Elance

If you haven’t already heard of, or aren’t already on, Elance then you will definitely want to look in to it. It’s an entire online community of work for remote freelancers that handles everything from the job posting to the payment. You can post jobs or bid on jobs in a system that’s very similar to Ebay. Each user can create their profile within Elance, allowing them to upload portfolio pieces and write a bio to let prospective clients know why they’re the best fit for the job. You can open a free account, which limits you to bidding on jobs in one profession, and the most important thing to keep in mind when you first get on there is to take placement tests. The tests will show what your skill level is in your area of profession. If you don’t have any test results on your profile then a prospective client will most likely quickly move on to the next provider, as they don’t know how good your skills are.

oDesk

Similar to Elance, oDesk is an online community of freelancers and outsourcers. You are also able to create a profile, and search for jobs, though the process of being verified on oDesk is a little tougher than Elance. This is a great source for finding work now and building long-term business relationships.

Guru

Guru is another online marketplace of freelancers and outsourcers. It’s free and easy to post projects on Guru, if you’re looking for help. If you’re looking for work you can create a profile, bid on jobs, win jobs, and get paid. If you’re curious what kind of jobs you can find on there, browse around and see if there’s anything that you want to bid on.

Freelancer

Claiming to be the world’s largest outsourcing marketplace, Freelancer is another great site to look in to. The format of Freelancer is just like the rest of the global market outsourcing sites, you create a profile, browse for jobs, and bid on them. One thing I think is pretty cool about this site are the stats on the homepage. You can see a real time calculation of how many users, projects and dollars spent are happening on the site. It gets you motivated to find work and get going on it!

Craigslist

You won’t find nearly as many job opportunities on Craigslist as you will on those global marketplace sites like Elance and Guru, but it’s certainly worth having a peak at every day or two. When I first got in to freelancing I got a lot of work on Craigslist, in fact, some of my biggest clients to date are ones I got off Craigslist years ago. Keep in mind that you don’t have to limit yourself to your home city, browse other cities close by, or major cities for telecommuting positions.

It’s also worth noting that with so many users going after the posted jobs on those global outsourcing sites, it can be a bit difficult to land your first gig. Along with your test result scores clients often look at your feedback rating, so if you haven’t done a job yet you won’t have any feedback. Much like Ebay, once you do a job for someone they will give you some sort of rating on how you did and leave feedback as to how their experience was working with you. You’ll find starting out that with no feedback it’s a little hard to get a response. You may want to consider making a hungry bid, coming in low on cost, and writing a stellar bid pitch and hope that the client is impressed with your placement tests.

About the author: with over ten years in the freelance web design and writing fields, Scott Stanton has had his finger on the beating pulse of the industry’s hottest design trends and bends for the past decade. Scott regularly writes for Wix.com the free website builder. Follow him on Twitter @TheScottStanton.

Google AdSense is probably the most popular and the easiest source for webmasters to earn some advertising revenue. Google AdSense automatically delivers text, image, video and rich media adverts specifically targeted towards the content on your site. Meaning if you run a blog much like this site, Google will pull design-oriented adverts in to the spots. This allows the advertisers to target their specific audience, which in turn leads to the webmaster getting more clicks from the ads, and, ultimately, more revenue.

Google does all of the hard work for you, taking into consideration your geographical location, your market, the viewing audience, and other factors. This results in advertisements being more effective for everyone, the advertiser, the company whose site the ads appear on, and the viewers clicking on the ads. All the webmaster has to do is insert the AdSense JavaScript code into their page, then, each time the page is loaded, the code fetches content from the Google servers.

There are a few different applications that Google offers for their AdSense program. AdSense for Feeds is a program that runs on RSS and Atom feeds that have over 100 people subscribed to them. Google simply places an image into the feed and Google writes the content based on what the content of the feed surrounding the image includes. If the viewer chooses to pursue the ad they simply click on it and are taken to the advertisers website.

Adsense for Search is a program where website owners can include a Google Custom Search box in their website for viewers to either search the web, or the content of the site. Google will then share 51% of the advertising revenue generated from those searches with the site owner.

