Web Design Clients Galore Guide

“Most of the marketing stuff out there is meant for corporations which makes it hard to implement for small business web designers. Kenn’s guide, Web Design Clients Galore, is very personable and easy to read with the nuts and bolts of building for succeeding in your practice.

One key point in his book that I love is the advice on specialization. Designers have got to realize that you can’t be everything to everything to everyone and the sooner you focus, the sooner you’ll be successful.“

Ilise Benum
Author of The Designer’s Guide
to Marketing and Pricing.
Marketing Mentor

“It’s a competitive world out there especially for new, excited web designers. We are not natural born sales people either. Your advice is practical, easy to absorb, and makes good sense.

I especially like how it helps you see things from the client’s perspective. It’s perfect for getting web designers up to speed on how to position themselves for getting clients.”

Donald Sparkman
Graphic Designer &  Author of 
How to Sell Graphic and Web Design

Great book! Easy reading. The best part is the step-by-step way it deals with the critical arena many of us can use help with – selling our services. This book is going to help a lot of web designers.

Jim Smith
Web Designer & Author of
How to Start a Home-Based Web Design Business

Extremely practical. Kenn gives enough examples, scripts, templates, and formulas so you can implement what he teaches. Web Design Clients Galore is an excellent primer for any freelancer … he teaches you how to set a solid foundation for marketing your freelance services, so you can have a profitable career.

~ Lexi Rodrigo
TheSavvyFreelancer.com

Fun, easy, and very informative with mind-changing insights (packaging is one of my favorites) on how to earn more as a web designer.

~ Holly Chantal
Web Designer & Book-Yourself-Solid Coach

At first I thought this book was going to be another discourse on social media and why it’s so important to have a presence on Facebook or Twitter.

It wasn’t. I was pleased to find Kenn’s book was about something bigger: how to attract and retain clients that you will enjoy working with, and that will be happy to pay for your services.

Many of the ideas presented in Kenn’s book took me years to figure out. Had this book been around when I started my business 10 years ago I could have saved myself  going down some fruitless paths and had a more clear focus from the get-go.

Kenn’s book is an easy and enjoyable read.  I didn’t really think a non-fiction book could be a page-turner until now.

Kenn’s book is a timeless guide for helping new web designers build a solid foundation to grow from and an existing designer to check in with how they are doing business, and find ways to do it better.

Thanks for writing this Kenn.

It’s well written and full of good information. It’s also beautifully laid out.  You have done an excellent job and you have created a very good info product.

Mark Frank
Web Designer & Author of
Start Your Own Home-Based Web Design Business

How I got three new clients in one week while visiting Paris.

And that’s not all. I was even more blown away because those three clients were acquired in three 1-hour phone calls with no contract writing, and amounted to 11k in revenue.

I would brag except that I didn’t do anything worth bragging about. After the excitement, I reflected, and it became very clear how it all happened. It wasn’t rocket science, magic, or luck.

Here’s the crux of what I did to get more clients fast.

All I did was approached my business from the client’s point of view. I created services that were based on client’s needs.

• I spoke about what I did in terms they wanted.
• I stopped talking about web design, HTML, graphics, etc.
• I figured out what keywords to focus my SEO on.

With an easier way to get new projects, I now enjoy:

• Feeling secure that there’s income coming in the future
• More time from less proposal and contract writing
• Less annoying administrative, accounting, and invoicing tasks
• Decreasing my marketing work to a few hours per month
• Getting all my clients from the Web. No in-person meetings

Three reasons you are struggling to get all the clients and design projects you want:

1. Finding clients is a skill you weren’t taught.

Unlike tying your shoes or learning to swim, there was no teacher waiting to show you how to find clients. As a result, finding clients is like swimming, jumping for the first-time into a lake – people flail their arms trying to make it ashore and when they do, they are exhausted. Who wants to do that over and over?

2. You have been fed bad information.

Well-intentioned family and friends love to give advice, but they don’t really know your business. The Internet is loaded with info on getting web design work,  but much of is just bad or out of context.

