 In third grade, I wrote middle school papers in HTML and I did not print the output, I printed the original code when I turned them in, and the teachers did not appreciate that. Fun fact though, I did a report on the death penalty and I had a midi plan in the background of another one that bites the dust, so I was really proud of that in third grade. Yeah, I had a dark sense of humor even back then, but basically I started doing websites and I was looking for a CMS, and I started on PHP Nuke, and then I found this CMS called Mombo, and I was like, oh, this makes the job a little bit easier, and then Mombo went belly up right after I joined it, and then found Joomla, and I'm like, this looks a lot like Mombo on the back, and had no idea it was a fork of the project, and I thought it was just something that looked exactly the same. Got involved in that, started volunteering, then got involved in WordPress, started helping out speaking and other things, and I fell in love with community, and with that I was able to learn these tools really well. When I was at an agency, I've built hundreds of bank and credit union websites for Insider Joomla, I've built hundreds of hospital websites in WordPress, and I really just really love these platforms, and I've been able to help people kind of grow and help their businesses. Now my job is just talking to people and sharing kind of my expertise and seeing how our tools or our philosophies can help them grow their businesses. So who here does freelance website full-time? Is there a full-time source of income? Who here is a part-time gig making websites for other people? We have about half-half, okay, cool. So how to make $100,000? Basically you would need to sell $100,000 product to one person, or you sell a $50,000 project to two people, or you sell a $25,000 project to four people, or you sell a $10,000 project to 10 people, I believe it in my math and ease, right? So $5,000 project to 20 people, or sell a $25,000 project to 40 people, or sell a $1,000 project to 100 people, or sell a $500 project to 200 people. It's just that easy. So but you know a lot of people are like, great, literally you're telling me I need to sell $500 to 200 people, and that's all I need to do. And at the end of the day, I talk to people and I'm like, yeah, that is literally all I need to do because I find so many people overvalue their work, and when I say that I don't mean that they overvalue their expertise, but a lot of people that are especially new in the WordPress community that want to build websites for other people, and you know they might not even be a full developer. Maybe it's what I like to call an integrator, they know how to install plugins, they maybe know a little bit of CSS, they maybe make something look nice, but they may be not building something from scratch. But I talked to all these people like, oh yeah, I went out on my own, okay cool, what's your average client? Well, I did two jobs last year, I was like, okay, great, yeah, one was for $5,000, one was for $15,000, okay, why is it all you did? Oh well, I talked to all these people that couldn't afford me. You know, I have a minimum $5,000, or I have a minimum $10,000, or I have a minimum $20,000 bid, and I'm like, okay, but you're not busy. And I hear this, I've heard this from hundreds and hundreds of people, is they think they're up here, but they're not keeping their pipeline full. So I talked to all these people, they say, oh great, how long does it take you to get a project? You know, it takes me about four months to really find one, quote one, and close one. And then I have to do the project, that keeps me busy for two months, and then another four months. So I'm like, okay, and how much are you getting for those projects? Oh, $10,000. And they're really proud of themselves that they sold a $10,000 project, but when you break it down, they're not making the money that they need for the effort. So I say reverse it. I've talked to people that are doing this full time now. What if you sold a $500 website to 200 people, and I walked through how to do that on the later slides. It's very, very easy to get people at this level. Now the caveat is, you have to make sure you're pricing your product accordingly with their expectations. You can't sell a 60 hour project at 500 bucks. That just doesn't make any sense. But you know how many people are just fine with something that would take you, honestly, two hours to do with some of the templates and themes and page builders that are out there? Honestly at the end of the day, you need to get your portfolio full, and you need to get where the money is. If you're wasting all your time trying to get to the $5,000, $20,000 projects, and you're not keeping yourself busy, $100,000 is very attainable. And I know that as though it's kind of funny you look at this, but it really kind of makes it easy because 200 people when you break it down is not that much. One $500 project every business day is $130,000 a year. And yes, you might not get that day one, but we kind of talk about some tools and ways that you can kind of do that. So with that, I am not saying that if you are able to sell a $10,000 project consistently that you should not do that. You should definitely do that. And you can still quote that stuff. Cuz I usually find that people when they start, they need to start low and they need to get portfolio stuff and they need to get a lot of good happy customers. And then when their knowledge and their portfolio goes up, maybe they start charging $1,000 or $1,500 and it starts to scale accordingly. But at the end of the day, if you're not full with work, just get the work. And if you get your processes done right, it won't take you that long to be able to churn these things out correctly. And then at the end of the year, you'll have 200 customers you can refer people to. And then when you bid maybe the $10,000 or $15,000 project, you're not wasting 20 hours in meetings