Category: Freelancers & Agencies

“Choosing a niche,” or coming up with strong business positioning, is one of the most difficult exercises for many of the freelancers I’ve worked with over the years. I think they point to a big disconnect between what niching actually is and what niching is thought to be.

According to a recent AND CO report, “Freedom is the new wealth.” What they’re referring to is the actual freedom that comes with being self-employed and away from the constraints of corporate life. Many of the surveyed freelancers reported serious issues with profitability, leaving me to wonder: Is professional freedom more valuable than financial freedom? I’m kidding. Of course, I’m not wondering that. I know for a fact that if you’re swimming in debt, struggling to stay in the black with your business and fighting for every single penny you earn, there is absolutely no freedom there. Today, I’m going to ask you to imagine a world where you had the security of knowing you were financially covered before you even begin work.

Toolbar Extras is a plugin built with the user in mind by giving easy to reach access to site building resources. This plugin gives you an extended toolbar in the WordPress admin to let you have quick route to features of a wide variety of third-party plugins, like page builder Elementor, and even a handful of themes. Developer David Decker was kind enough to answer my questions about his history with WordPress, how he began building Toolbar Extras, what it’s like to build a plugin that supports so many third-party products and his thoughts on Elementor and page builders in general.

Ever feel like you’re spending too much time searching for leads, convincing them to work with you, and then trudging through projects that fail to generate a worthwhile profit? It’s a common enough problem, for sure. But it’s not one without a solution: high ticket sales funnels. They can work, but high-ticket sales funnels are not for the faint of heart.

So you do web development projects in your spare time to expand your skills and make some extra money. Good for you! At some point you may decide that being a full-time freelancer is a viable option. Where do you start? You’ve come to the right place.

I know, I know… “Sales funnel” is a bit of a buzzword at the moment. But this episode of the WP Elevation podcast — featuring brilliant teacher Dave Foy — is going to change how you view sales funnels and how you use them in your business. More specifically, you’re going to learn how to use sales funnels to sell high-ticket products and level up your business.

You’ve probably read a lot about freelancing: Feast and famine. Where to find clients. How much to charge. These topics are fundamental, but it seems like most freelancers burn out before they get over these hurdles. Can freelancing be a stable, long-term career?

One of my favourite tools for business is Asana. Recently, I talked about how I use it to manage client lists more effectively by creating templates for them. Now, I’m going to let you know how I use project management templates in Asana to work more efficiently and consistently from project to project. In this tutorial, we explain how to use project management templates in Asana to work more efficiently and consistently.

Offering website maintenance in your web business is the best way to establish recurring revenue, provide quality support for your clients, and build relationships so you stay in business for years to come. Featuring a website maintenance sales page on your website is the best way to begin this conversation with clients, and having a strong sales page is a key ingredient in that equation.

Working freelance is great. No boss breathing down your neck and telling you what to do. The freedom to set your own working hours and work from wherever you want. And the opportunity to make a great living doing what you love and what you’re best at. But it does come with its downsides. The main one, especially in the early days, is financial. Your income isn’t guaranteed, you don’t have a regular pay check, and you have to cover your business expenses.

Some of the greatest sports stars in history — from Willie Mays to Mickey Mantle — have experienced slumps. And even great actors like Harrison Ford have had to take some side jobs when roles were scarce. No doubt, slumps are scary, especially for independent consulting business owners, but they don’t have to be permanent. With the right moves and a little luck, you can be hitting homers again in no time. Here are a few ideas and actions to consider.

Did you know that a client looking for a custom WordPress site usually pays between $3,000 and $15,000 dollars to a remote freelancer? In this post, I’ll show you the stats that point to an abundance of remote freelance work in the WordPress market and where to find a good client for your next project.

Freelancing is a cool job to have for many reasons. However, until you have a paying client on the books, you can only guess how viable it’ll be. Once you have one client, the ball will begin rolling and before you know it, you’re ducking under a door to escape the huge boulder coming your way. Though, we can’t guarantee that our advice on finding your first client also works when looking for the Ark of the Covenant. Here’s how to find your very first client.

If you’re looking for new ways to connect with your clients, creating ebooks might be just the thing. Here, we help you weigh the pros and cons and give you a rundown of how to get started with ebook creation as a promotional tool.

If you’re a freelancer, contractor, or small business owner, working with clients can be one of the most challenging parts of your job. This is especially true when those clients become mysteriously unresponsive. When this happens, you’ll need to be vigilant in sending a follow up email. And this is where some handy email scripts come into play. When written with a little thought and foresight, the right follow up email can produce quick results.

