If you are in the Webdesign world you know there are times when income can be scarce. To improve your overall profits you should examine your competitors and listen to your customers.
Instead of turning income away because it is not part of your normal offerings you might find that not only your customers need but your competitors customers are left high and dry when it comes to small projects or value added services.
Here are a few things that you might want to look at if you aren’t already offering them to your customers.
Domain Name Registrations
This is pretty straight forward and all customers will need the service. If you are providing their initial site reselling domain names is just another product that can provide some instant offsets to discounts you might provide for your main service. Don’t be afraid to markup the cost of domains higher then the lowest price out there. Sure you can get a cheap domain but if your customers are buying a total solution then a 50% markup is nothing.
Reselling Hosting
Reselling hosting to your clients should be something you advertise even if you are just selling templates. Webdesigners can make extra money by getting a basic Reseller Account from most large host comapanies for under $100 a month. This relatively small outlay will allow you to host a large number of clients on a shared server and if you grow large enough for about double that price you can get your own server. Making money from hosting is relatively painless with cPanel WHM and an automatic signup package like Client Exect. And because its automated 24/7 you might not even have to deal with your hosted clients unless they need other services.
Installing and Branding Blogs or Other Software
The ability to brand applications like wordpress, bbs systems and shopping carts to match a customers primary site is something you might offer when you are selling a full commerce solution but customers that have static sites now like the ability to interact with customers and add news and product information in a simple interface. You should learn and offer migration of data and branding or theming of any package you normally support and make extra money by offering this service to anyone not just the top priced accounts.
Marketing Solutions
Some of your customers may want to add advertising and signing them up through your affiliate id can provide extra money long down the road. Each program is different so find solutions that best fit your customer and may also allow you to share a percent of their profit. This is how these programs are designed to work so don’t shy away from them.
SEO and Index Announcement Services
One of the best things about SEO services is that it can be automated. Yes there are a number of precursor things that you need to go through including building keyword lists and analysing your clients competitors but once that work is done you should be able to build a system that you can for the most part walk away from and then just monitor. Providing this type of service will make your clients happier about how the public sees their products and services and it is likely to hold or get you return and referred clients if you can follow through.
Final thoughs on making extra cash
Listen to your clients, If more then a few of them contact you about a service find a way to provide it to everyone.
Think of yourself as a small restaurant. If you keep hearing people ask for Iced Green Tea and you don’t serve it then get some.
You will have happier clients that won’t be searching someplace else for small things only to endup walking away because that new place that made them a logo provides everything you do but also offers logo design.