and discovery for something that doesn't get there. But I got to the point where at the agencies we were in and even when I was freelancing before I took this job. If somebody called me for a complex project, I would charge them discovery time. I would charge them $5,000 before I even gave them a bid on some of my higher projects I did when I was later because I had that value and I could justify it with my experience. But if you don't have that, just get the work. Money in the bank is better than hopes and dreams later on. And what's funny about this is when you have the work, the other issue that a lot of people have is they don't change their price. They undercharge when they have a huge backlog of work. Every time I've raised my price when I've had a full backlog of work, when I was trying to do this as more of a full-time thing, before I got my day at my dream job of being a community guy, every time I raised my price, I got more clients. But that was because I had the backlog of all of those projects, hundreds of projects behind me. So it's definitely a game. There's a great video that I recommend on YouTube. It's called FU Pay Me, except it's not edited. It does have a lot of language, but it's by Mike Medazzotti. It's Creative Mornings. And it talks about contracts. And that's an important thing, is make sure you have contracts. And at the end of the day, make sure you talk about communication. Start low, don't get an ego. That's what I always tell people, because so many people honestly have an ego. And they feel like they're wasting their time and effort because they're giving out these projects for $500 or $1,000 or whatever it is. You know who doesn't have an ego? Wix.com, Squarespace, Weebly. They're perfectly happy to take the money. And guess what? They have a process that works for a lot of people. But you need to be clear. There's a great book by Nathan Ingram. He's from iThemes. And he does a lot of business consulting. And it's like dealing with problem clients. So his stuff is his book's called Building Fences Around Friendly Monsters, where a client is just, it's a monster, but you need to build fences around it, such as expectations. So when your client emails you at 2 o'clock in the morning, if you respond, even though you happen to be up anyway, right away, that sets that expectation at, oh, you're available at 2 o'clock in the morning, instead of setting a reminder to have an auto reply on the next business day. Right now, all my clients that I have currently, even though I've had them previously, they all know I am not 21st 7 and I am not available when they need me. Any request they have has a minimum one week turnaround because I'm on the road 180 days a year. And they're okay with that. Other people might not be okay with that, but I set those expectations clear. And you also need to set expectations about what they're buying clearly. There are plenty of people that are perfectly happy with five page websites at 100 bucks a page. There's a company out in Atlanta called One Week Website, and they charge between $100 to $400 per page. And a lot of people just buy two or three pages from them, and they actually were a big sponsor at WordCamp Atlanta a couple of weeks ago. In motion hosting, that's something called Website Quickstarter where they'll build you a one page site within two business days for $99 flat and it's selling really well because there's a need for those types of clients. And if you can sell higher, please do, but a lot of people are having trouble filling that pipeline and getting enough portfolio work to be able to move themself up that ladder. So when you sell a website, make sure you're being clear what they're buying. You know, if you're selling a $500 product or a $1,000 project, say, hey, you're buying it. You know, I got 30 templates you can pick from. And then you just say, you can pick a fine template and we'll edit this amount of content. You have to provide the content. And if you don't, but be very clear about what you're providing because this, if you're not very clear ahead of time, you're gonna get sucked in changes and waste all your time and this plan won't make any sense because then you're spending 40 hours on a $500 project. You have to be extremely clear with these clients on what they're buying and a lot of people are okay with that. The same reason why Wix, Weebly and Squarespace is taken away from WordPress market share of every single year. WordPress is growing over the overall CMS business, but Wix, Weebly and Squarespace are selling these $40 a month plans that people are more than happy to buy. And there's nothing wrong with Wix, Weebly and Squarespace. Those tools are actually pretty phenomenal from an end user perspective. They just wanted a website that's pretty and it got online and it does that. But you can help them provide that but have them own it because eventually those clients are gonna be successful hopefully and they're gonna need more than the limitations that those platforms provide. And then they're gonna get sticker shock when they realize they can't do X, Y or Z and you have to rebuild a project from scratch and then it's gonna be five or $15,000. What's also nice about these small clients is you can nurture them. As they grow, you can sell maintenance packages. You can sell updates, things like that. But there were three main ways I recommend people get projects. B&I, referrals and chambers of commerce. Anyone here but a member or a member at B&I? Okay, does it work for you or did it work for you? Cool, does anyone have a bad experience with a B&I group? No? Business, network and international. It is a lead exchange group that meets every week and there's only one person per category. So like one website designer, one insurance agent, one realtor and you pass leads back and forth on a weekly basis. There are thousands of them across the world and there's probably like seven in Hamilton. If I was gonna guess and