I’m willing to bet you already use a number of marketing techniques to drive leads and clients to your WordPress business. But are you using the right strategies and platforms in order to get the most out of your marketing efforts? And, by “get the most out of”, what I mean to say is: Are you attracting the best clients with your inbound and outbound marketing techniques?

Here are 14 mistakes freelancers make when creating a project estimate and how to fix them or avoid them all together.

When we bring on a new client, we go through a pretty extensive discovery process. We’re of the belief that the most valuable branding work is authentic to that individual client. So we want to get to know them as well as we can before we try to represent them with visual design. Before you start developing a brand for a client, here are the things you need to understand about that client.

When you onboard new clients, is it fair to say that collecting pertinent information at this stage is one of the greatest pain points in your process? It doesn’t have to be that way, though, if you can power your WordPress site to do it for you. In today’s tutorial, I’m going to show you how to systemise the client onboarding and information intake process with contact forms and pages.

You don’t have to wait until you onboard a client to start building a relationship with them and establishing trust. Generating loyalty with your audience can happen at any time. A great way to start making those genuine connections is by giving them something of great value. With a content upgrade, not only do visitors acquire a free and super valuable resource, but you now have a way to directly get in touch with leads by email.

I get it. Social media is a tough nut to crack. And that’s exactly why I made this checklist because I think it will help freelancers pulling all their hair out with no idea where to start. Here, I’ve laid out an easy-to-follow, actionable social media checklist for freelancers who want to use social media to get more clients.

It doesn’t matter whether you’ve gone into business for yourself or you work for someone else. Your original goal probably wasn’t to remain in the same position for the rest of your life; you wanted to experience professional growth. For those of you that run your own business, there is even more opportunity to grow as its wholly yours to control: your revenue, your client base, and even your personal growth. But it can be difficult to do when you don’t know where to grow to.

Getting your website up and running is a great first step towards building an online presence for your brand and business. However, once your website is live, your job is not done. While WordPress is powerful and easy to use, there are certain steps you need to take to ensure your website continues to operate without any issues and converts your visitors into customers.

It takes a big person to admit that their client relations needs a boost. However, regardless of whether you’re man or mouse, improving client satisfaction is straightforward enough that anyone can do it. In this post, we’ll offer a few key considerations for how to ensure satisfaction among your clients. However, before that, let’s quickly discuss why this is an important aspect of being a stellar web professional!

The web design proposal is the first document that you and your client will have. Until then, there have probably been some conversations through email or phone calls, but now the ice is broken and it is time to start earning their business. Here’s the step by step guide to writing the perfect proposal.

At the end of the day, WordPress clients come to you for the purposes of goal attainment. You are the expert and so they reach out to you in order to get the best results on their path to success. But have you ever considered what is the best way to provide WordPress consulting services to these clients?

One of the scariest things for a freelancer is looking ahead at their calendar and seeing nothing but blank spaces on the to-do list. When your freelance sales pipeline is low and you don’t have any upcoming projects, it can be a bit alarming. But the ebb and flow of busy times for freelancers is often normal so don’t get too worked up if you don’t have a lot of work coming up. Instead, use the tips here to attract more projects and keep calm (and busy) during your slow times.

This is a solid post from Dean at WP Buffs, who makes the case for freelancers to set out a “how I work” document which sets client expectations. Proactively setting these expectations lets you as the contractor define when you’re working, when you’re available, and how clients can get in touch with you. With these expectations set, most clients will respect the boundaries, won’t have a problem with you not getting back to them at the weekend, and are thus much more likely to have a great experience with you.

Thinking about creating a Facebook Group to promote your business? You are in the right place! Read on to find out how we did it! We decided to share a case study about how we grew our group and why you should do it too! Join us for a 10 minutes read where we share the little-known details and the challenges we faced while growing our Facebook group. After using the methods, our Facebook group had a 400% increase in the number of members, but most importantly, our engagement increased with 350%.

If you don’t charge what your consulting services are worth, you’ll soon find you won’t have the ability to offer that service to anyone. The following guide covers everything you need to know to build and sustain profitability in WordPress consulting.

Do you ever feel guilty about selling WordPress services to clients? Like somehow you’re ripping them off because you’re doing something they could easily do on their own if only they took time to research it? Or perhaps it’s the fact that WordPress and many of its integrations are free and you feel that your markup is too high? You should never feel guilty about that.

