Breaking In To Website Design – Getting The Right Clients
Website design is a wonderful entrepreneurial job, with low start-up costs, the ability to largely set your own hours, and to do work that’s creative and fulfilling. That being said, it’s also got all the perils and challenges of owning any small business: You’ve got to generate client lists and contacts, keep your existing clients happy, and keep your best work forward as you scout out future business and show off your skills.
There are two aspects to this problem – getting the clients you want, and maintaining a good client/vendor relationship in the first place.
The first (and best) way to get new clients is to give your customers a bonus for referring new clients to you; perhaps give them a free month of site maintenance or a few hours of free site support. Referrals from existing customers are a passive way to get new clients; if you do good work, your customers will direct new business to your door.
The next place to sell your skills is a direct clearing house marketplace, like eLance, or Get A Freelancer, which serve as places for customers to ask for requests for bids and for freelancers to bid what they’d charge to do them. eLance and Get A Freelancer tend to grossly underpay for the work they do. They’re good for starting out, and they’re good for getting some kind of work when times are slow, and the clients you impress there may well refer you to other people.
Lastly, since you’re doing search engine optimization for your clients, you should definitely do it for your own site. SEO for “web design” is silly – SEO for “web development [your city]” is not, particularly if you mostly work with local businesses. You’ll want testimonials, and you should have your clients put back links to your primary business page on their sites – they won’t generate much traffic through the links, but they’ll help in your SEO efforts to get your own site at the top of the rankings.
Once you’ve got the clients you want, the next step is to keep them. It’s amazing how many freelance web designers (or freelance workers) fail to do this adequately. I’ve picked up so many clients who’ve been burned by web design flakes and poseurs that it’s not even funny.
First and foremost, you’re selling reliability and a certain level of confidence. Brilliance is nice, but not necessary. Reliability, the ability to hit your deadlines, and the ability to meet your quotes without additional charges is essential.
To do this, make sure all communications are documented in writing, that all expectations are CLEARLY laid out, and that milestones and metrics for accomplishment are in place. At the beginning of each project, you need to define the project’s goals. At the end of each project, both sides must assess what went right and learn from what went wrong. You should always follow up on design projects after a month or two and make sure the customer’s needs haven’t changed.
Finally, don’t do what many freelancers do – don’t take on a project you lack the skills to handle, by low balling the price. It’s OK to learn a single new skill on a project; don’t commit to learning a programming language on one, or commit to learning how to use Photoshop if you’ve never touched it before.
Read about how you can find new clients through the help of email marketing.