My Journey to Becoming a 6-Figure Web Designer

in this video i want to share with you how i went from doing a miserable college job doing this well what do you all do i'm taking care of all the spiders and the ants get you out of here don't come back to becoming a full-time freelance web designer making multiple six figures all while having the time to do this let's get into it [Music] welcome back to another video if this is your first time here welcome to my channel my name is peyton smith and in this video i want to share with you my story of how i went from a struggling frustrated college student to building my own freelance web design agency and being able to build a life that i really enjoy and am passionate about this all started back in college i was really frustrated i didn't really enjoy college i wasn't liking my classes i was having a really hard time finding what it was that i wanted to do now i come from a family where my dad's an attorney and my brother is an extremely successful salesperson and so obviously i wanted to do something that could provide well for my family but i didn't want to do that at the expense of doing something that i'm passionate about and so to buy myself time while i was figuring out what i wanted to study i chose to do a summer sales job with my brother so i could go out and get a little experience maybe make a little money and figure out what i wanted to do and so i'm really grateful for this sales job we knocked doors we went door-to-door and sold pest control and it was a great opportunity and i'm grateful for this job because a it taught me sales skills that have forever changed my life and b it taught me really quickly that i did not want to do that job for the rest of my life so i did that job for several years but any time i had a spare minute i was designing i loved to design i had just found adobe illustrator which was a game changer for me and i started to do little one-off freelance logo design jobs not because they were great money but just because i loved to do it and that was kind of my first foot in the door to freelancing and as i continued to do those logos throughout the years i started to get more offers to design business cards and posters and then eventually websites and that made perfect sense to me because websites are kind of a higher value or or higher perceived value service than just regular design and so i started taking courses and i started learning about web design and i built my first website in wix and after i did that and i got paid a few hundred dollars something clicked inside of me and i thought this is what i want to do for the rest of my life now with college i wasn't making any ground with any of my classes anything that i was studying the sales job was getting old and so i knew that really quickly i was going to have to make a decision was i going to stick with the sales job that was paying pretty well or was i going to abandon that and all of the security that came with that and go out on my own and try to freelance now a decision needed to be made because i had just recently been married and we had our first child and it was kind of decision making time right like were we gonna go out or were we gonna stay home and i remember very vividly being out at the park with my wife and our newborn and having this discussion saying if we don't go out and do our sales job this summer are we going to be able to make it are we going to be able to pay our bills and honestly i didn't know but i knew that that was the moment that i just had to jump ship and go all in on my freelance business mainly because i was losing so much passion for the sales job i wasn't sure if mentally i could do it and so that day they're in the park we decided that we were going to go full time on our freelance business so on may 14th we officially launched pate digital now it's named after me mainly because i didn't know what else to name it but that first month that we launched things did not go well i think we only made like 980 dollars and so that was a big red flag to me and my wife i'm sure to both of our families um it was a tough start because that one project that we got that month was from one of my roommates and so really we uh we were starting from scratch and so those those next couple months we really hustled we tried to kind of network my wife was so supportive and i slowly started landing little projects here and there you know 300 for a website here 500 for a site there and slowly we started to get a little bit of momentum for the rest of that year i worked super hard i spent money on courses i watched free trainings i watched youtube videos and i i don't think i've ever worked so hard on my life because i knew that it was kind of life or death um for my family maybe that's a little too too dramatic but we were worried about covering our bills right and so i was hustling and by december of that year so about six months later we had a month where we made four thousand twenty two dollars and that was big time for us i feel like that was the first time in our in the life of our business where i thought well this might actually work we actually might we might make this thing work to provide a living for us the rest of our lives now at this point another thing that made a huge difference for my business is i found webflow so i stopped designing websites in wix and i went all in on webflow to design and develop my sites and this increased the value of everything that i was doing tenfold and with webflow and everything that i've i had learned from those courses and free trainings i feel like i was finally armed with everything that i needed to start bumping up my prices and making more by may of that month so almost a year later we made five thousand six hundred dollars and we're starting to pick up momentum we were super excited my wife was um while she always believed in me i could tell that she was more relieved seeing hey money's starting to roll in we're