to smaller businesses, focusing on excellent services at a price small and medium businesses (SMBs) can afford.

The key to great marketing is to show how a website leads to more sales. When you work in the web development business, it’s easy to focus on the technical details behind the sites you create, but that’s a mistake. Don’t talk about a custom theme or better UX design. Instead, talk about getting featured on search engines or attracting customers who expect a modern website. We’ll cover this more in the second part of this article series.

We’ve mentioned a few times that you should only look to SMBs at first. But why?

There are a few reasons SMBs are the best place to start. First, SMBs bring in recurring revenue that most big clients can’t offer. Bigger clients expect a lot of work, but most local businesses will be happy to pay $ 50-100 USD per month for small changes like seasonal announcements. These only take a few minutes for you, which is why a lot of small sites usually result in more revenue than a few big projects.

Second, small sites allow you to develop a portfolio quickly, which is helpful when you’re just starting to serve small businesses. If you’re designing new sites every week—instead of every few months—you’ll be able to show off your skills faster, which means it’ll be even easier to find new clients.

And finally, small sites bring security. You’ve probably heard horror stories of designers or agencies with one or two clients. One quits for whatever reason and leaves the designers broke and desperate. The bigger your clients, the less you can afford to lose them, and the riskier your business model becomes.

That’s why we recommend smaller clients, but a lot of them. If an agency with giant clients loses one or two, it can lead to bankruptcy. But if a handful of our clients canceled in one day, it would barely hurt our business. This helped us early on. In just a few months after using the MRR business model, we already had around 50 clients. That steady income let us hire more designers and keep growing the agency.

How To Pick The Best Client Niche For You

The very first MRR client is always the most challenging—where do you look? You might be tempted to visit freelance marketplaces or randomly contact every local business, but don’t! The answer is more straightforward than you might expect. You just need to choose a single vertical or industry to start with. Once you’ve excelled at one niche, you can move to others. Using this strategy, we approached various sectors and are now servicing over 70 different verticals.

Having a narrow niche makes it easier to sell to a prospective customer. For example, let’s say you’re trying to acquire a construction client. The best way to get them interested is to show them another construction website, especially if it’s one with a similar color scheme and branding. Sticking with similar businesses makes this easy.

You’ll also develop skills and a reputation serving this vertical. For example, if you’ve created websites for ten hair salons in your local area, you’ll quickly become the go-to designer for salon owners.

Being the “go-to designer” in a niche will bring in free referrals since local business owners are always looking for peer recommendations.

How should you choose a vertical? Well, start by thinking of areas where you already have experience or references. Ask yourself these questions to find a good match for your expertise and skillset:

“What industries have you worked with before?”

What businesses do you know about?”

“What types of businesses have you worked in before, if any?”

“What local businesses do you know about or use often?”

“What interests do you have in common with various local businesses?”

An easy way to enter a niche is to study the clients you’re already serving. If you helped a corporate cosmetics company, local salons could be an easy fit. But it doesn’t just have to be design experience. If you had a part-time restaurant job in college, love clothes and fashion, or always recommend the same barber to friends, you might have a great starting place.

Once you have this vertical, you’ll want to create buyer personas and target everything towards them. Spend some time planning out exactly who your ideal customers are. Think carefully about what the owners care about, what their days look like, and how a website will help them grow their business.

Do some market research to learn more about your target persona. Searching online is easy, but you can get better information by calling those types of businesses or meeting some business owners. As you gather more information, you can use it to reach more business owners in the same vertical.

As you grow, you can repeat this process to expand into more and more verticals.

How To Find Great Clients

As you find more clients, it’s easy to say yes to everyone. But to stay profitable, you need to focus on your strengths and only take on clients that will help you reach your goals.

First, you want to make sure every client is happy to pay your prices. The tiers help keep you flexible for different budgets, but if a client tries to bargain down your price, it’s a red flag. It’ll be stressful to work with them once you sign them on, and they’re probably not worth the effort. Also look out for clients who ask for special favors since extra work will eat away at your profits.

Note: Of course, if enough clients ask for a specific service, you can consider creating a new tier or adding the feature to an existing package at a fair price. But don’t make special deals with individual clients.

As we mentioned earlier, you should also avoid the temptation of big-ticket projects. While the number seems big, you’ll earn more with smaller websites. It sounds counterintuitive that small sites would make more, but it all comes back to the magic of recurring revenue.

For example, let’s say a potential client asks you to create a sophisticated portal website for $ 10.000 USD. But in the same amount of time, you could build 15 simpler sites. Those smaller sites would generate $ 7.500 USD in setup fees and $ 750 in MRR. After a year, you would have earned almost twice as much from smaller sites than the big project!

You also need to say no if a client asks you to help with other related services, like content marketing or social media. Unless these services are part of your agency growth plan, focus only on website design. The time you spend building a content strategy or promoting on Facebook is time you could be earning more recurring revenue with web design.

A great solution here is to partner with other agencies or freelancers that specialize in these services. If someone asks for a logo or an ad campaign, you can refer them to your colleague, and in turn, they can mention you when their clients ask for website designs.

One of the easiest ways to get more MRR clients for your web design service is word-of-mouth marketing. Your original customers have put their trust in you, and you need to reward that trust with incredible customer service and attention to detail. You can even showcase the sites you develop for them and (with their permission) list them as references to help potential customers make a decision.

Treat your early customers well, provide prompt and friendly service, and you’ll keep them for years to come.

But not only are strong client relationships important for referrals, they also help keep you profitable! The most time-intensive part of your job is finding new clients and designing their site. Every month a client happily pays you, the more profit you make off the original sale.

What We’ve Learned About Growing A Web Design Business

Running a web design agency isn’t easy. Our sincere hope is that some of the things that work for our team will work for you as well. Our agency has been going strong for years now, and the business still runs on the same principles we used when we started. What we’ve shared above is enough to get you started, but it’s only the beginning!

As you grow, you’ll learn strategies that help you become more efficient and identify areas where you can improve. To give you an example: We focused a lot on process efficiency and built our design and management tool Sitejet to reduce the creation time per website by 70% and optimized all customer interaction processes (e.g., feedback management) for more effortless communication. It’s created to help designers grow their business and give back time for what you love: being creative.

Design skills are essential to making a living in the design world. But to succeed, you also need plenty of hard work and a willingness to experiment until you get it right. Start with the right mindset, and you’ll be amazed at what you can build.

