New Orleans Internet Marketing

Conceptualization
I started Independent Layout & Website Design while in graduate school. I had a passion for designing websites, and I wanted to have my own business so that my hours could be flexible. My goal was not to create a large design firm and have to hire employees, but to market myself as a freelance designer and find jobs that were within my realm of knowledge and ability.

The first thing I did was come up with the name, logo and concept for my company. Mistake #1: If I had known that one of my most effective marketing tools would be search engine optimization (SEO), then I would have considered that as a very influential factor when deciding on the name for my company. I got lucky, because even though I didn’t know anything about SEO when I first started, the name I chose had “website design” as part of it, which would turn out to be a popular keyword phrase I would target in the search engines.

Creating My Site
The website I designed went through a few revisions, and I think that my website has always been one of the most important selling tools for my ability as a designer over the years. I haven’t worked on it in years because my business has changed so much, but when I was designing sites for other people, that was the first place they went to see the kind of work I did. I had a small portfolio of only a few sites I had completed, and I did a few more for small businesses at really great prices in order to build my portfolio up quickly.

One of the best things I did for my site was to make it search engine friendly, but I’ll talk about that later when I discuss SEO. The second best thing I did for my site was to make it a useful, interactive tool for my clients and visitors. I didn’t think it would make much of a difference when I first did it, but I added a form so that people could request quotes through the site. When I was marketing my site more, I had regular quote requests coming through the form, usually about one a week. I was amazed that this many people wouldn’t pick up the phone to call before I had the “quote request” form. The other interactive feature (both are really simple), was to put a way for clients to pay me through the site. Anything you can do to make it easier for people to pay you is a good idea. I made a simple Paypal form where clients can enter their name and the amount they’re paying. I also think it goes without mention that a designer’s portfolio is prominent and easy to navigate.

Marketing
My next challenge was to get my name out and be seen. Mistake #2: I experimented with “Yellow Page” advertising first (print and online), which turned out to be the worst investment out of the many I tried. The “Yellow Pages” may work great for some businesses, but not for “web design.” The prices they charged were astronomical (my dollars went much further when spent on the internet), and the few referrals I got were terrible. The most discouraging part of dealing with the company was the bureaucracy involved. The salesperson sold me with their “online Yellow Pages” ad. She was armed with enough statistical information to sell me on the opportunity and promised gazillions of pageviews and clicks per month, but when I looked at my referring site stats - it was nothing like she had described. I got almost no clickthroughs from this popular online yellow pages. Then when I went to cancel my ad…. that’s when things got tough. I had to go through many different channels, and none of the people I spoke to were able to help. Finally, one day I had all but given up, when I submitted a complaint about the ordeal through their website - and low and behold, someone took care of it. It was a great relief to not feel like I was being taken advantage of anymore!

I was starving for work, and I needed some quick jobs, so I printed business cards and flyers. I spent the extra money to get really high quality print work done, and I went through popular business areas of the city, handing out flyers and introducing myself to small business owners. This worked fairly well and I got some of my first web design clients like this.

Then I started looking at ways to market myself on the internet. If I was going to design websites for people I had better know something about internet marketing right? My first search engine marketing experience: I placed a pay per click ad on an obscure meta-search engine. I don’t even remember the name of it, but it was really neat seeing my ad show up whenever some typed in anything having to do with “website design.” Only problem was, I think I was the only person using the search engine :) Luckily, it was a very cheap ad. BTW it was of more value than the Yellow Page ad, and about 1/10 of the price.

I later used Google Adwords and Overture. Both are great tools, but when I first started search engine marketing (SEM), I didn’t have the knowledge that I do now, that can make SEM much more effective. One of the simple things I would do today if I was doing SEM for my design work, would be to create simple, purposeful landing pages for the pay per click ads. If I was trying to get “Design Quotes” from my pay per click campaigns, my landing page would have the quote request form right there on the page, with brief text about “why my company is the best to request a quote from,” very few outgoing links, and a few examples of work I’ve done (small screencaps that enlarge on mouseover - not taking the user away from the page).

Search Engine Optimization
Paying for clicks is ok, but when you can get unlimited traffic through natural search results, that’s even better. I not only wanted my site to show up in the search engines, I wanted my clients’ sites to have high rankings as well. So I started researching SEO. The fact is, there’s a ton of information out there on SEO, and if you work hard enough, do some “trial and error,” and read good sources, over time, you will eventually succeed. If you keep reading this blog, I will talk about many of the successful methods I’ve used to achieve great search engine rankings over the years.

