In the last Parts we decided our niche, got some prospects on the hook and mocked up basic sites for the leads.

Now we’ll offer packages and close our clients to start recurring revenue.

There are three primary ways to generate income from a web design agency:

1. Upfront design fee
2.
Ongoing subscriptions
3.
Bolt on services

My recommendation is to weight towards ongoing subscriptions and bolt-on services.

Upfront is fine for quick cash but puts you more in the freelancer category. We instead want to build a business.

Let’s look at the maths. Say you charge $500 as an upfront fee for web design work.

If that’s your model and you want revenues of $100k/annum you need to sell 200 clients over the year. That’s 16 clients a month or 4 a week.

This is certainly doable but means you are always on the chase for new clients - this requires constant time and energy.

If you focus on subscriptions the model is different. If a page is $30/month for the client you will start with low MRR (monthly recurring revenue) but it’ll start to stack.

At 10 client you’ll have $300/month recurring revenue ($3600 per annum).

At 50 clients it’s $1500/month ($18,000 per annum).

At the same 200 clients as the fixed price model it’s $72,000/year, less than the fixed price model but it’s recurring. You’ll make that $72,000/year without having to chase new clients (leaving aside churn for now).

Have another year with 200 clients and you’ll be at 400 total for $144,000/annum recurring etc., 600 clients for $216,000 etc. etc.

Finally you can sell bolt-ons.

For instance providing an SEO (search engine optimisation) package for $500/month or a social media marketing package for $1000/month. This is where the big monthly subscriptions come into play and where you should be focusing.

You can either provide these bolt on services yourself, outsource the work or work with a partner who does everything and you split revenue.

Bolt-ons will be a part of any good web design agency and I’ll talk about this more in the next Part.

Your main choice is how you want to balance:

• Upfront design fees

• Ongoing subscriptions

Use this prompt:

Act as a business pricing strategies

Generate a pricing plan for my web design agency

The websites are for companies in the [niche] industry

It will be a mix of upfront design fees
and Ongoing subscriptions

A weight of 0 will be all upfront, at-cost subscription
A weight of 10 will be all subscription, zero upfront

The subscription costs my web design agency $10/month to service

Based on my industry web and design standard pricing

Produce pricing plans for 0, 3, 6, 10 weights.

Make sure to enter your particular niche industry as this will adjust pricing - for instance a package for a hairdressing customer will be lower than a package for a law firm.

Here’s a basic output:

Use this as a guide to decide the sort of pricing scheme you’d like to go for.

Base this in reality by checking out other web design agencies in your niche.

For your first few clients you’ll be doing this work at a discount - this is until you can build your portfolio and gather up reviews and testimonials.

However, use these prices as your baseline and give % discounts to initial clients - they’ll know that these are the real prices and that they are getting a deep discount.

Premium Prompt - SOP

The above prompt will give basic packages and pricing.

Chose the basic balance of upfront and subscription that works for you.

Let’s go a step further though with this prompt:

I like option [enter option number]

Provide a basic and premium version 

For each provide a feature list for a sales page

And a daily, weekly, monthly SOP for my team

This will generate variant packages as well as standard operating procedures for both levels:

Adjust these to match:

• the features provided by your AI web builder of choice

• what ongoing services you are happy to add / outsource

We’ll discuss add on services more in the next Part.

Pulling it together

In the next Part we’ll look at scaling up and adding real revenue using bolt-on services.

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