Ask HN: How to land more web development and design contracts?
I'm a web developer and designer who's been doing this for over ten years. I've had a long list of clients that I've been working with for years, but during the past couple of years, I had a few problems and now I'm back looking for work, but it seems that the field has changed quite a lot, and I can't seem to figuer out how to bring in any new clients anymore. This is my portfolio if it helps: www.aladinbs.com
I sell around 1.5-2m a year in website and design and marketing projects for a 5-7 person team mostly through a monthly adwords spend of $1k and portfolio references and being legitimate SEO experts so our site performs well and our client sites perform well.
Minimum website project is 5.5k, the moment I just stopped working with smaller budget clients, the moment my time opened up to pursue more profitable partnerships. The cap on sales is only on production assets and could easily be 2xed using the same methods and more lenient sales tactics.
Most clients could care less about technology, but most of our projects are in Umbraco which allows us to not be apples to apples to your run of the mill wordpress providers (im personally a fan of wordpress and have hundreds of WP sites from my affiliate marketing and webdesign background)
I reviewed your portfolio, if I was hiring or looking for a web provider, it wouldn't work for me because nothing in the portfolio is complete. You should determine your audience also as most of your portfolio language is heavy with design terms, business owners (if that is your audience) should be talked to in their own language.
It would be great to get your advice regarding my company. I've started a small company and have 5 clients currently, I manage social media, SEO, website changes, content writing, etc. I'm charging a small upfront fee (about £500) followed by a monthly retainer for a minimum term of 12 months (£300).
The problem I have is that it doesn't scale at all. ALL of my time is spent on SEO, Social Media Posting (Creating posts and then scheduling them), and finally content writing for blogs. I could hire people to do these things (i'm actually struggling to find jacks of all trades like myself) but the problem is that it's no longer profitable if I start hiring.
Any advice? It would excellent if we could chat privately somehow.
In 2008 (the last time I did freelance web design) I was able to charge decent money for a custom website. Nowadays people can get that with WordPress and a $60 Themeforest template or something like Wix or Shopify. So you will have to compete with that (or layer value added serves on top). One interesting way I generated a lot of business back in the day was redesigning websites on spec. Basically I found businesses with websites that needed refreshing and I just redesigned them without asking. Then I emailed them a link to a fully functional version of the site. You can recycle the design for multiple prospects and just update the content. I stuck to single verticals like restaurants to make it easy. Here is an example of businesses I would target: http://thechinagarden.com/ or https://www.blujamcafe.com/ since they are in my neighborhood (I can work the "we are both local small businesses" angle and maybe get some free food out of the deal.
I get a lot of clients who tried building a website themselves using Shopify or Wix and gave up to then contact me to build them a website.
You can still make a living at freelance web design, that's how I feed my family. But you need to offer an excellent customer service too, people seem to give more value to a decent web designer who has excellent customer service than a genius web designer who has very poor approach. I'm charging between £600 and £1500 for websites built using Divi and WordPress on my main web design business - https://freelance-webdesign.co.uk/
Not sure if this is helpful, but I've been doing webdev for the last 3 years as a summer job for small businesses in my hometown during uni. I hate to say it, but byoung2 hit the nail on the head when talking about the need for "cookiecutter" websites. Most small businesses are looking for basically a 5 to 10 page website, with some basic information that looks pretty - they don't need/want/care about anything custom.
Therefore, I think the key is adding value to these "cookiecutter" websites to justify your rates. Can you bring in a photographer to get some pictures of the business for social media and website use? I often find small business owners know they should be engaging on fb/ig more, and are stressed about the fact that they have nothing to post. Are you a hosting reseller? That could be an avenue for increased revenue as well.
I know my "adding value" spiel does not help with your "finding clients" question, I think byoung2 covered everything i'd recommend - walk into a ton of small businesses with mock-ups of their new websites and quotes for how much they'd cost.
Hey, I'm a web developer and designer. I spent the last six years contracting, and just in the last three years I've 5x'd my rate actually. I'm writing a book about it:
If you shoot me your email I'll send you the entire manuscript so far. Also would love to hop on a call and just tell you everything I'm going to put in it -- looking for feedback on the content.
I read the TOC, good advice, even there without reading the whole book :).
I Just wanted to let you know, that rendering on iOS has one issue with the first line https://devcareer.elliotbonneville.com/75d18802eaaa487dbd510... is not wrapping, so it make it bigger than 375 points/px
I am still not sure I want to be exactly in that area but my current way of working doesn't seem to click with my soul that well lately so I am looking for options.