I went to the B&I website because there's a lot in every city I've ever been to. The issue with B&I is there's so, they're basically big clicks of people talking and if you don't fit in with that specific B&I group that might not be the B&I group for you. I had to visit like seven B&I chapters before I found one where I felt comfortable with the other members. But what's cool about B&I is you can visit any chapter once for free. So go to B&I, visit a chapter and when it's all about giving, that's why I like about B&I, it's all about giving out other information to people. You're not trying to get leads from people. You're trying to give leads to other people but also have them know about you. So when I was in B&I, I did everything I could to give leads to everyone else as much as I could and that was noticed. So they would try to do the same thing instead of just saying what did I get this week? I was like, oh, well, I met someone who needs wedding photography and I know a photographer and I'd give them that lead or whatever it is. But again, you have to be very specific with the group and find the one that works for you. Also, B&I only works if you can commit to it. You have to go every single week. If you can't go, you have to have a substitute or get kicked out of the group. It's a very structured group but it does work. I talked to a lot of people that don't like B&I because they're like, well, I went once and I didn't get any leads after like a couple months. B&I also, I found, takes about six months depending on the cost of your service to really get a lot of good leads. But the lower your price point, the more leads you'll get because people are more willing to take a risk on passing a lead on a $500 project versus like a $50,000 project. Chambers of commerce, anyone here part of their local chamber of commerce or rotary or anything like that? Yeah. Anyone here that finds those networking groups are useful to them? Anyone here that finds those local chambers or networking things aren't useful to them? Okay, great. So chambers of commerce are very similar. I love chambers of commerce but there are so many in every region, find one that works for you, become a member and become active in those memberships is when I used to attend chambers of commerce, I said, what do I do? I'm like, oh, hey, my name's Bob-a-Bella, what do you do? And then they would tell me what they do. And then I'd be like, and then I'm thinking by my mind, how can I sell them a website? How can I sell them a website? Oh, you're a plumber, great. Do you have a, you know, and I would instantly go back to how can I sell them something instead of saying how can I add value to you? And then a really good friend of mine, John Rampton, he was rated by Time Magazine as one of the largest Twitter influencers. He has like two million followers. He writes for Time, Newsweek, ABC, all those major publications. He's like, demo, I give out as much, I help people as much as I can and that's how I get all my business. And he's closed multi-million dollar companies and all this stuff. And he's like, I've done the math. Every 10 people that I help will equal this much value in revenue. Every 100 people that I help will equal this much value in revenue. And every 1,000 people will equal a million dollars of revenue. You know, those are his rough numbers. So that's how my philosophy is, is on web ventures, I'm uncommissioned. If someone wants to talk to me about how we can maybe help them from a fiscal perspective, I'm happy to talk to them. If it works out great, if it doesn't, that's fine. If they just need a referral, like, oh, hey, let me refer you to someone at C-Panel. I think your product would be really good at their confidence. I'm gonna do that regardless because it's gonna be good for the brand and good for me just by helping other people. And that's what I do in my evangelist job is just try to help people as much as I can and not try to sell our products because at the end of the day, that's gonna take care of itself. If you have a decent product or service and you're just nice, you're generally helping people, people will remember that and pass your card and information around. And that's where Chambers of Commerce and B&I come in really handy. But for both of those, for me, it took six to 12 months of being really active of giving before I was able to reap those rewards back. But what's really nice about these is that B&I and Chambers of Commerce are so easy to sell $500 projects to. I know someone that was in a Toronto-sized metropolitan area and they joined their local Chamber of Commerce at B&I and they're like, hey, we sell $500 websites, we'll have them in a week. And they show some, they give like 20 examples of like five page sites that are basic templated sites and they get orders all day long. They literally do one site a week, sorry, one site a day. They do one website a day and they're just getting the orders because it's a good product that people are willing to pay for. Think the dry cleaners, the mom and pop pizza shops, these people that just want something basic and they were gonna go to Wix or Weebly because they saw the Super Bowl commercial but then they're like, oh, I know this guy, 500 bucks, yeah, the websites look fine. Great, I'll go with you and then you can focus on kicking them out. And if you have a process that's able to have a website that's done in under three hours, you're making pretty good money because your billable rate's a little less than 150 an hour at that point. Yeah, a little bit more than 150 an hour and that's a pretty good billable rate and you're not spending a lot of time acquiring it plus then you can get the footer link on the referrals that say, hey, site built by ABC Designs. Please click here and you can also automate some of this process and have just order forms on the website but you have to be clear on what you're buying if you're doing this low-end stuff. And if you are already