I'm new to making websites and enjoy it. I can use Dreamweaver and Wordpress. My goal is to make $200 a day. Should I focus on building small sites for people, like little $200-300 sites, and try to get a new client a day? Or focus on doing bigger projects?
$200/day is life changing money for me. I dont have a car now, I take the bus, in the middle of texas, and with that kind of money I could rent a nice place and get a car.
I just want to know the best path to being successful with wordpress. thanks
As someone who's built WordPress websites for business owners for about 5 years now, I'd say start small, then scale from there.
The important thing is to focus on delivering a unique service. The problem with this industry is that designers and developers always focus on what they can do for the client as opposed to what the client REALLY wants.
So, when you approach businesses or organisations about your services, find out what they would like their website to do for them. I'm a lead generation strategist/consultant, and whenever a WordPress projects came up, I won't wear my "design cap" but would wear my "marketing cap" instead. I would ask this question - "what can I do to help my client generate leads and sales through their website?"
If you can make your clients websites work hard for them, then you will get a lot of referrals (I'm saying this from experience; 90% of the website projects I've done came through referrals).
Let me share with you how I moved from $500 websites to $2,000 and above. I decided to apply what is called "Education Based Marketing" - this means giving your clients a web strategy session, and helping them understand what you are doing or going to do for them. When you make the whole process all about them, and operate with integrity, then you are going to set yourself apart from others. And please, don't compete on price... most website designers always do this just to win a client. Let your work speak for you, If they think your fees are too high, then they are not your ideal clients.
There's more to share, but I'll pause here, in order to avoid overwhelming you. Feel free to reach out if you need further help. All the best!
You've sort of started to figure out the math of your problem, which is great. Most people never even get there.
Here's the issue: the more sales you have to make, the more time it's going to take you to make them.
And it takes just as much time--maybe even less--to make a higher ticket sale than a lower ticket sale. Why? Because the people who have money HAVE MONEY. They simply move some from their pile to you. The people who don't have money DON'T HAVE MONEY. They have to scramble to get the cash from somewhere else to pay you.
There are other attitude differences that make the low ticket a worse kind of client as well, but I'll skip those for now.
Nobody cares where you are. Working remotely is accepted today, and you don't have to go into detail about your situation with potential buyers. Remember: you know everything about you; they know next to nothing about you. They don't need to know all those details. You're a web designer...they need a website. Stick with that.
Back to the math. Fewer sales needed = less time spent on selling. If you have to make a sale a day to hit your money target, you are always going to be stuck in selling mode. Let's not even get into the hassles you'll also get attracting that level of client.
If you have to make two or three sales, now you have time to fulfill the work.
But this has everything to do with your own mindset and comfort zones than anything else--if you think "$6000 is a lot of money," you'll never act on it. The number is too scary. Out there in the world, though, are plenty of people who believe $6000 means a lousy website that they can't trust the developer of. Their comfort zone is not your comfort zone.
Would a big retailer trust a $300 web designer to make and maintain their site?
Now ask yourself why not.
Would a SME trust a $1000 web designer to make their site?
Same thing, right?
Use these reasons as your marketing. You're sorting for prospective clients who value A, B, and C. They know a $300 website is a laughable template, which won't support what they need and do.
They need to TRUST the person behind the site can fix problems, keep it up and running (they don't know the difference between hosting and web development, and I can give you examples--but downtime for development is bad, too), and make improvements swiftly.
But hey, if you can make a sale a day at say $400, and outsource the work to a dev you trust at $200, then that's another path to success with your revenue equation. I just think that's a lot harder to achieve since you need so much more traffic and have to manage so many more projects...each with its own baby birds in the nest screeching for attention.
Making $200 per day is pretty tough when you just have started your business with WordPress, but it is possible if you have some patience and work on your skills and reputation, so that you get the right clients.
For starters, you can start to build more skills by offering your expertise on project platforms like UpWork.com. I have done this and got a bunch of good clients who paid me for larger projects over time. But it took me about a year to get to a point where it was starting to be profitable. On the other hand, I have learned a lot about getting new clients, working with clients and handle difficult clients. So I think it's worth a try.
After a while, I took on work on codeable which ist much better to get clients who are willing to pay more for excellent solutions, but I believe you need to get invited there, so you have to build some kind of reputation in WordPress first, to show that you are a top coder.
Referring to your question if it's better to get many small clients or a few large ones, I would aim for the larger ones as getting on a new project will take more time in just getting started with the client (like understanding their needs, exchanging all necessary data like login passwords, etc).
From my experience, it's also great to have agencies as clients, who are doing websites for their clients. I worked with a lot of designers who used me just for the coding part, so I've got a lot of smaller projects but all based on the same design agency.
Hope that helps.
Let me know if you have any questions.
Marian