getting to see kind of the results or the fruits of all of our hard work and our patients by october of 2019 we had made nine thousand twenty three dollars and we were starting to get more referrals and word of mouth and i was starting to generate some organic leads from my website uh my messaging and my packaging and everything was starting to improve and we just continued to grow we continued to work hard while we did have slow months i could see that our overall trend was we were making more and more every month by january of 2020 so just last year we made twelve thousand five hundred and sixty three dollars at this point i was really starting to catch my stride and i was starting to get better results for my clients and the reason for this is i decided that design wasn't enough right like i just wasn't getting paid enough for my web design projects and also i was starting every month basically from scratch and so what i mean by that is if there was a month where i didn't land any new web design clients we weren't getting paid and so it was a full-on hustle and so what i determined i was going to do is i was going to learn seo and offer that as a monthly service that would bring recurring revenue for us and so i took a bunch of courses i spent a bunch of money and invested in myself and my my knowledge and my learning and we started rolling out kind of these mini seo campaigns to get these websites of my clients to rank on google and immediately i saw how much more thrilled they were about the work that we were doing but also how much easier it was to convince them to spend money because they were actually getting something in return which was traffic that was driving revenue for their business and so at this point it was like i was seeing dollar signs because i saw that i could not only make tons of money for myself but even more importantly is i can make tons of money for my clients and anybody is going to pay if there is a return involved by november of 2020 we had made thirty five thousand three hundred and eighty nine dollars now this was due to uh we were still picking up a lot of web design projects but every time i would design a website we would roll that into a monthly seo campaign and so now not only was our monthly income way bigger than when we started but it was consistent we weren't having these up months and down months but it was slowly and consistently rising because i knew every single month that we had you know x amount of money that we were going to make from our seo campaigns and that we were guaranteed that for the next 12 months of the agreements that i had with all these clients and so at this point again we really started to catch a stride our confidence went through the roof and we started looking to hire people as well i brought on a team of six individuals to run our seo campaigns i brought on a part-time web designer a part-time project manager and things just exploded so at the time of filming this it is april of 2021 and last month which was march was my biggest month ever we were just shy of 97 000 and when i look at where i am now versus where i was clear back in may of 2018 i can't believe how quickly this thing has grown and i could say thank you to a million people because i wouldn't be here without them but also what i can tell you right now if you're in a position where you're having a hard time finding clients or you're not making as much as you want there are really just two things that you need to do in order to push yourself further and and reach success and that is number one be flexible don't be so rigid in the fact that you're a designer that you're unwilling to learn additional skills whether that's seo or sales or people skills or charisma or whatever it is be willing to learn more and be better because as you hone in those additional skills it's going to make you much more appealing to potential clients and the second thing is don't give up if you look back at all of the the struggling months that i had there were a lot of times where i wanted to quit and i wanted to go back to my sales job or i wanted to go back to college and just take up a normal job and the only thing i can tell you is just put your head down and give it time to grow the only reason or the biggest reason that i see web designers fail or other freelancers in general is they abandon ship too early so stick with it be flexible put in the time to learn and get better and i know that you can reach your goals now if you found any value in this video i would really appreciate it if you would hit that like button down below as well if you want to learn more about how to build your freelance web design business how to get better as a designer as an seo as a business owner please consider subscribing to my channel as well i've got new videos coming out every single week obviously i don't really make much money from this channel but i do love sharing my insights because i wish that i had somebody that would just give me the the road map and the shortcuts so i could kind of jump over all of the difficult months and get to success faster and so please down in the comments if you have any questions for me or anything i can help you with please feel free to reach out and i will look forward to catching you in the next video what do you all do i'm taking care of all the spiders and the hands get you out of here and don't come back we have a no solicitation call don't come back always there sign up i'm gonna pick one up okay i'm sorry don't question no we won't sorry sir

Channel: Payton Clark Smith

Views: 3,871

Keywords: web designer, web design, freelance web design, freelance web developer, freelancer, freelance designer, web designer career 2021, My Journey to Becoming a 6-Figure Web Designer, web development, web development 2021, freelance web design salary, payton clark smith, pait academy, pait digital

Id: Fdl4v3LXQLY

Length: 11min 51sec (711 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 15 2021