Increasing Freelancer Sales

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supermike
Forum Contributor
Posts: 193
Joined: Tue Feb 28, 2006 8:30 pm
Location: Somewhere in the Desert, USA

Increasing Freelancer Sales

Post by supermike »

I'm struggling a bit here this month in trying to drive up my freelancer sales. I keep getting these "script kiddies" (let's call them). They're either newbie affiliate marketers who joined some program for $2K, or some teen with dad's credit card. And they want me to bring up some kind of streaming video site for like $300 (or something like that). I'm like, "Dude, um, get back on your tricycle and go home -- I think your mom is calling you," (but in nicer terms, of course).

So I'll share with you what I have, and perhaps you can share with me something that you might know. I need to increase my sales this month for building PHP websites. Some of these ideas below are still ideas yet -- I've yet to finish them.

- Do an online and offline sales campaign. As for an online one, do it by paying for it in the usual places (AdWords, SitePoint, etc.) and then also look for free things like forums that let you advertise in a forum post, or advertise in your signatures. As for offline sales, an ordinary full-color business card will do, pinned up in all kinds of places in a busy town. You can also drive around office parks and downtown buildings, collect addresses, and send out letters and then follow up with cold calls. You'll get a lot of "NO" and it's depressing, but occasionally something comes through. And the clients you get through offlines sales, I've found, are more lucrative than the clients you find online. This is because the clients you find online often know a thing or two about dealing with developers, while the offline clients may still be new to the web and only have a puny website -- not the kind of thing you can offer them.

- Communicate with affiliate marketers and web designers in their online turf. Find out where these guys are, let them know who you are through your signature, and interact with them. If that means Facebook, or Warrior Forums, or Wickedfire, or SitePoint, or Adobe Flash or Photoshop forums, or someting else -- then so be it. The affiliate marketers want to get websites up, and the web designers can sublet work to you as well.

- For your clients found from offline sales leads, try to pitch to them the idea of you as their web host (even though you outsource it), and you as their web payment processor (taking your percentage before PayPal, Google, WorldPay, or other provider does their thing). Your clients found from your online sales leads probably won't let you get away with this, but your local clients may have no problem doing this. I know a guy in town, for instance, who gets away with charging his clients $200/mo. in web hosting, and he doesn't even host the sites in his office! Instead, he gives the appearance that he hosts the site in his office. He also provides one free update per month for that fee. And he makes enough money to have a fancy office, drive a mercedes, own an expensive beach home, and have 5 other employees working for him. Now, if I could just charge $50/mo. in web hosting fees for something that I outsource on a shared hosting plan, that would be sensational.

- For your local clients (again, clients found through offline sales), I also recommend taking a percentage out of any shopping cart you set up on their site. That way, the money from the customer goes to you first via PayPal or whatever, you take a percentage out, and then you pay your client the rest. And I imagine the range has to be flexible in the 1%-%10 range, depending on the amount of money pushed through your system.

- Sometimes when you establish relationships with your clients who are web designers, you can encourage them to do online and offline sales campaigns to drive more business to both of you. (I should know -- I'm getting my favorite UK client (a web designer) to do this very thing now. We're going to be passing work either way among both our sales campaigns.)

- Make yourself more marketable. Train, train, train, and train again. Learn not only how to install something, but how to connect pieces of it (usually the login user/group system) with another package. And that takes PHP coding. So, that could mean learning how to connect Drupal's login system to a Vanilla (getvanilla.com) forum system. Or it could mean learning osCommerce, ZenCart, Magento Commerce -- that sort of thing. So when business is slow, get yourself a marketable skill. Remember, your weak portfolio could be turning clients off this very moment -- clients who may already be visiting your site.

- Bring up a series of forums on multiple topics where you can bring in ad revenue.

- Bring up a free dating site to bring in ad revenue and sales from gifts.

- Bring up a classified listings site to bring in ad revenue and paid listings.

- Find portfolio clients and give them perks and freebies with the agreement that you can put a picture of their site, and a link to it, from yours, along with a short description on what you did.

- Find web designers on the web and make a short pitch to them on what you can be called upon to do.

- Advertise and get one or two clients on retainer for like 1/2 your normal rate. I've got one and I love them to death. Their work is difficult, but only in bursts, and man they really pay my bills in the meantime.


So, a few key things can be inferred from this:

* Hedge your bets by doing off-shoots from your web development.
* Get some residual income projects up (your own sites) -- LOTS of them.
* Make yourself more marketable.
* Consider offline sales, not just online sales.
* For local clients found from offline sales, who often don't know better, consider doing "web hosting" and "eCommerce", but which you outsource and take a partial cut, giving yourself residual income.
* Web designers and affiliate marketers can be repeat business. Newbie ones can be cheapskates, but more experienced ones pay reasonably well.

That's my advice. So what's your advice?
matthijs
DevNet Master
Posts: 3360
Joined: Thu Oct 06, 2005 3:57 pm

Re: Increasing Freelancer Sales

Post by matthijs »

What I basically get out of your points is:
- spread your income to several more smaller pieces of income. Ok, does sound fair. But would it also mean you're so busy doing all these little things you can't focus on the more important tasks anymore?

