Special Edition: Recent Episodes
The Admin Bar
3 weeks? 3 months? 3 years? (Yeah, I just finished a 1,000+ day project)
No matter how long it takes, most of that time is spent waiting...
...on content
...on revisions
...on approvals
...on payments
How much actually design & development time is really needed for your average brochure site? If you had everything you needed, I bet you could do it in a day.
And that's exactly what my buddy Hans was doing just before he sold his agency (and started Termageddon).
His same-day website program was not only a hit with his clients, but at $2,900 each, the amount of time his team saved made it more profitable than the big, drawn out projects.
By reducing projects to a single day of design and development:
- Clients had a clear understanding that ‘today is the day’ to put in all their requests because they understood (and respected) the process.
- After a hard days work, you’re done! You can go home, feeling accomplished and not having to stress about a deadline.
- 4 same day dev’s per month equals about $12,000/month in revenue (not to mention maintenance revenue).
- Great way to get a project done and right into an ongoing maintenance plan.
But how to you get everything in place and ready for build day?
How do you execute a one-day build?
How many hours does it include?
What about things (like SEO) that take more time?
What happens if it doesn't get done before the day's end?
And how do you sell clients on this concept?
Those questions and more are being answered in this live event!
Below is a overview Hans prepared to help you plan your Same-Day Website builds!
- Get projects done in one day (no sleepless nights stressing about upcoming deadlines). It feels good to start and finish a project without it dragging on.
- Clients understand they have 8 hours until site launch. “Today is the day we launch your website”. Customers have a much better understanding of prioritizing.
- Great pay - average at $150-$200/hr easy.
- Get to maintenance revenues faster. One day turnaround on projects means lots of conversions to maintenance plans.
-
Instantaneous feedback - When a client is a part of the design feedback process where they provide instant feedback, they feel a better sense of ownership of the design process. As little adjustments get made, they respond instantly with their thoughts, moving things along quickly.
-
Not a good fit for all businesses. This is a niche offering.
- Requires hands on communication for 8 nonstop hours.
- Exhausted after a hard day’s work
- Can’t build advanced stuff; could get boring/repetitive.
- Could potentially cannibalize your higher priced packages.
- Lack of vetting can get you into trouble. Make sure the customer knows exactly what they’re getting (and exactly what they are not getting).
- As you grow, you can get ‘bogged down’ with more and more maintenance clients. Have a strategy in place for ongoing support (GoWP.com, etc).
What was included in a Same-Day Website:
The client would get 8 hours one-on-one time and could choose any of the following:
- 5-7 page website with features such as:
- Contact form
- Newsletter signup
- Google analytics
- Google maps
- Yoast SEO integration and basic page optimization
- Other (stuff they could have done prior to the meeting):
- Google my business setup
- PDF guide on how to manage google my biz from smartphone
- Content creation
- Image license identification
- Logo creation
- Google my business setup
We encouraged clients to provide Google Docs with copy for each service they provide, even if it is just scratch notes for each page.
Flow Overview
Marketing - how to drive leads to your One-Day Website service
Offering same day websites is a potent idea. People respond very well to it. They remember it. You just need to get it out there and get some experience under your belt. Below are some ways you can do this.
Think to yourself ‘what businesses/industries need time sensitive, fast-turnover type websites’?
- Event planning service providers - Organizers of events often want a website to showcase their event and possibly take sales through a third party payment link.
- Digital marketing agencies - Offer same day websites for landing page/conversion websites as well as supportive websites for landing pages.
- Media purchasing companies (like billboard companies) - Oftentimes, companies run campaigns branded a specific way and need a dedicated website for it.
- PR companies - For example, PR companies that help companies with reputation management. If something occurs where a company gets some kind of bad press, these firms jump in and move quickly to provide their side of the story. They may want websites that communicate this information, and they may need a quick turnover.
The majority of my Same-Day Website clients spanned a lot of industries and different needs/goals for their websites. What you need to know is how to ask the right questions to see if they’re a good fit for a same-day-website type service.
Create a self standing website discussing your same-day-website services. Build it in a single day to demonstrate your capabilities! Start ranking for ‘fast websites ___(city)___’.