In this first part of our series, we’ve explained the basics of finding your first few MRR clients. But to keep growing, you need scalable sales to bring in a steady stream of high-quality clients. That’s what we’ll cover next: the step-by-step methods we’ve learned to scale an agency quickly.

Stay tuned!

Articles on Smashing Magazine — For Web Designers And Developers

04 Nov

How To Build Rapport With Your Web Design Clients

by TBSCategories: News

Working as a freelancer in the creative space is rife with obstacles. Some we can see coming, others we can’t.

One of the challenges that many freelance web designers face in their first few years is managing client relationships. We’ve all heard about — and experienced — the horrors of clients running amok on our work, turning a piece of thoughtfully-considered design into a playground of questionable ideas that often run against best practice.

When these situations are not managed delicately, the client-designer relationship can break down, invoices may go unpaid, and as a result, websites go unlaunched. This is a scenario that no designer — or indeed no client — wants to be a part of.

In this article, I’m going to teach some strategies for managing client communication and processes that have helped me to run less stressful projects and achieve better results, as well as draw upon some best practices to help you manage the business side of your work.

My False Start

When I started freelancing in 2009, I had very little experience in dealing with clients. I’d only graduated from university two years prior and had been in a steady job ever since. And that job was in-house at an office supplies company, which means that the closest I came to having a client was my boss, which is nothing like the client-designer relationship at all.

Thus, once I started my own practice, I was not equipped with strategies for managing clients and expectations. As you might imagine, things didn’t go very well.

As a result, working with a diverse range of clients, from small to large and with varying technical requirements was a challenge. My business acumen left a lot to be desired, and I knew it. I was not confident in my sales skills and this mindset shook the very foundation of my service. It led to me producing lesser-quality, lower-paid work for clients who had little understanding of the design process.

At the time, I blamed the clients. But, in hindsight, I see that the problem was being caused by the way that I was doing business. I would wonder how other designers — those well-known faces in the industry — managed to produce much better, more profitable work and seem happy about it. This was truly an enigma to me at the time, and as I said: it was easier to blame others than to look inward and resolve the problem at its core.

What Was The Problem?

The main issue was one of mindset. When I dug down, I realized that I didn’t consider myself worthy of their business. This manifested in a lack of confidence in my work and some eye-wateringly low prices.

“We need a homepage design with unlimited revisions — how much?”

“£20.”

Ouch.

Frankly, it doesn’t matter if you’re reading this as a new freelancer, an experienced business owner or an in-house designer; if your mindset is not geared toward building confidence and rapport in your professional relationships, you’ll constantly face challenges in dealing with other people.

I realized over time that the way I was looking at my business was upside down. I focused too much on the output (the website design, the money) and not the input (building a relationship with the client).

So I switched it around.

Developing Relationships (Not Just Websites)

In business, at least a part of your motivation must be to develop relationships with clients. It’s important to recognize that clients work with you to solve their business problems. They’re not buying a website: they’re buying a tool to reach some business goal. It took me years to fully appreciate that clients care very little about your tech skills or design flair. They care much more deeply about your ability to help them reach their goals and, less-apparently, how you make them feel during that process.

To earn respect from your clients and to establish yourself as an authority in your area of work, you need to look beyond your core skill-set. You need to put processes in place, backed by a growth mindset that will see you handle tough situations. Here are some top tips for doing that:

1. Get Your Formal Processes In Place, And Follow Them

When starting out as a freelancer it is tempting to work without a contract and without taking a deposit payment. This is a problem because according to a private survey conducted by creative freelancer platform YunoJuno, 55% of its UK members have not been paid for work at some point in their career.

Putting procedures in place isn’t a silver bullet, but it can mitigate the risk. If you’re operating without contracts and deposit payments, you face two very real problems:

  • You have less security.
  • You’ll be taken less seriously.

Your client could cancel the project or make unreasonable requests of you. It is vital to establish the goalposts in a written contract, and take at least some of the payment upfront. This gives you security and leverage if things start to go wrong.

“I’ve been stiffed by clients, experienced scope creep like you couldn’t imagine, spent months on a ‘rush job’, and on occasion, completely lost track of half-completed projects.”

— Jenny Knizner, VP of marketing at job portal Moon-lighting

When you take the time to put processes in place, those formalities that you once considered inconvenient can really become a saving grace.

But perhaps most importantly of all, following these basic rules helps to establish you as a professional. It sends out a message that you take your work and your time seriously. And if a prospective client is reluctant to make any contractual commitments, that’s a pretty good sign for what working with them might be like.

The foundation for leveling-up your web design business starts by tackling the basics.

2. Don’t Hide Behind Your Email

To establish rapport with your client, you’re going to have to talk to them. Face-to-face meetings in person are great, but so are video calls. And there is really no excuse to not do at least do the latter, especially since we’re all familiar with video conferencing now.

As industry veteran Paul Boag explains in his book Digital Adaptation:

“Digital does not work well in a world of departmental divisions. People need to sit together, work together, and solve problems together.”

This means you need to spend real time with your clients, doing real work, and not skirt around big topics over email or any lesser medium.

Distance creates disconnect, and email sure creates some distance. It has its uses, but when it comes to discussing big ideas, it can be very limiting. If you want to be seen as a project leader, somebody who knows their stuff and can be trusted, it means showing your face once in a while. It means giving your client (and the project) the time and space it deserves to grow and evolve.

Web design is a service-led industry, and good service is built on clear communication.

3. Get To Know Your Clients

Clients are people. People have motivations, dreams, fears and problems just like you. It’s so easy, especially if you hold them at arm’s length, to see clients simply as projects. You’ll have a significantly easier time if you earn their trust by getting to know them. They will be more likely to pay you on time and respect your design decisions. Trust is not earned through emails where you only talk about work. Trust is built by taking the time to speak, face to face, about things other than work. Don’t be afraid to make small talk about weekend plans or current affairs, and observe how your relationship matures to a point of mutual respect.

“It’s in small talk, in conversations unrelated to work, where we explore other aspects of the person with whom we’re conversing… Big relationships are built on small talk.”

— David Burkus, author of “Friend of a Friend”

When was the last time you spoke with a client about something other than your work? Take the time to do this to strengthen your relationship, but be mindful of the line between friendship and a professional partnership. Be friendly with your clients, but know that they’re not your friends. This blurring of boundaries can lead to a relaxing of your professional processes, and before you know it you’re chatting at 9 PM and doing everything for “mates rates”.