As a result you get led astray and you get frustrated. It makes succeeding seem like some huge secret that no one ever told you. 

3. You have success stoppers.

You may have bad habits or defeating beliefs that are keeping you stuck. They operate on a subconscious level and they cause you to repeat bad behaviors over and over again.

Unless you shed some light on these behaviors, they’ll keep you stuck. They’ll keep you thinking that you’re not good enough which in itself also buries you deeper into the failure pit. 

It’s not a secret nor rocket science. What should you do?

Take the time to learn the skill of finding clients

It isn’t rocket science, though at times it might seem like a mysterious power that some people are blessed with. It’s definitely a learnable skill.

Get a teacher, get resources, get books – but from sources that are related to your  kind of business. Ask questions, try new things, and be willing to make some mistakes while learning. Get help from supportive people who will be there when things get rough.

12 things you’ll learn.

In the guide you will discover …

1. How to turn more curious prospects into paid contracts
2. Keys to getting paid much more per project
3. How to get prospects excited and practically sold before they talk to you
4. Techniques for signing up clients fast – in one phone call
5. The one thing your website needs that will compel prospects to visit
6. My secret for getting paid in full at the start of a project
7. How to weed out the bottom-feeding, micro-managing clients beasts
   and instead attract the fun, easy-to-work-with clients
8. How to get more visitors to email or call you from your website
9. How to create a constant stream of clients instead of feast or famine
10. How to position yourself so that clients are coming to you instead of you hunting for them
11. Ways to increase your income without adding more work
12. What to say to new prospects to get you hired

It’s not a guide for:

• Accounting and taxes
• Time tracking and invoicing
• Legal advice or setting up a corporation
• Learning CSS / Photoshop / CMS / programming

It’s a guide for getting lots of clients because without them,
you’ve got no business!

If more clients, projects and income is what you need most now and you want to be a highly-paid professional then this guide is a must-have.

Four benefits I enjoy:

Benefit 1: You stop “hunting” for clients and,
instead, they hunt for you!

How does it feel when you have to “go out there” and “sell yourself?” Do you feel needy? Awkward? Does it seem like you have to do a lot of work to convince someone to become your client? That’s what I felt and it sucked.

Now that I do things differently, clients are coming to me and it’s AWESOME! I feel respected, wanted, and excited to give them my best. That’s how work should be.

Benefit 2: You can charge higher fees.

How so?

The main reason you can charge higher fees is that you’ll be seen, from the client’s perspective, as extremely valuable. And the higher your value, the more money clients are willing to pay for it.

More money helps

It helps pay the bills. It helps you take vacations. It helps you work a little less. It enables you to afford the lifestyle you want. It gets rid of money worries.

What would $1,000 more each month do for you?

Maybe pay off some debt that’s been giving you grey hair? Disappear for a weekend to get a much needed sun-and-beach break? Get a new laptop? Maybe even taking a weekend off and do nothing because you’ve got money to cover your expenses?

Benefit 3: You get the “good” clients.

Good clients totally rock.

The good clients are the ones who trust you, give you space to work, pay you on time, and are fun to be around. They know quality when they see it and they want a good web designer to work with.

You can avoid the blood-thirsty bottom-feeders.

You can easily say NO to the bottom-feeder problematic clients. These are the ones who often nickel and dime you. They are never happy, and as a result your energy is just drained. Unsustainable.

You get more freedom and fun in your work.

The good clients don’t micro-manage, so you get the creative room to do your best. You can relax and enjoy web designing knowing your client appreciates you. It’s sooo nice.

Benefit 4: A flexible lifestyle.

Rich, in my book, means doing fun things (not having load of cash).

Isn’t our ultimate happiness based on how much we enjoy living? If so, then our time and how we spend it is what’s important. Time-rich possibilities:

• A mom who wants to spend more time at home 
  You’d like to be with your kids and work when they’re in school or in bed. You work from home instead of saving travel time and being within arm’s reach of your family.
• A world adventurer working on the road 
  Maybe you’d like work on planes and trains while you check out insanely amazing ice formations in Patagonia (my style).
• A 9-to-5 escapee seeking more control over her life 
  Maybe you’d like to do some site-building late night, while commuting, or on weekends to free yourself from corporate America.

