How can I become really good at creating webflow websites? I want to be able to charge $1500+ a website.
Stop creating Webflow websites.
Yes, you read that right.
I’d bet that your web design skills are already good enough to charge $1500+ for a website.
But I’d also bet that your sales skills (and confidence) aren’t good enough to charge $1500+ for a website.
A few years ago, I sold a $12K website project to a client.
I didn’t sell it to the client by raving about how pretty my websites were.
Instead, I talked about how much revenue the new website would generate for his company.
I positioned the new website not as a wonderful piece of art — but as a solution to his low-conversion problem.
I showed him that with an increase in conversions, he could be generating an extra $100K+ per year from his website.
It was one of the easiest sales I ever made.
Why?
Because I didn’t talk about how good I was at creating websites.
Instead, I talked about how I could solve his problem — and help him make more money.
The website was just a means to an end.
Stop focusing on how good you are at creating websites.
Start focusing on how much value your websites can create for your clients.
If you can generate a 10x ROI for your client, you can charge far more than $1500.
Can a personal website hurt your job prospects?
Having a personal website is far more likely to help than hurt your job prospects.
Here’s a story from Tiago Forte about the importance of having a personal website as a job seeker:
“I remember when I was working at a consulting firm, I was responsible for hiring an employee.
They were going to be a junior analyst — the lowest ranking person in that brand of our consulting firm in San Francisco.
And even back then — this was 2012 — there were two piles for resumes:
- People with a website
- People that didn’t have a website.
It was that clear.
And maybe 10% at most had a website.
Just having the basic: this is who I am, this is a photo of me — and sometimes the website was nothing more than their resume in a website.
But it showed initiative, diligence, attention-to-detail, motivation, agency — all of these things that we wanted.
And I imagine there will be a third pile: people who not only have a website but have a blog.
They’ve actually synthesized their thinking.
Really, it’s a form of leadership. To stand ahead of the crowd in that endless line of people all being judged by the same criteria.
They stepped forward and said I want to be judged by the quality of my ideas — and these are my ideas.
I really think increasingly, every position in every company is going to have the equivalent of that.”
If you’re writing and sharing about your professional life, having a personal website can only help — whether you’re looking for a job OR clients for your business.
What is the best app or website for writers to express their talent?
If you’re writing in a business context:
- Quora: On Quora, people ask questions, you write answers to those questions in order to help them. Quora is perfect because you’re never starting with a blank page — you get a prompt to start writing. It forces you to think about making your writing useful.
- LinkedIn: On LinkedIn, people expect to learn about your B2B products or services on LinkedIn. LinkedIn is where you can freely market yourself and write to get found by your potential clients so you can eventually connect with them.
- Your Personal Website: Your personal website is your online hub. Unlike any other website or app, you own it. WRiting on your personal website helps establish your personal brand — creating the perceptions others have about you when they find you online.
By writing on these three sites, you’re not only improving your writing skills and expressing your talent, you’re also…
- Helping people and providing value
- Marketing yourself and/or your business
- Attracting opportunities through your personal brand
The benefits of writing online are endless.
What are great websites, and what makes them great?
Ed Latimore — author, blogger, and retired boxer— has a fantastic personal website:
If you take a look at his website — and read the purpose of his website— you can see how it’s designed to help him achieve his goals (through providing value to his readers):
The purpose of my website is to teach what I’ve learned from the different phases in my life. Since I’ve experienced a lot, I think this provides me with a wide variety of topics to write about and my website reflects that. I write about everything from growing up in the hood, to sobriety, to forgiveness. If I don’t know it well, I don’t write about it.
Behind a website like Ed’s is a strong process.
I asked Jon Persson, the brand strategist and designer who built Ed’s website, his strategy for building it:
I’m a brand strategist at heart, so we always start by developing a brand strategy to guide not just the website project, but all aspects of the personal brand. Then we refine the brand messaging. Making sure you know what to say and how to say it in a way that is both compelling and genuine before you get into the website is key.
The next step is to prioritise objectives. When you try to make your website do everything, you will inevitably create a Frankenstein’s monster that accomplishes none of your goals. So we list out all the business and user objectives first, and then ruthlessly prioritise them until we end up with just the three most crucial ones.
Then we actually start building the website: layout sketches first, then a high-fidelity prototype, and finally a working website. After launch, we look at how it performs and make optimisations over time.
Fundamentally, it’s the same process whether I work with a personal brand or a big organisation. The mindset is a little different though: with a personal brand, you have to make sure that what you do is congruent with the real-life person behind the brand. Just because something might make business sense, doesn’t mean it’s right for that person.
Great websites don’t just look great — they create an outcome for the business or person.
And you can only create an outcome when you have a strategy for doing so.
There is a lot more that goes into a website than making it look pretty.