4. Build Long-Term Relationships

If you want to truly build a business, and not become some transient freelancer who ultimately gives up and goes back into full-time employment, you need to think of your client relationships in the longer term.

This means digging into their goals and their business well-beyond what your project will deliver in the first instance. Consider how you can help them in other ways: read an article relevant to them? Send them it. Stumbled across a new piece of software that could make them more efficient? Recommend it to them. Find ways of delivering value to them, and it will come back to you in more work and referrals.

Repeat business is important because the average repeat customer spends 67% more in months 31-36 of their relationship with a business than they do in months 0-6. This particular study pertains to e-commerce sales but I have seen similar patterns in the B2B space also. It’s really all about trust. Once you’ve earned it, they’ll come back for more.

Taking the time to foster a relationship with your client helps to shift your thinking away from seeing them as a means to pay the rent this month, to looking at them more as a long term partner.

5. Practice Your Self-Development

If you’re anything like me, achieving the previous four points would have felt like a steep hill to climb when I started over 10 years ago. Being able to really grasp a piece of work and manage the project and people effectively takes experience, confidence, and skill.

For the main part, much of this depends on peeking outside your comfort zone. Running video calls with multiple stakeholders, managing conversations with clients, and insisting on good practices (such as contract signing) all require a level of assertiveness that doesn’t come naturally to many people.

If you struggle with self-confidence and feel ready to build your resilience, read up on things like positive affirmations and assertiveness skills. These “self-help” ideas are easy to sneer at but they will provide you with practical tools to seriously boost your confidence and grow as a professional.

In Summary, The Product Comes Second To The Service You Deliver

Website development is a service. Clients pay for the end product, but the experience they have in working with you will be remembered. How you make people feel matters.

To quote Simon Sinek’s book Start with Why as mentioned above:

“People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it.”

If you want to do better work for more money and be respected along the way, taking the time to grow as a professional and go the extra mile in how you manage clients can do a lot for you.

Whether you’re embarking on a freelance career, or you’ve been around for a while, I urge you to invest some time in reflecting on your work process and communication skills. Reflect on how you’ve done business to date, and consider what the next 3 years might look like for you. The service element of the web design industry is only getting more competitive, sophisticated, and demanding. But with demand comes amazing opportunities. Are you prepared for it?

Recommended Reading

Articles on Smashing Magazine — For Web Designers And Developers

04 Nov

How To Build Rapport With Your Web Design Clients

by TBSCategories: News

Working as a freelancer in the creative space is rife with obstacles. Some we can see coming, others we can’t.

One of the challenges that many freelance web designers face in their first few years is managing client relationships. We’ve all heard about — and experienced — the horrors of clients running amok on our work, turning a piece of thoughtfully-considered design into a playground of questionable ideas that often run against best practice.

When these situations are not managed delicately, the client-designer relationship can break down, invoices may go unpaid, and as a result, websites go unlaunched. This is a scenario that no designer — or indeed no client — wants to be a part of.

In this article, I’m going to teach some strategies for managing client communication and processes that have helped me to run less stressful projects and achieve better results, as well as draw upon some best practices to help you manage the business side of your work.

My False Start

When I started freelancing in 2009, I had very little experience in dealing with clients. I’d only graduated from university two years prior and had been in a steady job ever since. And that job was in-house at an office supplies company, which means that the closest I came to having a client was my boss, which is nothing like the client-designer relationship at all.

Thus, once I started my own practice, I was not equipped with strategies for managing clients and expectations. As you might imagine, things didn’t go very well.

As a result, working with a diverse range of clients, from small to large and with varying technical requirements was a challenge. My business acumen left a lot to be desired, and I knew it. I was not confident in my sales skills and this mindset shook the very foundation of my service. It led to me producing lesser-quality, lower-paid work for clients who had little understanding of the design process.

At the time, I blamed the clients. But, in hindsight, I see that the problem was being caused by the way that I was doing business. I would wonder how other designers — those well-known faces in the industry — managed to produce much better, more profitable work and seem happy about it. This was truly an enigma to me at the time, and as I said: it was easier to blame others than to look inward and resolve the problem at its core.

What Was The Problem?

The main issue was one of mindset. When I dug down, I realized that I didn’t consider myself worthy of their business. This manifested in a lack of confidence in my work and some eye-wateringly low prices.

“We need a homepage design with unlimited revisions — how much?”

“£20.”

Ouch.

Frankly, it doesn’t matter if you’re reading this as a new freelancer, an experienced business owner or an in-house designer; if your mindset is not geared toward building confidence and rapport in your professional relationships, you’ll constantly face challenges in dealing with other people.

I realized over time that the way I was looking at my business was upside down. I focused too much on the output (the website design, the money) and not the input (building a relationship with the client).

So I switched it around.

Developing Relationships (Not Just Websites)

In business, at least a part of your motivation must be to develop relationships with clients. It’s important to recognize that clients work with you to solve their business problems. They’re not buying a website: they’re buying a tool to reach some business goal. It took me years to fully appreciate that clients care very little about your tech skills or design flair. They care much more deeply about your ability to help them reach their goals and, less-apparently, how you make them feel during that process.

To earn respect from your clients and to establish yourself as an authority in your area of work, you need to look beyond your core skill-set. You need to put processes in place, backed by a growth mindset that will see you handle tough situations. Here are some top tips for doing that:

1. Get Your Formal Processes In Place, And Follow Them

When starting out as a freelancer it is tempting to work without a contract and without taking a deposit payment. This is a problem because according to a private survey conducted by creative freelancer platform YunoJuno, 55% of its UK members have not been paid for work at some point in their career.

Putting procedures in place isn’t a silver bullet, but it can mitigate the risk. If you’re operating without contracts and deposit payments, you face two very real problems:

  • You have less security.
  • You’ll be taken less seriously.

Your client could cancel the project or make unreasonable requests of you. It is vital to establish the goalposts in a written contract, and take at least some of the payment upfront. This gives you security and leverage if things start to go wrong.

“I’ve been stiffed by clients, experienced scope creep like you couldn’t imagine, spent months on a ‘rush job’, and on occasion, completely lost track of half-completed projects.”

— Jenny Knizner, VP of marketing at job portal Moon-lighting

When you take the time to put processes in place, those formalities that you once considered inconvenient can really become a saving grace.

But perhaps most importantly of all, following these basic rules helps to establish you as a professional. It sends out a message that you take your work and your time seriously. And if a prospective client is reluctant to make any contractual commitments, that’s a pretty good sign for what working with them might be like.

