I've been working on a webdesign service web site for quite some time now, and I was wondering if anyone here owning one and promoting it could share some advice on the best ways to promote such a service. I would like to thank all of the responses in advance.
Hey there, you should start off by submitting your site to some directories. There are a lot of them out there. Maybe someone has a better idea then I though.
I 100% agree with this. Establish yourself locally. Make yourself some money.Make a decent name for yourself.Then in the future you can afford to advertise and hit the global market.
Yes, local promotion is the way to go as you will need some "face" time with new clients. Word of mouth will grow from there if you are good. Also try becoming a provider on Elance.com Good luck.
Yep, there is a ton of competition for search terms and AdWords keywords are expensive too. Go for the local searches as those will be easier to achieve rankings for and more likely to turn into paying customers.
I honestly wouldn't even hit local search yet. It's so commoditized that people think they can just get a 'free website starter kit' with their hosting package, and that's good enough You need to do some selling in person, walk into local businesses
Just make good projects. Get a couple of awards, get listed in res72 and other sites about design with your sites... In this niche actually, when You are good You don't have to spend a dime on ads... That's of course if we assume that you're not one of thoser guys selling crappy designs to people who completly have no idea about internet... that's not fair. Work on your esteem not backlinks...
It's true i'm having the hardest time charging enough, for some reason I want to give everyone deals One thing is that I started off just doing sites for friends/family, but now that I have a decent portfolio, I'll charge realistic prices
To clarify, when I recommended local promotion I meant local publications, newspapers, yellow pages, flyers, mailers etc. Not local search engine ads. Good luck.
You don't have to veer away of trying to tackle SEO. Every industry has keywords that are not very competitive, and can bring in a decent amount of traffic. Do your SEO well, be consistent and patient. Find the keywords that aren't horribly competitive, and spend a lot of time developing a great site, and most importantly, spend even more time focusing on your offsite optimization. Get yourself a lot of 1-way inbound links from web design / development related sites. If you know what you're doing, you'll hit GOOD positions for those keywords within a half a year.
take one zone at a time , even in local market . one of the most common questions you will hear while approaching a web design client is wether you have experience designing sites of their kind of business. Do one site say for example of eg. a carpenter and then find out other big carpenters in your town from the yellow pages and show them the site you made for the first guy . If you get 3 carepenters sites in your portfolio take some money out of your kitty and create some pamphlet / CD showcasing your designs for the other carepenters and promote yourself as the next big thing in Carpenter websites and distribute them freely to all the carpenters . pls note : carpenters was just a example
My tip is to participate in some competitions over at namepros. You can just do a design when you have time, with no commitment and everyone can see your work, so you might get some people contacting you about doing bespoke work. I entered a comp came 2nd and won $20. Just an idea, not trying to plug namepros, just a tip from personal experience