able to consistently sell $1,000 projects and keep yourself busy, great. Keep doing that and then push for $1,500 and then push for $2,000. But if you're not able to consistently able to fill your funnel, start lower just to build the base. It's not saying you have to be there forever and I've never once had a client get mad be like, well, you changed your prices. Yep, I did. And if you wanna keep working with me this is what it's gonna cost. In fact, I've had clients that had certain companies that we just didn't like working with and we would change the rates just for them. They'll be like, you know what? It's just not our new rates 200 bucks an hour but it was 150 before. Yep, but for years 200. Well, I don't wanna pay that. Well, that's fine. I can recommend someone. And more often than not, I've been surprised at people that have been like, well, I wanna keep working with you. Well, that's what's gonna cost to keep working with us because you're just building these small projects, you're interviewing clients and you're not stuck in these long relationships. I can't tell you the amount of times I've taken larger projects because it was $5,000 and I was poor and I was excited to get a $5,000 project that ended up sucking away three months of my life and I hated every second of it because it was $5,000. But when I started doing the low-end stuff, the clients were happy and it only takes 10 of them to equal the same $5,000 and I was happier at the same time. And then the secret weapon to all this is, sorry, that was a weird break. The secret weapon to all this is hosting. Who sells hosting for their clients? Okay, who lets their clients choose their own hosting? Okay, here's my biggest recommendation is I don't like selling hosting to clients directly because I find that gives you in a very weird support middle ground unless you're doing consistent work for that client. If you're just handing over a one-off site and then you do the hosting, first of all, I hate the annual billing letter of, oh, here's my invoice for the yearly hosting and then have to try to drag the money out of these clients. That's the bad part about low-end clients is they're not the best at paying their bills for renewals on the hosting and I just hated dealing with all the billing on that plus they call you for every little question even if it's not something that's inside your support. Now if you're selling maintenance as a service and like with maintenance plans that's something you can add on and then that's a different story but if you're just selling the website and passing it off let them get their own hosting but get an affiliate account at a host you like or trust. I've never, nope, I've never once had a client not take the hosting I recommend across thousands of clients ever. And a standard shared hosting account where you get a 20% commission on shared hosting on a $75 annual hosting plan. For 200 sites a year, you get $3,000 in affiliate revenue your first year, $6,000 in affiliate revenue your second year, $9,000 in affiliate revenue your third year because they're compounds because you get more clients each and every year. Now these dozen figuring attrition you have to figure in probably a five to 10% attrition rate if you're looking at averages but for basic numbers here also you could go after a managed hosting plan like I used to put my clients on a $50 a month plan that I got 50% commission on and at scale it works out. I make a good part-time income just on those hosting referrals for clients I haven't touched in years. Year four, $12,000, year five, 15, year six, 18, year seven, 21, year eight, 24 and the more you add the more compounds because everyone needs hosting they don't know where to go if you find a host that you trust and recommend that will work well with how your workflow is this is your secret weapon because clients don't care about affiliate links. You have to let them know that you get a little bit so here's how I word it because some country like in the US you have to let them know if it's an affiliate link legally. I say, hey, I recommend XYZ host in motion hosting and I really recommend it for these five reasons and hey, please use my link and just so you know I do my price can be so low in the building because this helps me subsidize some of that it doesn't change your price at all most people are like, sure but because they buy the hosting themselves you know what happens? The host gets all the calls of this isn't working or that isn't working or my website's down or my website was hacked your host gets to be the bad guy that says yeah, you didn't update WordPress and you got hacked and that's your fault you know and it's so nice to just wash your hands of all of that mess now if you're selling maintenance plans and you want to sell hosting you definitely can but I just I find it wasn't worth the hassle at those lower end clients and the higher end clients I didn't want to take the risk so I would recommend a host and these are always hosts that I had good relationships with so I could like call support and they know who I was or whatever but this is such a good way to get some residual income that a lot of people don't ever think about and then the last thing I wanted to kind of talk about was community online so there's so many ways you can get leads so this is the link to our user group on BoldGrid it's not just for BoldGrid users it's for WordPress users it is on the book of faces so I apologize about that if you're not a Facebook person but if you don't do Facebook during the WordPress Slack also go to Joomla Meetups go to Drupal Meetups everyone's like but I'm a WordPress person yes, you can make so much frickin' money at another CMS project because you'll meet these people that are die-hard about Drupal and Joomla and they don't want to touch those projects and sometimes those clients just want a WordPress site and they don't want a Joomla or a Drupal site well guess what, you can