Make an Extra $5k Per Month as a Web Designer

what's going on guys welcome back to another video i am really excited about this video today because we are going to be covering the exact process that i took to take my web design business from an inconsistent one to two thousand dollars a month and allow me to push up past that five thousand dollar a month threshold so if you're making less than five thousand dollars a month and you're working a website to website and you're feeling frustrated and overwhelmed or if you're in a position where you just wanna start making more consistent money as a web designer this video is going to walk you through the entire process that i'm using right now in my business to allow me to take on more clients make more money per client and be able to manage my business in a way that allows me to continue to scale bigger and bigger now this is the first video in a series where i'm gonna be covering everything that i've had to do to reach these benchmarks of five thousand dollars a month and seven thousand eight nine ten thousand plus per month in my web design business i'm going to be kind of pulling back the curtain and showing you everything that i did and the biggest things that kind of made the difference for me and getting me up to that next level and being able to manage things and keep my clients happy and keep delivering value all while making more money and bringing on more work and kind of growing and scaling my business now it took me over 10 months to reach the point where i was making 5 000 a month consistently and this is the kicker as you always see people on youtube and other gurus talking about selling websites for 15 000 but the fact the matter is when i started i was having a hard time finding clients that would pay me more than a thousand and it was frustrating i felt myself getting bogged down with even just one to two clients i was feeling overwhelmed and i i wasn't getting paid enough and i was having a hard time finding new clients and i was stressed at where my new clients were coming from and i felt like my entire process just had no direction or purpose and it was making it really really difficult to scale in a predictable way so if you've had any of these issues you're not alone it was a rough couple of months for me but i was able to find the thing that kind of pushed me beyond that five thousand dollars a month now the trick was tearing apart my entire business and then setting up a business model that allowed me to follow the same process for every single client that i brought on i realized that i was wasting all my time and energy stressing about writing great proposals and signing clients and getting agreements to them and creating content and designing a logo and then going through a million revision processes and then literally catering to every need that my client had and by the time i finished with one or two clients i was far too exhausted and i lost all ambition to want to continue to scale and find new clients and grow and i was kind of just hitting my head against the wall without the ability to kind of step back from my business and then look for other ways to make more money without a system and expectations that go along with this system i guarantee that you're just going to continue to feel bogged down and it's going to be really really difficult to feel that ambition to want to scale so if you're dealing with any of these issues right now i'm going to give you the building blocks of a successful web design business and i'm going to show you how you can kind of tear apart your business and then restructure it so moving forward it doesn't matter if you've got one client or 10 or 20 clients you're going to be able to follow this process and successfully take your clients from the moment that you send them a proposal to when you deliver a project and you get paid and i'm going to show you everything that you need to do to get that set up the first thing that you're going to need to make sure that you do is create set packages and set prices and then stick to those no matter what having set packages and pricing makes the entire process much easier when you're pitching your clients because you know exactly where you need to pitch them at and it's going to eliminate that entire process of you giving them kind of a random bid and then them haggling the price down and then you taking a project that's not worth your time and so by laying things out clearly you're going to be able to kind of set that baseline and know if somebody wants a project done for any less than say twelve hundred dollars i'm not going to take that project and by doing this you're going to be able to stick to your guns stick to your prices and then you're not going to end up like me where my first four or five clients were all paying me less than what i needed to kind of put the time and effort into managing those and doing a good job and then next thing i knew i was just a total slave to my clients and i wasn't getting paid what i was providing for them and so we want to make sure that you can stick to these prices and packages and by doing this it's going to make it much more clear for both you and your client plus by doing this it's going to make the proposal and agreement process way easier on everybody and that leads us to number two you need to have templated proposals and agreements now i feel very strongly that you should not waste time drafting a new proposal in a new agreement every time you sign a client because this can be incredibly time consuming and also it leaves room for you to make mistakes because you can't spend two hours every day reading through a new proposal and typing things out and spell checking just to send a proposal to somebody that may not even read it and so by creating templates for these things that are easy to edit where you can plug in obviously your package and your price and your timeline and you can make small edits like that but then you're going to be able to confidently send those things out quickly so if you are using templated proposals and agreements already let me know down in the comments and if you're not i would love to hear why not and if it's actually working for you i'd be really curious to find out so number three is you have to have a timeline and you've got to stick to it at the start of my freelancing business i had way too many client projects that were meant to go just a month or a month and a half and ended up stretching out past like seven eight nine months and it was absolutely miserable because it ended up being way more work for me all my projects started to stack up on one another plus i wasn't getting paid and so it was just really frustrating to kind of sit back and allow my clients to just yank me around and determine when they felt ready to launch their website this happened because i didn't set expectations on a timeline and because of this my clients had no direction and it's important to remember that you can't rely on your clients to kind of lead this project because they're not going to know how