Selling & Building Same-Day Websites

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How long does your average website build take? 

3 weeks?  3 months? 3 years? (Yeah, I just finished a 1,000+ day project)

No matter how long it takes, most of that time is spent waiting...

...on content

...on revisions

...on approvals

...on payments

How much actually design & development time is really needed for your average brochure site? If you had everything you needed, I bet you could do it in a day.

And that's exactly what my buddy Hans was doing just before he sold his agency (and started Termageddon).

His same-day website program was not only a hit with his clients, but at $2,900 each, the amount of time his team saved made it more profitable than the big, drawn out projects. 

By reducing projects to a single day of design and development:

• Clients had a clear understanding that ‘today is the day’ to put in all their requests because they understood (and respected) the process.
• After a hard days work, you’re done! You can go home, feeling accomplished and not having to stress about a deadline.
• 4 same day dev’s per month equals about $12,000/month in revenue (not to mention maintenance revenue).
• Great way to get a project done and right into an ongoing maintenance plan.

But how to you get everything in place and ready for build day?

How do you execute a one-day build?

How many hours does it include?

What about things (like SEO) that take more time?

What happens if it doesn't get done before the day's end?

And how do you sell clients on this concept?

Those questions and more are being answered in this live event!

Below is a overview Hans prepared to help you plan your Same-Day Website builds!

Why consider offering Same-Day Websites?

The Pros of Same-Day Websites:

• Get projects done in one day (no sleepless nights stressing about upcoming deadlines). It feels good to start and finish a project without it dragging on.
• Clients understand they have 8 hours until site launch. “Today is the day we launch your website”. Customers have a much better understanding of prioritizing.
• Great pay - average at $150-$200/hr easy.
• Get to maintenance revenues faster. One day turnaround on projects means lots of conversions to maintenance plans.
• Instantaneous feedback - When a client is a part of the design feedback process where they provide instant feedback, they feel a better sense of ownership of the design process. As little adjustments get made, they respond instantly with their thoughts, moving things along quickly.

The Cons of Same-Day Websites

• Not a good fit for all businesses. This is a niche offering.
• Requires hands on communication for 8 nonstop hours.
• Exhausted after a hard day’s work
• Can’t build advanced stuff; could get boring/repetitive.
• Could potentially cannibalize your higher priced packages.
• Lack of vetting can get you into trouble. Make sure the customer knows exactly what they’re getting (and exactly what they are not getting).
• As you grow, you can get ‘bogged down’ with more and more maintenance clients. Have a strategy in place for ongoing support (GoWP.com, etc).

What was included in a Same-Day Website:

The client would get 8 hours one-on-one time and could choose any of the following:

1. 5-7 page website with features such as:
   1. Contact form
   2. Newsletter signup
   3. Google analytics
   4. Google maps 
   5. Yoast SEO integration and basic page optimization
2. Other (stuff they could have done prior to the meeting):
   1. Google my business setup
      1. PDF guide on how to manage google my biz from smartphone
   2. Content creation
   3. Image license identification
   4. Logo creation

We encouraged clients to provide Google Docs with copy for each service they provide, even if it is just scratch notes for each page. 

Flow Overview

Marketing - how to drive leads to your One-Day Website service

Offering same day websites is a potent idea. People respond very well to it. They remember it. You just need to get it out there and get some experience under your belt.  Below are some ways you can do this.  

Form partnerships.

Think to yourself ‘what businesses/industries need time sensitive, fast-turnover type websites’?

1. Event planning service providers - Organizers of events often want a website to showcase their event and possibly take sales through a third party payment link.
2. Digital marketing agencies - Offer same day websites for landing page/conversion websites as well as supportive websites for landing pages. 
3. Media purchasing companies (like billboard companies) - Oftentimes, companies run campaigns branded a specific way and need a dedicated website for it.
4. PR companies - For example, PR companies that help companies with reputation management. If something occurs where a company gets some kind of bad press, these firms jump in and move quickly to provide their side of the story. They may want websites that communicate this information, and they may need a quick turnover.

Be open-minded.

The majority of my Same-Day Website clients spanned a lot of industries and different needs/goals for their websites.  What you need to know is how to ask the right questions to see if they’re a good fit for a same-day-website type service.

Launch your own same day website:

Create a self standing website discussing your same-day-website services.  Build it in a single day to demonstrate your capabilities! Start ranking for ‘fast websites ___(city)___’.

Exposure yourself via non-profits.

Build some same day websites for non-profit organizations in the hopes it gives you exposure, and gives you the ability to learn what works and doesn’t work. