The average salary of a freelance web designer is about $57,470 a year. Admittedly, this isn’t much and it’s an average number. This means that many web designers make much less than that. If you are one of those free agents or if your web design agency as a whole isn’t performing as well as you’d like it to, consider expanding your horizons. There are many other ways for web designers to increase their income when clients are rare.
How to Make More Money If You Are a Web Designer
1. Be a designer
Web design is all good and fun but if you are lacking clients in that area, you should turn your talents to other niches as well. Obviously, you have the talent needed for design, so start offering other services similar to your primary focus. For example, designing logos, brochures, or any other graphic materials depending on your personal talents and preferences.
This particular avenue for increasing your income is a good choice because it offers a lot of flexibility to a freelancer. On the other hand, you might be facing the same problem, which means you might not have enough customers. In this case, you should consider uploading your works to specialized online platforms, much like Shutterstock for photos.
2. Start selling web hosting
You are already helping people make websites, so take it a step further and help them launch those as well. For this you’ll need to find out what reseller hosting is and how to use it. By becoming a hosting reseller, you will be able to not only help your customers but also get your own hosting for free or nearly free because you can use the money pay for it with the money from the customers whose websites you “host”.
Offering people a chance to design a website and immediately get access to reliable and affordable hosting will definitely make it easier for you to attract more customers. This might be exactly the thing that will give you an edge over your competition.
3. Offer help with marketing
Another service that is closely tied with web design is promotion, which means you can offer marketing help to your customers. If you are promoting your own business through social media, SEO, and paid ad campaigns, you know how to do this and offering assistance to your customers will definitely bring you more of them.
When you offer this kind of service, you should aim to not attract customers who seek this service exclusively. Instead, your goal should be to try making more money per client. This is what you need to keep in mind when developing your own marketing strategy.
4. Partner with a compatible business
If you can’t offer any marketing services yourself, you can still try making money off them by partnering with a marketing agency. In this case, you both benefit because you will be able to reach another pool of potentially interested customers fast.
This deal is possible not only with marketing agencies but with a business offering any kind of service that can complement your own. It’s an efficient method because you basically get an increase in business without having to do any additional work that is outside of your main specialty.
5. Go client hunting
Cold-calling might not be fun, but you definitely should read up on its best practices if you are running low on clients. Web design is an extremely competitive field, so you can’t sit around waiting for customers to come to you.
Reach out to them first instead!
Go browsing and contact companies with dreadful websites directly. Make a beautiful offer to make sure business owners understand how much of a difference changing their web design (with your help) can make.