WHERE would you do your work?

That corner office at home? On the back porch? Local artsy coffee shop? With other interesting locals in a co-work office? Atop a mountain?

WHAT would you work on?

When you’ve got people banging down your door to work with you and all the income you need, it’s MUCH EASIER to choose the work you want as well as outsource work you would rather not do.

When I started getting more clients I went abroad.

I took several-months stays in France, Mexico, and Argentina because I love seeing new people, places and things. I simply took my laptop, worked in coffee shops, and checked out the cities during non-work hours. Fun!!!

More benefits:

• You know where to go to find new clients when needed.
• You know you’ve got income coming in the future.
• You feel confident when it comes to selling.
• You don’t have to chase payments as much.
• You drastically reduced proposals writing.
• You spend less time stressful marketing efforts.

Five things most web designer loathe. Are you struggling with these?

1 – After talking for hours and writing up a beautiful proposal, they say “no” (or they spontaneously disappear).

It’s disappointing to get a NO when you’ve spent hours with the prospect giving them great ideas, answering their questions, and writing a unique proposal especially for them. What a (insert choice French word here) waste!

One day I did the math, and it gets ugly. Let’s say I spent four hours with a prospect. One hour for the initial meeting. Two hours for writing a proposal. And, a final hour going over the proposal with them. I’m assuming no proposal revisions which I do remember doing quite a bit of.

Let’s say I needed three clients per month to satisfy my income needs. Then, I would need to spend 12 hours per month for three clients. And that’s only for the ones that say YES. More often, I would get a NO.

So, let’s say I signed one in three prospects. Then I would need to talk to a total of 9 prospects during a month. That would mean I would spend 36 (9 x 4) hours selling! This doesn’t count the time I had to spend networking or scourging the net for prospects! Which would easily add up to over 40 hours per week just selling. Imagine working 8 hours a day for one week just selling.

Sigh.

* The more ideal situation, which I help you achieve in my guide, is to spend a lot less time trying to “sell them” and instead feel very confident that a high percentage of new prospects will hire you on the spot in as short as a single 1-hour phone call.

2 – Getting paid a low hourly rate and resenting the work.

I never liked talking about fees. I didn’t know what to charge. I didn’t know how to explain my fees. Even worse was lowering my fees to get the client to say yes – which caused me to resent the work.

* In my guide, I help you get paid more, virtually eliminate invoicing, and even get paid in full up front. You’ll know how to quote your fees easily and confidently too.

3 – Wasting hours on job boards like Craigslist or Elance.

I spent a lot of time on these job boards trolling for work (I felt like a troll!).

They were complicated to use back in the day (early 2000′s) and setting up your profile took work. I remember countless hours searching for projects, bidding, and following up with very little success.

In my experience, the job-board method doesn’t work because you get lumped in a pool of desperate-for-work, low-bidding web designers. It seems like a small handful of web designers made any money on those sites. I do NOT recommend this method.

* The better way to go is to apply the techniques in my guide to get clients coming to you; clients who respect you and pay you well.

4 – Not knowing where to go to find clients.

Not knowing where or how to get more clients if you need them can be stressful. Do you scour the Web? Go to some in-person meetings? Start calling companies cold? When bills are coming and work isn’t around, that worry feeling can really gnaw you away.

I did a lot of different things including: networking events, leads groups, cold calling, warm calling, walking into stores, Craigslist, partnering with graphic designers, Google ads, SEO, and probably a few others. Most of it was a waste – until I figured things out.

* In my guide, I will show you exactly where to go to get clients. And, better, you won’t have to spend hours getting them, you’ll know what to do, how to do it, and confidently know more are going to come.

5 – When you talk about what you do, you get crickets.

When I talked with people about what I do, I was constantly reminded about how many people are doing what I’m doing and that what I was doing wasn’t anything special. “Oh, that’s nice, my pet Chihuahua is a web designer too.”