The foundation for leveling-up your web design business starts by tackling the basics.

2. Don’t Hide Behind Your Email

To establish rapport with your client, you’re going to have to talk to them. Face-to-face meetings in person are great, but so are video calls. And there is really no excuse to not do at least do the latter, especially since we’re all familiar with video conferencing now.

As industry veteran Paul Boag explains in his book Digital Adaptation:

“Digital does not work well in a world of departmental divisions. People need to sit together, work together, and solve problems together.”

This means you need to spend real time with your clients, doing real work, and not skirt around big topics over email or any lesser medium.

Distance creates disconnect, and email sure creates some distance. It has its uses, but when it comes to discussing big ideas, it can be very limiting. If you want to be seen as a project leader, somebody who knows their stuff and can be trusted, it means showing your face once in a while. It means giving your client (and the project) the time and space it deserves to grow and evolve.

Web design is a service-led industry, and good service is built on clear communication.

3. Get To Know Your Clients

Clients are people. People have motivations, dreams, fears and problems just like you. It’s so easy, especially if you hold them at arm’s length, to see clients simply as projects. You’ll have a significantly easier time if you earn their trust by getting to know them. They will be more likely to pay you on time and respect your design decisions. Trust is not earned through emails where you only talk about work. Trust is built by taking the time to speak, face to face, about things other than work. Don’t be afraid to make small talk about weekend plans or current affairs, and observe how your relationship matures to a point of mutual respect.

“It’s in small talk, in conversations unrelated to work, where we explore other aspects of the person with whom we’re conversing… Big relationships are built on small talk.”

— David Burkus, author of “Friend of a Friend”

When was the last time you spoke with a client about something other than your work? Take the time to do this to strengthen your relationship, but be mindful of the line between friendship and a professional partnership. Be friendly with your clients, but know that they’re not your friends. This blurring of boundaries can lead to a relaxing of your professional processes, and before you know it you’re chatting at 9 PM and doing everything for “mates rates”.

4. Build Long-Term Relationships

If you want to truly build a business, and not become some transient freelancer who ultimately gives up and goes back into full-time employment, you need to think of your client relationships in the longer term.

This means digging into their goals and their business well-beyond what your project will deliver in the first instance. Consider how you can help them in other ways: read an article relevant to them? Send them it. Stumbled across a new piece of software that could make them more efficient? Recommend it to them. Find ways of delivering value to them, and it will come back to you in more work and referrals.

Repeat business is important because the average repeat customer spends 67% more in months 31-36 of their relationship with a business than they do in months 0-6. This particular study pertains to e-commerce sales but I have seen similar patterns in the B2B space also. It’s really all about trust. Once you’ve earned it, they’ll come back for more.

Taking the time to foster a relationship with your client helps to shift your thinking away from seeing them as a means to pay the rent this month, to looking at them more as a long term partner.

5. Practice Your Self-Development

If you’re anything like me, achieving the previous four points would have felt like a steep hill to climb when I started over 10 years ago. Being able to really grasp a piece of work and manage the project and people effectively takes experience, confidence, and skill.

For the main part, much of this depends on peeking outside your comfort zone. Running video calls with multiple stakeholders, managing conversations with clients, and insisting on good practices (such as contract signing) all require a level of assertiveness that doesn’t come naturally to many people.

If you struggle with self-confidence and feel ready to build your resilience, read up on things like positive affirmations and assertiveness skills. These “self-help” ideas are easy to sneer at but they will provide you with practical tools to seriously boost your confidence and grow as a professional.

In Summary, The Product Comes Second To The Service You Deliver

Website development is a service. Clients pay for the end product, but the experience they have in working with you will be remembered. How you make people feel matters.

To quote Simon Sinek’s book Start with Why as mentioned above:

“People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it.”

If you want to do better work for more money and be respected along the way, taking the time to grow as a professional and go the extra mile in how you manage clients can do a lot for you.

Whether you’re embarking on a freelance career, or you’ve been around for a while, I urge you to invest some time in reflecting on your work process and communication skills. Reflect on how you’ve done business to date, and consider what the next 3 years might look like for you. The service element of the web design industry is only getting more competitive, sophisticated, and demanding. But with demand comes amazing opportunities. Are you prepared for it?

Recommended Reading

Articles on Smashing Magazine — For Web Designers And Developers

03 Nov

How To Build Rapport With Your Web Design Clients

by TBSCategories: News

Working as a freelancer in the creative space is rife with obstacles. Some we can see coming, others we can’t.

One of the challenges that many freelance web designers face in their first few years is managing client relationships. We’ve all heard about — and experienced — the horrors of clients running amok on our work, turning a piece of thoughtfully-considered design into a playground of questionable ideas that often run against best practice.

When these situations are not managed delicately, the client-designer relationship can break down, invoices may go unpaid, and as a result, websites go unlaunched. This is a scenario that no designer — or indeed no client — wants to be a part of.

In this article, I’m going to teach some strategies for managing client communication and processes that have helped me to run less stressful projects and achieve better results, as well as draw upon some best practices to help you manage the business side of your work.

My False Start

When I started freelancing in 2009, I had very little experience in dealing with clients. I’d only graduated from university two years prior and had been in a steady job ever since. And that job was in-house at an office supplies company, which means that the closest I came to having a client was my boss, which is nothing like the client-designer relationship at all.

Thus, once I started my own practice, I was not equipped with strategies for managing clients and expectations. As you might imagine, things didn’t go very well.

As a result, working with a diverse range of clients, from small to large and with varying technical requirements was a challenge. My business acumen left a lot to be desired, and I knew it. I was not confident in my sales skills and this mindset shook the very foundation of my service. It led to me producing lesser-quality, lower-paid work for clients who had little understanding of the design process.

At the time, I blamed the clients. But, in hindsight, I see that the problem was being caused by the way that I was doing business. I would wonder how other designers — those well-known faces in the industry — managed to produce much better, more profitable work and seem happy about it. This was truly an enigma to me at the time, and as I said: it was easier to blame others than to look inward and resolve the problem at its core.

What Was The Problem?

The main issue was one of mindset. When I dug down, I realized that I didn’t consider myself worthy of their business. This manifested in a lack of confidence in my work and some eye-wateringly low prices.

“We need a homepage design with unlimited revisions — how much?”

“£20.”

Ouch.

