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Make Money with building Websites: The ultimate Way

Patrick Jones

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Atleast this could become fastlane instead of just getting a commission?

That sounds like building up a web agency.

For me the approach outlined in this thread is not fastlane. It's something that allows you to work flexibly, pays good money and teaches you to think in terms of needs and wants.

It gives you the freedom and space to build something fastlane.
 
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banjoa

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This thread reminds me of a post I read about finding a niche.

Many people have difficulty finding ideas, niches or what to do because they think about what they can fulfill.

Thinking about what you can fulfill/do will limit a lot of people in coming up with a business idea because most people lack skills that the market wants and will pay for.

An easy way to go around this is to have a mindset shift:

Do something you don’t have the skills to fulfill. This way you will be forced to think like a business man and actually providing what people want.

I was listening to a podcast where Dan Norris said the reason why wpcurve was successful was because he outsourced all the technical aspects of the business from day one.

This forced him and his cofounder to focus on more important and high ROI activities from day one like marketing/sales.

Having this mindset shift will provide you with more ideas and niches to take on.

Why?:

Because you won’t be limited to only ideas you have the skills to execute.

All you have to do is listen to the market. Look around you and see what people are paying for without worrying about whether you can fulfill it or not.

This brings me back to one of my favourite quote:

‘Sales solves everything.’

When make sales you will figure it all out. So worry about only that.
 
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SkyLake

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1. Find and partner with a reputable web agency in your area.
2. Write up contracts so nobody gets scammed.
3. Ask them how much is their average sale. Let's say they say 5k.
4. Double that price. You find businesses that need a website, you sell each one for 10k.
5. Get paid 50% upfront from the client. You then pay 50% of that to the agency so they begin the work.
6. When the work is done (Which you won't have to do any of it, this is what the agency specializes in, let them deal with all the back and forth and designs and colors and whatever) you collect the remaining 50% from the client and do 50/50 with the agency again.
7. Win-win for all parties.

This will require hustle and good sales knowledge. Won't be easy and simple at first. You will probably have to keep trying until you find an agency that is a good fit. The transition between you the seller and the agency that the client goes through should be simple, professional, smooth and efficient.

But is doable. You have to take care of all the details at first, then you can create a system that makes you 100k profit a year (or more if you want it and can hustle).

8. Now use that money to go Fastlane. Or simply live comfortably on your 100k profit a year business.



There are many ways you can use to make this work. Agency, freelancers, your own in-house development team.
You will need to spend some time learning the basics of the technologies used, but nowhere near close professional skills.


If you are a good coder, and learn enough sales, then you've hit the jackpot. You can do anything you want. You're a goldmine waiting to be used.
 
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Arqium

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As a software engineer, most of us grow up with this kind of one sided mentality about ROI. We always push for the technical mastery; we want to use the fanciest framework, use shiny things like GraphQL and other buzzy technologies, but at the end, the people who know how to sell get the most money, at least in my experience. It's hard to swap the chip from being overly technical to be a good seller.


I was working as consctruction manager as architect (civil engineer job btw) a few years ago, building a very luxurious condo here in Brazil.

A friend of mine was a real state agent, he sold 1 apartment that I was building, and walked away with something like 1 year of my pay in the bag as his comission.... in fact a bit more.
I was earning something like 20k year (salary here is low), and he went out with 30k comission... because the apartment he sold was something like 600k, and his comission was 5%.
 

Over

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I know it is a basic question, but I am not familiar with this stuff. Out of curiosity - let's say I have found a web developer from poor country. He is ready to do a site for me. Then I've found a local compay with bad and old site. I talked with them and they agreed to change their website. Do I need some accesses to their webpage to modify it? Or do I need to ask my developer to create it from the scratch? And If yes, then what about a domain name? Can someone please explain me this part of process? Thanks.
 

KeepGoin

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You forward the lead to the developer and collect your commission.

Technical stuff you do not want to concern yourself with.
Do you contact these leads through a cold call after finding the outdated site? Or is it an email?
 

Over

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You forward the lead to the developer and collect your commission.

Technical stuff you do not want to concern yourself with.
Can you tell something more about the profits and earnings? How much usually those programmers from countries like Vietnam/Romonia takes per one website and how much profit do you get per the whole transaction? I know it depends on the client, but just typical price spread.
 

Patrick Jones

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Do you contact these leads through a cold call after finding the outdated site? Or is it an email?

