Hello, this is Rob from Rob cabin.com. And today we're going to be talking about diversifying and specializing now sounds like a contradiction, but it's not. And I've tried to explain. So let's get going. Now the online landscape is constantly changing, and clients need a helping hand to negotiate their way. And web designers up particularly lucky here, because they have so many allied skills and services, branching out from the core discipline.

So today, there's all sorts of new social media channels, new rules on SEO and everything. And clients are always asking about these. So as a web designer, you should always be looking to get into these little diverse areas where you can help the client. People who want websites will probably also want SEO services. And businesses who are having websites or even printed material designed, will want copy checking, writing and editing services. And if you are at all interested in marketing, then there is social media to negotiate.

And here are some new ways where you can make money whilst you deliver your core web design services. So first of all, as I mentioned, text editing and copy checking design clients are often busy people. They know what they want to say, but they sometimes don't have the time to say it properly. And very often, the text supplied by the client can be modified quickly and easily and it needs to be because clients do provide text that is substandard. And this is a service you can provide to any client quite cheaply. an extra pair of eyes can check for spelling and punctuation errors as well as making sure there is a consistent tone to the text.

And I found clients very happy to pay a little extra for text editing and copy checking services. Secondly, writing sometimes the customers I work with can't afford to get their texts written by a professional copywriter. When I see they are struggling with poorly worded text, I will offer my copywriting services and this all goes back to blogging. If you spend everyday writing, you will get better at it. And I'm a much better writer than I was even two years ago. So if you write and keep writing, you will develop skills that your clients will be only too happy to pay for.

And as I say it all goes back to blogging. So another reason to keep pricing is to keep adding quality information to your blog, which will ultimately help you increase the traffic to your website and get Clients so it's a win win win on writing next up SEO. Now when designing and developing a website for a client, it's always sensible to get the SEO rights straight from the beginning. And by that I'm talking about on site SEO. So guessing the markup have the HTML, absolutely correct the page titles, the descriptions, the alt text for the images, and everything like that. As always, you'll need to understand your clients market and products properly and research what keywords will work best for them and build this into their optimized website.

So for example, you can find out that one of your clients will be better off being called full vo garage repairs London as the title to their website, if that is how they will perform best in searches after you've done keyword research. So I offer on site SEO as a Part of my basic website package and I'll be coming on to packages later. So once you know what keywords your client needs to target, and which pages are optimized for which subjects, you can use this information to help your client with on site SEO. Now, the way I would advise clients on SEO is something I've mapped out on my SEO, social blogging and relationships course and there is a special offer in this course for that course. And all this is about is on site SEO, and explaining the power of blogging and the use of social media and a little bit of guest posting, but this isn't about the old link building practices that used to go on up until a few years ago or up until a year ago.

Even I would not recommend that you indulge in off site SEO Link Building practices for your clients. Because in this day and age with Google making all their algorithm changes, it's just too dodgy to get into. But you can't go wrong with the basic on site SEO, blogging and social media advice that I've given that course. So moving on to social media, then you can offer your clients some really useful packages with social media, as it's increasing in importance every day. And if your client is setting up a new website, it's very often the case that your client will want to set up some new social media profiles as well. Twitter, Facebook, Google Plus, obviously, so you can help them set up a Twitter profile because you can choose the background image, the colors and the header image to go along with your clients logo and corporate colors etc.

Similarly, with Facebook, you can create a Facebook page for them. And that will have to have a header image, a profile image. And everything. YouTube is even more complicated. They have a new header image for the new one channel layout. And you can help them with that.

Google Plus again, has a very large header image size. And you can set up Google plus pages for your clients. You can even help them with their google plus profile as well. It's up to you how far you want to go into this. I mean, you can even help your client post to these social media platforms. And really, the sky's the limit as far as social media is concerned, but offering a package whereby you can set up the social media accounts is a very easy job for a designer to do.

But it's a job that a lot of clients will appreciate. And lastly, offer different types of web services and we're gonna get on to this now. So you can diversify on different types. of websites and web services. People are looking beyond the traditional blog being half of their online presence. iPhone and Android apps are a growth area you can move into if you wish to.

