there's no better time than right now to start your own design agency there are a wide range of platforms that offer professional looking websites without the need to code and today I want to go over a few methods which I think are the easiest ways to make money online so just to give you a bit of background I've been selling digital Solutions now for over 14 years and for the last 7 years I've been running my own design consultancy so on one end I'm selling digital solutions to people who know what they're doing so this
is delivering highly specialized solutions to clients mostly done inigma or I'm putting together design courses for uh educational institutions now this requires a lot of experience and knowledge which is difficult to get into but on the other side of spectrum I'm working with a lot of non-technical clients where I'm designing websites branding and hosting Solutions and this is where I think anyone with zero experience can get started and start earning money online very easily all you need is a laptop and connection to the internet and this is exactly how I got started over a decade
ago when I first started freelancing and the good thing is you can charge a oneoff fee which can range anything between 1,000 all the way up to £10,000 if you manage to get a really really solid client and you can structure it in a way where you've got them on a retainer and you're earning passive income from them every year simply just by hosting their website now you might be thinking surely there are a lot of people doing this already or am I too late to get started well I've done a little bit of research
for you and I live in the UK and according to the Federation of small businesses at the start of 2023 there were over 5.5 million small businesses and 28% of them still don't have a website with an additional 357,96 new businesses set up every year so in the UK alone there over 1.84 million potential customers and because the digital product you're not actually limited to Regions so in the US there are over 5 million new businesses is set up every year so the opportunities are endless for me Beyond clients in the UK I also work
for clients in Europe Dubai South Africa and Singapore you just need to know how to position yourself properly and start reaching out to these clients so the first thing you need to do is pick a platform this is where you're going to host your website now there are a few ways you can approach this I have my own preferences but in reality any of these will work so let's start off with the easiest ones so the two easiest ways I think a viable as a solution is uh Wix and Squarespace personally I prefer Squarespace I
host four different clients website on Squarespace and I just think they've got really professional looking templates which you can pull off the shelf and when you replace the images and the copy with something that's more in line with your clients they're more than happy with it it's just really Simple Solutions that you can provide Wicks on the other hand they have a lot more templates but to me a lot of them are just not professional looking you just wouldn't present that to anyone as their actual website if Wix is something that you're more familiar with
then obviously go ahead using that and if your clients want to take things to the next level you can open stores on both Wix and Squarespace as well where they can sell products online link up credit card Solutions and book in meetings so there are loads of different e-commerce solutions that both platforms provide on the medium side you got framer and webflow these are a lot more customizable than Squarespace and Wix but the learning curve is a lot steeper personally I don't host anything on framer or workflow but I do know some industry friends who
actually use both of them so on the hard side you've got WordPress personally I don't like WordPress I do St two clients that I'm hosting on WordPress from over a decade ago but it's just really painful to use uh you're relying on third party plugins and themes and all of them work differently they've got customiz backend UI that each one of them are just slightly different and if if you don't know how to use something you're pretty much stuck you can't call WordPress up for uh technical support because the plugin you use they're not related
to Wordpress so they won't be able to help you uh with any issues I would avoid it but again if you are familiar with WordPress feel free to use that and on the very hard side you can code it I do have two clients that I'm hosting uh websites for by HTML CSS and JavaScript again if you want to get started quickly this is probably not the way to go but there's no harm in learning how to code as well because it is a very good skill set to have it'll probably just take you 6
months to a year uh of learning before you can put together something uh professional looking so you might be thinking if it's so easy to put together something on Squarespace or Wicks why would people pay for you to provide a website for them and the really really simple answer is they just don't have time to learn how to put together a website so a lot of the clients I've got from back then were restaurant owners so imagine if you're a restaurant owner and you spend hours preparing food you work long shift and then at the
end of the day you got to do your accounting as well by the time you finish work it's probably 10: p.m. the last thing they want to be doing is learn how to use square space to put together a website a lot of them are happy to just pay two or 3 days worth of work just so that they can have a website up and running without them having to think too much about it once you've picked your platform go ahead and build a website now I'm not going to be doing a tutorial here on
how to use Wix or Squarespace webflow or framer there are plenty of resource about those online the second thing you can do before you even finish building your website is to start telling people what you do and also identify yourself as a web designer you just wouldn't believe where opportunities would come up so previously I mentioned a gaming client that I work with I actually met them at egx which is kind of ComicCon in London I provided some feedback on the game uh they really appreciated it and asked me what I did I just said
yeah I'm a web designer um I provide design solutions for people and recently one of my Jiu-Jitsu coaches he asked me if I can make a website for them and a friend of mine he's starting his own business and again he just approached me and asked me to set up a website for him so you just need to embrace the fact that you are now a web designer and that you can provide web design solutions for your clients and again non- Tech clients they are not bothered at all if the website that they given not
coded by hand as long as professional looking and you can provide them with a customized website they're more than happy with whatever it is that you've provided them third thing you need to do is think about the type of solutions that you're going to provide so obviously the first thing I've mentioned uh web design and web hosting this should be the main thing you push out because I think this is the highest earning and it's the lowest effort so the second thing you can do is actually provide posters and flyer designs this is actually how
