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

Let’s look at where the real revenue kicks in with bolt-ons.

Whilst the upfront design fees and hosting subscriptions are solid revenue drivers the real profits for a web design agency come from the high priced bolt-on services.

SEO (Search Engine Optimiation) is a great example here. It’s a method for making sure a website shows up on Google for the correct searches.

Often you can charge $1000+/month retainers for SEO services to provide keyword research, on-page optimization, content creation, link building, site speed optimizations, reporting etc.

The name of the game now is to focus on converting a % of your web design clients to services like this - high value, high priced bolt ons.

Here’s a prompt to generate potential bolt-on services:

Act as a web agency strategist

Generate a list of bolt-on services I can upsell web design and hosting clints onto 

The industry niche is [niche]. Align services to the niche.

For each provide:
-suggested pricing, based on market rates
-brief list of service features
-brief list of how to deliver, daily, weekly, month work.

This generated a list of 7 ideas specific to the “freight forwarding” industry I specified for the example. Here are two examples:

How are these bolt-ons delivered?

If you want to keep all of the profit you can provide the services yourself internally by hiring an in-house SEO expert. This can be a full time employee or outsourced contractors depending on scale.

Here’s a prompt:

Act as a web design agency owner

We are launching [name of bolt on service]
[Copy/paste details of bolt on service from previous prompt]

Draft an Upwork RFQ 

Include hours required to provide this service to [estimated sales] clients

This will generate a basic RFQ (Request for Quotes) for you to use on Upwork.

Make sure that the numbers make sense here.

This suggests 225 hours of work per month for 5 clients. Assuming $1000/month per client that’s $5000 revenue.

We’d need to make sure that the freelancer/employee can be hired for less than this for the hours required. Adjust the price, hours of work and hourly rate to make sure that the hiring makes sense.

You could also partner with service agencies and split revenues. They take on all the work and you just collect a cheque for each client you sell into their services.

For this search for “whitelabel” services - for example “whitelabel SEO” and you’ll find lots of options.

By launching and stacking up these bolt-on offers you can rapidly accelerate the income from your agency far beyond the initial service offering of web design.

Premium Prompt - Outsourcing

If you are doing the work yourself or bringing in a team member here’s a useful prompt to create SOPs for the work required:

Generate a detailed checklist of daily, weekly and monthly activities in tabular format

For each provide:
substeps
tool suggestions
time to complete
learning resource 

Include admin/operation activities

Use this under the package description generated above. For the example I used the content marketing package. Here’s an example of one of the tables:

The prompt will give you the task type, some substeps, tool suggestions and the hours required.

I’ve also included a learning suggestion column - ask ChatGPT for more details on these to get full guides, allowing you to build up a learning repository for yourself or staff members.

Use these sort of SOP checklists to build out the new bolt-on services for your business. Just keep stacking them upon each other as you scale.

I recommend using Notion as a central repository of these SOPs so it becomes the central operating system of your business.

Pulling it together

This week we covered the overview of how to build out a web design agency using AI tools.

A reminder of what we covered 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