In addition, there are plenty of other website types you can specialize in, for example, ecommerce sites. There's some good WordPress plugins. There's WooCommerce for example, and there are dedicated shopping CMS is like Magento that you can look into. You can do membership sites, you can do this with WordPress, and there's a plugin called WishList Member that's very good for this multilingual sites. You can do this on WordPress, and there's a plug in called WP ml WordPress multi lingual that's excellent for multilingual sites. You can set up social sites, you can do that with buddypress on WordPress forums, you can set up with forum software such as PHP, BB, or the bullets And in addition to offering different types of websites, you can offer complete domain registration, web hosting and email hosting packages.

So we've talked about this before where you can offer domain name registration, some clients will like to register their own domain themselves, which is fair enough. But sometimes they really don't want to do it because they're not very technical. And it can help you to do it because if you register their domain, then it's easy to change the name servers at the domain name registrar, etc. web hosting, again, offer web hosting and put your clients site on your own hosting environment. It's something you know, you'll get to be able to set them up more quickly on your own host than you would using a third party host. And as I said before, you've got to charge properly for this.

I don't think this is an easy thing to offer. This goes the year round and they're going to expect a good 24 seven service so you've got to charge properly for it. Another reason is email hosting can cause all sorts of problems, especially if you're on a shared host. Because if you're on a shared host, and you route the email through that host, you may find other websites are spamming through that host. And therefore your clients email gets blacklisted. And to circumvent this issue, use Google Apps for Business to host your clients email.

And you can use advanced DNS to route just the email through Google Apps for Business. And that's a very good service for email. And I would advise you to do that if you are hosting a client on a shared host, at least I would advise you to do that anyway. And lastly, email marketing, you can offer to set up an email list for your client using email marketing companies like MailChimp and AWeber. So there are a host of other internet services you can offer your client within the basic design and development package. Also, you will learn how to provide some of these services by being asked to do them for the first time by a client.

And this has happened to me a few times a client has asked me Can you do this? Can you do that I haven't actually been able to say that I have done this before, but I do it anyway. And this is teaches me a new discipline and increases my knowledge. So your knowledge and ability will increase the more you offer to your clients. So this is a huge way of increasing your skills whilst being paid there. Here's some other things you can do.

And I've touched on this earlier offer packages. This is very important. So you can have a package of a website design with proper on site SEO. Having registered the XML sitemap with Google Webmaster Tools set up Google Analytics created a blog with Good permalinks and proper titles on the pages, etc, and include all of that into a package and have a set price for it for each client. And this not only gives you a bigger job, it also explains the actual extent of the job to the client. And so there's no contractual problems later in the day, and your client sometimes doesn't want you to do one little task in their big projects.

There are enormous economies of scale and consistency benefits to be had if one company handles as many things as possible. So be that company offer your client complete packages, so they can receive a portfolio of services. And you can ask for a reasonably premium price for this instead of doing a small little job for the client. So moving on, then print design course many web designers offer print design and others design services, I often find myself doing business cards, flyers, brochures, and on screen PDFs as well. But in the case of the print design, always offer to print it for the client and deliver it. And again, try to own as much of the job as possible, and therefore charge the premium price for it.

Now specialization, this might sound like a contradiction, I've been talking about diversification. And now I'm talking about specialization. But it isn't a contradiction when a web designer first starts out as a freelancer, or when a new graphic design company has just set up. The temptation is just to take any work that's offered. And this is only natural. However, many web designers find that afterwards, as well as diversifying, they will also be specializing and be drawn into an area that they enjoy.

So I've asked the designers that contributed to my web designer business This survey about this subjects of specialization and this is what they said about it. So first up David airy. Now, if anyone was to think of a designer that does logos or was a specialist in brand identity, they may well come up with the name David, Eric. So this is what David said. And he urges caution at first and says, I think when you're learning, it's important not to limit yourself to a niche. The more you know about design in general, the better equipped you are when it comes to specializing, so David's saying that specializing is something that comes later rather than sooner.