Frankly, it doesn’t matter if you’re reading this as a new freelancer, an experienced business owner or an in-house designer; if your mindset is not geared toward building confidence and rapport in your professional relationships, you’ll constantly face challenges in dealing with other people.

I realized over time that the way I was looking at my business was upside down. I focused too much on the output (the website design, the money) and not the input (building a relationship with the client).

So I switched it around.

Developing Relationships (Not Just Websites)

In business, at least a part of your motivation must be to develop relationships with clients. It’s important to recognize that clients work with you to solve their business problems. They’re not buying a website: they’re buying a tool to reach some business goal. It took me years to fully appreciate that clients care very little about your tech skills or design flair. They care much more deeply about your ability to help them reach their goals and, less-apparently, how you make them feel during that process.

To earn respect from your clients and to establish yourself as an authority in your area of work, you need to look beyond your core skill-set. You need to put processes in place, backed by a growth mindset that will see you handle tough situations. Here are some top tips for doing that:

1. Get Your Formal Processes In Place, And Follow Them

When starting out as a freelancer it is tempting to work without a contract and without taking a deposit payment. This is a problem because according to a private survey conducted by creative freelancer platform YunoJuno, 55% of its UK members have not been paid for work at some point in their career.

Putting procedures in place isn’t a silver bullet, but it can mitigate the risk. If you’re operating without contracts and deposit payments, you face two very real problems:

  • You have less security.
  • You’ll be taken less seriously.

Your client could cancel the project or make unreasonable requests of you. It is vital to establish the goalposts in a written contract, and take at least some of the payment upfront. This gives you security and leverage if things start to go wrong.

“I’ve been stiffed by clients, experienced scope creep like you couldn’t imagine, spent months on a ‘rush job’, and on occasion, completely lost track of half-completed projects.”

— Jenny Knizner, VP of marketing at job portal Moon-lighting

When you take the time to put processes in place, those formalities that you once considered inconvenient can really become a saving grace.

But perhaps most importantly of all, following these basic rules helps to establish you as a professional. It sends out a message that you take your work and your time seriously. And if a prospective client is reluctant to make any contractual commitments, that’s a pretty good sign for what working with them might be like.

The foundation for leveling-up your web design business starts by tackling the basics.

2. Don’t Hide Behind Your Email

To establish rapport with your client, you’re going to have to talk to them. Face-to-face meetings in person are great, but so are video calls. And there is really no excuse to not do at least do the latter, especially since we’re all familiar with video conferencing now.

As industry veteran Paul Boag explains in his book Digital Adaptation:

“Digital does not work well in a world of departmental divisions. People need to sit together, work together, and solve problems together.”

This means you need to spend real time with your clients, doing real work, and not skirt around big topics over email or any lesser medium.

Distance creates disconnect, and email sure creates some distance. It has its uses, but when it comes to discussing big ideas, it can be very limiting. If you want to be seen as a project leader, somebody who knows their stuff and can be trusted, it means showing your face once in a while. It means giving your client (and the project) the time and space it deserves to grow and evolve.

Web design is a service-led industry, and good service is built on clear communication.

3. Get To Know Your Clients

Clients are people. People have motivations, dreams, fears and problems just like you. It’s so easy, especially if you hold them at arm’s length, to see clients simply as projects. You’ll have a significantly easier time if you earn their trust by getting to know them. They will be more likely to pay you on time and respect your design decisions. Trust is not earned through emails where you only talk about work. Trust is built by taking the time to speak, face to face, about things other than work. Don’t be afraid to make small talk about weekend plans or current affairs, and observe how your relationship matures to a point of mutual respect.

“It’s in small talk, in conversations unrelated to work, where we explore other aspects of the person with whom we’re conversing… Big relationships are built on small talk.”

— David Burkus, author of “Friend of a Friend”

When was the last time you spoke with a client about something other than your work? Take the time to do this to strengthen your relationship, but be mindful of the line between friendship and a professional partnership. Be friendly with your clients, but know that they’re not your friends. This blurring of boundaries can lead to a relaxing of your professional processes, and before you know it you’re chatting at 9 PM and doing everything for “mates rates”.

4. Build Long-Term Relationships

If you want to truly build a business, and not become some transient freelancer who ultimately gives up and goes back into full-time employment, you need to think of your client relationships in the longer term.

This means digging into their goals and their business well-beyond what your project will deliver in the first instance. Consider how you can help them in other ways: read an article relevant to them? Send them it. Stumbled across a new piece of software that could make them more efficient? Recommend it to them. Find ways of delivering value to them, and it will come back to you in more work and referrals.

Repeat business is important because the average repeat customer spends 67% more in months 31-36 of their relationship with a business than they do in months 0-6. This particular study pertains to e-commerce sales but I have seen similar patterns in the B2B space also. It’s really all about trust. Once you’ve earned it, they’ll come back for more.

Taking the time to foster a relationship with your client helps to shift your thinking away from seeing them as a means to pay the rent this month, to looking at them more as a long term partner.

5. Practice Your Self-Development

If you’re anything like me, achieving the previous four points would have felt like a steep hill to climb when I started over 10 years ago. Being able to really grasp a piece of work and manage the project and people effectively takes experience, confidence, and skill.

For the main part, much of this depends on peeking outside your comfort zone. Running video calls with multiple stakeholders, managing conversations with clients, and insisting on good practices (such as contract signing) all require a level of assertiveness that doesn’t come naturally to many people.

If you struggle with self-confidence and feel ready to build your resilience, read up on things like positive affirmations and assertiveness skills. These “self-help” ideas are easy to sneer at but they will provide you with practical tools to seriously boost your confidence and grow as a professional.

In Summary, The Product Comes Second To The Service You Deliver

Website development is a service. Clients pay for the end product, but the experience they have in working with you will be remembered. How you make people feel matters.

To quote Simon Sinek’s book Start with Why as mentioned above:

“People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it.”

If you want to do better work for more money and be respected along the way, taking the time to grow as a professional and go the extra mile in how you manage clients can do a lot for you.

Whether you’re embarking on a freelance career, or you’ve been around for a while, I urge you to invest some time in reflecting on your work process and communication skills. Reflect on how you’ve done business to date, and consider what the next 3 years might look like for you. The service element of the web design industry is only getting more competitive, sophisticated, and demanding. But with demand comes amazing opportunities. Are you prepared for it?

