5 Streams of Recurring Revenue You Can Add to Your Web Design Business | EP 702

5 Streams of Recurring Revenue You Can Add to Your Web Design Business

1. Maintenance Plans  00:41
2. Hosting  02:30
3. Content Marketing 03:42
4. Email Marketing 05:22
5. Social (organic and paid) 06:03
6. Bonus: Reputation Management – helping clients get reviews 07:00

Read the full episode transcript below:

00:28 David Blackmon: Hey everybody. Welcome to another episode of wp the podcast i’m David Blackmon

00:29 Tim Strifler: And I’m Tim Strifler.

00:30 David Blackmon: Today we’re going to talk about five streams of recurring revenue you can add to your web design business. Now these are things that you’re probably already doing for yourself, if not for a few customers why not give it as an option to have that revenue coming in over and over and over again. On a monthly or annual basis one of the things that i disliked about being in client services building websites when i started my WordPress journey was the never-ending cycle of having to make the next sale, having to get the net close the next client, in order for money to come in. So i wanted to set something up to where i could have recurring revenue so i didn’t have to do that and that’s the first thing that I did, and i’ll start us off Tim is maintenance plans. My goal was by year five of being in my WordPress web design business was to have a hundred clients paying me x number of dollars a year on a recurring basis,  so that i could start the year off with a pretty substantial income without actually having to close a single client So and in my case i charged way back then fifteen hundred dollars a year to do updates and and um you know backups and security for those clients which really was an easy thing for me to do because i could automate everything unless the website got hacked, and then i’d have to do some work and there were a few of those that happened and stuff. So maintenance plans is a probably the best place that you can do it because your clients aren’t technical people and they don’t want to mess with it. So maintenance plans number one what’s number two, Tim?

02:39 Tim Strifler: Yeah this one goes hand in hand with maintenance plans, and that’s hosting. Uh a lot of times it’s going to be they’re paying you for both hosting and maintenance um but not always they can be separate. I think most web designers that i know that, do maintenance plans. They won’t maintain someone’s site for them unless they’re hosted with them because they don’t know what kind of hosting they’re going to get and how likely it is to get hacked and those types of things. Um but yeah so that’s that’s a super common and super easy way because most of the time your client, they’re a small business owner yeah right they don’t know anything about hosting, they don’t want to mess with that. They are trusting you to build their site and they also want you to maintain and host it for them. So that they don’t have to think about it, and they don’t have to learn what the hosting companies are, and you know, what type of hosting they need, that sort of thing. And so for a lot of clients it’s just easier to trust you the web designer to just handle it all for them it’s good and it’s great recurring revenue.

03:42 David Blackmon: Absolutely. Number three is content marketing. You know a lot of this these next four things can be grouped into a category that some businesses have built an entire business around, and it’s called inbound marketing. And content marketing is one of the things that you can break out and individualize without having to manage all of the stuff. If you’re a small company but you can help them content is so important for websites to get found even in 2022. It’s still hugely important it’s going to be probably the best investment that a company can make, is to create valuable relevant content put it on their website, so that Google sees them as an authority in whatever their niche business is. Well you can offer that as a service a recurring service to clients where you do the keyword research you find out exactly what targeted you know keywords can be can be targeted in their industry, and put together a content calendar and even go so far if you want to up the volume. If they, you know do that alone in and of itself because they’re not they don’t know how to go research keyword, you know phrases and find out what the search volume is, and whether it would be valuable to them or not, and put a plan together as far as how to attack that you can do that. You can even hire you know writers to create that content as well, and we’ve done all of that for clients and stuff and it works really well. And it’s great recurring revenue.

05:20 Tim Strifler: Yeah absolutely. The next one uh on the list is email marketing. And uh we’ve talked a little bit about email marketing the last few episodes, and uh we’re gonna be talking more about it. Something that David and i are passionate about, but um managing that for a client can be a great recurring revenue stream. Because again it’s something that they don’t know it’s not in their wheelhouse and it’s not that hard. Doesn’t take a whole lot of of strategy, and and planning to manage it for them and as David mentioned, you can have you can hire people outsource that to do that. Uh that uh service for them so email marketing is awesome.

06:03 David Blackmon: The next one is, should be the obvious one you know, managing their social platforms social media marketing and stuff . Both organic and paid, and when we say organic we’re talking about not like running ads on social, but like posting regularly managing their social platforms putting together a content calendar for the social media platforms as well. Whichever one is best for that company and stuff but it also includes the paid, which you know, what there’s a lot of experience and know-how that needs to go into that marketing, how to create audiences, how to how to figure out what’s working what’s not working. And there’s whole businesses built around just paid ad marketing as well both on social and google as well. So that’s that’s also another way that you can create some recurring revenue for your company.

07:00  Tim Strifler:

Yeah, and so uh the last couple that we few that we’ve talked about content marketing, email marketing and social as David mentioned you, kind of have to to learn. You need to know how to do it right. You can’t just start selling it to a client if you don’t have any knowledge about it,  however we have one more one bonus tip uh number six on our list here, which is something that is very easy to implement and doesn’t take a lot of uh knowledge. And that’s reputation management helping your clients get reviews and i got to give credit to Eric Dingler, uh he’s a friend of mine in David’s um he’s a panelist with me over on Divi Chat, and this is something that he started doing. And uh i don’t remember the name of the platform i wish i could share it here but he uses a a platform that that does the bulk of the work for him, and he sells it as an add-on service to clients to help them get reviews. And it it basically is a system that um after they become a you know customer of the client they get automatically gets sent this email. That’s uh strategically written to help them uh get uh want to write a review and blah blah. And so it’s a really great easy way to get recurring revenue, but it’s also something that adds a ton of value to clients, because a lot of times clients don’t understand the value of reviews or testimonials and stuff. And so this is something that like like boom on their website like that’s going to make an immediate impact for them as well as help them with SEO and stuff too so..

08:38 David Blackmon: Yeah that’s that’s absolutely fantastic. So tomorrow we’ve got another great topic, how to distribute your podcasts once you’ve recorded it? How do i get it to all the different places that there are podcasts to go to we’re going to kind of cover and talk about that a little bit tomorrow, Tim and i have obviously been podcasting for a minute so, episode 703. Tim until tomorrow we’ll see you then.

09:07  Tim Strifler: Take care bye-bye