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grugdev42

You might laugh, but selling cheap marketing websites is an easy $10,000.

Selling ten $1,000 websites to small businesses is easy. It isn't fun or exciting, but it works.

It's 50% sales, 30% chasing people, and 20% building.

Find small local businesses with bad websites, or better yet no website. They honestly do exist.

Resist the urge to make your own anything. Just use Squarespace or Wix!

You don't need to hide SS or Wix from the client. Tell them you just charge for your time to set it all up. If they complain then move onto the next customer, they would likely be a pain anyway.

People will say "small marketing websites are dead with SS or Wix about", but it's not true. Most small businesses just don't want to learn how!

If you cold call all week I bet you can have a couple of deals done by Friday! Good luck.

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This is spot on. I run a small agency, and the number of clients coming from Wix or Squarespace is surprising—especially considering those platforms are marketed as “easy.” I’d recommend using your LLM to research businesses that need websites and start reaching out by email or phone. After that, it becomes a numbers game. Most business owners eventually realize they need professional help in this space. Skip the penny-pinchers and focus on quick wins, and delegate if the margins are there.

Lastly, most of the advice you'll get around here will be technical, but every now and again a gem will popup that sort-of 'fills in the blanks' when it comes to the other part of this, which is sales and marketing. It's not easy, but it's not all hard. I recommend this thread if you want to read more about it, the Op gives some good advice on how to get leads, and eventually customers. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46661167

Friend of mine develops and runs eshops. Through word of mouth he runs like 60-70 right now. Big and small. He sells setup, etc and takes care of hosting and patching and developing new features.

The most money and the easiest ones come from hosting ;-) it’s like X amount per year so that they don’t have to worry about it. He runs two huge servers, and makes pretty good money at are going to increase over time.

But he had patience and will to do the dirty work early on. Now he is riding the wave.

How do you convince a small business or individual that $1k is a good price for their website? As someone that has learned web development as a hobby many years ago, I’ve helped build sites for several people through word of mouth but I can never seem to ask much for the work I’ve done for some reason. I work really fast, it’s easy, and even fun for me. This idea sounds great and I even have access to create unlimited sub-accounts on a CRM platform paid for by my real job. I can make full websites with storefronts, blogs, forms, galleries, email/sms flows, you name it. My issue is knowing how to convince others how valuable the work is. Any suggestions?

Well the first point is don't ask for payment after the work is done. No one will pay because you've already solved their pain. You're in a weaker position at that point.

Tell them how much you charge before you start work and ask if they want you to start work. It can only go one of two ways.

The easiest way to convince them is to compare it to sales. If they are an electrician with an average job of $500, that website only needs to earn them two extra jobs per year to break even.

But the easiest way is to be a sociopath and not care. Ask the question and they will either say yes or no. No one is going to assassinate you for pitching a marketing website to them.

If they say yes, do you care where the money has come from? Would it matter if that was their last $1k? If they're loaded would you feel more confident? What if you do a great job and then it turns out that money came from illegal sources?

What about if they say no? Will you stay awake at night worrying that their business is losing work because people think they're weird for not having a website? What if your marketing website lands them a big client because of the "authenticity factor" of having a professional marketing website?

None of these things actually matter. But getting paid $1k feels good, especially if you've done a good job and earned it. :)

Thank you for the new perspective! I was looking at it the wrong way. They're not paying for the website, they're paying for new customers. I think I can manage taking a bit of time to understand their business a bit and then explain how a site will be valuable to them.

EDIT: Did you mean $1k annually or just for the initial project?

It's been a while since I did these, but I used to charge $1k to get it set up, then $500 per year to keep it going.

I will say I was very cheap though. But I made my money on quantity. I would do two a month on the side of a full time job.

They were very simple websites though. But most of the time that's all people need.

You can charge a lot more than you think. IMO, $1,000 for a website is too low. I provide commercial electrical services and $1,000 would get you one of my electrician’s labor for six hours, which does not include material. For specialized electricians who do things like work on generators and do switchgear testing, $1,000 only covers around 5 hours.

This has also always irked me when thinking about switching to web development full time, knowing how much to charge. I've never been able to get a clear answer on how much is enough or too little for projects. OP suggested $1k for a small business site and honestly this seems pretty fair to me, although I think I just interpreted their other comment to have meant $1k annually... I think I'd rather have an initial project fee and then a monthly for any maintenance or changes, but then how much should that be?

> People will say "small marketing websites are dead with SS or Wix about", but it's not true. Most small businesses just don't want to learn how!

Even if they want to, they have approximately 500 other problems to deal with that are more urgent.

Just figure out how you handle support after the initial project phase: It's a lot easier to get a small business to spend $1000 on a website than to get them to spend $100/year for the constant trickle of small changes they'll inevitable need later.

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