This is the first lecture of the survey results of my web designers survey. And this lecture is about what designers do, how they make money and where they find their clients. So let's get going. So as you know, I surveyed over 40 web designers, and most of them were working from home and running their own businesses. And as you know, participants were from every continent and spread over different design disciplines. And they represented every level of experience from people who were just starting out to people like Jonathan Nolan, who was once deputy head of the UI group for WordPress, and now is developing his own blogging CMS and David S. The author of logo design love, a designer whose blogs attract over a million monthly pageviews.

All of these survey results and graphs, and all of the comments from the designers are all available as downloads in PDFs in this and the next lecture. So if you don't want to sit through the lecture, all the results of the survey are there in a PDF. And if you want to go back to this information, of course, you'll always have the PDF to access. But let's get going with the survey. And the first question was, on average, how many hours a day do you actually spend designing? And of course, this is a bit of a shock to some people, but it's less than four hours a day average.

So less than half the working day you actually spend designing, and this is pretty obvious and pretty standard because you're a business owner, you're not just a designer, and that's something you have to get to grips with. So what are you doing If you're not designing, so the next question is how many hours a day do you spend on social media, web browsing, unrelated to your marketing. So this is just web browsing purely for one's own enjoyment and nothing connected to work at all. And the average was 1.6 hours a day. Something you might have a problem with as a web design business owner is productivity. It can be very easy these days to get distracted by various websites.

Classic thing is you go on Facebook to promote one of your blog posts and you end up chatting to friends online. So look how many the professionals do 1.6 hours of this make sure you do less than that. So this next question is more about work. How many hours a day do you spend on social media web browsing, specifically related to marketing yourself? So this is going on Facebook, Twitter, forums, and live In networking with other designers and other professionals, and on average our designers did one hour of this every day. And how many hours a day?

Do you spend liaising meeting, talking or writing emails to clients? And the average for this was 1.3 hours a day of client contact. And lastly, in this section, how many hours a day do you spend writing blog posts, responding to comments on your blogs, or general work on your websites. Now bear in mind that all these designers have a website, usually with a very good blog, and they're running their own companies. So for them, the website is the hub of their business activity or the hub of the online world so there's no surprise that they spend an average of an hour a day on this so you can see how the day is split up. So to give you a rough outline, then save the day is eight hours long.

They spend about four or hours a day on designing one hour a day communicating with clients one hour a day on the website, one hour a day on marketing. And another hour of the day is taken up with leisure pursuits online. But that's just an average of what these web designers told me. Of course, the individuals could be wildly different. Okay, so now we're coming on to the section about income. I wondered how designers were earning their money.

So asked about the income and how it splits. And this brought some interesting results. So first question I asked was, what percentage of your annual income Do you receive from clients in the country you operate in? As you can see, the average is only 67%. income comes from their country. And for some of them, none of their income comes from clients from within their country.

So it's a good idea to realize that this is an international global business and some us but designers will only work with us based clients maybe. But otherwise, it's more likely that you'll be working for people from all around the world, which is a good thing. Now, this one quite surprised me. Bearing in mind, we surveyed a lot of really successful graphic designers, as well as some web designers who are just starting out. And this was asking roughly how much of your annual income Do you receive from something other than client work. So that could be product sales, advertising income, affiliate income, all these sort of passive incomes that designers could receive and it came out as quite low as 7.7% average.

So the passive income is quite difficult to get going, but it's something you should stick with, put it on the back burner so to speak, as it will grow over the years. Next question, roughly how much of your annual income Do you receive from your single biggest client? Now I wasn't surprised with this at all because you will find Once you get going, after a few years that you will develop some really good long term relationships with some excellent clients. And that's certainly how I make most of my client money. And an average of nearly 40%. From our web designers comes from their biggest single clients such as one client, they get an average 40% of their income.