Mail is mitko dot p at gmail dot com, would love to read some of your stuff and give an opinion.
Ah, the freelancing feast/famine cycle. This is really easy in theory, but very hard to get off of in practice.
Here's how I've dealt with it:
1. Niche down really tightly. It seems like you've at least narrowed your expertise to the frontend, but do you specialize in certain industries? Sizes of companies? There are so many general purpose freelance frontend architects, so find a way to get more specialized in your messaging.
2. Network, network, network. Service businesses are relationship based, so if you let your network stagnate, you're going to struggle. I set aside half my time each week for sales and marketing, and at least half that time is networking with people or staying in touch.
3. Do things that bring you energy rather than listening to gurus. In other words, if side projects get you jazzed up and you can build them to facilitate your marketing, do that. If writing works, do that. If you like sending cold emails, try that. If you're doing marketing that doesn't even feel like work, it'll be more sustainable.
By providing value through solid content marketing strategy. Here is one of our blog posts around ON-Page SEO for businesses that want to get consistent organic traffic. In this checklist/article, you will see the complete on-page tactics utilized by SEO specialists such as optimizing title tags/ meta descriptions. Website Speed and Website Design also play a pivotal role in how long a user stays on your website. Google also demands a clean UI/UX for a website for rank in it's top 10 positions.
The #1 thing we do to get business during a slowdown is start contacting old clients. You can also ask if they would recommend anyone else "that it might make sense to talk to".
Minimum website project is 5.5k, the moment I just stopped working with smaller budget clients, the moment my time opened up to pursue more profitable partnerships. The cap on sales is only on production assets and could easily be 2xed using the same methods and more lenient sales tactics.
Most clients could care less about technology, but most of our projects are in Umbraco which allows us to not be apples to apples to your run of the mill wordpress providers (im personally a fan of wordpress and have hundreds of WP sites from my affiliate marketing and webdesign background)
I reviewed your portfolio, if I was hiring or looking for a web provider, it wouldn't work for me because nothing in the portfolio is complete. You should determine your audience also as most of your portfolio language is heavy with design terms, business owners (if that is your audience) should be talked to in their own language.
The problem I have is that it doesn't scale at all. ALL of my time is spent on SEO, Social Media Posting (Creating posts and then scheduling them), and finally content writing for blogs. I could hire people to do these things (i'm actually struggling to find jacks of all trades like myself) but the problem is that it's no longer profitable if I start hiring.
Any advice? It would excellent if we could chat privately somehow.
You can still make a living at freelance web design, that's how I feed my family. But you need to offer an excellent customer service too, people seem to give more value to a decent web designer who has excellent customer service than a genius web designer who has very poor approach. I'm charging between £600 and £1500 for websites built using Divi and WordPress on my main web design business - https://freelance-webdesign.co.uk/
Therefore, I think the key is adding value to these "cookiecutter" websites to justify your rates. Can you bring in a photographer to get some pictures of the business for social media and website use? I often find small business owners know they should be engaging on fb/ig more, and are stressed about the fact that they have nothing to post. Are you a hosting reseller? That could be an avenue for increased revenue as well.
I know my "adding value" spiel does not help with your "finding clients" question, I think byoung2 covered everything i'd recommend - walk into a ton of small businesses with mock-ups of their new websites and quotes for how much they'd cost.
Your website looks great btw.
https://devcareer.elliotbonneville.com/
If you shoot me your email I'll send you the entire manuscript so far. Also would love to hop on a call and just tell you everything I'm going to put in it -- looking for feedback on the content.
Mail is mitko dot p at gmail dot com, would love to read some of your stuff and give an opinion.
I shot you an email and added you to the Google Doc. Thanks for your interest!
Here's how I've dealt with it:
1. Niche down really tightly. It seems like you've at least narrowed your expertise to the frontend, but do you specialize in certain industries? Sizes of companies? There are so many general purpose freelance frontend architects, so find a way to get more specialized in your messaging.
2. Network, network, network. Service businesses are relationship based, so if you let your network stagnate, you're going to struggle. I set aside half my time each week for sales and marketing, and at least half that time is networking with people or staying in touch.
3. Do things that bring you energy rather than listening to gurus. In other words, if side projects get you jazzed up and you can build them to facilitate your marketing, do that. If writing works, do that. If you like sending cold emails, try that. If you're doing marketing that doesn't even feel like work, it'll be more sustainable.
If you want to read in detail here is the link https://technerds.com/blog/on-page-seo-a-detailed-checklist-...
- [0]: https://mobile.twitter.com/jugurthahadjar/status/13106682933...
Which were?