AdSense for mobile content is identical to the regular AdSense program, only it’s targeted towards mobile websites. The ads generated by Google match the content of the mobile site. The difference between AdSense for mobile content and the regular AdSense program is how Google generates the ads, rather than using JavaScript they utilize PHP and ASP scripts.

AdSense for domains is a program allowing developers to populate undeveloped sites with ads in an effort to generate some revenue off their domain before publishing their site or reselling the domain.

You can also target people on video content with AdSense for video. This is a common practice on popular YouTube videos.

Whether you are a hobby webmaster who maintains a personal site for fun and you’re looking for some supplemental income to help with hosting costs, or are looking to utilize your web presence to generate a decent amount of income, Google AdSense is a program certainly worth trying. The cost to the site owner is nothing, it only takes a few minutes to set up and Google does all of the accounting. Give it a shot and see how much extra income you’re able to generate.

About the author: with over ten years in the freelance web design and writing fields, Scott Stanton has had his finger on the beating pulse of the industry’s hottest design trends and bends for the past decade. Scott regularly writes for Wix.com the free website builder.

When I just started WebDesignDev.com, I obviously didn’t have a Twitter following. As a matter of fact, getting Twitter followers isn’t easy at all – most of you already know that from experience. It wasn’t easy for me either. That is, until I came up with a strategy. Read on to find out how I did it.

One day I was writing a blog post on WebDesignDev and it hit me: “why don’t I follow the followers of successful web design blogs?”. I thought surely many of them will follow me. After all, I am in the same niche and my blog provides valuable web design insight, advice and resources. I started out by adding 100 followers a day from top web design blogs and websites. Most of them would follow me back, and they were exactly the followers I was looking for: not some automated bots, not some people only interested in selling something, but instead, people who are genuinely interested in learning about web design.  You are probably thinking “I don’t have time to add 100 people a day.” It was extremely time consuming for me too…until I accidentally stumbled across TweetAdder.

This is how I’ve used TweetAdder to help me get 32,000 targeted followers that I have now:

First you must of course log in and it will take you to the main window. Once you log in, click on Open User and select the Twitter profile you want to use.

Next, click on Follow and make sure you click on Automation On so that you automatically follow people without lifting a finger. You can keep the Automation settings at the bottom as default, which will give you about 144 people that you follow per day. Even assuming a 1.44:1 follow back ratio, that’s 100 real, targeted followers every single day. If you want you can set shorter follow duration to get more followers, but I would recommend keeping the follows to no more than 200 per day.

Next, click on “Tweet Search” under the Search Users To Follow section:

Next, make sure you click on Automation On. Afterwards, start adding all of the web design related keywords in the box below. You will only need to do this once.

When you are done, it will look something like this:

TweetAdder has definitely been a lifesaver for me. What are you waiting for? Start building your huge Twitter following by using it like I am. They even offer a free trial.

Tip: coupon WEB20 will get you 20% off.

After you build a sufficiently large following of Twitter users, stay active! Use your Twitter account daily and tweet things that people will find useful. Tweet news, promotions, advice, etc. If you send a useful tweet to your followers it WILL get retweeted and the followers of your followers will follow you too.

If you’ve found my advice helpful, please do leave a comment and tell me how much your Twitter followers list has grown!

Tools you should use:

1) People skills and desire to succeed

2) Account on Elance.

3) DreamTemplate

4) HostGator Reseller Hosting

5) SEOMoz

6) Simple PHP; PHP & MySQL For Dummies; and Learning PHP, MySQL, and JavaScript

STEP 1. Look for creative ways to find more clients.

Bring offline businesses online.

Tool you should use: People skills and a desire to succeed.

This can be an awesome way to earn a lot of cash. Do you know how many local business in your area don’t have websites? Hundreds! Do you think they don’t have websites because they can’t afford them? No! They are still doing business the old-fashioned way, so you will need to enlighten them. Go to your local businesses, call them, e-mail them, do everything you can to get in touch with them and tell them that you can bring them a lot of exposure and customers by bringing their business online and creating a website for them. I got a lot of customers this way, and I know you can too.

