How To Make A Lot More Money Online Doing Web Design

Posted on 29. Jul, 2010 by Web Design in Make Money Online

Web designers make an average of $35,000 per year. Some make more, some make less. The reason why most web designers do not make six figure incomes is simple: they are great web designers, but they are not great businessmen and businesswomen. As the owner of WebDesignDev, I want to share with all of my loyal WebDesignDev readers how you can make a LOT more money as a web designer by following 5 simple steps.

Tools you will need:

1) People skills and desire to succeed

2) Account on Freelancer.

3) DreamTemplate

4) HostGator’s Reseller Hosting

5) Underground Traffic Blueprints

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 need: 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 need: Account on Freelancer.

Another great way to raise your web design income is through a freelancing site. I personally have been a huge fan of Freelancer. 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 Freelancer 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 Freelancer 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.

STEP 2: Don’t waste time. Time is money.

Tool you need: 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. And that’s exactly what I do. I use DreamTemplate to complement my design work. They give me unlimited access to more than 3000 premium templates with Photoshop PSD & HTML files included. I use the PSD’s to create websites for my clients in a fraction of the time it would take me to create those websites from scratch. By creating a website for your client using premium templates, not only will the website look awesome from the start and be error-free, saving you countless hours of frustration, but if you use DreamTemplate you will also have access to 3000 premium templates so chances are you will find something to fit most clients’ needs.

STEP 3. Become the All-In-One Solution for your clients. Think outside the box.

Sell hosting to your clients.

Tool you need: HostGator’s Reseller Hosting.

After bringing offline business online and saving yourself a lot of time by using customizable templates, 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’s 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.

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

Tool you need: Underground Traffic Blueprints.

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. I will discuss the importance of building traffic to your web design website next.

STEP 4. Get more traffic to your web design site

Tool you need: Underground Traffic Blueprints.

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. But the problem is, 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 make 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. My blog, WebDesignDev.com, went from 10 visitors to thousands of visitors per day and I credit it in very large part to Underground Traffic Blueprints.

STEP 5. Don’t just design, code!

Tools you need: 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. 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 to them, 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.