Web Designer Business Model

[3dyDesign]

Warning: This thread is NOT a breakdown of the best business models for those who want to make an (excellent) living designing websites.

I have noticed that the majority of you are fairly smart, and some seem to be successful earning money on teh interwebz.

So I was wondering if any of you works or wants to work as a web designer. What ways to *ahem* get rich do you have in mind?

From my personal experience, you will have no problem earning a BOLD: (I know it doesn't work, but just pretend that the next word is in bold) decent living if you do have some skills and do good to high quality work. However, you will work more and earn the same as pretty much anyone with a 9-5 job. At least for the first year(s).

But will you eventually, with the years, start getting results from your marketing moves and you'll have enough clients coming to you to raise your prices and refuse the ones with ridiculous expectations?

Or you think a designer should earn a part (or more) of his money selling themes?

But here are the problems with selling themes: If you can't market them extremely well, you've been wasting your time. If they are not of super-top quality, you've been wasting your time. If you made a stunning theme for a niche in which people are not interested to get a theme, you've been wasting your time. If you're pricing it more than people are willing to pay, you know what's gonna happen. And if you're pricing it too little, you've been wasting your precious time.

So what else? Blogging? eBooks? Consultance?

A combination or all these money sources?

Really, just post here what you think would be a good business model for a web designer.

 

[shindig]

It's a hard gig any way you slice it. So many people in 3rd world countries working for $3 an hour.

Sooo many web design firms that simply oversee the outsoucing. So many stock template sites with thousands of themes.

Customization of other people's projects is where you can charge decent money.

I think getting good at SEO principals and converting/optimizing people's existing sites to search friendly sites can be a valuable, easy to market skill.

Building a solid portfolio of your work is key to showing your value.

I built my friend a website that wasn't doing very well, even with an adwords campaign, I had all kinds of graphics for buttons and shit. One day in 3 hours I remade it as a very simple, but clean site, filled out all the alt tags for any images, stuffed keywords in numerous places, registered it on google places and threw up a google coupon for a discount on the service. The next day he had people trying to use the coupon with 0 advertising. He ended up getting more work than he could handle from it with 0 advertising other than google.

There's some real value in showing people traffic before and after.

 

[dafonz]

The problem with being *just* a web designer is that you're trading hours for dollars and you can only raise your rates so much.

If you want to get rich, you have to leverage - figure out what makes you good and figure out how to standardize the process so you can hire people out to do it. Think McDonald's as an extreme example.

Doing so leaves you working at a higher level where you can provide direction to your workers, but leave the stuff that takes a long time to them. It's what other people on this forum are doing when they automate things. Same shit, different workers.