The money isn't in the website, it's in the related services.
If you're targeting SMBs, you can almost treat the actual site design/dev as a loss leader.
Offer comprehensive packages that guarantee you long-term recurring monthly revenue, rather than a just a one-off "website development" service.
For an example, a "premium" hosting/management service is an easy sell.
* "Your own virtual private server with dedicated IP address and hardware resources"
* "Uptime monitoring" (automated/free)
* "Site & Server Security" (one-time hardening of your CMS and/or any other attack vectors + apt update / apt upgrade every couple weeks)
* "DNS Management" (create or change some DNS record every few months, if ever)
* "Site backup and restoration" (one click on Digital Ocean and many other providers), etc.
* "x free hours per month of updates, no rollover" (will often go unused)
My agency has SMB clients paying up to $250/mo for hosting/management alone (actual cost: $10-15 per client).
Easy money.
Next, we have SEM and local SEO (citation building/management and reputation monitoring).
The beauty of these services is that they're relatively easy to scale and/or outsource to some white label provider. In the case of local SEO, tools like BrightLocal basically do all the work.
Even if you don't want to take this route, you can still differentiate with strong backend development skills.
For example, we secured one contract because we offered a creative solution to integrate the website with the client's legacy on-premise CRM (which has no API), which no one else had the first clue how to do because there isn't a WordPress plugin for that (slight sarcasm).
If you're targeting SMBs, you can almost treat the actual site design/dev as a loss leader.
Offer comprehensive packages that guarantee you long-term recurring monthly revenue, rather than a just a one-off "website development" service.
For an example, a "premium" hosting/management service is an easy sell.
* "Your own virtual private server with dedicated IP address and hardware resources"
* "Uptime monitoring" (automated/free)
* "Site & Server Security" (one-time hardening of your CMS and/or any other attack vectors + apt update / apt upgrade every couple weeks)
* "DNS Management" (create or change some DNS record every few months, if ever)
* "Site backup and restoration" (one click on Digital Ocean and many other providers), etc.
* "x free hours per month of updates, no rollover" (will often go unused)
My agency has SMB clients paying up to $250/mo for hosting/management alone (actual cost: $10-15 per client).
Easy money.
Next, we have SEM and local SEO (citation building/management and reputation monitoring).
The beauty of these services is that they're relatively easy to scale and/or outsource to some white label provider. In the case of local SEO, tools like BrightLocal basically do all the work.
Even if you don't want to take this route, you can still differentiate with strong backend development skills.
For example, we secured one contract because we offered a creative solution to integrate the website with the client's legacy on-premise CRM (which has no API), which no one else had the first clue how to do because there isn't a WordPress plugin for that (slight sarcasm).