I started out over 14 years ago back then having a website wasn't really a thing most businesses I worked with were just local businesses they just had people handing out flyers and posters everywhere but fast forward 14 years people are still wanting posters and flyers designs even in this digital age because everyone's on social media nowadays so uh most companies who don't actually have a website yet they will probably have an Instagram page or a Facebook page set up already and a lot of them do actually require post designs uh from designers again this is
something that you can sell to your customers and I'll show you a shortcut on how you can provide flyers and post designs really simply so 14 years ago when I first started I did make all the flyers from scratch in Photoshop now this is very very time consuming and what I ended up doing after two or three Flyers was um I went on to fly Heroes and just bought one of their bundles so you can see here they have over 1,800 designs that you can choose from uh for Adobe Photoshop and if you just scroll
down you can see all the different designs that they've got for a price of $89 now if you compare that to the price that you can charge for flyer designs 14 years ago I was charging 00 per flyer design some were a little bit more some were a little bit less but back then I believe I pay 50 Quid uh for all of the Flyers so for half the price of just one flyer that I used to sell I was able to buy over 1,000 templates that I can just keep reusing and all I got
to do is just replace the content and images and you're good to go the third type of service you can provide is branding and Logo designs now personally I don't really do this anymore because it is a lot of effort and people don't want to pay too much for it but when you're first starting off and you're reaching out to small clients you'll probably want to pick up a lot of this as well because it's good practice and it improves your Photoshop and Illustrated skills so so personally I would just recommend providing these three solutions
I think things to avoid is probably are probably photography and videography I think the barrier to entri to those are quite High uh you need relatively expensive equipment to get started on those uh so unless you are already pretty good at this and you happy to pay for some expensive equipment up front I probably avoid these and just get your clients to take um you know just decent images with the iPhone iPhones nowadays can provide pretty good images next you're going to have to think about the pricing of your Solutions you're either cheaper than your
competitor or you're better than your competitor and when you're starting out you want to attract as many clients as you possibly can and you would naturally lean towards the cheaper end of the pricing structure but personally I wouldn't recommend that because it's natural for anyone to try and push your price down and a lot of the times if people hadn't already reached out to these potential customers most of them would just end up going with the first people to reached out to them so obviously don't price yourself out completely I would recommend pricing it at
maybe ,500 up to £2,000 as a whole package so you've got web design posters and branding all bundled up together and the reason why I say this is because people will always negotiate with you and if they don't negotiate then perfect you've got yourself um a good deal and when they do negotiate with you you want to be able to break down different components within your services so that they can reduce the cost but then on your end you're reducing effort as well most people who are non-technical will think that web design and hosting are
the highest effort out of the three different solutions that you are providing but in reality it's by far the lowest so if someone wants to negotiate let's say you're charging 1,500 and they say oh that's too expensive uh can you reduce the cost you can say okay well you know for 1500 I provide web design hosting posters and flyer design and branding so what I can do is I can reduce that down to 12200 and I just provide web design and hosting um posters and F designs so you can structure it that way where you're
reducing the cost but you're also reducing the services otherwise if you're only selling one product at a time which most people do they end up doing the same amount of work but then for Less cost so I would always structure it in a way where you're providing a few different things and then when they negotiate you're removing one part of the service which I think your priority should be removing branding and logo design because that is so much effort um and then you can reduce the cost and use that time to find another client as
well and the next thing is to start reaching out to customers now I don't want to get in trouble with showing anyone's data or anything like that uh but what you can do is uh you can go on Google Maps and just type in a specific type of service so so the main clients that I worked with when I first started out uh 14 years ago were local restaurants takeaway bars nightclubs personal trainers and uh local contractors like plumbers and electricians and if you were around the West Midlands Birmingham area around the 2010s most of
the posters you saw that's just people thrown away and on the floor were probably my designs that I go from flyer Heroes now my priority I would recommend is uh personal trainer I think personal trainers have a higher sustain rate because a lot of them they will continue on being a personal trainer throughout their whole Liv and number two I actually would recommend takeaways over restaurants and actually I love the existing clients I've got from 10 years ago they're actually Chinese takeaways with really good margins so in my opinion those two are the top ones
to try and reach out to so what you should do is just provide a little bit of research on why they should be creating a website so we look at this post by magnetize studio um they're saying that 94% of first impressions are design Le and 75% of users judge a company's credibility based on his website you can use these statistics to reach out to these potential customers which will help you sell the solutions that you're trying to sell to them and then once you reach out to your local ones you can can look at
wider areas so again as I said digital products they're not bound by region so if you want to just stay nationally you can just reach out to people in your country and the next thing you should do is keep track of all your clients so I used to have an Excel spreadsheet where I have the client's name the email and what date I send an email to them after maybe 7 days I will drop them another email again to try and reconnect as someone who owns multiple businesses I get a lot of emails every day
uh people trying to sell their services so if I show you this email I've got um obviously I've blanked out all the details you know they send a message on Thursday 25th Friday 26th and Saturday 27th um so every day they just kept following up now I didn't actually work for these people because they're not providing something that I need right now but I do applaud them for their consistency so you just got to make sure you're following with your lead and just start reaching out to everyone and develop a online pres so hopefully that's
given you some insight and motivation to get started with your own design agency and I truly think this is something where you can transition into a full-time business earning money from anywhere in the world