Freelance.

Tool you should use: 1) Account on Elance.

Another great way to raise your web design income is through a freelancing site. I personally have been a huge fan of Elance. When you look at the main page of the site you can see there are hundreds of jobs posted daily. The jobs posted are so diverse that any web designer can find a project to bid on. Do enough jobs on Elance and get enough feedback and you’re almost guaranteed to be the winning bidder for the projects you choose. Once you get that client from Elance and make them a website or design something for them, there’s a great chance they’ll come back for more business. Residual income is key in earning six figures as a web designer.

Case studies.

Check out some extremely successful ways in which web designers who read WebDesignDev found more clients:

Case study #1 from Charles Coyle:

” My best tactic believe it or not was direct mail.

“The most successful thing I ever did was give a presentation describing how we developed the product and how they could do the same. I sold more than 80% of the room. One person even went back to her boss and said she would not build their own, because we were so far ahead and cheaper.”

- Steve Robillard

Case Study #3 from Nuno Barreiro:

“1 – Clients don’t come to you only because you work on this area. You’ve got to chase the clients. Create accounts on common social media like Facebook and Linkedin, but create also on networks that’s dedicated to your area of expertise. Get yourself a twitter account and start following companies and other freelancers to see what’s being done. Send emails directly to possible clients but make sure your presentation letter is well done and try to get a meeting.

2 – Don’t lie to clients. You have to be honest if you want no problems. Present your work and give tips to your clients that you might seem useful. Remember, it’s your expertise. Not theirs. If you lie to your clients, if you promise more that you can really do, then you’ll get problems sooner or later. Keep in mind that “mouth-to-mouth” is also a powerful tool. Don’t give them any reasons to talk trash about your work to anyone.

3 – Give fair prizes and development times. Clients will also try to pay less and want all as soon as possible. Without using “techies” that they don’t understand, explain them well why you’re charging that price and why you need that time for development.

4 – Be always available for your clients. You too have the right to free-times. Sometimes clients don’t understand that, but if you’re away from office, at least keep your cell on and be sure to read your emails sometimes.

5 – Continuous support. The job is done? Maybe not. Be sure to give your client all the support they need. If you show them that you care and that you’re a good professional, then the next job is yours, no doubt about it.

I’m sure that there’s much more I can do, but only with that strategy I acquired more than 10 clients in 9 months and those clients already got me the contacts for some friends of theirs that are in need of someone in my area.”

- Nuno Barreiro

Case Study #4 from Les F.:

“Within my 3 years of being an active freelancer, one of the most successful tactics I used was understanding my clients’ wants, needs and issues so that I can connect with them. Due to the lack of managing my customers’ relationship, I have learned that a freelancer should act out the role of a mentor in some cases. Some clients need that sense of concern for their business from the freelancer, thus far prompting the client to trust and rely on doing business with you. In a nutshell, our focus should be in serving the customer rather than the customer serving us.”

- Les F.

Case Study #5 from Brandon J.:

“My best tactic is creating a relationship and continuing to build that relationship into a client. I make sure head to the local Chamber meetings, Rotary Clubs, etc… These places are great for starting new business and personal relationships. By creating a true relationship with someone, I believe, you’re more likely to build a longer lasting client instead of a fly-by. Although there is value in fly-by clients, I’ve found I make more money off of my reoccurring client base, plus I have greater passion for making their company a success online, as I now have a personal interest in the matter!”

- Brandon J.

Case Study #6 from Stephanie Ritchey:

“My best tactic for getting clients lies in two things; using a free-lancing service and a customer referral program. I use a service called Elance that gets me about 30% of my clients. This service is cheap to use and has certainly more than paid for itself over the years. My customer referral program gives clients a small amount off of their next bill for referring a new client to me. This it has gotten me another 10% of my business. Most of my other business comes from various places; forums or blogs that I’ve linked to. Once in a great while I will actually get someone who has stumbled across my website and gets me that way, but I wouldn’t call it an SEO success by any means, at least not yet.”

