Are you a Web Designer or Developer? Yes? Well are you optimizing your reach by expanding your services beyond Web Design? No? C’MON! Whats wrong with you?! Jeez!
As a Web Designer you have more options and services to offer your clients then in most other freelance fields. Some of which take almost no work at all! From Web Hosting to SEO, here is the run down of the basic services all Web Designers should offer…
#1. Search Engine Optimization
As a designer you’re going to learn a bit about SEO sooner or later so you might as well just dive in. SEO services can stand on there own so why aren’t you cracking into this field? The resources out there are abundant so you have no excuse not to do it!
Try some of these as a starting point:
Online SEO Tools - The Ultimate Collection
#2. Web Hosting
Either by using a reseller account or certain shared accounts (check your TOS!) you should be offering some type of web hosting to your clients. If you don’t have tons of clients knocking down your door for web hosting (why not?) there are still many cheaper reseller accounts out there. If you pay $9.99 a month for a reseller account and charge each client say, $5.99 a month then you just need two clients to start getting to the profit point.
When getting started, look for reseller accounts that offer customer service so your not stuck with handling everything yourself!
#3. Competitor Website Analysis
For those of you who net the established clients out there, then you could possibly be offering them a “Competitor Website Analaysis.” Basically that means you will be using free online tools to research their top competitors and then create them a (monthly??) report on these statistics. You will get information such as Number of unique visitors, Budget spent on advertising, their cost-per-click, demographic makeup and more…
It’s not hard to do but the competitor website needs to be established enough for this info to be available on the following services:
(Credit: Jamie Mintun)
#4. Marketing
If you’re good at marketing yourself (and you need to be!) then you are probably good at marketing others as well. Depending on your knowledge in this area, you need to be at least offering some sort of marketing from your clients whether it be adword’s or any other type of campaign or viral marketing. There are tons of resources out there and the overload of information can be daunting but don’t let it fool you- it’s not complicated! As a web designer you know about branding your clients and yourself, now you just simply need to build awareness of that brand by setting up campaigns for your clients and monitoring that with analytics software and tools that you are already aware of!
#5. Project Management / Consulting
If you’ve worked on any number of “larger” web projects then you’ve had to be the project manager before. If you’ve also contracted out some of the positions on the project as well then you should definitely know how to manage a project.
There are many out there completely lost when it comes to getting an idea off the ground and then to completion. As web designers we build something beautiful and functional out of thin air every day. As any seasoned freelancer can be a top project manager, any talented web designer can be as well!
Set up software such as ActiveCollab and start adding projects and clients while keeping you and your clients organized by using tasks, messages, milestones, attachments, and so on!
#7,521. Everything Else!
If you can’t do it yourself… find someone who can! Contract them out and then offer that service directly on your website.
Too many freelancers don’t take advantage of contracting out projects. As a web designer, i’ve done many contract jobs for web design firms… some of those web design firms have absolutely no web designers on their team! When they receive a project- they contract it out, skim some off the top and by the end of the day they made money from doing almost nothing but handling a few emails! So go network and start to build up a list of other freelancers who offer services that you don’t!
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Jon
July 23rd, 2008 at 12:37 am
Some useful tips, but I’d have to say that reselling hosting can create a lot of hassle with clients in the long run - sometimes it’s far easier to develop a relationship with a host and negotiate a discount on behalf of your clients, and leaving them to pay the bills directly.
This will save time and a great deal of effort and mean that you’re not the first point of call for any technical issues on the hosting side of things.
Alex S.
July 23rd, 2008 at 12:58 am
@Jon: You’re right… but there are some reselling services out there which do handle some degree of customer service. Of course you’re still the middle man and it does involve some work on your part anyway.
For smaller client sites i just link them with my shared hosting account and charge them for their use of the bandwidth and storage. Seems to work for me. If you do however know your way around some server issues then reseller accounts could be the way to go.
Ash
July 23rd, 2008 at 7:17 am
I would personally tell people to run a mile away from offering hosting if you are freelancing. It turns into a nightmare and you end up footing the bill for hosting or constantly chasing up hosting bills. Dont do it!
Alex S.
July 23rd, 2008 at 10:56 am
@Ash, my experience has been good so far! I would never make it a full time job by any means though.
Internet Mogal
July 24th, 2008 at 3:59 pm
Actually if you look at GoDaddy’s reseller program, it’s pretty good if you want to seriously dabble into web hosting. You can also make profits off domain name registration, email marketing, etc. so that you’re not limited to just web hosting. It does cost to get the reseller account but if you want to make an investment and give it a serious push, it’s worth a look at.
You can get a catchy domain name and then domain mask it to your reseller account so people don’t readily see it as a GoDaddy reseller. I do it here with this domain: http://www.webhostingforsmallbusinesses.net and it also helps me get domains at a discount for my own projects. I don’t host with them though.
Zlatko
July 26th, 2008 at 6:37 am
Thanks for the advices, I’ve never considered that I should ever learn some of those additional stuff!