The basic idea here is we want to talk to 100 potential clients.

If we get 1-2 people interested (1-2%) we’ll pursue the niche.

We’re going to send all 100 a breakdown of their current website and how it can be improved and we’ll ask if they want to know more. And each email will be unique.

Let’s get going.

First we need a list of companies in our niche. Let’s use ChatGPT’s web search to generate this.

Head into GPT-4 and simply ask:

Research a list of 100 [niche type] in [location]

I put in “Research a list of 100 freight forwarding companies in the UK” and received this:

ChatGPT has found me useful lists that I can draw from.

You can now ask ChatGPT to go to the sites (do this one at a time) and get the websites for you.

I asked for the GoodFirm list from the example above and ChatGPT extracted the websites:

We now want email addresses from each of the websites.

Unfortunately ChatGPT won’t extract (“scrape”) this information but we can easily go to the sites and manually grab email addresses - we only need ~100.

If we were looking for contact details from thousands of companies we’d use a scraper like Octoparse or a service like Hunter.io.but for now manually collect the leads. Alternatively hire someone on Fiverr to do the task for you quickly and cheaply.

Once you’ve got a list of around ~100 websites and 100 emails we’re in business.

Make sure you have a nice speadsheet with all this information so you can keep track.

We’re now going to analyse each page and find potential improvements.

For each url feed it into ChatGPT and use this prompt:

[website url]

Review this website homepage and offer 3 specific improvements
-One on the copywriting 
-One on call to actions (clarity, focus on one, phrasing, frequency)
-One on SEO (identify the main keyword and assess how well optimised the page is)

Focus on real issues not generic suggestions

ChatGPT will run an analysis on the page and come up with suggestions for improvements.

Here’s an example output:

Copy and paste these into your spreadsheet for safe keeping.

Now we’re going to spin up an email. Use this prompt below the suggestions:

Based on these suggestions write a cold outreach email to the company offering web design services

Start with a greeting, using the company name

State that you help companies in this niche with their websites

Sensitively integrate these suggestions

Give reasons why these suggestions will help the company's bottom line

Finish with a CTA to reply to the email in order to learn more

Keep the whole email short and concise to respect their time

This prompt leads to a short respectful email:

Continue this process for all 100 prospects.

Will this take time? Absolutely. But it’s a very valuable process it allows you to gauge the market. Far better to spend time doing this now rather than instead waste time registering a company, setting up a flash website for ourselves, running adverts and finally realising the market isn’t interested!

Go ahead and send your generated emails out to all 100 prospects. There are ways to do this using sophisticated email CRM tools but that’s overkill at the moment. Just copy and paste the emails and messages from your spreadsheet and send out the emails. Never build systems for something that is unproven.

Premium Prompt - Visual inspection

An alternative or supplement to the above approach is to run a visual inspection.

Screen the entire front page of the target website. I personally use Awesome Screenshoot for this - it’s a free Chrome extension that will grab a whole website like this:

Upload the screenshot into ChatGPT and ask:

Visually inspect this homepage.
Review the structure, whitespacing, visual elements, copy, call to actions and other page elements.

Give me 5 specific improvement recommendations

ChatGPT will run a visual inspection that can capture more information that the text based inspection we used above alone:

Pulling it together

Go ahead and run the process of contacting 100 leads.

Consider this your MVP - minimum viability product. We’re seeing if there’s any appetite before we jump in and waste our time.

If you get 1-2 bites we’re good to go and ready to move to the next Part.

A reminder of what we’re covering this week :

Part 1: Web design niche

Part 2: Finding web design clients

Part 3: Building sites

Part 4: Packaging your services

Part 5: Scaling your web design agency