Rejection is part of the gig. And you know what? It’s okay if a prospect rejects your proposal, so long as the reason for it is valid. Perhaps your style of communication or work doesn’t blend well with the client’s. Or maybe your pricing is too far out of reach for a company of that size. Or maybe they really are happy with their current web designer. When there’s a valid reason for rejection, accept it with grace, thank them for their time, and move on.

As WordPress gains more and more of the global CMS market share, there are a lot of opportunities to help businesses establish a strong digital presence with it. Needless to say, launching a WordPress business in this environment is a smart move. That said, no matter how slow of a start you have with your WordPress business, there are costs everyone has to contend with.

Professionals make the most money, have the most influence and generally have it good. They also fair well when faced with challenges since they are skilled and hence more confident in their capabilities. They are the creme de la creme, and everybody (read clients) want a piece of their awesomeness. Pros do it big and are as a result the envy of the millions who don’t make the cut. With all these nice things ready for the taking, why wouldn’t anyone want to become the go-to person in their area of expertise? Here’s how to do it.

Getting established as a WordPress pro isn’t easy. If you want to freelance or set up a WordPress business, you’ll need to build up a list of clients and establish a reputation for yourself. And if you’re looking for a WordPress job, you’ll need to demonstrate that you’ve got experience with WordPress and can work with it at a professional level.

If you gain clients and do well, you can expect the amount of business coming in to grow over time. You might decide you don’t want to take on extra work, or you may choose to grow your business by taking on new staff. Either way, your business will develop as you gain more expertise. As this happens, you can start charging more and taking on bigger and more interesting projects.

This post has everything you need to know about attracting better clients with decent budgets into your business. It’s no 5-minute fix: time and effort will be required on your part. But if you follow this simple step-by-step guide, you too can start winning better, higher-budget web design clients.

Are you wondering whether you need a piece of paper to be successful as a Web Designer or Developer? Trying to decide if self-education is enough, or if you really do need a degree to become a Web Designer? Well here is a list of the pros and cons, from someone who’s done both!

In this episode, Joe Howard, the founder of WP Buffs, explains that it isn’t rocket science. He gives us some simple tips to grow your business by getting the customers come to you.

Contracts allow us to come to a mutual understanding with our clients regarding what we will be doing, at what cost, and for how long. Here are nine tips that will have your loving contracts and winning more contracts, faster.

The biggest issue that WordPress businesses and consultants face is cash flow. For some reason, particularly as new businesses, we feel that continually finding new customers is the key to growing a business. But many businesses owners still feel there is a disconnect between your new customer sale and creating a regular customer out of them. I’m going to show you how to start that conversation with a customer to move them to a regular customer.

Finding new clients is exciting and inspires our confidence. It means money in the bank, food on the table, a roof over our heads and spare cash for fun stuff like holidays, new Apple products or whatever your vice is. So why are most freelancers so bad at it and how can you fix it?

Services are a completely different type of digital “product”. You trade your time and specialized skills for remuneration, instead of selling a downloadable product. How do you ensure your service is beneficial to both you and your potential clients? Here we’ll provide tips and advice for selling your services online.

The WordPress market is full of themes and plugins created to make designing a website with WP a breeze. However, since so many view WordPress as an easy-to-use system, there is quite a large sum of people who think that they will only need to pay $500 for a site that you would rightly charge $3,000 for.

What would be the ideal work process for you? Is it handling the design division of a large client of yours, or to work with several small business owners and help them accomplish more – or maybe partner up with a designer while taking care of the technical infrastructure?

If you’ve been struggling to find new business, grow your team and deliver incredible results, optimizing your business process is just as important as improving your technical or design skills. Here are eight steps that would enhance your online presence and improve your business process, boost up your profitability and establish you as a professional WordPress consultancy.

Sales. Ick. Blech. Ugh. There is very little that the average designer, developer, freelancer, or business owner likes about sales, except the very end result of gaining a new client or customer. Let’s examine 10 simple ways you can sell less and still close new sales.

How do you steadily drive sales up? I remember selling our first website (HTML) for $300 and feeling as though I had just hit the lottery. Skip ahead 15 years and we’ve had projects in the $30K range. How do you do that? How do you drive sales up that far in less than 15 years? Here are 3 ways to increase your sales today.

A few years ago I was sitting in an office with a group of folks. This was one of those times when I was helping out a company, and they were stuck and they asked if I would meet with their marketing team. They were stuck. I want to help you, too. You don’t have to suck at branding and marketing.

Your prospects care about 3 things: Do you understand the core problem? Do you have the right experience? Do they trust you to fix their issues? You know this. You do this. And the point of this post is to help you to win more clients. So what’s the trick? I’m about to tell you.