If you’re a WordPress freelancer working hard to improve your offerings to your clients – be certain to watch this video and learn about a few different tasks that you can add to your website scope for clients to “opt in” on. Every little thing adds up so that your new proposals are rolling out at $8K, $10K, $15K ++
Full Transcript
Hey y’all, I’m Kori Ashton and this is another WordPress Wednesday. Hey, so a lot of my audience, y’all are freelancers out there, y’all are working every single day to find clients that you can build websites for specifically WordPress websites and you’re doing your best to grow the scope with that client, to have big vision with that client so that you’re able to sell websites upwards of five to $10,000. How are you able to do that each and every time where when a client comes to you and sits down you say,
You know, my starting fee is $4500, and then depending upon what else you like we can kind of add different tasks, ala carte style, and let me show you big picture, show you what that could look like.
And dream big with the client so that the next thing you know you’re actually averaging your invoices to be somewhere around six to $8,000 and every once in a while you’re seeing that $10,000, $15,000 project come in as well. I’m gonna show you today a couple of things that you can be adding to your scopes to improve that bottom line and grow your profit.
Hey also be sure to stick around if you’re interested in my health journey and how I’m surviving cancer, check out the end of this video.
Website Audit
One of the easiest things that you can add on a website package is for you to do a current website audit. So let’s say a client’s coming to you saying
…listen, my websites really old, I don’t know what I wanna keep, what I do wanna keep, I don’t know what information’s current or not, some of the pictures I want still, I don’t know what I want, I don’t know what I should be keeping, can you help me with that?
Don’t do that for free. You absolutely wanna add that to the package and say
…let’s take a look at your current website, I’ll go take a look what’s in your Google Analytics, we’ll pull your top 25 landing pages, we’ll get some ideas of what pages are being seen, what are not being seen, and we’ll come together with a game plan and a strategy of what you should be keeping from your current website.
Think about spending three to four hours collecting this information, depending upon how large that website is, charge your hourly rate, and add that to a package deal. So let’s say three or four hours and you charge $100 an hour, this is an additional three to $400 that you can tack onto a project, and you should be charging for.
Competitor Analysis
Another thing you can plan for maybe an additional hour to two hours per competitor is offering a competitor analysis. So let’s say that you have a client who has four or five other competitors in town that they’re a little curious about, they’ve mentioned to your their websites, and they need to be competitive with them inside of the Google search results.
Maybe they’re a carpenter or a plumber and it’s just a packed-out city and there are a lot of options. How do they compete with those higher-end competitors in town? Well, one of the things you can do is spend time assessing each one of those brands, allow the client to name their top three that they believe are their top three competitors.
Then you go spend about an hour to two hours per competitor evaluating their Facebook page, their website, looking and seeing what their rank is, and just kind of overall getting the idea of what their marketing strategy is online. Put that together in an analysis, in a report, and submit that to the client so that they understand gosh, this competitor is publishing on Facebook every single day, this competitor blogs, but the last time blogged was 2010.
Think about assessing their strengths as well as their weaknesses so that we can identify for your client what opportunity looks like. Again, for this you would charge your hourly rate, so let’s say that you’re looking at one to two hours per competitor, they wanna list three competitors, you’ve got, you know, anywhere between three to six hours that you’re gonna be spending on this, your hourly rate, that’s an additional 600 bucks already with these first two things we’ve added, we’ve just $1,000 to your scopes.
Offer Copywriting
Now copywriting is a different story. Some of us don’t consider ourselves to be writers at all, some of us would rather video blog all day long. But those of you who might be able to write or you can outsource it and bring that in and make a little bit of profit off of that, this is an option because a lot of your clients, as you probably well know, struggle to write their about us information even.
They struggle to write about their services and they never really had a professional sit down and help them. Stretch that out, expand it out, and really kind of cultivate that conversation on their website. In order for them to be ranking higher on Google, they’re gonna need that text content and this is where you can really start to add in charging anywhere between three to $500 per page that you’re writing for them.
Now if a client says no no no, that’s gonna get way too expensive way too quickly, then what you wanna suggest is,
…all right, let’s take your top three major landing pages and let me at least write for those and I’ll charge you $250 per page.
So that right there is an additional easily $750 that you’ve added to your scope.
Audience Analysis
An audience analysis is actually really easy to put together and most of your clients won’t know this information. So what you wanna do here is charge anywhere between 200 to $300 for a quick audience analysis. What you’ll do is you’ll get access to their Facebook page, you’ll get access to their Google Analytics. Go into the demographics, go into the reporting in both of those areas and pull that demographic information.
Whether it’s predominately male or female, what region they’re coming from, what age group they’re coming from, if they have household income information, any of those characteristics, any of those assets that you can pull out of there, put that together in a report, submit that to your client. That gives them a very pinpointed, very targeted audience model that allows them to use that information across the board. Whether they’re trying to source new imaging, whether they’re trying to figure out what social networks they should be on, this information’s gonna be very, very relevant to their marketing and you wanna be able to be at the forefront of that showing them that you understand how to not only gather that information but critique that information and apply it to their marketing strategy inside of their website. This is something, again, very easily added inside of a scope, very easy to explain to a client why they need to invest in something like this.
Onsite SEO
Onsite SEO is a simple one to add to any scope because guys, think about this, more than likely they’re coming to you to get a website to be found on Google, right? To rank high on any search engine for that matter. So how do we do that? If you itemize on your scope that you’re gonna give them onsite SEO and you’re gonna be addressing their meta tags, their page titles, their snippets, right, you’re gonna be addressing all of that, that you’re gonna be adding any information, alt tags and title tags, and all the different things that you can be adding.