- milk your clients to the max. May sound a bit over the top, but that's how it comes across. I'm not so sure about this. How long will this go well? What if your clients discover that you are charging $50/month for hosting while you pay $3/month yourself, while you don't have to do anything?
Find portfolio clients and give them perks and freebies with the agreement that you can put a picture of their site, and a link to it, from yours, along with a short description on what you did.
Wouldn't these clients allow you to do that anyway, without you having to pay them? I mean, I would assume you are allowed to put work you've done your own portfolio isn't it?
Advertise and get one or two clients on retainer for like 1/2 your normal rate. I've got one and I love them to death. Their work is difficult, but only in bursts, and man they really pay my bills in the meantime.
So, basically half your rate? What do you do if I come to you and want that same (half) price? And then, if you accept, I go to the next developer and tell them I found a developer who does it for half their price..

Anyway, these are just some questions I have. Maybe your advice does work. In some situations.

My advice? Focus on fewer items. Specialize. Market yourself as a specialist in that area. Embrace your clients and make sure they will advertise for you. Maybe this will take more time but (I hope) it will pay off in the long run. If we want to be a serious professional business, we shouldn't start selling aggressively like we're on a marketplace screaming against eachother selling the cheapest flowers.

Anyway, that's the direction I want to go. I want my existing and future clients to tell everyone "You have to be with Matthijs for that and that. That's his specialty and he really delivers".
supermike
Forum Contributor
Posts: 193
Joined: Tue Feb 28, 2006 8:30 pm
Location: Somewhere in the Desert, USA

Re: Increasing Freelancer Sales

Post by supermike »

- busy. Yep, sure am! The point is to get the other bets hedged and rolling, then focus more on the important tasks. Often you have to put your own projects on hold in order to focus even more on a client project.

- milk. First, this is only for clients you pick up locally in your area, not savvy ones you find on the Internet. Second, I'm not the only one doing this in my area -- all the guys here do this, and they would end up charging far more per year than I would. I think it has to do with the fact that clients out here are a bit dopey and "redneck", and once they pay an annual fee for hosting, they think they can call you for small, free updates to the site, so you might as well charge them. As for milking them, I guess it all depends on price, and it's relative. Instead of them paying a direct fee of $10/mo. for shared hosting, I charge them $350/yr and pocket $230 each year. Just the price of doing business.

- milk, part 2. I also have to say that I have to do something that counteracts against the foreign competition that steals food out of my mouth every month because their currency exchange rate is 4x cheaper than mine.

- half rate. First, this is only for a retainer client, which are very rare to find. And my retainer client doesn't outsource me -- I only do internal web apps for their company. Second, my clients don't know that I do this.

- portfolio clients. I'm finding it tough to get special agreements to list a client as a portfolio client. My last client wanted to brag that he did the website all by himself so that he could draw in more clients. Why? Because he's a designer. Sure, I helped him a great deal on the design, and then turned around and did a lot of work on the development. But then I didn't realize he would do this. Anyway, in the long run on this deal, I realized that if he becomes more marketable because of our work, then so be it -- he can then draw in more work and can call on me to assist again since I'm his favorite developer. So I let that one go. But I still need to find a portfolio client, and one that is flexible enough in their NDA to let me put an image of their site on my site, along with a link and a description of my work. For some reason this is a bit tough, and not because my work is shoddy or something.

- specialization. To me, this means freelancer death. For instance, if I only focus on eCommerce packages, then I've just shot myself in the foot because I only get 5 of those requests a month out of 15 sales leads that might come in, and only 2 of those sales leads actually materialize, and I'm lucky if one of them deals with eCommerce.
matthijs
DevNet Master
Posts: 3360
Joined: Thu Oct 06, 2005 3:57 pm

Re: Increasing Freelancer Sales

Post by matthijs »

Fair enough. Sounds like you know the business around you pretty well. I'm on the other side of a big sea in a totally different situation, so can only speak for my situation. In the past few years for me it has been that 25% of the clients bring in 75% of the income. But that also means that there are a lot more clients with smaller projects on which I'm basically losing. You know, "really simple websites" which must not cost a dime. But in the end after X revisions, 75 emails, 65 telephone calls, 3 meetings and 4 months working a few hours a week on a project like that and billing $900 is just not good enough.. If I do ask more reasonable prices I don't get these jobs. For these kinds of projects there just are too many "nephews" doing the jobs for too little money. I can't and don't want to compete with that.

I mean, if I had to try and get a normal income with these smaller projects I would have to work literally 80 hours a week...
That's why I'm trying to get more into the corporate world. Working with professionals who know that stuff costs money. If they, say as a consultant or manager or whatever have an hourly rate of $100, it's cheap if I charge $60 for mine.

But, you might be right that spreading your income could work for you. And if you do manage to get these deals with clients paying a yearly amount for hosting I'm not stopping you :)
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