Try both, see what works for you. It depends heavily on country, target audience, etc. You can also try and find out where they network, meet them in person.

Can you tell something more about the profits and earnings? How much usually those programmers from countries like Vietnam/Romonia takes per one website and how much profit do you get per the whole transaction? I know it depends on the client, but just typical price spread.

You don't want to interact with developers from remote countries. For it to produce good results, you will need to have a solid understanding of the technical side of things. As well as be very good in project management, issue management, etc.

The idea is for you to bring clients from a western country in touch with a developer from a western country. Clients need websites and developers don't like doing sales/acquisition. That's the need you want to address.

Bring a developer a lead for a new website that the client pays €3,000 for. Receive 12% commission - you do the math.
 
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D

Deleted67963

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as a fullstack dev too, you don't imagine the work and investment in term of time it cost us to be top notch.
tech is growing so fast and competition is so high that you need to dedicate all your time for it.
currently I'm selling my time 400€/day (7h) (in the French country side so my costOfLife/income ratio is very good for my needs) on a 5 to 6 days per week and I can assure you it's exhausting AF, and that's why I joined the community.

@Patrick Jones is 100% right, you can have the nerds knowlegdes or the fanciest tech in your plateform, if you don't know how to sell you are doomed. Simple as that

I'm amazed by all the shitty stuff being sold (from a tech and engineer view)....
 

itfactor

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As mentioned above, I target businesses that already have a website. They don't need to be sold on the general idea of a website, only the idea of a new one.

Fear generally works well for any kind of selling and google provides good tools for striking it into their hearts. Most older websites fail horribly on Page Speed and Mobile Friendliness:
PageSpeed Insights
Mobile-Friendly Test - Google Search Console

Reports full of red colours are quite effective. You can also tell them how google punishes mobile-unfriendly sites, how slow load times loose business, etc.

Ca$hvertising is a good read on learning to sell:
Ca$hvertising: How to Use More Than 100 Secrets of Ad-Agency Psychology to Make BIG MONEY Selling Anything to Anyone by Drew Eric Whitman

I had some limited but rewarding success using this method in the past in selling SEO services.

What I did was:
- Find a local business that have just published a print ad in the newspapers. In case you don't know, a tiny square in the classifieds can cost $X,XXX to $X,XXXX. This way I know that these guys have the marketing budget to spend on.

- Research on the business site's Google search position, Google Maps reviews, Yelp, Facebook page reviews.

- Print everything on paper. Whip out a red marker and circle every little item that is negative. Bad reviews, low Google ranking. I'll even stick some handwritten post-it notes with my own comments to give it a personal touch.

- Put every page together in a nice folder with the cover that reads "Important SEO information about XYZ LLC", put a paper band around the folder (like those that comes with those expensive writing notebooks) that contains my contact info.

- Mail the folder in a manila envelope to the target business. Sometimes they will call back, but usually they won't. I will give a follow-up call and ask them what they think about my little report about their business.

From there on it's smooth-sailing to a close. For every 10 mailers each month I closed 3 clients.

This mailer method costs about $4-6 per business including all the writing materials and stamps. It's cheap considering the amount of fees you are charging for SEO services.

Now the reason why I had limited success was because:

- It becomes very time consuming to scale. In one month I could only manage 15 mailers max. If I hire another guy to do 30 a month, the labour costs do add up.

- I shifted my services from SEO to PPC shortly (because that's where my interest lies), and for PPC this method doesn't work with the mailer because it's impossible to get any data about your target business's ad campaign unless you have access to their Facebook or Instagram account.

Overall, I would say this mailer method is a highly effective way to get your foot in the door for an SEO, website design, or even online reputation management business. And it sure as hell beats cold-calling hundreds of people and getting the phone hanged up on you :D
 
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0dysseus

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I am a developer, and I agree. Me learning sales and marketing is a proof of that.

If you just want to make $$$, probably no need.

But don't forget, being technical is a ridiculous advantage. Should you pursue that mastery if you don't already have it? I wouldn't recommend it, unless it is of interest to you. Having both skillsets developed will put you in the top 1% of online entrepreneurs IMHO.

Plus, being an engineer develops in you an entire new set of worldviews and models, whose value leaks out into every area of your life.
 

dkostadinov01

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Does anyone have an advice on how to find the people who need a website?

A friend of mine did something like this and failed miserably.
 