I wanted to show up #1 for “New Orleans Website Design.” That was my goal. It wasn’t until later that I learned about “keyword suggestion tools” that would have shown me that “New Orleans Web Design” was a little more popular of a search, and that I would have done better targeting that instead. The initial results were amazing. I was #1 within a few months of starting SEO on my site.

SEO is a lot different today than it was 5 years ago. Although the basics are still the same (content, content, content), good rankings take more time, and search engines have devalued many of the methods we previously used that greatly enhanced our search engine rankings. One example is the link exchange. Doing a link exchange was one of the methods I used at the time to help my site’s search engine rankings, and it had a profound effect. Not only did my site show up at the top for “New Orleans Website Design” for many years, but it also was in the top 20 on Google for “website design” (by itself) for a few months. (And believe me, there’s a lot of websites out there targeting that phrase).

It’s really not a big deal to me anymore since I’m not designing websites for clients, but it’s still neat to see my old site rank well every now and then. At the time of writing this, it’s #1 in Yahoo! for “New Orleans Web Design” and “New Orleans Website Design.” I’ve been linking to another local company form the homepage for a while now who also targets that phrase, so I think that’s why it dropped out of Google for the time being.

The short of it is, for the purpose of marketing my company, search engine optimization was one of the most valuable tools available. Companies make very large investments in TV, radio, and print advertising, but it barely costs anything to get your website to rank well for popular search results on Google, Yahoo! and MSN. Best of all, good search engine rankings put you in the public eye 24/7, and put you in direct contact with the visitor.

Making Money
I had a contract I used, and I recommend always having new clients sign a contract. If someone refuses to sign a contract, let that be a warning sign. I found some web design contracts online and developed one to suit my needs. Ideally, a contract is something a lawyer should write, but anything is better than nothing at all. It basically just needs to state what you are going to do, what materials will be needed form the client, what will be paid up front, talks about ownership of the work, etc. Again, mine is very very old and I would rewrite the whole thing if I was still designing websites for a living, but you can see it by clicking here.

Get Paid for Your Work. Always require that clients pay half up front. I never had an issue with this. Clients were always willing to pay half up front for the jobs I did. Don’t charge too much, and don’t charge too little. If you don’t charge enough, people will think there is something wrong with the work you do; and if your prices aren’t competitive, they will probably hire someone else if they shop around. Base your prices on your experience, and don’t fall into the trap of quoting a price on something that you’re unsure of how long it will take to do. Research work you’re not familiar with thoroughly before quoting a price. If you consider your time valuable, your clients are more likely to as well. The best rule of thumb I used was to make sure I quoted prices that made the work “worth my while.”

Find a way to make money off of hosting. If you’re starting off small like I did, you obviously can’t afford your own web server. There are many companies around now that have special plans for web designers where you can host many accounts within one main account and manage billing for them through it as well. Shop around for the best deal.

This was my mistake #3: I didn’t manage the hosting for my clients. I thought that a selling point for my services would be that clients would save money on hosting by going directly through the hosting company. This was a big mistake for a couple of reasons. One reason this was bad is that clients will get bills from domain name services, hosting services, internet services, and they won’t always remember which are real services they buy, and which are fraudulent scams commonly sent through the mail. Then they don’t pay one, and their site goes down. Then guess who they call? You. And guess what you’re not getting paid for? To deal with their web hosting.

Another reason to manage their hosting is that you know what services the host provides and you have easy access to all of the accounts. If you have to install something on the server for one client, you can easily install it for another client without having to worry about the way different web servers deal with things. It’s more difficult to manage many websites on different hosts than it is to manage them on one. Charge a monthly fee for it, and try to require it for new clients if possible. You can even offer to manage their domain name for them, while leaving them as the registrant. Some domain hosting companies are better than others about security for you and your clients’ domain names.

Another way to make ongoing profit from each site you design is to do the marketing for the client’s website. When I was designing sites, link exchanges worked really well, and I was doing them for clients. My mistake #4: was not charging for the service, which was really ongoing and time consuming. After a while, I started ignoring the link exchange requests because they weren’t worth the trouble anymore. Other things I could have offered, that I didn’t at the time, were ongoing link development, search engine marketing (pay-per-click), and directory listings. I did offer some directory listings to my clients, but just for the more important directories, and again, I’m pretty sure that I didn’t charge them for the listings.

Results
My business evolved because of the knowledge I acquired in SEO and marketing along the way. I found ways to make money on the internet by designing my own proprietary niche websites, which has been much more rewarding to me these days. I did enjoy the work I did while I was designing websites for other people as well, and hopefully some freelance designers out there will be able to benefit from some of my success and failure mentioned above.