What Is Your Earning Potential?
Most people I talk to would like to add at least $5,000 to $10,000 per month to their income. That's $60k to $120k per year. Can YOU earn that much?
Think about two things. First, how much money do you want your business to generate for you each month? Now, how many clients do you need to win at your current pricing to hit that goal? Is it realistic to think you can achieve your revenue goals with your current structure? Let's figure it out.
Pricing Structure
Let's look at your pricing structure. If you're like most people I talk to, you'd probably like to add an extra $5,000 to $10,000 per month to your income. In other words, it would be cool to make $60,000 to $120,000 per year running your own web design business. So, let's just look at the low end of generating $5,000 per month with your own business.
Fill in your own numbers, but the stats show that the average WordPress site costs less than $1,000. Let's assume you do better than average and make $1,250 per project. To hit $5,000 per month you need to land four projects per month which is one project per week.
$1,250 x 4 = $5,000 (one project each week hits your goal)
How many of the people you talk to end up hiring you? Maybe you have a 25% close rate. So if you talk to four people, one of them hires you on the spot.
4 meetings per week to get 1 project each week
How many leads do you need to generate to get four meetings each week?
This depends on how warm the leads are to start with. A good conversion rate on warm leads is about 33%. So, you invite three people to meet with you and one person schedules a meeting.
Cold traffic is far worse. A good conversion rate on cold traffic is 2% so you have to reach out to 50 people to get one meeting booked. One meeting, not one paying client. But even if your conversion rate on cold traffic is really good and you get 5% of the people to schedule a meeting you still have to reach out to 80 people every week to get your four meetings scheduled each week.
Contact between 12 and 80 leads per week to get 4 meetings scheduled
And, don't forget, you're doing all of that while you're trying to build and launch the project you landed last week.
Do you have a pricing structure that's going to work for you?
Raising Your Rates
That's a heavy-duty workload and it's probably not anywhere near attainable for one person. How do you find that many leads? Also, this assumes you are doing all of your lead generation organically. Otherwise, you need to have a marketing budget to run ads and that's going to eat into your $5,000 per month goal. Now you need to make even more money each month which further exacerbates the problem.
So, what if you raise your rates and charge $5,000 per project? Now you just need one client per month. That just cut your marketing lead generation work down to just 25% of what it used to be. One project per MONTH instead of one project per WEEK.
Ok, but what is your answer when your client asks you questions like:
- Why are your prices 5X more than everyone else?
- Why shouldn't I just build a Wix or Squarespace site and save myself $4,500?
Most people fall back to saying things that the client doesn't value as much as they value their $4,500 in savings. For example:
- Your site will look unique
- I provide great customer service
- I truly care about your success
All of those things are great and probably do set you apart from the average low-budget developer on Upwork or something. But are those reasons worth $4,500?
Most clients are going to say, “No.” because the outcome you are providing is not different enough from the outcome they could be getting for far less money. In their mind the outcome is that they now have a website that looks decent on mobile phones and full-size screens, it is secure, etc.
For most web designers, the strength of their offer is not powerful enough to justify charging $5,000 when the next best option is only $500.
What's Different About You?
The solution to this problem is to make sure you have strong answers for why YOU (not just your raw skills) are worth dramatically higher prices compared to all the low-budget alternatives out there.
How are you going to handle the challenges facing web design consultants today?
- How do you market your business so you don't sound exactly like everyone else?
- How do you attract clients who have a real budget for your work?
- How are you going to get people to not only value your work but also value YOU?
If these are questions you are wrestling with, then schedule a call and let's get you the answers you need so that you can add an additional $5,000 to $10,000 per month to your income without burning in the process.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