- Stephanie Ritchey

STEP 2. Become the All-In-One Solution for your clients. Think outside the box.

Sell hosting to your clients.

Tool you should use: HostGator Reseller Hosting (hint: coupon SPRING gets you 20% off)

If you’ve read my guide up to this point, you are ready to start thinking outside the box. One thing that most web designers don’t realize is that web design business does not stop at web design. You can sell hosting to your clients! Think about it. You just designed a great website for your client. The client wouldn’t just like to host his or her website, the client needs hosting to run the new website. So what I do is I sell hosting to my clients using HostGator Reseller Hosting. It is the most reliable hosting company I have ever worked with, and you will see in my other articles that I praise them whenever I get a chance. People love all-in-one packages and if you don’t take full advantage of that you are losing a lot of money on each client.

Hint: coupon SPRING gets you 20% off.

Sell SEO (Search Engine Optimization) services to your clients.

Tool you should use: SEOMoz.

Why is this so important? SEO companies make tens of thousands of dollars per month. What’s the difference between a web designer offering SEO services in addition to web design and an SEO company offering only SEO services? The web designer can make even more money than an SEO company when they sell both SEO, web design and code websites for their clients! (I will discuss the importance of coding in Step 5). SEO companies charge anywhere from several hundred to several thousand of dollars per month for each client to bring the clients good rankings with search engines and maintain those rankings. If you know SEO and can give clients results, they will stay with you for as long as their website is active. This means thousands of dollars of repeating income every month. This is why it is so vital for every web designer to know SEO.

STEP 3. Get more traffic to your web design site

Tool you should use: SEOMoz.

You must have traffic to your website to have any clients. More traffic to your web design site means more clients. More clients obviously means more money. Not having traffic to your website is equivalent to having the talent of a professional singer but only singing in your own house. You must let the world know about your services. The problem is that most web designers don’t know how to build traffic to their websites. The sooner you learn how to build traffic to your website, the sooner you’ll be on your way of making six figures as a web designer. You accomplish 2 things when you know how to get traffic: 1) getting a lot of traffic and customers to your web design site, and 2) selling SEO services to your web design clients. There is terrific software available now that can really help you get traffic to your site. It is called SEOMoz and I recommend you use it to build traffic to get a ton of clients (it’s used by Walt Disney, Overstock, BestBuy and thousands others).

STEP 4: Don’t waste time. Time is money.

Tool you should use: DreamTemplate.

We all know that time is money, but what many web designers don’t know is that they could make great, professional websites using customizable templates. Think about how much time you will not have to spend on designing that website for your client when you can do it in the blink of an eye using a customizable template. That’s time that you can spend on doing projects for other clients. You can use DreamTemplate to complement your design work. Now I am not saying that all you should be doing is taking their templates and customizing them, but they can make your job as a web designer a lot easier. They give you unlimited access to more than 3000 premium templates with Photoshop PSD & HTML files included. You can use the PSD’s to create websites for your clients in a fraction of the time it would take you to create those websites from scratch. By creating a website for your client using premium templates, not only will the website look professional from the start and be error-free, saving you countless hours of frustration, but you will also have access to 3000 premium templates so chances are you will find something to fit most clients’ needs.

STEP 5. Don’t just design, code!

Tools you should use: 1) Simple PHP; 2) PHP & MySQL For Dummies; 3) Learning PHP, MySQL, and JavaScript.

I want to repeat what I have pointed out earlier – the sooner you become the All-In-One solution for your web design clients, the sooner you will be making a lot more money. You need to be fully comfortable coding websites and editing customizable templates. You need to have a lot of traffic to your website in order to have clients. Some of the reading materials I can suggest are Simple PHP, to grasp a really good idea of the PHP basics, PHP & MySQL For Dummies and Learning PHP, MySQL, and JavaScript. Of course you can also read my tutorials.

