Okay, so here's our next section where I introduce my question there of web designers who are independent and working from home usually running their own web design business, as I didn't want to make this course all about me, and everything that I thought was right about how to run a web design business. So I questioned over 40 other web designers, and got their opinions on all the things that we'll be talking about, and represented in the sample of these 40 odd web designers. There were different disciplines of design, some are web designers, someone will print designers somewhere identity designers, although all the designers questions in the survey had least a website, websites are obviously quite important. So I sent off this questionnaire to sample of freelance and independent web designers to see if there are any rules or common practices involved in running a web design business.

And the answers were fascinating. For example, I found that the most of us charged 50% up front. Also, I learned that only half of us always use contracts. And I found out we spent on average 1.6 hours a day, indulging in personal social media unrelated to work. Now, as I say, it was a cross section of designers and I purposely chose that and they're from all corners of the world. They would from different age groups.

Some were starting out, but others are super successful people who are almost household names in the design scene. So now here's a brief introduction to eight of them and Each of these designers gave me an extra quote, which is a short little piece of advice about running your own web design business. So that's great advice here. And let's have a look at the first one. So the first one probably needs no introduction. It's David airy.

David area is a brand identity designer, or the goto logo guy. And his clients include Yellow Pages cheer, calm, birdie or associates. You might have heard of his blogs, there's logo design, love, David airy, calm and identity designed, and together they attract more than 1 million monthly pageviews. So that's a huge, great audience he has. He also wrote a book called logo design love a guide to creating iconic brand identities. And this has been translated into Chinese, Portuguese, Czech, German, Polish, Korean and Russian.

And here is David's quote, he says In order to run a design business, don't be afraid of mistakes. Everyone makes them. The important part is accepting responsibility and learning from your errors. So next up we have Douglas Banville, who runs a small graphic design firm in Rhode Island, near Providence, Boston. Douglas started his blog a few years ago. And he quickly established himself after writing a blog post about phone combinations as a typography expert.

So this is the power of blogging, you just write one blog post and it goes absolutely crazy in terms of visitors who want to read that blog post, and you can build almost an industry of that. So as a result of writing blog posts about font combinations, he now has a successful e book, The Big Book of font combinations, as well as an iPhone app for font combinations as well and these have been inserted incredibly successful products for him. So he's a great example of a web designer who has turned his hand to creating products and passive income. And here is his special bit of advice for running a web design business. Find a niche and fill it. You may have to start broad but narrow your skill set and master some speciality niches.

If you don't, you will join the nameless ranks of generalists who were also afraid to specialize, and now pay the price of flipping burgers with most of their time. generalists have little definable expertise, and thus little dividable value. The next step is round a clay now Rhonda is an awesome designer and WordPress expert she seeks to help her clients become successful utilizing a complete package of services that includes custom logo design, print, design, and production, custom website design, blog design, and custom summarization. So like me, she considers herself a marketing consultant, as well as a graphic designer. And Rhonda came up with a couple of quotes for us. And the first was linked to this illustration on the left by Ben Couric.

And in it you can read very simple message, don't work for free. Under the guise of good exposure, it is bad exposure. If you don't value your work, neither will anyone else. So fairly simple advice there that I would absolutely 100% go along with. The second bit of advice is just as good. If you want to get business you must have an awesome website showing your best work and a nice friendly picture of yourself.

People prefer to hire someone who looks friendly, rather than a faceless internet presence. Include a blog on the site for SEO value if nothing else, find successful designers in the same niche and get to know them by commenting on their blog. Twitter etc. Once you've established a relationship, send them a nice note complimenting their work and let them know you do similar work. Tell them if they ever have passed along work, they don't have time for you to appreciate a referral. So random basically sums up my SEO and marketing philosophy.

They're in a paragraph, have a great website, start blogging, find other successful designers that you like for all sorts of reasons. Maybe because they do similar work to you or something like that. And start commenting on their blogs, get to know them and drop them an email sometime. And this will not only get you maybe get you work that they can pass on if they're too busy. But also it's a relationship in the niche and that can give you links as well as business which is also good for SEO. So really great advice there from Rhonda Next up, I think a lot of you will have heard of Chris Spooner his first blog at Spoon Graphics contains beautiful tutorials for designers in Photoshop and Illustrator, as well as fantastic video advice for designers.