Recommended Reading

Articles on Smashing Magazine — For Web Designers And Developers

03 Nov

How To Build Rapport With Your Web Design Clients

by TBSCategories: News

Working as a freelancer in the creative space is rife with obstacles. Some we can see coming, others we can’t.

One of the challenges that many freelance web designers face in their first few years is managing client relationships. We’ve all heard about — and experienced — the horrors of clients running amok on our work, turning a piece of thoughtfully-considered design into a playground of questionable ideas that often run against best practice.

When these situations are not managed delicately, the client-designer relationship can break down, invoices may go unpaid, and as a result, websites go unlaunched. This is a scenario that no designer — or indeed no client — wants to be a part of.

In this article, I’m going to teach some strategies for managing client communication and processes that have helped me to run less stressful projects and achieve better results, as well as draw upon some best practices to help you manage the business side of your work.

My False Start

When I started freelancing in 2009, I had very little experience in dealing with clients. I’d only graduated from university two years prior and had been in a steady job ever since. And that job was in-house at an office supplies company, which means that the closest I came to having a client was my boss, which is nothing like the client-designer relationship at all.

Thus, once I started my own practice, I was not equipped with strategies for managing clients and expectations. As you might imagine, things didn’t go very well.

As a result, working with a diverse range of clients, from small to large and with varying technical requirements was a challenge. My business acumen left a lot to be desired, and I knew it. I was not confident in my sales skills and this mindset shook the very foundation of my service. It led to me producing lesser-quality, lower-paid work for clients who had little understanding of the design process.

At the time, I blamed the clients. But, in hindsight, I see that the problem was being caused by the way that I was doing business. I would wonder how other designers — those well-known faces in the industry — managed to produce much better, more profitable work and seem happy about it. This was truly an enigma to me at the time, and as I said: it was easier to blame others than to look inward and resolve the problem at its core.

What Was The Problem?

The main issue was one of mindset. When I dug down, I realized that I didn’t consider myself worthy of their business. This manifested in a lack of confidence in my work and some eye-wateringly low prices.

“We need a homepage design with unlimited revisions — how much?”

“£20.”

Ouch.

Frankly, it doesn’t matter if you’re reading this as a new freelancer, an experienced business owner or an in-house designer; if your mindset is not geared toward building confidence and rapport in your professional relationships, you’ll constantly face challenges in dealing with other people.

I realized over time that the way I was looking at my business was upside down. I focused too much on the output (the website design, the money) and not the input (building a relationship with the client).

So I switched it around.

Developing Relationships (Not Just Websites)

In business, at least a part of your motivation must be to develop relationships with clients. It’s important to recognize that clients work with you to solve their business problems. They’re not buying a website: they’re buying a tool to reach some business goal. It took me years to fully appreciate that clients care very little about your tech skills or design flair. They care much more deeply about your ability to help them reach their goals and, less-apparently, how you make them feel during that process.

To earn respect from your clients and to establish yourself as an authority in your area of work, you need to look beyond your core skill-set. You need to put processes in place, backed by a growth mindset that will see you handle tough situations. Here are some top tips for doing that:

1. Get Your Formal Processes In Place, And Follow Them

When starting out as a freelancer it is tempting to work without a contract and without taking a deposit payment. This is a problem because according to a private survey conducted by creative freelancer platform YunoJuno, 55% of its UK members have not been paid for work at some point in their career.

Putting procedures in place isn’t a silver bullet, but it can mitigate the risk. If you’re operating without contracts and deposit payments, you face two very real problems:

  • You have less security.
  • You’ll be taken less seriously.

Your client could cancel the project or make unreasonable requests of you. It is vital to establish the goalposts in a written contract, and take at least some of the payment upfront. This gives you security and leverage if things start to go wrong.

“I’ve been stiffed by clients, experienced scope creep like you couldn’t imagine, spent months on a ‘rush job’, and on occasion, completely lost track of half-completed projects.”

— Jenny Knizner, VP of marketing at job portal Moon-lighting

When you take the time to put processes in place, those formalities that you once considered inconvenient can really become a saving grace.

But perhaps most importantly of all, following these basic rules helps to establish you as a professional. It sends out a message that you take your work and your time seriously. And if a prospective client is reluctant to make any contractual commitments, that’s a pretty good sign for what working with them might be like.

The foundation for leveling-up your web design business starts by tackling the basics.

2. Don’t Hide Behind Your Email

To establish rapport with your client, you’re going to have to talk to them. Face-to-face meetings in person are great, but so are video calls. And there is really no excuse to not do at least do the latter, especially since we’re all familiar with video conferencing now.

As industry veteran Paul Boag explains in his book Digital Adaptation:

“Digital does not work well in a world of departmental divisions. People need to sit together, work together, and solve problems together.”

This means you need to spend real time with your clients, doing real work, and not skirt around big topics over email or any lesser medium.

Distance creates disconnect, and email sure creates some distance. It has its uses, but when it comes to discussing big ideas, it can be very limiting. If you want to be seen as a project leader, somebody who knows their stuff and can be trusted, it means showing your face once in a while. It means giving your client (and the project) the time and space it deserves to grow and evolve.

Web design is a service-led industry, and good service is built on clear communication.

3. Get To Know Your Clients

Clients are people. People have motivations, dreams, fears and problems just like you. It’s so easy, especially if you hold them at arm’s length, to see clients simply as projects. You’ll have a significantly easier time if you earn their trust by getting to know them. They will be more likely to pay you on time and respect your design decisions. Trust is not earned through emails where you only talk about work. Trust is built by taking the time to speak, face to face, about things other than work. Don’t be afraid to make small talk about weekend plans or current affairs, and observe how your relationship matures to a point of mutual respect.

“It’s in small talk, in conversations unrelated to work, where we explore other aspects of the person with whom we’re conversing… Big relationships are built on small talk.”

— David Burkus, author of “Friend of a Friend”

When was the last time you spoke with a client about something other than your work? Take the time to do this to strengthen your relationship, but be mindful of the line between friendship and a professional partnership. Be friendly with your clients, but know that they’re not your friends. This blurring of boundaries can lead to a relaxing of your professional processes, and before you know it you’re chatting at 9 PM and doing everything for “mates rates”.

4. Build Long-Term Relationships

If you want to truly build a business, and not become some transient freelancer who ultimately gives up and goes back into full-time employment, you need to think of your client relationships in the longer term.

This means digging into their goals and their business well-beyond what your project will deliver in the first instance. Consider how you can help them in other ways: read an article relevant to them? Send them it. Stumbled across a new piece of software that could make them more efficient? Recommend it to them. Find ways of delivering value to them, and it will come back to you in more work and referrals.

