Hello,
I was curious, how people find good paying cleints for WordPress website development. I'm a small agency founder and work mainly on fiverr, but the customers usually come with very low budget with high expectations. So I was looking to explore some alternatives.
Upwork has higher budget clients. Just keep your budget high, when I was younger I’d drop prices to get clients and those clients were always the biggest headache.
If you are local I know a lot of people have success advertising locally. Usually people who don’t have a website and need one go local first if they aren’t technical.
Fiverr is the problem here. It has played a huge part in destroying market rates.
Shift to Upwork.
Get clients in real life, stay away from all online platforms.
I have been really focusing on local prospecting especially small business owners/service providers. I have found that charging more filters out the worst type of clients who take up a disproportionate amount of time.
Hi, what does your “good customer” look like?
I am a customer (actually I try to do everything myself because I don’t trust sellers) the only way you have to convince me that you are my ideal supplier would be for you to show me many examples of websites so that I can choose the header I prefer, the footer I prefer, the functions I prefer…. without surprises, there would always be the doubt of the graphic part: will you be able to interpret my tastes?
At the end of everything I will want to know what the total cost is: will you be able to predict it precisely?
Also I believe that you will want to be paid in advance, right?
You understand that from my point of view, the choice will be difficult and you will have to convey a lot of trust in me…
To conclude I believe that the best customer will be the one who has few doubts about the final result, only in this way will he not have negative surprises and will not ask you to change everything… maybe ;-P
you’ve just said that you’re on fiverr, a place where people are looking to spend as little as possible. try searching for someone in your own country or someone locally instead. reach out to businesses, offer them your services.
freelancer sites are not places which you’ll become rich off of.
raise your rates
I do mostly local and a lot is referral based.
I fell into doing one local restaurant I frequent and they praise me to everyone.
Many of their customers at the bar are blue collar guys with small businesses so Ive been doing all their sites/branding. Construction, renovations, concrete, tree trimming, etc.
I also mingle with people there and they know what I do so Im the go to.
Im also listed local on Google Places.
I have a starting rate so I weed out those that only want to pay $200… They can go to Fiverr…
You must read, watch and try everything sales.
Learning structured sales will teach you what you seek.
I’ve been freelancing for a living since 2004 and in the 2008 financial crash I went to my local library and read the sales books.
This saved my business and has made me at minimum $50k per year and max $100k per year but since I live in New Mexico I don’t have to make more than that since the cost of living is low and I’m married.
Sales and learning solutions selling will help you convert yourself from just building WordPress sites to being known as a consultant.
Start by going to https://jonathanstark.com and listen to his podcast, buy one of his books, read his free resources, blog posts and especially watch this video which will teach you why [Hourly Billing is Nuts](https://youtube.com/watch?v=B1b7QlQILRo)
Learning sales is the skill that will easily separate you from the crowd.
And yes move to Upwork and make sure to follow[my rules for winning jobs there](https://www.reddit.com/r/Upwork/comments/1epd84y/comment/lhl3j3w/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=mweb3x&utm_name=mweb3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button).
Freelancer here, been freelance for almost 15 years and never worked at an agency. Every “good” client I “found” came from grinding and hustling. When I wanted to give up, I just hustled more.
The biggest parts of the hustle that you need to realize are: (1) it’s a numbers game, there’s no magic source of only good clients—out of 50 leads you might end up with 1 “good” client who not only has a budget but who can see your value and is willing to trust you and pay you; (2) get good at learning to find which leads are worth spending time on—the best clients don’t need to learn (and certainly won’t learn from you) why it’s better to hire you than someone offshore for $2 per hour; the best clients know that already.
At some point you’ll reach a level where referrals will allow you to hustle a bit less, but I still get referrals who I end up turning away because they’re not good clients. Of course, another skill to learn is how to do that politely and finesse it so that the referral source doesn’t dry up.
Just keep working at it.