Build some same day websites for non-profit organizations in the hopes it gives you exposure, and gives you the ability to learn what works and doesn’t work. Do it 7 times a year, which accounts for about 3% of your entire amount of days you can be billing for. Consider it an investment into marketing (it can drive leads to you.. hopefully).
If you go ‘all in’ on same day websites, partner up with an agency that doesn’t do same day websites, and throw business both ways. You’ll want to make sure to partner with web agencies that charge MINIMUM $5k for a website, thus no overlap.
- Reaching out to agencies to form these types of partnerships is done countless times each and every day, but offering same day websites is a relatively new concept and may get your
Have Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) in place
For this offering to work, you need to have your processes in place and you must know them in and out. The date of development is intense; don’t let disorganization get in your way. That’ll be bad for you and your client whose paying you $3k to be on your A-Game.
I would recommend creating a list of questions/tasks for each of the four stages below.
Sales - how to close the deal and what to ask to verify they’re a good fit.
What are the clients needs?
Do they have requirements that make it not a good fit for Same-Day Websites?
Some questions you may want to add to your own Same-Day Website SOP:
- What is your goal of this website?
- What information do you want your website to disclose?
- If you have multiple products/services, do you want a page for each one as well as an overview ‘products/services’ page?
- What type of functionality do you need? (provide options, ie contact form, etc).
- What pages do you want on your website?
- Do you have imagery or can I share a link with you to a repository of images that you can choose from?
- Do you have a logo?
- Do you need search engine optimization for this website?
- Do you have a domain? If yes, do you have the login info?
- After launch, do you want maintenance?
- Where are you located? Can you meet in person to work together at all?
After understanding their needs, tell them they’d be a good fit for your same day website service. Explain what the program is. Chances are they’ve never heard of anything like this before (at which point in time you can let them know how much ground you can cover in a day, perhaps reference other client sites youve worked on or your own agency site if you built it in a day).
After they agree to doing a Same-Day Website, send them an invoice and when paid, they can select a date for their upcoming development day.
Pre-day Setup - how to encourage customers and yourself to prepare for their big day.
Have pre-written emails lined up ready to go, asking for items that are absolutely required as well as assets that can help you cover more ground on date of development. I’d recommend a company like ActiveCampaign that sends a series of emails prepping the client. My must-haves were domain login information, # of pages, functionality defined (ie if a contact form, who does it get sent to internally, etc). My ‘want-haves’ were copy, logos/branding (aka things we can do during the development date, but it will mean we have less time to work on the website itself).
Also, make sure the client understands that during the date of development, that they need to set aside that one day to provide instantaneous feedback on the website project. This is why I highly recommend doing this in person, because when doing it virtual, sometimes the clients get distracted with other things.
Purchase and set up a license with your hosting provider, install theme, plugins, maybe even create the pages and make a first attempt at global header/footer navigation. Review all documents that customer has provided and start to visualize how the date of development will go.
Same-Day Website day - processes and flows breakdown
You need to orchestrate the entire day and communicate to your client progress. Lay out with them first thing in the morning how the day will progress.
Review with them what they’ve provided and what is still missing. Define together roughly how much time will go to each page. This helps because if one page in particular is taking a while, you can communicate this fact and they’ll have understand that they need to make some decisions so that you can move on. Sometimes I’d take a break on one page and come back to it after we knocked out a couple other tasks.
I started these meetings at 8am SHARP with the client. Usually I got to the office before 7am to have an hour to myself to start everything up.
Have printouts of the day, objectives, etc. Share with your client too.
Assign tasks to your client while you are working. Perhaps they can take some time to write in more copy, or find more images through a site like shutterstock, or work on getting their Google My Business account set up.
Ask client to leave a review online while you are in the process of launching their completed website.
Day after - items to provide client // maintenance // debrief internally/improve processes.
After date of development, send a recap email, covering everything you did. Provide WOM and any other pre-made assets you’ve created to help them run their new website as successfully as they can.
Review your SOPs and make improvements to it.
Future ideas:
Launch a ‘half day website service’ for single landing pages. Need to be careful here; you don’t want a ‘single page’ to be filled with 10+ sections.
Conclusion
Same-Day Websites isn’t for everyone, but when it is a good fit, it can be a wildly profitable, exciting and simple model to run that makes your clients extremely happy.
