For many businesses, proof of concept poses a huge barrier to growth and success. They must prove to their potential audience that the product they’re selling is worth the investment.
Without that, it’s almost impossible to achieve any degree of success. For web development companies, this is not often such a pressing issue. The target market has a clear understanding of the need for web development and design.
The bigger challenge is how to cut through the noise and generate meaningful revenue in an overcrowded industry where customers have hundreds of choices from which to select.
Three Ways to Increase Your Revenues
Whether your web development company is still fairly new or you have hundreds of clients in the fold, expanding your revenue is an inherent and primary focal point for web development companies. That being the case, here are five of the most practical and sustainable ways you can increase your revenues going forward.
1. Reevaluate Your Business Model
Start by studying your current business model. According to entrepreneur Ross Beyeler, all web development companies ultimately sell one of three things: time, technology, or thinking.
Unfortunately, most are focused almost entirely on the first item: time. When you’re selling your time — i.e., billing for individual projects that each require a certain number of hours of work — you’re always going to be limited by the number of hours in a day/week.
And if you want to expand your revenue, you have to take on more work or hire more people. An easier way to grow revenue is to shift your business model to include selling technology and/or thinking.
“Rather than doing the same (or similar) thing for clients repeatedly, invest your time upfront to create a piece of technology that can be resold to any number of customers with no, or minimal, time involved on your behalf once it’s built,” Beyeler suggests.
Many web development companies find it initially profitable to build and sell themes, apps, or software. Once designed, these require very little ongoing time commitment, which makes them perfect for generating extra income without additional effort.
The third option is to sell your thinking, which essentially means monetizing your knowledge. This might take the form of writing a book about how to build a web development business and sell it to other web developers.
Or it could look like developing a course for building websites. These require time on the front end, but should evolve into steady, passive income on the back end.
2. Introduce Auxiliary Services
More and more, businesses are looking to hire companies that can help them in all areas of their digital presence, not just web development or web design. They want to hand everything off to one firm and get a suite of services in return.
As a web development company, you can serve this desire by reselling services. Search engine optimization (SEO) and web development go hand in hand. Thus, it makes sense that your business should offer SEO as part of your client package.
But you don’t need to hire a team of full-time SEO experts to accomplish this. Instead, you can simply hire a private-label SEO company to handle your clients’ needs (though it will be delivered under your brand). This essentially empowers you become an SEO provider without having to do all the legwork.
3. Increase Your Prices
The final suggestion is the most obvious strategy, yet somehow the least employed. When it comes to boosting revenue, web development companies are often too afraid to raise their prices for fear of losing clients.
But this is exactly what many ought to do. Increasing prices to reflect your time, experience, and skills is a natural part of doing business.
Though you might possibly lose a few of your most price-sensitive clients, you’ll make up for these small losses with the meatier margins you’ll gain from your other clients. You’ll also put yourself in a position to appeal to more premium clients who seek to work with “high-end” providers.
Adding it All Up
Revenue isn’t the ultimate measuring stick of success. As you know, massive revenue figures without healthy profit margins represent nothing more than a waste of time and resources.
So as you augment revenues generated by your web development company, make sure you keep an eye on your profit margins. If you do, you’ll set up your operation for success for years to come.
Larry Alton is a professional blogger, writer, and researcher. A graduate of Iowa State University, he’s now a full-time freelance writer and business consultant.Currently, Larry writes for Entrepreneur.com, Inc.com, and Forbes.com, among others. In addition to journalism, technical writing and in-depth research, he’s also active in his community and spends weekends volunteering with a local non-profit literacy organization and rock climbing. Follow him on Twitter (@LarryAlton3), at LinkedIn.com/in/larryalton, and on his website, LarryAlton.com. To read more of his reports — Click Here Now.
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