3 Simple Ways to Increase Your Web Design Business Revenue & Profitability

So you’re a web designer and you want to make more money.

Maybe this is your side hustle and you are just dying to make enough income to leave your full-time job.

Or maybe you’ve already been designing websites full-time for a while and you’re ready to hit that next income milestone.

Today we’re going to talk about the three ways that you can increase your revenue to become a more profitable designer.

I’m Galen. I’m a web designer and business strategist, and today I’m so excited to talk to you about the three ways that you can increase your profitability as a web designer. You hop on a sales call or a discovery call with a potential client. You get really excited about designing their website, but you think about a few other things that you could offer that they might find valuable.

If you haven’t yet watched my video all about how I show up confidently on sales calls with potential clients, I’m going to include a link to that around this video.

Add-ons can easily increase the value of a web design project by a few hundred dollars, all the way up to thousands of dollars. It completely depends on how you structure it, but for me, I like to make my add-ons a no-brainer, so I like to price them really competitively so that way a client who’s about to pay me thousands of dollars for a website doesn’t think it’s that big a deal just to add on a few hundred dollars here and there to get some more tasks done that are going to set them up for success with their new website.

Some examples of this could be Google Analytics and Search Console set up. It could be SEO or optimizing images for them. There’s a lot of different things that you could include as extras for your project that aren’t necessarily part of your base package.

Even though you’re a designer, there’s probably other skills that you have. That could be copywriting. It could be social media design, and so maybe you offer them a copywriting package or maybe you want to offer them social graphics that match the design of their new website. Whatever it is, try to pick something that you’ll actually enjoy creating for the client. Because the worst thing is when they actually add on that add-on, you make that little bit of extra cash and then you are dreading actually doing the work that you said you would do for them.

If you’re curious about how I integrate add-ons into my web design proposals, I have another video about that that I will link alongside with this one. Or you can check out my link to try HoneyBook, which is my client relationship management system. And when you sign up using my affiliate link, you actually get access to my template right away inside of your account.

The next way that you can increase your revenue as a web designer is by selling templates. And I don’t just mean website templates, although website templates are great too for people who are more in the DIY market or don’t quite have the budget to hire a professional designer like you. Someone could even fall in love with one of your templates and end up hiring you to customize it for them.

But you as a business owner probably have a lot of different templates that you’re using in your business from your processes or other things that you’re designing for your own social media or your own marketing that you could easily sell to clients.

I personally sell website templates, blogging templates, notion templates. I have a ton of different templates that I created for myself and then modified so that I could sell them to potential clients or other designers out there interested in my processes behind the scenes.

There’s nothing better than waking up in the morning and checking your phone or coming back from dinner with friends and realizing you made a bunch of sales while you were doing something else entirely.

Remember that if you do create templates for your business, it does take some time to market them. I highly recommend creating evergreen content like video or blog posts that’s going to continually attract people to your website to showcase the templates that you’ve created so that way you make sales on an ongoing basis.

Or if Instagram is more your style or something like TikTok, make sure you keep creating content and talking about your templates if you want to keep selling them. Most of the time when people create templates and then have trouble selling them, it’s because they just aren’t talking about their products enough.

We think that our audience through email or social media is listening to us all the time, and they’re going to get sick of us if we keep promoting the things that we sell. And while that can be true, the other side of the coin is most of the people in your audience are following hundreds, if not thousands of other people, and they really aren’t paying that much attention to every little thing that you post.

So rather than feeling like you’re annoying them all the time, think of new creative ways. You can talk about your templates every single week to keep driving those sales.

Speaking of selling templates online. If you want to build a community around your customers, I highly recommend circle. Circle is the perfect place to host your online course or membership. You can have a free or paid community. You can host live events, you can send direct messages to your members. They can interact with each other. It’s sort of like a forum similar to Facebook groups, but so much better.

I host my group program specifically for designers, Simplified Designer inside of Circle. I also have a membership community as well as a private podcast that I host in there too. It is so wonderful to be able to connect with my members, to be able to give certain members access only to certain sections in inside of Circle and they make it so easy just to manage it all. Thanks to Circle for supporting this channel, and if you want to go check them out and start your free trial, I’m including a link in the description below.

The third way you can make more money in your web design business is by charging more. I know you’re thinking that’s totally obvious, but I’m going to tell you exactly how to go about doing that.

What we charge for the work that we do, I find is deeply personal and a lot of us have some interesting money mindset issues about what we’re comfortable with charging.

Some people say, charge what you’re worth, and other people say, figure out what you want to make for your income and work backwards from there.

While I do think it’s really important to figure out how much is actually going into your projects from a time perspective, from a money perspective, because running a business is expensive.

I also think it’s important to look at the value that you’re providing your clients, and that value comes from experience.

The more you work on client projects, the faster you’re going to get, the easier it’s going to get, and the more you’re just going to have the general experience to give your client the best finished product.

For example, maybe when you first started as a web designer, you didn’t know anything about SEO and you were just putting websites out there hoping they would rank in search, or hoping clients wouldn’t notice when they didn’t. But now maybe you’ve taken a few courses, you’ve done a lot of research, you’ve attended YouTube Academy and learned as much as you can about the subject.

Now you feel much more confident. You’ve seen your past client websites start to do really well in search, and you can think about that as value that you bring to the table when you work with future clients.

Now SEO is something that you can talk about during that sales call to really build up the value that you are creating for your client, and therefore you should feel more comfortable charging more for that expertise.

If you’ve been designing websites for a while now, I want you to think back to that first ever client that you designed a website for. Think back to that website and you probably look at it and think, templates when I designed this? Because our style changes over time. We get better. We improve every single time we build a new website.

It’s important to take that into consideration, into your pricing. Look at those time, those milestones. When you start to book out in advance, when you start to get more yeses than nos to potential clients, that’s a good sign that it’s time to raise your prices.

In my business, I only offer design days, so I charge by the day for design work and because I chose that business model and I don’t do longer ongoing projects, it’s really important for me to charge enough per hour that it makes sense for the work that I’m doing.

People always say that as you get better at design work, you should switch to project-based work because as an hourly designer, you end up making less or getting penalized for becoming faster at the work that you do because it takes less time to complete the work.

That’s why as a designer who offers design days or day rates, it’s really important that I keep track of how much time it takes me to complete a website. And as I start to get faster and as I become a better designer, I need to charge more accordingly so that I am compensated for the speed increase in the work that I’m doing.

If you want to learn more about my web design process, how I offer design days and what that looks like for my business, I have got a three day challenge that you can sign up for and I’ll put the link in the description below.

Thanks so much for watching. I hope you enjoyed this video. Make sure to like and subscribe and I think you’ll find these videos super helpful on the next stage of your web design journey.