A special thanks to Hans and Termageddon for providing this awesome content to the community! If you don't have a privacy policy or terms of service option in place, then I highly recommend checking out Termageddon and learn how you can increase your recurring revenue by taking advantage of their services — built for agencies!
Kyle and Matt chat about a recent request from one of Kyle's clients. They requested to be sent maintenance reports on a regular schedule. Is it worth spending the time setting them up and sending them out or is it a waste of time and energy that could be better spent elsewhere?
Let's discuss!
In this episode of The Admin Bar, one of our favorites, Jim Galiano, is coming by to tell us all about something new he’s built….
If you’ve taken our advice in the past and listened to Jim’s podcast, you’ve undoubtedly been inspired by his no-nonsense approach to business and marketing.
While so many agencies are diving deeper and deeper into technology & gadgets to build their agency, Jim often talks about his “less moving parts” philosophy.
There’s no shortage of information out there for the aspiring agency owner who wants to grow a team. There’s nothing wrong with that if you have the right makeup for it — but what about for folks (like me) who want to be solo and maximize their profits without the overhead of a “traditional” agency model?
This is exactly what Jim has been doing for years— and now he’s going to share all his experience with us from the ground up in his new course: The Solopreneur’s Guide to Starting, Building, and Marketing a Successful Digital Agency
We discuss what lead Jim to this “less moving parts” approach, how it’s impacted his business, how his customers respond, what his new course will cover, and just who it’s aimed at helping.
Wanna know more about The Solopreneur’s Guide to Starting, Building, and Marketing a Successful Digital Agency?
This 10-module course (priced at $98 — woah!) is designed to strike a balance between giving you what you need to build out your entire plan and system, without drowning you with information overload.
You’ll see how Jim: * Sets pricing & creates offers for all income brackets * Writes a simple yet powerful business plan to guide his growth * Gets free publicity for himself and his clients through mainstream media * Markets his business without manipulation
You’ll also learn… * How Jim’s contract works—ensuring he always gets paid * How his “minimalist” marketing plans gets better results than the ‘be everywhere’ model that’s so popular today * How you can focus on the projects you enjoy and scale at a level that suits your desire (without pressure & stress) * Why Jim sends verbal proposals and gets “Yes” right there on the spot * His cold-calling methods and scripts to find new business with ideal customers * How he builds relationships through simple videos for his customers * How to create a platform where you can consistently be seen, heard, or read
You all know that I’m a HUGE fan of Jim… As soon as he told me that this course was in the works I asked him where I could sign up. I want to be the first customer— as this is exactly the kind of business I want to build for myself.
In this episode, we discuss a situation that happened to Kyle recently, and why the WAY you phrase your marketing messages can make a big difference. This is a bonus, podcast-only episode not found anywhere else as a thank you to all you audio-heads. Happy New Year!
Join Our Community: https://theadminbar.com/group
Like Our Facebook Page: https://facebook.com/theadminbar
See it all on the website: https://theadminbar.com
Lee Jackson visits The Admin Bar to talk about his exciting plans for 2019, including EVEN MORE content, a BOOK, and his very own IN-PERSON EVENT called Agency Transformation Live!
Always a pleasure to chat with Lee and try and keep up with all he's up to.
Bonus! The Admin Bar Exclusive: The burning questions our community asked that you won't find ANYWHERE else! No one has the guts to ask the hard-hitting questions we do!
Learn More & Get Tickets:
Agency Transformation: https://www.TheAdminBar.com/AgencyTransformation
Other Mentions:
Angled Crown: https://www.AngledCrown.com
Event Engine: https://eventengine.tv/
Agency Trailblazer: https://www.AgencyTrailblazer.com
Richard Bland: https://bhambrabland.co.uk
Matt Davies: https://www.antisushi.com/
https://theadminbar.com/cartflows
Tools like WooCommerce for WordPress have a powerful ecosystem, but the front-end options are very limited. CartFlows is a revolutionary new plugin that will take your sales funnels (a.k.a. "flows") to a whole new level.
CartFlows will allow you to completely customize the user experience in your online store, including bump offers, upsells, downsells, and much more.
Join Kyle Van Deusen as he talks to CartFlows co-founder Adam Preiser on the eve of the launch.