Web Dev - subscription based model. Questions on Securing customers locally
I am currently building a web development business made to provide services for small businesses. I plan to charge a monthly fee to build and manage the website for my customers allowing them to have a professional hand coded website without having to dish out a large some of money immediately.
I would charge $150 per month allowing the customer the option to change and update the website as they wished.
How I plan to get customers :
- Distribute fliers / business cards
- Walk in to business that may need my services and pitch the idea on the spot.
- Email businesses with outdated and bad looking websites / No websites a redesigned image of their homepage and ask them if they would be interested in updating their website.
- Local newspaper ads
I would appreciate any feedback or ideas from the community on how those of us who plan to operate on a local level should market our products!
Thanks for reading ,
To be honest, you’d be better off just building word press/shopify sites. most people don’t value a custom site and would be happy with a simple template based site. It’d make you way more money too
I'm going to setup 2/3 static website templates using my own code, this way I should save lots of time in the long run allowing myself to just add changes to my templates.
Ah yep that’d work! I honestly find those website builders a pain to work with. CSS and HTML all the way. Check out Netlify for free hosting, best service out there
I've been doing freelance work for small local businesses for a couple years now. Your not far off. Subscription is the way to go. You can charge more than $150 though.
Small businesses DO NOT want a CMS. It's just the only thing they have been offered. Do you think a plumber wants a CMS to edit their site? No, they never use it. All of my sites are hand-coded, I offer unlimited edits. I have a dozen clients. I average 4-6 edits in a year. Not per site, all of them combined! So you are on the right track with this.
When looking for potential clients, run a speed score (https://pagespeed.web.dev/) on their site. Most sites score terrible, especially if they are on WordPress or a site builder. Present this info to them and explain why it's important.
Calling and talking to the businesses is fine. Never tried knocking on doors in person but it might work.
Thanks for the reply. It's good to hear from someone with experience in this area.
Presenting the speed test is a great idea thank you 👍
Do you have any tips for me on how I should setup the general structure of my sales pitch?
Sure. Tell them how you can help them. Don't talk about how clean your code is, how you don't use templates, etc... None of those things help a small businesses get a return on their investment.
Talk about how your sites are fast, use SEO best practices, all of which will help rank their sites higher for Google searches. You will fail a lot but you only need to close 10% of your pitches to be successful.
Also, when I say my sites are hand-coded, it doesn't mean I designed and wrote every piece of HTML. There is nothing wrong with using free templates online and twisting them to your liking. Don't reinvent the wheel :)
You might one to guarantee a bucket of hours per month with that price. I'm sure people wil frown and feel it's too good to be true unless they see more.
Also, I don't really know your target customer. I run a web dev agency and we work with people who already know a lot about software, so if this is about local businesses that don't know much about software/web development might be a bit different.
I would target small businesses who don't know much about SEO / Web dev. A lot of these people have been burned by crappy WP developers so I would explain to them the importance of a fast website with good SEO.
I would build a 5 page website for these small business and let them focus on growing their business while I handled the website and kept it up to date.
There would generally be little changes requested month to month so thats how I would plan to scale.
Is there a minimum contract period? 150 dollars is not a lot of money to build websites. Custom websites could quickly require several hundred hours of work.