So knowing more about design and the experience of designing helps you choose your speciality but as Karen McDade points out, experience teaches you to choose your clients carefully as well. So we're back on the choosing plants tack, but listen to what Karen has to say is that she says, When I started freelancing A few years ago, I just took any work that came my way in an effort to build my business. After a while I had a lot of clients. But because I wasn't selective, some of them were less than desirable. I ended up working long hours for all those clients who wouldn't pay me on time or at all. I was quite naive and trusted in their word that they would eventually pay up.

It came to a head one night when at 3am, I realized I was working way too hard for the level of income I was actually bringing in. So this is a familiar story. And now having streamlined clients, Karen now provides a better service and her portfolio has improved as a result. So we've talked about this before the importance of keeping good clients and letting the low quality late paying clients go. So how do you choose the area of design to specialize in most designers say this happens naturally, and you are drawn into a particular area, as it is particularly interesting more enjoyable for you. So this is what Christina says.

I think it's important to find a specialism, but it's up to the designer to figure out how wide or narrow their specialism will be. For instance, some designers might only offer design services in a very specific niche, which can establish them as the go to expert in that field, whereas other designers might offer a wider range of services under the umbrella of a particular aspect of design, which obviously increases their potential client base. It all boils down to the designers interests, and what kind of work they enjoy creating. So I think Chris is absolutely right here. Seek out what you enjoy doing. And Mike Smith seeked out what he enjoyed doing and his particular niche is WordPress websites and themes.

And this is what Mike says I was someone who did A little bit of everything when starting out, add banners, CD covers, flyers, website, headers, etc. I stumbled on WordPress and started building sites for myself and just learn the ins and outs of it so much that it seems right to offer WordPress themes as a service. Once that took off and started doing well, I started doing less and less of the other stuff. Nowadays, I spend 90% of my days working with WordPress, designing themes, coding my own themes PSD to WP for other people, etc. I like specializing because it gives me the ability to focus on one thing and do it really well. People like that.

Okay, so it's good to get really good at something because then you can ask for more money and you'll enjoy it more. Your speciality can be any aspects of design, logos, brand identity, WordPress themes, WordPress and SEO print anything. However, designers tend to specialize in one aspect of design, not in any particular industry. None of the designers I spoke to specialized in a specific niche. So nobody specialized in an industry like education or retail or pharmaceuticals, for example. Now this may happen to some people, some people may do this.

Some design companies may specialize in real estate or something, but I found this less common amongst the independent web designers that I surveyed. Then finally, and this is the most important, you can specialize to use your design skills into passive income rather than active income. So active income is when you work once for a few hours or a few days or a few weeks for a client creating something then you get paid once and that's it passive income When you work once, create a product or some software or something like that, and you get paid multiple times over the years, then this is the way you can really propel your design business. And this is what Douglas Bonneville did. And his particular niche that he went into was font combinations. And this is what he said.

He says, I really started to think about a product, and how I could step back from the crowd and say, How can I help graphic designers, and not so much clients anymore, I focused on treating myself as a client, producing my e book, and a few apps focused on typography. Things have gone extremely well since then, and I'd never go back. So this is a different way of looking at things. So it's possible to find a speciality that is beyond the client work and focuses on selling products. And this is really something you really need to be thinking about. And there's a lot of Other examples of people who've been hugely successful in this there's Addy Rockstar specializes in creating WordPress themes and hooked up with a couple of other guys, and created woo themes, and woo themes as a hugely successful theme company.

And they've sold over 80,000 themes. Similarly, Chris Pearson, the creator of the thesis fame, and Brian Gardner, the creator of Genesis themes, these are all web designers, but they've taken the design to the next level, and created scalable businesses. And this is the next step of your web design business and you can't take it too early. So always be thinking of passive income. Always be thinking how your diversification and specialization could result in a higher earning capability and increase scalability for your product or your business. So on that note, very exciting note, I would say goodbye.

And I hope you enjoyed this lecture on diversification and specialization. Thank you. Goodbye.