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D

Deleted67963

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Does anyone have an advice on how to find the people who need a website?

A friend of mine did something like this and failed miserably.

I know the following is completely bound to time but

If it's him doing the website I recommend to sell his skills rather than a project, because selling projects is a pain in the a$$, you have to deal with so much stuff you can't control at all and the client has always something to say at the end..

What I do for the moment is looking for a company that hire a dev (frontend, backend, fullstack etc..) and tell them I want to work with them BUT as a freelance, so we make a contract like 6months fulltime with 2month notice, at x€ / day (a day == 7h), so you are doing the exact same thing as an employee but you are free to get other clients or move at the end of the contract, plus you can make up to 3 or 4x of what you could earn as en employee.

The other thing he can try is to sell the time of other devs if he does not have the skills.

My point is, I worked 4years in web agencies (around the world) and it was a real pain to look for clients, selling websites, you have to make a very specific contract with all the features, responsive or not, on which browser etc...

Selling your skills is easy as a pie and you get paid for what you did at the end of the month, not 2month after the project because the client thinks it's not done or because you have poorly evaluate the time needed to achieve it
 
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wisam

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As a software engineer, most of us grow up with this kind of one sided mentality about ROI. We always push for the technical mastery; we want to use the fanciest framework, use shiny things like GraphQL and other buzzy technologies, but at the end, the people who know how to sell get the most money, at least in my experience. It's hard to swap the chip from being overly technical to be a good seller.


I was reading this out to my mentor and we both had a good laugh . People spend a fortune and burn years at college to earn degrees just to make some basic living only to see the sales guy with no degree taking home the big dough .
 

dkostadinov01

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I know the following is completely bound to time but

If it's him doing the website I recommend to sell his skills rather than a project, because selling projects is a pain in the a$$, you have to deal with so much stuff you can't control at all and the client has always something to say at the end..

What I do for the moment is looking for a company that hire a dev (frontend, backend, fullstack etc..) and tell them I want to work with them BUT as a freelance, so we make a contract like 6months fulltime with 2month notice, at x€ / day (a day == 7h), so you are doing the exact same thing as an employee but you are free to get other clients or move at the end of the contract, plus you can make up to 3 or 4x of what you could earn as en employee.

The other thing he can try is to sell the time of other devs if he does not have the skills.

My point is, I worked 4years in web agencies (around the world) and it was a real pain to look for clients, selling websites, you have to make a very specific contract with all the features, responsive or not, on which browser etc...

Selling your skills is easy as a pie and you get paid for what you did at the end of the month, not 2month after the project because the client thinks it's not done or because you have poorly evaluate the time needed to achieve it

Thanks for the heads up and stopping me before wasting months on this subject. :D

As a Computer Scientist student I'll go and work myself for now until I gather enough decent money to start my original business idea.
 

AppMan

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So is the process:

1. Offer businesses their own website
2. Look for affordable website developers
3. Provide website to the business
What do you mean by point 1, , do you mean redesign their website then show it to them to buy it? What if they refuse?
 
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dkostadinov01

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What do you mean by point 1, , do you mean redesign their website then show it to them to buy it? What if they refuse?
You can refuse to pay the freelancer If he doesnt get the job done. However this is very dirty business...
 

AppMan

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You can refuse to pay the freelancer If he doesnt get the job done. However this is very dirty business...
I dont think this is sustainable unless designing the website cost you no money such as if you are designer by yourself. however it will cost you time , especially you are doing something to WOW the buyer
 

mtnman

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Didn't read the whole thread, but this is still valid in 2019. The mistake web designers make (myself included), is not parlaying the immediate capital you get from client projects, into developing assets for yourself alongside the whole time. Otherwise, you'll be chasing your tail forever...
 
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Patrick Jones

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If it's him doing the website I recommend to sell his skills rather than a project, because selling projects is a pain in the a$$, you have to deal with so much stuff you can't control at all and the client has always something to say at the end..

That's why you want your involvement to stop at collecting the commission. Let the developer deal with the actual project.

What I do for the moment is looking for a company that hire a dev (frontend, backend, fullstack etc..) and tell them I want to work with them BUT as a freelance, so we make a contract like 6months fulltime with 2month notice, at x€ / day (a day == 7h), so you are doing the exact same thing as an employee but you are free to get other clients or move at the end of the contract, plus you can make up to 3 or 4x of what you could earn as en employee.

Sounds a lot like slowlane.
 

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