I've sold a lot of websites to local businesses and this is by far the easiest way to land web design clients so in the next couple minutes I'm going to share with you my five proven strategies to actually find these local clients and then I'm going to share with you one of my local business projects including how I found them and how much I charged for the website and then at the very end of this video I'm going to share with you my golden question that I ask every single Prospect to get them interested in
hiring me for a website project so let's get into it I absolutely love focusing on a local geographical area because there's just less competition I don't have to compete with all the other web designers in the entire world and usually if you look at just your own City there's just a handful of other designers and so it makes it a lot easier for you to compete and stand out now one thing that you're going to want to keep in mind about selling websites to local businesses is these most likely are not going to be 10,000
15 20,000 000 websites typically these companies have smaller budgets and so you should shoot to charge between three and $5,000 for a website but of course this will depend on the client's budget and their needs now one of the best parts about local businesses is they rarely need some type of custom website or custom solution typically they just need a standard brochure website with a few pages so while these are going to be lower ticket projects they're going to be way faster turnaround way easier to manage way easier to find and for most of these
you can use templates to build the website because the clients don't really care and then the best part of working local is the insane referral potential meaning if you do a good job for one company they're much more likely to recommend you to some other local business because in tight-nit communities people talk especially business owners all right so now let's talk about the five methods that you can use to actually find these local clients so the first method is cold Outreach and cold Outreach often times gets a bad rap because it is one of the
less effective ways but what I found is on a local scale it actually works really well because it never is purely cold Outreach a lot of times you can make it feel like warm Outreach because you live in the same Community you have common interest you have common connections and it's really easy to bring something up that's relevant and personal to them and so it's not going to feel like cold Outreach and they're much more likely to respond to you now cold Outreach can be done through a phone call through a email and through social
media and I found the most success doing cold Outreach through Facebook because it seems that Facebook is a lot better at keeping things grouped into communities whether that's a Facebook group or just common connections that you have through your friends the next method is my bread and butter and that is local SEO it doesn't take a whole lot for you to rank towards the top in the organic search results and on the maps and so really all you need to do is create a Google business profile which is completely free you need to verify your
location which you can just use your home location if you don't have an office and then you can hide that location on your listing then you're going to want to start collecting Google reviews now if you don't have any past clients to ask for a review you can ask friends and family people that know you know your work and know your character because the more reviews you get the more your business listing is going to stand out and then the only other thing you need to do is optimize your website for local keywords now there's
a lot more that goes into this I've actually got a full training inside of my PR group so if you want to check that training out on local SEO and there's like 20 other trainings you can just click the link right up here in the corner the third method is called oim or open your mouth now this is exactly what it sounds like you just need to be willing and confident and brave enough to open your mouth and talk to everyone you can about what you do I've sold websites to my dentist to my gym
to people that go to my church and people that live in my neighborhood and it doesn't take a whole lot and you don't don't have to come across a salesy just be quick to open your mouth and share with people what it is that you do so really quickly I want to share a website that I landed clear back at the end of 2018 so this was early on in my web design career but this is a website client that I landed via Facebook now this wasn't a Facebook friend in fact this was a friend
that I had on Facebook that posted about this new gym opening and it was a friend of theirs so kind of like a a mutual friend so what I want to do is open up Facebook and show you the actual conversation that I had with this individual I'm going to zoom in here a little bit more so I removed his name just for privacy reasons but the message that I sent him was hey trevan I saw you were opening a gym in Idol Falls Doug Swanson had shared it I grew up here in Idol Falls
and own a digital agency that helped small businesses especially startups with websites SEO online reviews and more I'm reaching out because yours is a business that interests me and I would love to chat and see if there is any way I could help even if I did a bit of free work just to open the door and get to know you my website is PID digital.com hope you have a chance to get back to me I've been waiting to do some work with this type of Niche so I sent this message and I got this
response hey man thanks for reaching out let me take a look at your website and I'll get back to you I'm interested so the reason that I got a response here wasn't because my intro message was so great the reason that I got a response was because I mentioned a mutual contactor mutual friend that we both had and that makes a prospect feel like oh gez I kind of know this person I better respond to them so what I said is sounds great no rush I know it's a holiday weekend talk soon so this was
a few weeks later and I said hey Trevon just checking back one more time to see if you had a chance to check out my site I would love to chat sometime this week and see if I can't offer anything to help you bring in a bunch of new clients I also have some solutions for online reviews that I would be happy to let you try for free just because I know starting a business has a lot of costs let me know so this follow-up message was what finally hooked Trevon and his response was Payton
would you have time next Monday to meet I'd really like to see some of your work and see what you could help our business with as far as advertising goes we really need to get a sick website going so after that I went and met with Trevon at his gym which again is another bonus of working with local clients we were able to talk about a website and eventually build this really great website it was a three-page website pretty easy he had all the images and videos ready he had a style in mind and so
it was a pretty simple project especially for how little experience I had so hopping over here into my bookkeeping software you'll see this Apex website build I charge a total of $1,799 which came in two different payments so $1,800 for this website now this may seem cheap to some of you but for me being so early on in my career this was lifechanging and so this really works cold Outreach like this and opening your mouth really works you just have to spend the time and look for the opportunities and the right people to speak with
the fourth method is local connections now there are several different ways for you to connect with local business owners you can join your local Chamber of Commerce you can look to give a presentation at some sort of local speaking event and I was actually surprised at how many of those there are and they need speakers so all you have to do is sign up you can be a sponsor for local sports teams or events and my favorite way to get local connections is by finding complimentary Partnerships so if I sell websites I might want to
reach out to other marketing agencies that don't offer websites and make some sort of agreement with them where they pass me clients and I pass them clients and it's a mutually beneficial agreement I actually made a partnership like this with somebody that buys and sells dental offices and they've referred me a ton of different offices to build their websites so if you find those great great connections it's just going to be a constant stream of referrals and the fifth method is what I would just call physical so this is doing physical outward visual things that
will get people to notice you so this can be passing around Flyers which is actually a pretty cheap way to connect with tons of businesses you can get a huge decal on the side of your car or on your rear windshield that just says I build websites and then your phone number or your URL and then one of my favorites is just wear a t-shirt that says I build web ites ask me about it and wear this t-shirt every time you go to the mall you go to the restaurant anything you can do to start
up conversations with people about web design all right so we've talked about all these methods and now I want to share with you my golden question that I ask every single Prospect now what you're going to find is that this question isn't some crazy Jedi mind trick it's actually very simple but the reason this works so well is it's non-confrontational and it's just a really smooth opener to get into a discussion about web design so every time I cold call somebody every time I walk into a business if I'm speaking with the owner I just
ask them when was the last time you guys updated your website for whatever reason people are really willing to answer this question and usually the answer is going to be oh it's been a while we've been meaning to do it but we just haven't gotten around to it and so that really opens the door for you to share what it is that you do even offer some sort of free website audit or just to take a look at their website and see if you have any recommendations for them once you get your foot in the
door like this it's going to be a lot easier to upsell them on a full website to help their business so thanks so much for watching this video I hope you land your next web design client soon and you might as well hit the like button down below for good luck we'll catch you in the next [Music] one