If you follow the steps in my guide, you will not only design websites for your clients, but you will also be able to Sell hosting, save a LOT of time by not designing from scratch, get many more clients by building more traffic to your site, and make thousands of dollars per month by selling SEO services to your clients. The sooner you start taking action, the sooner you can be earning a lot more money.

Step 1. Get A Powerful Back-end

The most important things to keep in mind when creating a web hosting company are your expenses and the time you need to spend on each client. You need to have a back-end that will allow you a lot of room for markup and profit. You also need a back-end that will allow easy client sign-up, with minimal work on your part. This is why I recommend you use a reseller hosting package. You do not need to invest in expensive servers. You do not need to monitor them for down-time and risk losing all your clients if something on your server breaks on Friday night and you fix it on Monday or Tuesday. You do not need to buy expensive cPanel licensing (you are saving $450 per year just on that) and all other software. I suggest using HostGator’s Reseller Hosting, that comes with already prepackaged cPanel, WHMCS client billing software, Fantastico and much more.  In case you don’t know what WHMCS is, it’s the all-in-one client billing/support software. It allows you to create invoices, subscriptions, and even has a great built in support ticket system. You get it for free with HostGator reseller hosting, which I think is pretty hard to beat. You can use coupon 25PERCENTSALE to get 25% off your order.

You will want to offer at least several hosting plans to your clients. People always like to have a choice, so offer 2-3 plans. Think about how you want to split the bandwidth/hard drive space that HostGator gives you in your reseller hosting plan.

Step 2. Create A Converting Sales Page

What good is a powerful back-end without a powerful front-end, right? This is why you need to create a very well converting and optimized sales page. Things to keep in mind: a) price. Make sure you set a price that is affordable and competitive; b) put forth the benefits of hosting with you; c) hosting duration – do you want to lock people into a contract, or give them freedom to pay month by month? d) promotions and special offers: give people coupons and incentives to host with you as opposed to another company; e) assure people your hosting is reliable. The 2 most important considerations for people buying hosting are price and reliability. Make sure you touch on those points in your sales page. See my list of Best Hosting Website Designs for inspiration. If you are a web designer, you can design the sales page yourself. As an alternative, there is a fantastic WordPress theme out there that lets you almost instantly create an amazing sales page using WordPress. It’s called OptimizePress – I suggest you check it out.

Step 3. Market Your Web Hosting Company

What good are a powerful back-end and front-end when you don’t have clients? This is why, after you create a powerful back-end and front-end, you must market your web hosting business everywhere you can. Put a link in your signature and post on relevant forums (Web Hosting Talk is the #1 hosting forum). Write relevant articles and submit them to article directories (Ezine Articles, GoArticles and others). Build links to your web hosting website. Market yourself on Twitter (see my post on how I got 32,000 Twitter followers), Linkedin and Facebook.

Hey guys my name is Corey and I’m a freelancer running my own business automatically without me having to be there, do much work unless I want to, and I get a lot more time to myself. Why? Because I outsource my business so that I can only do the work that will make my business more efficient and more profitable. I know many of you are probably completely booked with the projects you already have, so that mean you can’t work on expanding your business, meaning you keep your profits limited. With people in your situation, I like to tell them that they’re working for their business and not themselves.

I believe and people seem to prove everyday that outsourcing is one of the main keys to success. Why? Because it allows you to pay dimes for dollars so you’re always profiting even if you aren’t doing anything. What I did with my business was bring in as much clients as possible, and then I outsourced the projects, and collected the profits. Therefore, I get to work on the projects I have a passion towards or an idea and I get the freedom I became a freelancer for.

What Should You Outsource First?

The first question you need to ask yourself is “What is an immediate priority I can outsource?”  I personally outsourced projects first, then once I became comfortable to even free up more of my time; I outsourced some marketing to bring in more clients. Then that’s where the automation started to work, my staffs were bringing in clients and my other staffs were finishing the client’s projects. All I had to do is basically manage the clients.

It’s amazing how many people realize that outsourcing is important yet haven’t taken any action to eliminate their most stressful business tasks.

