It is hard to compete at, but can be a way to bootstrap a business trying to do other things.onion2k wrote:Where I work (me, the MD, and another developer) we've practically given up making websites for clients and now we mostly make sites that we can charge clients to use (eg email marketing stuff, stats, online booking services..). And we're branching out into selling actual physical things (completely unrelated to the web, or even IT). Selling small scale web development is incredibly hard to compete at.
I also think the designers get off easy because I could probably design sites faster than I could write the code for them. Sure, I would make less, but then again I could have less stress, less bugs that create follow-on warranty maintenance calls after the contract is up, and I could do more of these in a week and not be confused about handling multiple ones in the same week. (Doing multiple clients in the same week, as far as web development (not design) is concerned, can be nerve-wracking and confusing.) I only have marginal design capabilities now, though, so I don't pretend to be something I'm not.
There are obvious next steps for any budding freelancer. They could either decide whether they should continue on this route and optimize and automate, or do it occasionally but at a higher fee while they do something else as their primary income, or perform affiliate marketing (a natural for many PHP guys), or augment the income with residual income projects.
Obviously with the residual income projects (sites that charge for stuff) and affiliate marketing projects, no one likes to play games with physical inventory, so the name of the game is to make everything digital and augment with ad revenue (if not make it the primary income means). For example, pay-to-play areas of a site or stuff you can purchase and download.
Some freelancers can multiplex clients so that they make reasonable income, but this is very difficult sometimes and confusing. Still, however, it is inevitable because clients often try to hunt for you at the same time they find a designer, and then put you on hold for 2-3 weeks while working on a functional spec and a designer. So, in that 2-3 week span, you have to fill it with another client, and then you may have one client's time bleed over into another. (Of course by this I don't mean to insinuate that you bill one client for time spent on another client's time.)