I hated being lumped into a pool of “web designers” which ranged from a 9-year-old son who pirated Photoshop, to grandma who set up a Blogger page, to criminal high school drop-outs forced into trade school to stay out of trouble (tuition paid too). I felt there was very little respect for what I was going to do – become an awesome web design guru that everyone wanted to hire!

The problem was partly feeling a little low, but more so in getting no interest in what I was doing from potential clients. It was hard to get people to “want” to learn about what I do and to hire me. The better way is to be able to describe your work so that everyone’s ears perk up.

Now, I and other web designer who have figured out some things know what to say to complete strangers to get them to perk up and want to know more. These strangers were also immediately able to refer some clients to me.

*In my guide, I give you various tools (including the Dying-to-Meet-You formula) to turn heads and get people eager to talk to you.

More extra work that web designers with plenty of clients don’t waste their time doing: They don’t waste time driving to prospects.

• They don’t waste time writing lots of high-detailed proposals.
• They don’t waste time sending invoices.
• They don’t get flaked-out phone calls with prospects.
• They don’t get overwhelmed with scope creep.

A question that’s going to hurt:

What would things be like in six months from now if you continued down the path you’re on?

• Would your situation get worse?
• Will your struggle continue?
• Will debt build up?
• Will you still be stressed and in dire need of a vacation?
• Will you have to go and find a job?

If you’re not doing anything now to change things, things won’t change. Why not take a stand right now and do something about it? Why not take the pain out of what you’re doing now and put that energy into a new course of action that will help you get more income, more clients, more comfort, peace, and ease in your business?

My advice is get this guide now, apply it, skip burnout, and move right into success. I want you to have plenty of clients so you can get work, get paid, and enjoy web designing. There’s no need to be stuck unhappy.

Who this guide is NOT for:

• Freelancers who want a few big corporate clients. It’s not about cutting through corporate red tape, networking your way into companies, or writing big contracts. It’s for smaller web design teams or individual freelancers.
• Those who want to build a big web design firm. If you want to create a big web design company with tens to hundreds of employees in a large office building, this guide isn’t for you. It’s for the traveling, or work-at-home freelancer or small outfit that wants lots of clients.
• People who want to make a lot of money fast without much work. It’s not an internet get-rich quick scheme or an overnight-millions kind of guide. However, if you enjoy website building, want to run your own successful business, and get paid well, this guide can certainly help.

Two things I wish I did when I first started freelancing:

1. Learn from those who have gone before

I wish I had a successful web designer to mentor me. I was stubborn. I was too smart and too cool to ask for help. I had to figure it out on my own. I’d say I was dumb, but I’m sure I did the best with what I knew – then. Now, I’ve learned to find and learn from those who have gone before.

* When you implement the ideas in the guide you get the best of what I’ve learned over the past 10 years. Please use it.

2. Focus more time on learning to get clients and less time on learning new technology

I love technology. I learned how to integrate Flash with a database, hand-code an entire e-commerce website, and to doctor photos to make people gorgeous. I learned usability, accessibility, and search engine optimization. All that learning was fun, but, it didn’t help me get more clients.

* Start getting better at getting clients or there won’t be anyone to build for! Go buy my guide: buy it now.

Four reasons NOT to buy this guide:

1. You’re afraid you’re going to do nothing.
   If you’re 100% sure that you’re going to be lazy, then save yourself the money and don’t buy this guide now. BUT, if it’s time to change things in your business, get the guide.
2. You don’t know me.
   Yes, just like you, I like to buy from people I know and trust. You will get to know more about me in time. For now, get the guide, and start changing your business. I offer a double-money back guarantee.
3. You are wondering if you already know this information?
   If you don’t have clients coming to you consistently and paying you top dollar for your help, then you either don’t know the information or are not putting it to good use. Buy this guide and start taking the right steps now.
4. Is this guide too good to be true?
   This guide won’t change your business over night. It will take you some time and work to implement. Are the rewards of high income, easy client acquisition, and plenty of projects worth it? Absolutely! Buy now.