I DO NOT MAKE WORDPRESS! THIS IS NOT A WORDPRESS POST.
I have been making websites for many a long year and making a decent living doing it (made over 400 websites all with my own CMS - I do every thing from the hosting to the graphic design and everything in between). Thing is, for about 8 or so years I have wanting to starting giving away free websites and letting people add unlimited content, unlimited pages and get office hours support for the site. I want to charge a small fee for the sites monthly hire and localised SEO. I already do this with my current clients and they are all happy. But I charged them for their original site design so they expected the monthly fee as I explained it to them during our consultations.
So the free sites. About 8 years ago, (around then not exactly sure when it was) I built load of templates and started offering companies free website through my own site. I got no takers.. never have had any through the site! I still offer paid sites through my site and I get people phoning me and emailing me looking for websites.
The free and paid offers were in the same menu. Why do people not take the free site?
I have a small portfolio of free sites that I persuaded people to take. They wanted paid sites but I told them they didnt need to pay for the design as I could provide a good enough site for free for their business type (dog walker, painter and decorator etc etc).
I have been trying to get in to the "free site" business for years and yes I know that their are wix, square space and all these big dudes doing this but I provide sites to my local market and pretty much always have. So what is so good for the local market from my services ? Well I am shit hot at local SEO and for a local companies this is probably mostly more important to them than having an all singing all dancing website as they get calls and emails from them. No point having the best looking wordpress site on the block if you on page 3! Local market is a page 1 only competition and I get all of my clients up there! (my city has around 100k people in it so not huge)
I have put out leaflets, had one of my old staff cold calling hundreds of businesses, had a dedicated page on my website (btw i am at the top of the Google for "Web designers" in my local area so I am getting regular hits naturally).
Why wont people take free sites from me? Do they think that Free is too good to be true? Do they not want to be embarrassed by a free website?
A little info about my system. I make bespoke CMS and have done for a very long time (almost 18 years). My current CMS runs all of my clients websites and they love it! Very simple to use, intuitive, mobile friendly, SEO friendly, Google loves it (normal Google normal Lighthouse scores are around 98). The free version of the system is the standard install that ALL sites start with. The person who is using it can then select a design from inside the admin section and start to add their own content with my help as part of the FREE set up! If they have any issues, they can call me during office hours to help. BTW my current clients rarely call me as the system they have in place is dead simple to use and so they very rarely break anything and even if they do, as I made the system from scratch, I can fix pretty much any bug in around 10 minutes.
Why do people not like FREE!
If anyone has any pointers, I would be grateful.
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Edited spelling mistakes out
I have been making websites for many a long year and making a decent living doing it (made over 400 websites all with my own CMS - I do every thing from the hosting to the graphic design and everything in between). Thing is, for about 8 or so years I have wanting to starting giving away free websites and letting people add unlimited content, unlimited pages and get office hours support for the site. I want to charge a small fee for the sites monthly hire and localised SEO. I already do this with my current clients and they are all happy. But I charged them for their original site design so they expected the monthly fee as I explained it to them during our consultations.
So the free sites. About 8 years ago, (around then not exactly sure when it was) I built load of templates and started offering companies free website through my own site. I got no takers.. never have had any through the site! I still offer paid sites through my site and I get people phoning me and emailing me looking for websites.
The free and paid offers were in the same menu. Why do people not take the free site?
I have a small portfolio of free sites that I persuaded people to take. They wanted paid sites but I told them they didnt need to pay for the design as I could provide a good enough site for free for their business type (dog walker, painter and decorator etc etc).
I have been trying to get in to the "free site" business for years and yes I know that their are wix, square space and all these big dudes doing this but I provide sites to my local market and pretty much always have. So what is so good for the local market from my services ? Well I am shit hot at local SEO and for a local companies this is probably mostly more important to them than having an all singing all dancing website as they get calls and emails from them. No point having the best looking wordpress site on the block if you on page 3! Local market is a page 1 only competition and I get all of my clients up there! (my city has around 100k people in it so not huge)
I have put out leaflets, had one of my old staff cold calling hundreds of businesses, had a dedicated page on my website (btw i am at the top of the Google for "Web designers" in my local area so I am getting regular hits naturally).
Why wont people take free sites from me? Do they think that Free is too good to be true? Do they not want to be embarrassed by a free website?
A little info about my system. I make bespoke CMS and have done for a very long time (almost 18 years). My current CMS runs all of my clients websites and they love it! Very simple to use, intuitive, mobile friendly, SEO friendly, Google loves it (normal Google normal Lighthouse scores are around 98). The free version of the system is the standard install that ALL sites start with. The person who is using it can then select a design from inside the admin section and start to add their own content with my help as part of the FREE set up! If they have any issues, they can call me during office hours to help. BTW my current clients rarely call me as the system they have in place is dead simple to use and so they very rarely break anything and even if they do, as I made the system from scratch, I can fix pretty much any bug in around 10 minutes.
Why do people not like FREE!
If anyone has any pointers, I would be grateful.
--
Edited spelling mistakes out
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