You’re gonna be optimizing the images, that they load quickly so that they’re named appropriately, all the different onsite SEO tactics you can do even if it’s just basic. You can charge per page that you do this too. So again, this is something that adds up pretty quickly inside of your scope.
You can go very quickly from only charging $100 an hour building out a website to all the sudden having all of these different things begin to add up. Onsite SEO easily for us can add an additional three, four, $5,000 on any project we do.
External Integrations
External integrations are another opportunity where a quick buck, a couple of hours, you’re making the client super happy, you’ve added onto your scope. And what I mean by external integrations is something like if a client says to you,
Hey, I’ve got a Mailchimp account I’d like to be collecting email addresses.
Or potentially the client might just say to you,
Hey, I wanna have a newsletter sign up on my website.
And you say to them,
Okay, I can do that for you, but would you like it to automatically, dynamically, dump into a list for you so that you don’t have to manually download it every time and manually upload it every time because I can do that for you. As a matter of fact, I can actually set it up to where as soon as they enter their email address they get sent over to your mail program and that mail program then sends them a welcome notice, dynamically. And you don’t have to touch a thing and they’re there sitting in your list the next time you wanna email blast.
So something like this would be used between your website and maybe Mailchimp or Constant Contact or one of the other systems, Aweb or whatever it might look like, right. Whatever system that is over there, what you wanna do is just tell them, okay, I’m gonna get that all set up for you. Even if they don’t have that account set up yet, you can charge for that. These external integrations easily can add three, four, $500 onto a project.
Adding SSL/Security
Everybody’s looking for more and more added security these days, so I would highly recommend that as a post-launch, after you’ve launched the website, you tell the client, okay, I’m gonna spend an extra three to four hours making certain that:
- the website’s loading properly
- that it’s mobile-optimized
- that it’s fast-loading
- and it’s secure
So I’m going to be adding in an SSL for you and now some of that money is going to go to purchase the SSL, but some of that money also needs to cover your time to apply that SSL.
So you wanna think about both of those dynamics before you set this price point, depending on what type of SSL you wanna purchase for that client. But this is another really easy thing, it’s a quick upsell to a client where the client goes,
Oh, well, of course, I need security, yes, add that to the list.
Support Plans
And of course, if you watch my channel you know I’m an advocate for support plans. This gives you that reoccurring revenue, right? So all of that that I mentioned prior to is kind of a one time fee, a set it and forget it type of situation. And that’s one of the beautiful things about being a freelancer is that you get kind of these one-off projects, it’s great, the client’s off and running.
But the problem with that, the flaw in that theory, is that we really have no reoccurring revenue and then you’re always reaching for that next monkey bar, reaching for that next project, that next rung, just to get you financially through the month.
Well, whenever you have a support plan in place, this is that reoccurring revenue that comes into your pocket every single month that allows that stability in the slow seasons. If you’re interested in really learning more about support plans, I’ll put a video link in the description box below, click show more, and watch this next video as I share with you, very extensively, about how to build out your support plans.
Because this is really where you’re gonna start to see your annual revenue move from making maybe $50,000 a year to being over that six-figure hump. This is how you get there is adding in a required support plan.
So pretty amazing right? All of these things that sometimes we think, “well, I should just throw that into the package deal.” We should be charging for. Maybe some of these things you never even thought to charge for or to add to your scope.
But I want you to be thinking about all these different things that you can be adding to your scope.
Accessibility
Of course, there’s also accessibility issues coming out now, that that’s another add on that’s very, very important that your website is with CAD compliant.
Educate Yourself To Add to Your Website Scope
What does that look like, how can you educate yourself more as a freelancer to help you improve that service for your client? The more you educate yourself, the more you teach yourself how to educate your clients, the more you’ll be able to charge. That’s what this is all about, how to give more value to your client so that you can charge more and keep more value in your pocket.
Well, I hope this has been super helpful for you, I’ve enjoyed it. If you’re interested in my health journey, I’ll give you that update next. If not, y’all take it easy, I’ll see y’all next time, by everyone!
Health Update
Hey y’all, so I am on day three. Today is chemo day. So it’s every Wednesday I will be having instead of just WordPress Wednesday I will be doing chemotherapy for the next six weeks. So today is actually my first treatment. So I’m not sure how that will go, I’m gonna do my best to stay positive and hope that my immune system stays strong and that I’m gonna be able to be back here next week as well. So other than that, I’m still just staying as positive as I possibly can.
All of your love and support, all of your super kind comments and really, really encouraging words and tweets and emails have been just amazing, thank you so much. All the love, I literally am feeling it from all over the world.
So please forgive how I look, I’m a little bit chewed up and spit out just from literally surgery after surgery and treatment after treatment. But as long as I have my health and I’m able to hold up my head and come talk to you, that is my goal every week. It allows me to kind of take my mind off of cancer and all the other struggles in life and allows me to get here with you and be able to share this moment with you. And hopefully help you improve all of your online marketing and specifically in this video, your freelance business, which is my passion.
So all right y’all, thanks for sticking around, thanks for talking with me. Shoot me an email, send a tweet, leave a comment on this video, I’d love to hear from you. I’ll see y’all next WordPress Wednesday. Bye everyone!
