Forum Moderators: LifeinAsia
1.I want to start a web designing + SEO + content writing company
2.initially me and my partner will be the only employees
3.How much investment should i make?(Including hardware, man power etc)
4.Should i start off by hiring some Y web designers, x number of SEO experts, z number of content writers and so on or just progress as clients come in?
5.Will PPC be effective for procuring clients or should i stick to old SEO methods?
6.I presently have a PR 1 website which deals in website designing, work at home jobs etc. 3 months old.
Should i register a new domain for future business now itself(business may be started only after several months) or just reconstruct my present site to my needs then?
7.any other comments?
National and internationl customers: Effective online advertising to accept new clients.
Local customers: Print media, local advertising and local trade ascosiations.
In the begining local is a much easier option, you can easily do face to face meetings and interact with the local business community.
Over time as your brand grows you will be able to attract customers from a much wider area.
Mack.
Thanks mack. One of the workers in a designing company told me not to look for smaller clients after first 2 or 3 orders cause then i'll get orders from those kind only and i should go for high paying clients only. Is it true?
NO! If you are intending on going after larger deals with large companies you would need to be able to prove are are up to the job, the only real way to do this is to be able to present a detailed portfolio. The best way to achieve this is to work with basically any company that are willing to pay for your services.
As an example lets imagine you are pitching for a contract to built and optimise landing pages for a multinational pc company, they want full service build, optimise, ppc and tracking. If you approach then having only every had 2 clients it will be a hard sell :)
On the other hand of you have successfully managed several campaigns and have the evidence to support this then you will be better received by the company looking to hire.
As for pricing, this really depends on a number of aspects. The project size, number of pages, size of company, number of hours that will be spent on the project. Its impossible to really give you a fair idea.
Mack.
How much do you normally charge for per page? Is php pages charged more than normal xhtml pages? Just a rough idea would suffice
note: Please do not provide any websites name which does SEO service as the thread might get removed for suspected promotion
Can... only if you have PRODUCT you can sell. Do you have product?
Forget the SEO crap! You have to have a widget with a market value to be able to make income!
And that requires you have funding sufficient to cover the cost of each widget, shipping, and etc. For each of which you sell you'll get a markup/profit.
There is no magic bullet on the web. If you have product that someone desires, then you can sell it. Provide a good service/product and money can be made...not a lot, but decent and worth the effort. Think brick and mortar (ie, a store front) if you can sell that product THERE then you have a chance of selling on the web.
SEO for toothfairy services, on the other hand, is a waste of time.
I have around 10000$ as a start up loan from a bank. Interest 14%
At those rates you need to be able to turn projects round in 1-2 months max and work with customers who pay quickly. You need to bottom feed on elance for a year, taking the small jobs.
I read it about 18 months after I had started a business, my first with partners and employees. I found that I had committed about 90% of the sins (mistakes) listed in the book. Expensive mistakes at that.
Focus on cash flow. You already have a debt burden, at a high interest rate. Take any and every job - the previous posts are spot on. CASH IS KING, and without the cashflow the business will die, and die quickly.
The designer who gave you the bad advice did not start the business, obviously - or if they did they have forgotten the hard work it takes to have the luxury of only taking the big jobs.
That loan is not going to be fun to pay off as you seem to think money comes instantly on the internet, especially someone without a portfolio of previous designs to back you up. Expect a lot of rough times this first year, assuming you don't just give up and turn in the loan money before interest starts to pile up.
Loans of 10 x that are very easy to obtain for startups with rates as low as 2%. India seems a good place to start a business right now. I think 10K is no where near enough to start a real businesses though even in India, rates are now $10-15$ p/h.
Focus on those two things above all. When you have those two things, the rest will follow naturally.
When you advertise for web designers, require them to show you a full portfolio of their design work. Try to get an experienced designer to help you review these and pick out the candidates who have genuine innate artistic genius. There are many web designers who do it almost by numbers - they can make smart enough designs - but they won't blow the socks off your client and establish your business as somewhere to go when you want a site you can be really really proud of.
anyways so i should have a really good designer right? How do i test them? i mean if i ask them to show their projects they could simply show off a few templates right?
i do not know php or .net. considering the future prospective please advice which to study so that i can benifit from it for my web designing business
Stick to web design. Note there are cultural and aesthetic differences when it comes to what is "good" design. I met an Italian who gets his sites built in South America rather than Asia because South Americans produce something that is more aesthetic for European eyes. Get your designer to look for such differences and tell him not to use the colour blend tool so much. :) Yes, Indian designers love blends.
If you are pitching outside India, you will need to have better English in your collateral. As one example, Indians say "web designing" when others say "web design". In any country, spelling mistakes are not acceptable, so use a contract editor to check every job.
Your biggest expense will be PCs, power generators, air conditioning and anything else for an office. Initially you could work from home provided you pay contract staff on a piecework basis, not hourly basis.
Why?
Finding clients and talented coders you can trust is the difficult part.