Repeat business is important because the average repeat customer spends 67% more in months 31-36 of their relationship with a business than they do in months 0-6. This particular study pertains to e-commerce sales but I have seen similar patterns in the B2B space also. It’s really all about trust. Once you’ve earned it, they’ll come back for more.

Taking the time to foster a relationship with your client helps to shift your thinking away from seeing them as a means to pay the rent this month, to looking at them more as a long term partner.

5. Practice Your Self-Development

If you’re anything like me, achieving the previous four points would have felt like a steep hill to climb when I started over 10 years ago. Being able to really grasp a piece of work and manage the project and people effectively takes experience, confidence, and skill.

For the main part, much of this depends on peeking outside your comfort zone. Running video calls with multiple stakeholders, managing conversations with clients, and insisting on good practices (such as contract signing) all require a level of assertiveness that doesn’t come naturally to many people.

If you struggle with self-confidence and feel ready to build your resilience, read up on things like positive affirmations and assertiveness skills. These “self-help” ideas are easy to sneer at but they will provide you with practical tools to seriously boost your confidence and grow as a professional.

In Summary, The Product Comes Second To The Service You Deliver

Website development is a service. Clients pay for the end product, but the experience they have in working with you will be remembered. How you make people feel matters.

To quote Simon Sinek’s book Start with Why as mentioned above:

“People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it.”

If you want to do better work for more money and be respected along the way, taking the time to grow as a professional and go the extra mile in how you manage clients can do a lot for you.

Whether you’re embarking on a freelance career, or you’ve been around for a while, I urge you to invest some time in reflecting on your work process and communication skills. Reflect on how you’ve done business to date, and consider what the next 3 years might look like for you. The service element of the web design industry is only getting more competitive, sophisticated, and demanding. But with demand comes amazing opportunities. Are you prepared for it?

Recommended Reading

Articles on Smashing Magazine — For Web Designers And Developers

forbes-research-article-design
05 Oct

How To Help Your Clients Get More Backlinks Through Design

by TBSCategories: News

There are certain truths when it comes to what helps a website rank in search. Google wants to see:

  • Mobile-first design
  • Fast page speeds
  • Top-notch security
  • User-friendly navigation
  • Trustworthiness and expertise

… among other things. It also wants to see high-authority websites link back to your website.

And if your clients aren’t obsessed with getting backlinks right now, just wait and see. They’re highly coveted and some businesses will go to great lengths to get them.

Obviously, the quality of the content has to be there if it’s going to be share-worthy. However, the way a page looks can also make or break whether someone decides to share a link to it.

You might not think this is something you can help with as a web designer, but you definitely can. And this post will provide you with a number of tips on how to contribute to this great quest for backlinks.

How To Design Sites That High-Authority Sources Want To Link To

The quality of a backlinked page can reflect on the quality and reputation of the linking website, so authoritative sites have to be incredibly choosy about who they give backlinks to.

The content needs to be reputable and valuable. That’s non-negotiable. But the design has to be top-of-the-line, too.

Let’s take a look at some ways in which you can help your clients’ websites be seen as trustworthy sources worth linking to.

Tip #1: Visualize Data Whenever Possible

In my line of work, one of the most common reasons I link to other websites is to cite data that they discovered or own. I do this to strengthen my points as well as to lend credibility to the arguments I’m making.

That said, there usually isn’t just one organization doing research on the topics I’m interested in, which means I need to figure out which site is worth linking to. And that often comes down to how well they’ve visually depicted the data.

To be clear, I’m not just referring to statistical data. This also pertains to things like breakdowns of processes. Like if I’m researching how various companies handle a given task and a website has a great visual depiction of their workflow, I may be more inclined to link to that page since it’s more valuable.

Let me show you an example.

Let’s say I’m writing an article about why people uninstall mobile apps. I don’t just want to cite a random list of what I think are the reasons for something like this. I know that the evidence exists, so I go searching for sources that can back me up.

In my research on the subject, I find two credible sources that present similar sets of findings. This article appeared on Forbes:

And this blog post and infographic was published by CleverTap:

Let’s say that the two surveys both have a large pool of respondents and the research was done recently. In that case, I’d turn my attention to the way in which the findings are presented.

There are a number of reasons why I’d choose CleverTap over Forbes any day.

For one, CleverTap translated its findings into a user-friendly format. We’ve known for years that infographics get more engagement and shares than plain text content. Sharing and linking are two different kinds of engagement, but we usually do them for the same reason:

We trust the source or find some value in the content and want others to discover it as well.

So, because CleverTap presented this beautiful breakdown of its findings, it’s enabled me to more quickly and effectively identify the facts I’m looking for, more so than the run-on paragraphs on the Forbes site. With Forbes’ presentation of the data, I’d basically have to copy-and-paste the content into my own document and do some formatting of my own to try and figure out what’s going on.

No one should have to work for their data, just like no one should have to work to get through a website.

So, that’s reason number one. CleverTap shows extra care and consideration for the data that’s being presented as well as an understanding of the audience who needs to read it.

Reason number two is that Forbes’s page is littered with ads. When one disappears, another two appear in its place. It’s distracting and I don’t believe in sending people to a website that so blatantly prioritizes its profits over its content. Again, linked-to websites can have an impact on the linking website’s reputation, so this is something to consider when you design your own.

The last reason I’d link to CleverTap’s page over Forbes’ is because visually designed data saves me the trouble of having to create graphics on my own. It’s not like I can’t cite the data as is, but why should I? I know that it’s easier for my readers to find key data points and understand them when I call them out visually.

Plus, I’m already giving the linked website credit for their work, so I am more than happy to provide a companion branded image. It lends even more credibility to my source.

Tip #2: Make Lengthy Pages Easier To Scan

I have clients who constantly come to me and say, “I need you to write a 2,000-word article so I can rank #1 on Google.”

This is one of those SEO myths that’s part fact and part fiction. Here’s why:

Google’s John Mueller is often asked on Twitter to confirm various assumptions we have about SEO (since Google itself is so tight-lipped about it). And that’s when we get useful gems like this:

That’s what I tell my clients, but without the snark obviously. It’s not about hitting a target number of words that will magically make a web page rank. All you need to do is match the search intent and then unpack the topic as fully as needed.

