5 Ways to Create Recurring Revenue as a WordPress Web Designer | EP 471

5 Ways to Create Recurring Revenue as a WordPress Web Designer

1. WordPress Maintenance & Support. 01:15
2. Hosting.02:54
3. Facebook ad management. 03:27
4. Email marketing management. 04:36
5. Productizing. 05:47

Read the full episode transcript below:

00:25 David: Hey everybody, welcome to another episode of WP The Podcast, brought to you by WP gears. I’m David Blackman.

00:37 Tim: I’m Tim Strifler.

00:38 David: Today we’re going to talk about five ways to create recurring revenue as a WordPress web designer. Tim everybody likes more money right?

00:49 Tim: Yeah and everyone likes recurring money that you don’t have to go and resell a new client every month. You have it coming in every month. You can plan better. I don’t want to say it’s easy money, because you still have to work for and there’s still things that have to be managed and carried out, but it’s definitely better than having to go and sign a new client every single month. So yeah.

01:15 David: Absolutely, well here are the five ways, start off maintenance slash service agreements. Your WordPress websites need updates, they need backups, they need security taken care of and these are things that Tim and I really highly recommend that a professional handles for web clients. The great thing about WordPress is a lot of stuff clients can handle. There’s a lot of information out there. WordPress is user friendly, they can create their own content even create a new page, add it to their website pretty easily if they want to learn. However, there are a few things that we recommend that they let a professional handle and these are two of them, maintenance slash service agreements. If you don’t have that built into your recurring revenue, highly encourage you to do that. That’s in my opinion low hanging fruit, that is money that is just sitting there waiting to be had. I hate to say it. That sounds really bad but, it’s the truth.

02:21 Tim: Yeah absolutely. The next one here on the list, it really goes along with maintenance and service agreements and that’s hosting. A lot of times web designers will kind of bundle those services with their maintenance, and so it’s kind of like you get hosting, you get maintenance updates, all the things that David mentioned, backups. However, it can also be separated and so that can be a really easy low hanging fruit because a lot of small businesses they’re not technical, they’re focused on their business. They don’t want to have to go find a hosting company or do any of that. They want you to be their web guy, their web girl and so they want you to handle everything with their website and so offering hosting and charging for it is a great way to go.

03:08 Tim: So there’s lots of reseller hosting out there. Definitely I recommend checking out Flywheel. Flywheel has some white label will branding options for … and then you can generate reports and stuff, send it to your client, and so that can be a really easy way as a freelancer or a small agency to be able to sell hosting to your clients.

03:27 David: Absolutely. Next on our list is going to be Facebook ad management. So paid ads, why not? It’s something that is very helpful and useful to business now. That’s going to be something that you’re going to need to learn obviously. You’re going to need to become an expert so to speak to be able to do that for clients, but it’s a service that is definitely needed. It is a service that definitely works. So Facebook ad management. I’m going to give a shameless plug here, we actually have a Facebook ads course coming out on wpgears.com within the next couple of months, be on the lookout for it. Tim and I’ve been building it, we’re working with a couple of awesome partners Peter and Jordan, and they are Facebook ad experts. We’ve got a really great course that’s going to show you how to handle that for clients and stuff. If you’re a web designer this is a great way to make a recurring revenue stream.

04:29 Tim: Yeah, just because you build a website for your client doesn’t mean they’re going to get traffic, and so being able to up sell essentially what you’re selling is traffic to them, targeted highly qualified traffic. I mean it doesn’t get any better than that.

04:36 Tim: The next thing on the list here is email marketing management. It’s no secret David and I are huge fans of email marketing. We’ve stated publicly that it is by far our greatest revenue generation for our product businesses, being able to send emails and instantly see results, whether those are sales promotions, new products or just value freebies content that sort of thing. Email marketing is awesome, it’s definitely something that you can up sell to your clients as a web designer to create the strategy, get them set up and then manage it for them and do the email blasts. That’s a great service that you can get recurring revenue from similar to the Facebook ad management. And again shameless plug, we will be creating an email marketing course in the near future in the next few months. Again it’s something that Dave and I are passionate about that we think every business can greatly benefit from when you build a list and you use the list, nurture the list. So be on the lookout for that.

05:47 David: Last but not least is productizing. I was first introduced to this concept when I first got into WordPress. I remember reading a blog post about productizing, and this particular person had mentioned productizing actual Web Design, where he would basically build a website in a day. He wanted to turn it into a product to where he offered it to clients and stuff as opposed to doing custom web design for every unique client that came through the door. I just thought it was a genius idea, and Tim and I have since productize since we’ve gotten into WordPress.

06:27 David: Obviously we do plugins and themes for WordPress, and more in particular the Divi theme for WordPress. We’re pretty big product creators in that community. So we know firsthand there’s nothing quite like waking up in the morning with money in the bank already because people have purchased your products and stuff. Like Tim said, it doesn’t mean that there’s no work, there’s a lot of work that goes into it. If you’re going to productize, you’ve got to support those products, you’ve got to update those products, you’ve got to keep innovating. There’s a lot of things that go into it, but the payoff can be really really good in the long run, if you’re willing to forbear and kind of walk through that path and stuff.

07:12 Tim: Yeah. I’ll describe what I do and people are like, “Oh that’s really cool, you have passive income.” No, there’s nothing passive about it. It’s very much like David mentioned, you have to manage it, you have to do the technical support and do the marketing and all that. We love it, but it’s a lot of hard work. It doesn’t feel like work sometimes because we are passionate about it and it is really fun and rewarding, but it is definitely hard work as is any of the things on here and really anything in life worth doing is gonna be hard work.

07:45 David: Tomorrow we’ve got another great topic five WordPress companies you should be following in 2019. Tim until tomorrow we’ll see you then.

07:56 Tim: Take care. Bye bye.