And in March 2009, he launched line 25, which is an equally excellent blog covering all aspects of web design. Chris Spooner is another fantastic designer who has gone on to passive income from all sorts of ventures, actually, because he does videos on computer games and all sorts of stuff like that, which is not necessarily linked to design, but he's also extremely good designer, always in demand. But he he makes a lot of money from his websites anyway. So I'm not sure how much client work he does these days, but he's certainly a fantastic bloke to look up to and a good guy to listen to what he has to say. And here is what he has to say about running a web design business. I always advise up and coming designers to just keep practicing and experimenting, use things that capture your interest in everyday life as material for personal projects, then share your thoughts, processes, and the things you learn with others.

It's essentially what I do on a daily basis, and has seen to land me some great opportunities so far. So what he's talking about there is sharing. So if you do something great if you find out some great technique, or other, share it on your blog, and people will love you for it, and they'll link to you, they'll get to know you and just share more giveaway more free and that is great advice for a web designer, and anyone with an online business. Next up is Ryan chef, who's a designer developer. A teacher and entrepreneur from Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States, Ryan sent two equally useful pieces of advice. The first one I agree with wholeheartedly, I've said this many times, it's far easier to get clients to come to you rather than the other way round.

So he says, always be promoting yourself, the best way to find new leads is to let them come to you. So there's nothing worse than going around cold calling people. I'm not saying don't cold call. But when you cold call, people don't know who you are. And it's 10 times more difficult to sell your services to them than it is to people who know about you from your blog, or from videos or something like that. So and secondly, he echoes a lot of advice from other designers about getting paid, and that is require 50% upfront and don't accept payment on monthly plans.

It never works out how you intended so what He's talking about monthly plans there that will be about a monthly plan for a website design or something like that. Otherwise when you're offering web hosting, for example, now that has to be on a monthly plan or annual plan or something like that because it goes on and on forever and ever in the future, but don't do monthly plans for one off fees. So next up, we got Mike Smith, who runs made by gorilla, a WordPress design studio from Knoxville, Tennessee in the States. He also has a hugely interesting freelance design blog, and since he started working online in 2007, he has worked with over 200 clients build hundreds of websites and written and published over 200 articles on various blogs, with topics ranging from freelance tip to design resources, showcases and tutorials, Mike describes guerilla marketing As any number of unconventional methods of marketing with minimal resources for maximum results, any marketing campaign that uses non mainstream tactics and locations, so here is Mike's advice.

It's not always going to be fun, but at the end of the day, it beats the hell out of going to someone else's building and working to make someone else rich while receiving a small paycheck. And I can absolutely go along with that. 110% Mike, thank you very much. Next up we have Karen McDade. I've interviewed her for my podcast, and she is absolutely fantastic South African freelance graphic designer and she has a blog where she writes about graphic design and has a portfolio sites on a different domain. And she's got some great clients over the years Discovery Channel and National Geographic And she's also been published in advanced Photoshop magazine.

And she has some great advice here about clients. And it's something again, I'd go along with, I would advise people not to take just any client. If they hassling you about price, or give you a lot of uphill, then don't bother with them. nurture the relationships you have with your good clients. They are hard to find, be prompt with corresponding with them. And always give them your best work.

So great advice there from Karen about clients. And it's something I've been going on again, and again, watch out for those red flags. But if you get a good client, then just do everything you can for them because the good clients will stick around and use you again and again and again. And they'll also recommend you and if they're good clients, then they'll recommend you to other good clients. That's why good clients are what it's all about. Really in Running a web design business.

And lastly, we have Jonah Nolan who is a designer, entrepreneur, speaker, author, photographer, and uses the phrase creative professional to describe himself. His clients include WordPress, Microsoft, Virgin, and Ubisoft. Now, John's, an average Twitterer. And he's got his fingers in many pies. He's actually setting up a new blogging CMS at the moment, a kind of not a competitor to WordPress, but it's something in the WordPress space. So he's someone who's been around and knows a lot of people in the industry.

And he's very well respected looked up to figure and his advice to us is under promise over deliver overcharge. If you fail to do any of these things. You will make a loss a little bit tongue in cheek with the overcharging but you You know what he means. So finally, I'd like to thank here actually everyone who participated in the web design business survey that I completed with them. So amongst these designers are sort of real Rockstar, web designers, and also those who are starting out and starting to do quite well. I'm really happy to get all this information from them.

I think it showed a lot of good points, which I will be presenting to you in the subsequent lectures. And it's great that you're getting advice here from all these great people, and not just from me. So here's the list of them. I'd advise you to check out any of these websites and use them as a yardstick for your own sites. And there are some great websites here and a lot of inspiration for you. But thanks very much for listening to this lecture.

Next up, of course, is the first lecture of the web designers business survey. Thank you