That said, there is data from Backlinko that confirms that longer pages do rank higher in search…

But it’s not the sheer volume of words that lends to a lengthy web page’s rank. It’s because longer content tends to be more authoritative which makes it more link-worthy.

Interesting, right?

So, knowing this, you should do everything in your power to make a lengthy piece of content (any linkable page, really — including informational pages and the home page) super easy to scan, read and link to. Because even the most engaged reader is apt to miss important details or give up part of the way through if you don’t design the page the right way.

For the purposes of this example, I’m going to show you two examples of long blog posts that are top-ranked for “how to price a saas product”.

ProfitWell handles it well enough and has 93 external followed links to show for it, according to MozBar. These are backlinks that pass SEO value onto Google, which is how a website ranks higher thanks to its backlink profile.

All I probably need to do is show you what the above-the-fold looks like to demonstrate why this article hasn’t been linked to nearly as much as one of its competitors. Here it is:

In terms of overall design, ProfitWell has a great website. It’s even done a fantastic job laying out the post so it’s easy to scan through and read.

In just this screenshot alone you can see how effectively the designer has worked their magic on the page, including text enhancements like:

  • Header tags,
  • Bolded and highlighted hyperlinks,
  • Data visualizations,
  • Short sentence and paragraph structures,
  • Bulleted and numbered lists.

However, it has a number of things working against it, which is what I believe has cost it backlinks.

One is the overwhelming amount of distractions: the cumbersome sidebar, the sticky social share bar, the chat widget that needs to be dismissed and a lead gen pop-up that adheres to the bottom-left corner at times. Secondly, this is a long article. If people want to read it in full — especially on mobile — it’s going to take a lot of scrolling to get all the way through it.

Now let me show you how Cobloom’s page design is likely why it has 159 external followed links.

This looks fantastic, right? There are three sticky elements always present:

  • The sticky table of contents on the left,
  • The chat widget which is part of the ToC bar,
  • The social share widget.

But the sticky parts of the page never compromise the content:

In fact, the table of contents on the left makes the page easier to read (among other design choices that have been made). Readers can click on the section that they’re interested in without having to bother with scrolling down the page.

The only thing I’d say this page falls short on is the mobile experience. The table of contents isn’t present and the page feels a little wobbly, as if the horizontal dimensions weren’t properly sized. So, in terms of this being a link-worthy page on mobile, I’d say it’s not when compared to ProfitWell’s super mobile-friendly post.

But that’s a good lesson for you to take away from this. Use your sticky elements on mobile wisely. Rather than disrupt a post with a chat widget or a lead gen promotional bar, place the table of contents beneath it and let it serve as a secondary “navigation” for lengthier pages.

Tip #3: “Design” Each Page’s Metadata

As a writer, I spend a lot of time looking for the right links to place within my content. Which means a good chunk of my day is spent on Google, social media and Feedly trying to hunt down the perfect sources.

Can you guess how I narrow down my options to ensure that I always share or link to the best content for my website visitors or social connections? I use the page’s metadata to help me decide.

I’m not the only one who cares about the external “image” of a web page either. There’s plenty of research that points to attractive social media content getting more shares than those that aren’t.

So, in addition to designing pages to look more trustworthy and user-friendly, I’d suggest designing your metadata to make it look more carefully groomed. If you’ve taken the time to create a buttoned-up micro-image of the page, people looking for sources for their authoritative websites are more likely to give yours a closer look.

As such, there are a couple things I’d recommend you do to increase the likelihood that this happens:

The first thing is to ensure that the page’s metadata appears complete in search.

For instance, here’s what comes up when I search Google for “the most trusted brands in the world”:

For the most part, the meta titles are all fine as you can see them in full or, at the very least, get the gist of what the page is about and how it answers the search’s intent.

The descriptions aren’t that great, though, as some are nonsensical and some are incomplete. Both qualities demonstrate that the people behind the site didn’t care enough to write a helpful description for it. Authoritative figures are going to care about stuff like this.

One reason why is because it makes it harder for them to figure out which sites to look deeper into. It’s a pain having to review every top-ranking page because no details are provided to help weed out the so-so from the great. Also, if metadata isn’t filled in, the page might not look all that great when shared on social media, again requiring the sharer to do more work and clean it up.

Let me show you an example:

This is what MozBar reports to me from the Morning Consult page that ranks #2 for this search query:

The page title includes a bunch of icons that thankfully don’t appear in search results. The meta description, however, doesn’t exist. This is why when Google tried to retrieve a description about the page, it created this mess from the report’s findings:

“USPS. Score: 42.0% Amazon. 38.8% Google. 37.9% PayPal. 36.5% Chick-Fil-A. 36.2% The Hershey Company. 36.1% UPS. 36.1% Cheerios. Dove. 34.1% Tide. 34.1% Ziploc. 33.8% Clorox. USPS. Score: 42.0% Amazon. 38.8% Google. 37.9% PayPal. Chick-Fil-A. 36.2% The Hershey Company. 36.1% UPS. 36.1% Cheerios. Dove. 34.1% Tide. 34.1% …”

That might be enough to keep someone from clicking into the site, believing that if the metadata is this messy, the page is too.

As for the shareability piece, the lack of metadata causes issues, too. Here’s what this page looks like on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter (in that order):

Two of the shares pull in the brand logo and tagline, but not the featured image of the page. Two of the shares show no description at all while the other shows a snippet of the first sentence on the page.

Again, this lack of attention to detail ends up creating more work for the sharer, which might be reason enough for them not to share it. Or not to share anything from that website again.

One last thing you can do to make your pages look more link-worthy in search is to use schema markup. The #1 page (from Infegy) for “the most trusted brands in the world” did a good job of this (in addition to writing their metadata). The results look great:

If I needed this data for an article I was writing today, I’d probably end up focusing most of my efforts on this piece since it’s clear that the page and its metadata were so carefully built by its creators.

To recap: There are three things you should pay attention to when setting up link-worthy pages of your site for search:

  • Include complete SEO metadata.
  • Attach a featured image to the page that’s relevant and descriptive.
  • Use schema markup whenever possible.

Wrapping Up

You might not be too concerned with backlinks, but the owners of your websites certainly are or will be once they catch wind of the power they wield in Google. While a lot of the linkability of a page does depend on the quality of the content, certain design choices you make can affect it as well. So, add these strategies to your SEO-friendly design processes and help your clients claim those highly coveted top-ranking spots.

Articles on Smashing Magazine — For Web Designers And Developers

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