Projects develop in a sequence, like a house constructed from the ground up on a budget, you build the foundation long before you head out and buy furniture to keep costs at any one point in time as low as possible.

Jobs You Can Outsource

Some components of your business that you can outsource include:

• Projects
• Marketing
• Managing clients
• Deal closing
• SEO
• And more

Take Action

Now’s the time you need to take action, begin the outsourcing process and use the freedom it generates to devote more time marketing and expanding your business so you can create more cash flow to hire more people and bring in even more clients.

Cash Flow vs. Outsourcing

Outsourcing and cash flow are support each other. One generally helps to create the other and vice versa because you pay money to hire contractors and you hire contractors to make more money.

You don’t want to go into debt to pay for outsourcing unless you know for sure the return is big once the outsourcer completed the project. Outsourcing is something that may be a little scary to others because the money you spend today may not returned the next day.

Making Sure You Don’t Get Burned

We all know that sometimes we get those annoying clients that give you hard time while you chase them to get your earned dollars. To make sure you don’t hire an outsourcer and don’t get paid for the project, you MUST evaluate your prospect effectively to make sure they are serious and won’t burn you in the end. Also, asking for 50% upfront can break you even. If something like this happens and you don’t end up getting paid, it may be a little downfall to outsourcing but something like that would barely happen, but there is still a risk, just a smart one.

How to Pay for a Contractor

I use many different sources to pay my contractors but my main ways of doing so include paying by:

• PayPal
• Cheque
• Cash

How to Find Good Outsourcers

Most advice you read about outsourcing suggest you go to freelancing sites such as Elance.com and submit a job to find someone. This exactly isn’t the best way because usually these people are either way too expensive or they take too long to stretch their hourly wage.

I have never used a freelancing site to hire an outsourcer. To find good people I always rely on my 3 main resources:

1. My social network (online and offline)
2. My website
3. Craigslist.com
4. DeviantArt.com

Every person who has ever worked for me were either my shared friends or colleagues, people that contacted me from a Craigslist.com ad or DeviantArt.com job post ,or someone who contacted me after reading the career section of my website.

A good way to save money when outsourcing is to bring in talented interns to work for you or if hiring someone, to bring in a fresh talented graduate.

Outsourcing Sites

If all your other methods fail to get you a outsourcer and you are in desperate need  one, use any of the following sites to find one even though I personally don’t like to use them:

• Elance
• Guru
• GetFriday
• LinkedIn
• OutsourcingSweetie
• Professional Support Network

Here are some steps to take when hiring through outsourcing sites.

1. Review the job descriptions other people have used to hire someone to get ideas for your own job template. See the Customer Support category in Elance for examples.
2. Create a thorough description of the role: the time required, the hours of the day work is to be done, communication methods, skills and experience necessary, technology used, type of people they will have to support, pay scale, payment method (PayPal/Direct Deposit/Check?) – be as specific and detailed as you can to get rid of the bad outsourcers.
3. Submit the job to one or several outsourcing sites. I recommend you include a keyword or phrase within each job post that applicants must include in their application. This confirms they actually read the job details and helps filter away people who are not taking your position seriously.
4. Trial several people at once on a test job. Make sure it’s something they would do regularly when hiring them and take the best one. If their going to be completing projects, pick

Treat Good People Well

When you find someone who fits well, do whatever you can to keep them happy. People are replaceable, but it’s a time consuming and it’s a lot easier to keep good people who already work for you.

In my experience, one of the best ways to keep staff happy is offer consistent work. If business is going well, pay bonuses. Share the wealth and harness a team environment built on personal relationships.

What Comes Before Outsourcing?

In order for you to outsource you NEED to have a dependable cash flow, meaning you need to CLIENTS. If you’re having trouble building up your clientele quickly check out Client Ultimatum for a free training course on how to build up your clientele.

You’ve Got the Knowledge Now Use It

Now that you know the power of outsourcing, use it because that faster you do, the faster your business grows, meaning the faster you get have your freedom and live your dreams.

To Your Success,

Corey