Hello, and welcome to the introduction to my new course running a web design business. Thank you very much for taking the course becoming a web designer business owner is undoubtedly one of the best things that ever happened to me. It's improved my life considerably, and I hope it'll improve yours as well. This course is about providing quality design quality marketing solutions for clients. It's not about being a freelance web designer at home swapping hours for dollars, it's about starting a real company. You need to start to think of yourself as a company and not as an individual.

It's about forging mutual beneficial long term business relationships, because if you do this, you'll get proper money and proper recurring income. And the way you do this is to provide a quality premium service that people will pay extra for, I'm going to explain to you how to go for the top end of the market and not to compete with the medium and bottom ends of the market, because the only way you're going to compete is on price. And that's not a good way to make money. Now, the design business worldwide is huge and growing. And there are millions of independent designers who are earning a living running a business. What I'm going to show you is the basics behind running a business.

So I'm going to tell you how to save money as well as when to invest money. We're going to talk about productivity. A lot of people waste their time I can show you where to effectively invest your time in order to get The good clients and provide the quality premium service. And the key to all of this is communication. And I'm going to explain how to communicate to clients and potential clients. Now whether you've started your own design business or not one thing is for sure you can be successful Will you have to work hard?

Yes, you'll have to work hard, everybody works hard. But this is a job that you will always enjoy doing. One of the beauties, of course of running a web design business is all you need is a computer and an internet connection. But of course, I'm going to go into this in a bit more detail. We're going to talk about equipment, what you need in terms of your computer. It doesn't have to be a Mac, there just happens to be an image of a Mac here.

We'll also talk about the software you need. Of course, that is very important with web design. I'll be talking about the premium software, as well as the free software that you can use. And the good news is, there's a lot of free software out there. Finally, I'll be doing Talking about backup and the importance of backup equipment and procedure. So that's the equipment side of starting a business.

But there's another even more important side of starting a business, which is the plan for your new company, and how to put together a business plan. And now this is not something that stops at the beginning of your business, you should always have plans, I review my own plans every three months in my own website, and there's no better way of achieving things than actually writing them down as goals. But I'm also going to say that the best way to start is to just start because you don't have to give up your job. You can easily work on your own web design business in your free time, build it up slowly, or build it out quickly, but you don't need to leave your job in order to start so the best way to start is just starting. Next we'll go on to one of the questions I get asked probably the most and How do you get clients?

And the answer for me, it starts with your own website. So we're talking about your own website, your own blog, your own SEO, your own social media and the relationships online. And we'll come on to the relationships in the real world as well. And the benefit of all this is twofold. One, you get traffic and interest and potential clients. And two, you learn about the process.

And this knowledge is indispensable when creating online businesses and websites for your premium clients. So I'll explain about blogging with basic SEO and incoming links and how you can engage with social media so that your site is the hub of your online world. Because if you do that, you'll get clients going to you rather than you having to go to potential clients. One of the way you do this, of course is to build up relationships with With other bloggers or other web designers online, you'll also form partnerships and alliances with other web designers in the real world as well. And I'll explain how to do that these partnerships and relationships are incredibly important because people will give you work if they're too busy or they can't do it. We'll also explain about the portfolio how to stand out from the crowd to be creative and break the mold and find a niche and a specialization for you to market yourself effectively, online and off.

So clients are the lifeblood of your business. And once you've got them, I'll explain how to deal with them. On every lecture. There's a PDF you can download. And in the PDF, there are things you can copy and paste into emails. So I have some text for example, that you can use to communicate with clients and this is very important because you can lose clients during project If you use the wrong language with them, and so we explain what to say and what not to say, and how to deal with client issues, and this, of course involves invoices, proposals, contracts, money, and everything like that.

I'll also show you what to do when you meet clients what to ask and how to look out for those red flags in order to predict when a client relationship is gonna go sour before it does, because remember, not all clients are good clients, you want the premium clients, not the ones that are going to end up costing you money, rather than making you money. And next, we're going to talk about handling client requests. And this is all important. What you need to do is to create packages of website design processes or services that you're going to offer the client and you need them pre packaged, and there's a variety of good reasons why you need to do this, but I'll explain whole process to you, what you can offer the client and the combinations of all the processes that you do will all bundle up into large offerings that will go for large amounts of money, how to explain it to the client, how to explain what you're not going to do for the client, which is just as important because this will stop problems occurring in the future.

And I'll explain that for website design. But not only website design, we're going to talk about logo design, and other graphic design, like print design as well. And with all this, there's a lot of text in the PDFs that you can copy and paste and give to your clients as well. So we touched on money. Of course, already money is quite important to the business. But I'll also tell you what to charge how much to charge which is another question I get asked an awful lot.

We'll be talking about when to charge fixed rates for projects and when to charge hourly rates. How to get recurring revenue, how to raise prices because remember, we're going for the top end of the market here, and how to do the accounts. And again, there'll be a lot here for you to download like invoices, etc. As you know, I've been running a web design business for over six years now, but it's not all about me. What I did for this course was to interview over 40 other web designers that run their own businesses to Canvas their opinions on what they do all day, how they make money, who are their best clients, what sort of jobs make the most money, where they find their clients, of course, that very important question, and we get 40 different answers from them. They're all collated in graph form, so we can see the answers easily.

The web designers I have to say are spread all over the world and they have differing skills. Some of them are very specialized, some of them offer a more general service. Some of them are a few years down the line and have started to branch out into products and passive income. Others are just starting out maybe on their third or fourth year. So there's a wealth of information in these lectures. Of course, we're talking about money as well, because we talk about contracts and payment details.

I talk to people like David airy, Chris Spooner, john Nolan, I asked them specifically, how do you get clients? How do you sort out the money? How much do you charge? Where do you make the most of your money, that sort of thing. The online landscape is constantly changing, and clients need a helping hand to negotiate their way. So web designers are incredibly lucky, because they have so many allied skills and services, they say useful to people nowadays.

And they all branch out from this core discipline of web design. So we talk about the future because you don't want to be designing web. sights for the rest of your life. You need to branch out, you need to specialize and you need to diversify. That sounds like a paradox, but it isn't, you need to do both. And we'll explain that we'll talk about outsourcing and we'll talk about creating your own products and creating passive recurring income, which is a much better business model for the future.

So I love any of your comments. If you want to talk to me, you can head over to my website, Rob coven calm and drop me a line through the contact form. Or of course, you can contact me here through Udemy. But I've been running a web design business now since 2006. It took me two years to really get going and do it full time and in about 2009 I quit work for good and solely concentrated on my own business from home, but I can't tell you how bad my jobs were before that. I didn't actually have a web design job.

I was freelancing doing very menial typesetting roles in some very boring offices. And I was absolutely delighted when I got my first client through my website and even more delighted as you can imagine, when I was able to completely stop working for other people and work for myself, it's a real pleasure to be able to explain to other people and help other people as I do for my blog that can replicate this process as well. It's all about providing quality design and marketing solutions for clients and forging mutually beneficial long term business relationships. It sounds simple, but there's a lot of detail in there. So I'd love you to join me in this course. And I look forward to seeing you in the next lecture.

Okay, thank you very much. Goodbye.