Forum Moderators: LifeinAsia
I have been an independent webmaster for 3 years now and while I have some customers that come to me over again to post an update here or there I have very few of what I would call "profitable repeat clients". To me this should be no brainer for the web as clients that want to be successful should have a list a mile long of things to keep doing to a web site, but I am finding most them pay me to build the site and then never do another thing with it.
My question is what have others done to foster a steady supply of repeat business and encourage to update often? Most of my clients, which may be the wrong type are small businesses and figure once the site is finished they are ready to go. How do I convince them otherwise?
Fortune Hunter
Otherwise if you have tried that setting up a monthly special deal like instead of charging 30 an hour charge 20 and show how much they could actually save on a normal job. Of course that is just a simple example but it gives you an idea.
The email trick with specials normally works about 60% of the time for me.
Otherwise it sounds like you want to make more so this idea may sound bad but why not offer like 2 hours free for work and 25 after that or something.
There are a lot of tricks you can use, these are only the ones off the top of my head.
Clients quickly come to understand the value of having someone to take care of their site.
WBF
The problem is that not all of my clients pay monthly, they are usually late. Second, many of them pay me, but don't ever put effort into actually having me update anything. Now you are probably thinking, great! Money and no work! However I figure clients that don't use the service will simply cancel it after a while.
Maybe we can take this thread a different direction. How about we talk about specific ongoing work people have done for their clients. Maybe that will drum up some ideas for things we can suggest to our clients.
Fortune Hunter
However I figure clients that don't use the service will simply cancel it after a while.
So if you're going to offer it, make sure that you budget your time accordingly. Maybe you'll want to have the option to roll the hours over to the next month if you find yourself inundated with work.
I also give 3 free hours of maintenance for referrals that result in contracts.
You can also have the same for SEO stuff - where you create an optimised copy of a page they'd giving you per month (or week) and charge a regular fee for that.
Finally you can offer hosting - I have a managed server with dedicated IP that cost me X per year. Every little tasks (from setting up the ftp, dns, stats etc...) is taken care of by the hosting company. If there is a problem, I can email them (at any time of the day) and I usually get a reply (or the problem fixed) within a couple of hours. I charge my customers Y monthly (direct debit) and after 5 sites (some customers have more than 1 site hosted by me), I break even.
The advantage for them is that the monthly fee they pay me, wouldn't allow them to have the top package with all bells and whisles (webmail, video streaming, spam filtering etc) which I subscribed to and split over the different sites.
You are right about monthly billing being a lot to keep up with but in my case I was trying to use the plans to create a base monthly revenue stream so that I didn't have to start each month scrounging for projects to make cash for the month. The idea was to have income coming in even if I didn't have a project to work on.
The idea was to have income coming in even if I didn't have a project to work on.
I don't know if this was supposed to sound funny, but it did make me smile. I also wish I had an income whether or not I'm actually working : )
Nope, no humor intended, although in re-reading it I can see how that does sound a bit funny :) Hopefully the point is still made that the idea is to insure that you have some base level of income coming in that is there regardless of what your project schedule looks like. Otherwise it is pretty much like starting out every new month unemployed and you have to hustle to get a signed contract to keep the cash coming in.
I appreciate the need to hustle and working, but sales is a tough game and tends to wear you down if you always have to produce brand new business every single month rather than repeat business that just keeps coming back to you month in and out.
Hence the reason for starting this thread. Most business people will tell you it is much more expensive and time consuming to bring in a new client than sell to an existing one.
Fortune Hunter
You make your clients money!
They will come back at you with gusto, to the point you can't cope.
It is a very simple business plan, charge a guy $10 and make him $20 net. (you both win).
You don't think he will be banging down your door tomorrow morning to see what happens when he pays you $50.....or $50K or $5 million!
The best advice I could ever give to a Webmaster is to make their clients money, repeat business will not be an issue.
Telling them you're now retired might be :(
I think you give clients waaaaaaaay to much credit to actually figure out that their business increased this year and you should be getting the credit for that. In the ideal world all of my clients would realize how much I have done for them and couldn't stop throwing cash at me, but alas many of them benefit and think it was that ad they did the week before or their amazing business acumen. None actually think it was the result of the web site they put up 8 months before.
Also don't count on them actually asking their clients how they heard about them and keeping track of where leads are coming from.
Fortune Hunter
...to actually figure out that their business increased this year and you should be getting the credit for that...
So you do it.
That is one of the advantages of a maintenance contract - continuing site access. You benchmark the original site SERPs/uniques/etc. You track the changes. You provide the client with a monthly report highlighting all the good things deriving from you. You follow up with appropriate proposals to add value (framed and priced based on client ability to pay or willingness to share). You generate your future work from the benefits of your existing and prior work.
Most 'successful' web designers are not churning out new sites; they are developing a limited clientel on an ongoing basis. Work at developing relationships to segue from simple building to ongoing maintenance to complex stewardship (possibly with an interest).
Watch TV for 10 minutes and you will see an Ad. for a website that is of the form www.somedomain.com/123
What is that magic 123 about.....measurement of success?.
If you don't know exactly how each Ad. campaign performs you shouldn't be in business IMHO and you certainly shouldn't be advising others on how to improve their business!
I measure with a +- 3% error on how all my clients perform. That is my basic method of charging....how, the heck else do you really know what you are worth?
You want to keep the client, you want repeat business, you want clients to make money, you want to make money.....it's all numbers and measurements. Sure you can say it is their (client's) problem and not yours (I often think that), but, at the end of the day someone has to be left holding the buck....and for your own good it should be us Webmasters IMHO :)