be that guy or that girl that they recommend and you can be the same and sometimes they change when I started getting Joe Sonny here to WordPress events he would never touch anything but Joomla in fact his name was Joe Joomla and Joe did you just rebrand? Yeah and you're not doing WordPress stuff as well right? See and you can also bring people into the fold now he's a competitor so we don't like him as much but seriously just when you meet people and you help people they'll give it back to you because sometimes people like the CMS a choice and I don't care what CMS you use I'm not gonna say WordPress is the best or the worst or anything because tools are tools just don't be one that's literally my tagline because you can build the same site in five different ways the workflow that works for you I like WordPress, that's cool it's amazing, keep doing it but there are people that don't that's okay but they will have people that need that WordPress expertise and you can be that person also go to other just start up events in Minnesota there's a bunch of events just for new businesses when they register in the state you can get a list of who's a new business go to those cocktail hours through the chambers or other networking group because you can meet so many cool people that just need your product or service the work is out there Denver did a study this is about four years ago 65% of businesses in Michigan don't have any web presence at all period 65% of all businesses in Michigan don't have any web presence at all not a Facebook page not a Google page, not anything and these are small mom and pops these are people that are working out of their homes that need to be online because we live in a world that if you don't live online, you don't exist and I firmly believe that open source and democratizing publishing is a right to be able to have people share their voice and you have the power to change and allow people to have their voice but you have to make it accessible for people and you can get paid in the process so please don't take any of this talk and think that I'm saying oh, you're not worth the money and WordPress should be cheap I am not saying that at all charge what you're worth but only if you're busy if you're not busy, you need to change something and then when you start getting client referrals you can start ratcheting it up and a lot of times these clients once they're successful after one or two years and they have some money they'll remember that you were helpful they'll remember and maybe when they need a full project like a custom project you're gonna be that person that's been there every step of the way to charge them those additional things and you can still do the low end websites if you want, hire somebody hire someone for 10, 15 bucks an hour have them make websites in a few hours they can learn WordPress in the process you're still making good money and that's where I think the biggest Achilles heel with these freelancers are is they just care too much about their ego quite frankly and they'll defer making money until they get a project that makes them validate their self-worth but at the end of the day you need to make money to pay your bills otherwise you need to be doing something else so that is kind of the end of this talk I do have about 10 minutes for questions because we have a 15 minute transfer period between the talks because I believe 45 minutes so does anyone have any questions, comments, death threats? Anything? There you go, perfect and by the way just keep doing a lot of talks take a bunch of 20s and never give it back, you're fine yeah, I used to there was a service that I used to API on called I Need Articles that would write content for me through an API and I would double that fee so they charged $1 for 400 words I would charge $2 for 400 words and I had it automated in a process that worked out okay in the beginning but then what I ended up doing is I found a copyright I really trusted and I would just refer people to them if they didn't have content on their own and then he would give me website leads and we just kind of dealt with it that way instead of trying to, I used to put it in a project bid but it was really hard, it was just easier to say if you're not gonna get your content ready to me just go talk to Bob, I recommend him and he would just do the same for me but I did try to automate it for the really, really low end stuff for a while with one of those copywriting services and it was fine but it just, it's so hit or miss because you don't know what you're gonna get till you get it back so if the client, you can say all day long that you pay for it and you get what you get but at the end of the day the client still needs to be happy with the content although funny story is I used corporate Epsom as my go to default, lower Epsom I can't tell you how many banks and credit unions thank to me for writing their copy for them I can't, in hospitals, oh you wrote the copy it's amazing, I didn't even know you would do that I didn't, it's just placeholder text did you read it? So if you were looking for a really good Epsom corporate Epsom I found works the best for companies so yeah, I used to use back to the future Epsom and then that also didn't work but corporate Epsom sounds real enough especially if it like banks and stuff that people think it's like kind of legitimate any other questions or comments? No, okay, I know this ended a little bit early again I always, whenever I do a talk for the first time I try to keep it a little short in case, you know, however it goes thank you so much for your time if you need to reach me these are my handles and everything and I do got cards up here for both bold grid and web ventures if someone wants to grab one you can always reach me later and I'll be around for the rest of the day and then at 3.30 in this room there'll be a panel about page builders which I'll also be on along with some other people so thank you.