And that's not surprising. So another question about work, which is, how much do you outsource to others. And now again, I thought this was quite a low average. But you can see on average, most of the web designers do their own work, and they outsource very little I must admit, I do outsource a little bit more than that on Elance oDesk and crowd spring and others, but only 8.6 of our designers client work was outsourced. And the next question over the last year, what percentage of income Did you receive from clients you had worked for before. Now, you Your best clients, so your current clients, and it's no surprise that this was quite high at 47.7% think it could have been higher really, because a lot of your work after a few years will come from regular clients or recommendations from those regular clients.

And that's the next question over the last year, what percentage of income Did you receive from recommendations? And that came out as 30%? No surprises there. Most of your income comes from your regular clients or recommendations from them. And just to back that up, over the last year, what percentage of income Did you receive from new clients? And that's only 20%.

So you can see how difficult it is if you're starting out. You've got to make that figure 100%. Obviously, you can only have new clients. So that's why it's always best start out part time and increase as the years go by. But no surprise is really the new clients represented only 20% of our web designers annual income. So where do you find these new clients?

Here are the answers. The most common ways people get new clients is from their websites. After that we have other. And this is probably clients that they have met face to face in some way, either going to a meet up or through some local business group or something like that. Third Party websites, that's things like oDesk and Elance. I wouldn't advise somebody from United States or Europe joining those sites in order to get work because the rates are so low.

It's much better to get work through your website. So how do you get new clients? That's the one thing that all web designers want to know who want to start their own businesses. And here are some great quotes I got from my 40 or so web designers and This is how they get new clients. And there's a lot of great ideas in here. So I'm going to read them all out for you.

First one says I get my clients from a combination of cold emailing twice yearly, one print card, mailed per year, my website, my blog, social media, LinkedIn and Twitter, particularly the latter commenting on others blogs and various online forums, and other ones said cold calling, but people who are past or present colleagues of current clients in similar fields. So that really isn't cold calling because as I was just saying, your best clients are your current clients because your current clients recommend you to other clients. And what this web designer is doing is pre empting that by contacting present clients or past clients and asking for recommendations, and that's a very good thing to do, as well. Next one said please Person marketing in association and leads groups. That's sort of meetup groups, business groups, every major town and city has them, you have to get in contact with them, find out what the meeting, they might even charge you for coming.

And it's probably money well spent because you meet people face to face in a business environment. And everyone's looking for a web designer, so I can't over state the importance of meeting people face to face. The next one is through my blog. I've made connections with other designers and developers, and I receive work from them many times. Some of my best clients have come to me, because other designers are too busy and hand off their new contacts to me. So that's advice we've talked about earlier.

You've got to get into a circle of other web designers who you can get to know and if you do that, if they're too busy, and they need to recommend somebody, the first person they'll think of is you So it's really good to make connections with other web designers. And the way you do that is through their websites, commenting and emailing. And of course there we have recommendations from friends. Personally, I don't like that one, but it works for some people. Okay, 90% of my clients I get from word of mouth referrals. I occasionally get queries for work through my website, I don't advertise.

Okay, so word of mouth referrals through present clients is always a great one. Next one. Most of my business comes from referrals and business contacts. I market my design services through networking groups, and I do a course an email piece to current and potential clients. Now there's a good bit coming up here. When I finish a job for a client, I asked them if they are happy with the results in the service.

If they are, I asked them to keep me in mind for future projects and ask for two or three names of people. I might Contact for more work. So that is a really great bit of advice. When you finish the project a client's happy with you just ask them for two or three names of people who might be looking for work. You might even ask the client to tell two or three people about your services, you know, it's quite possible the client won't think of doing that off his own back. But if you ask him, then he might do it.

And that's a client recommendation worth its weight in gold. So remember, one client can turn into five clients. Okay, there's another word of mouth recommendation there. And another web designer is said I meet most of my clients through networking events, or attending classes at my local Small Business Development Center. So they're going in for a course in the in small business, obviously, there's going to be other small businesses there. Every small business needs a website.

And lastly, I would estimate a roughly even mix of far my websites, recommendations and repeat them So that just goes to confirm what we've been saying all along. So, I hope you enjoyed that. There's lots of good stuff in there. Remember, you can download this PDF if you want to refer back to it. So I hope you enjoyed that lecture. This is Rob from Rob Covent calm again, goodbye.