to do it right so you need to kind of take the reins be the professional and tell them exactly what needs to happen at what time and what happens if they don't fulfill their end of the bargain this timeline should include a launch date for the website it should include a deadline for the content that they're going to get you and they should also include somewhat of a warning or a notice that if they don't get the content to you in time you're just going to need to launch the website with placeholder content by doing this it's going to motivate your clients to get the things to that you need fast but also it's going to allow you to predict exactly when you're going to get the content when you're going to be able to launch the website and when you're going to get paid this is going to create much more consistency in your business not only that but you're just going to be able to stay on top of your projects quicker and obviously if you can take a project and bust it out in less than a month it's going to open up your pipeline and allow you to bring on more clients and more projects and get those done sooner and that leads us to number four which is getting your clients to create the content and then deliver it to you on a deadline this is one of the things that killed me the most at the start because i didn't set good expectations and so sometimes i would have clients that would say um either take the content from our old website or you just kind of create the content whatever you feel needs to be in there and i'm not a copywriter and i had no idea how to do this so first off their content ended up being complete garbage and not only that but it just added way too much stress and anxiety to the project because it was putting me outside my wheelhouse and so you want to make sure that you don't take on any parts of the project that aren't within your wheelhouse because this is going to take this system and this process that you've got down for every project and it's going to start stretching you thin when some projects you've got to create content and some projects you've got to design a logo and some projects you've gotta you know meet with the client twice a week to discuss strategy and all these things that kind of stretch you outside of your realm of what you do well is going to make it much much more difficult and so when it comes to content make sure that you let your client know that this is their responsibility that they need to have this to you within two to three weeks give them a deadline and then let them know that this is something that they can change later on once the website's live and so not to feel any pressure but also let them know that this is something that if they don't get to you in time you're just going to have to launch the site with placeholder content that they can change later on i promise you that this might seem like your clients will be upset about this but in the long run they're going to thank you for giving them a deadline and allowing them to know exactly what you expect of them and then getting their website live as soon as possible because at the end of the day that's the way that they're going to grow their businesses having a website live that their customers and clients can find to be able to contact them and hire them for their services and the longer that you delay that process it's just hurting their business now the fifth part of this process is having a revision process and then sticking to that and being very firm with it now obviously we want to make sure that our clients are very satisfied with the final product because they're spending their hard earned money on our services and so we want to make sure they're satisfied but at the same time if you show any doubt in your abilities as a web designer it's going to make them feel like they have to step in and make a lot of the decisions on the website and when they step in and don't trust your opinion this is when they start nitpicking every single paragraph and section and page and before you know it you're going to have gone through 15 revisions and they're still not going to be satisfied because they don't really know what they need they know they want something that looks good they know they want something that's going to drive traffic but if you allow them to make all the decisions they're just going to be frustrated and it's going to drag the process out way longer than you're going to be able to spend on it without losing time and money now i found in my business when i started showing confidence in what i was doing my revision process went from eight different phone calls down to literally one phone call where i would push the project forward and i would find that the design that i felt like they would be most satisfied with and i also was able to show them the reason that i set the site up the way that i did and why it's going to work to grow their business and then typically speaking my clients will dive in and maybe give me a couple bullet points of five or six things that they want changed or maybe errors in the content that they passed me and then we're ready to launch the site and i'm able to do that because they feel confident knowing that whatever i've built is going to work better than anything that they could suggest because i know that i'm the expert now by adding this five-step process i promise you that the entire process of running your web design business is going to be way less stressful and the hope is that if you can establish your business processes and kind of systematize your web design business it's going to make it easier to take on multiple clients at a time and you're not going to get bogged down by the nitpicky parts of running a business so in my next video i'm going to be sharing with you what i did to reach my next benchmark of seven thousand dollars a month and in that video i'm going to be sharing with you everything that you need to do to now take this systematized business and all of your processes and amplify those to start finding more clients and and raising your prices and doing everything that you need to to start building and scaling an awesome web design business so if you're interested in my next video make sure to click below and subscribe and then turn on the bell notification so you get notified when that next video launches and if you found any value in this video make sure you give it a like down below and i will catch you guys in the next [Music] video

Channel: Payton Clark Smith

Views: 6,188

Keywords: website design, Make an Extra 5k Per Month as a Web Designer, web design business, make money web design business, web design, get paid more for web design, web design business plan, web design business model, how to run a web design business, online business 2020, make money online, freelance web design, online business, web design passive income, make money with web design, how to make money with web design, make an extra 5k, make an extra 5k a month

Id: lMYhYIrWchE

Length: 11min 55sec (715 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 01 2020