Two Ways Up

A lot of web designers are caught in the loop of trying to offer more for less until their profit margins are virtually gone. There are two ways to charge more without losing clients to cheaper alternatives.

Three Positions

In web design, there are three ways to position yourself in terms of what people think they are getting when they work with you.

  1. Access to your skills
  2. Access to you (personally – as a consultant)
  3. Access to your product (or system)

Access To Skills

The vast majority of web designers land in group one and market themselves based on giving their clients access to their skills and services. Marketing skills/services is the easiest because it doesn't rely on personal branding or business development. Web designers usually learn some fundamental skills and look around for people who want access to those skills. This puts them in a situation where the competition is very high, there’s very little difference between the alternatives, and the price (profit margin) is very small.

Access To You

I know musicians who can play cover songs that sound better than the original artist. For example, I’ve been to cafes on the beach with live bands playing Jimmy Buffett songs and they sound significantly better than when Jimmy Buffet himself performs the exact same songs. But these bands basically just play for tips whereas Jimmy Buffett pulls in $250k+ per concert.
What’s the difference? It’s not the sound or technical perfection of the music. People want to hear and see Jimmy Buffett himself. It’s not the skills it’s the person.

This means you need to build your personal brand and get famous – at least within your niche. This is hard work, involves a ton of speaking and writing, and usually takes a long time. 

Access To Your Product/System

This is the approach I recommend and the main drive behind DoubleStack. You want to be able to offer both the tech stack AND the marketing stack to your clients – not just the tech stack by itself – thus, the name DoubleStack.

To pull this off you need the raw materials which are your web design skills and the ability to use various marketing tools and platforms.

The harder (and more valuable) part is assembling the components of your tech stack into a system specifically designed for something such as driving leads and growing a business for Personal Trainers. You have to do some digging to get there, but this is the fastest way to drive dramatically better results for your clients. When you're driving better results you'll get paid a lot better in the process – like over five figures.

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