Website design business can make money for you

Introduction

Website design is simply the process of creating websites for people and getting the websites live, online. As a business, it costs very little to learn and start. You can learn on your own free of charge. Free tutorials are available here

In the business, you could get paid from NGN10k to NGN100M depending on the extent the website required and your clientele.

There are generally two approaches to the business. You could
(A) Design websites for cash and or
(B) Design websites to address needs or solve problems

Lets look closely at both approaches


(A) Designing websites for Cash

This is the most popular form of this business. You find your clients, design sites for them and then you get paid.

What you need

- Get a Computer
A laptop preferably. This is because you will have to make presentations. A fairly used one here in Lagos Nigeria goes for about NGN60k.

- A Business Profile
Prepare a company profile. This just a document introducing you to anybody. It should say who you are, what you do, your mission, vision, contact address and more. Yes this very necessary because big businesses need to see that you are organized before they do anything with you. This also means that you should register your business. You could start an enterprise now and or Limited Liability ( LLC) later depending on what you can afford.

- A Business Proposal
This is also a document in addition to what is in your profile, it also shows a formal proposal or request to carry out a particular service or work. It is more detailed than your profile as it shows jobs you have done and a timed schedule/plan of carrying out the particular service.

As an extension of the above, you should build a couple of websites and put them on different free hosting plans. This is to show what you can do. You also need to create your own business website, it will also be part of your experience.

- Create and Print Collateral Materials
The most important ones are you business card and letter headed paper. Believe me,the first month will involve alot of writing and meeting people.

- Go find clients for your business
I won't go into the basics of tidying your appearance-believe it or not, you are now a CEO, you should look like one

(i) Tell everyone you know what you now do. You can never tell if your neighbor needs your services. Apart from word of mouth, try sending an email to all your contacts introducing your business.

(ii) Send / Drop your proposal in as many companies as possible. This step will require you to meet with Advertising executives, brand executives, CEOs, etc of companies. You should try to research the company you are going to, it maybe that what they need is a website manager, not a brand new website.

Try as much as possible to get contact details of decision makers in the companies you go to so you can keep intouch with them as often as once in two weeks. If you get more than 20 contacts, it could become economical for you to use bulk sms at NGN2.00. Click here for some bulk sms providers.

(iii)Get creative, there are so many ways to market a business. I once read one interesting book on this subject matter. Get it from your local bookshop or click here to get a copy of 101 ways to market your business.

From here
You can go then go a step further to offer further services like website hosting services. You could buy a reseller plan for a start. The sky is your limit if you keep to all this.

(B)Design Websites to fill a need
This is the second aspect of webdesign business. You build a website to solve a problem, answer a question, fill a need, give information then get paid from adverts on the website.

Examples of such websites are job search sites (jobberman.com worth $32,107), gossip/forum sites (nairaland.com worth $461,042 ), social networking sites (facebook.com worth $500,000,013). Source mywebsiteworth.com

These sites were setup to address certain needs and they became successful. The fundamental principle common to these websites is they tried to find what a lot of people are searching for on the search engines and then they give it to them in a way that is better than their competitors. Let's look at this principle in greater detail.

Find out what a lot of people are searching for
Use online keyword tools like wordtracker.com, google adwords keywords tool etc for free or Brad Callen's Keyword Elite Software for a token. You choose keywords with very high demand or searches/month

Find your competitors
For those high demand keywords, search google and go through the first and second pages of your search result. Those websites are your competitors. You need to visit these websites one by one and see how you can complement them i.e. offer related services to what they are offering.

From experience I'l advise, do not compete with these guys by offering the same things they are offering. Now if you decide on complementing them, you can then request them to link to you. This is important because people searching for things on the internet usually go to the search engines.
Now these search engines produce results for the searcher and then your site is found and ranked high if it is listed on websites on the first two pages.

Build your website
Take time to build your website. Take into account all the data gathered in the earlier steps and do proper Search Engine Optimization (SEO).Find more SEO tools here The life of your website depends on this.

Marketing your website
Apart from aproaching the websites in the first two pages of search results for your chosen keywords, you need to also get links alot of other places.

Write five articles related to your website, including a link back to your website and submiting to the top 5 Article directories.

Submit your website address to link directories. Get a free copy of Directory submitter software here

Use social networking, facebook, twitter etc to create more awarenes and write a blog to keep intouch with your website visitors. There is no hard and fast rule to getting more visitors to your website. I just takes you choosing some of these webmarketing strategies and doing them often.

Analyze Your marketing
Install google analytics on your website to monitor web visitors. It would enable track how many visitors you get, which countries they come from, which websites are sending visitors to you so you can decide on which websites you need to concentrate your marketing on

Make money
Since you have people coming to your website for your keyword, you could sell advert space on your website. To make it easy, just signup for Google Adsense. Its an adverting program where google will send you adverts related to the content on your page and you get paid if a visitor clicks on the advert. This can really be a sizable sum if you get up to 100 visitors / day to your website.

From here
You could go ahead and research another topic/keyword and build another website around it repeating the steps above.

Conclution
Every business takes time and effort to start and even more dedication for i to grow. Be consistent and work diligently, you will succeed.

If you know someone who is into this business, you could go ask him, it could be your shortcut to success. Read more on finding a Business Mentor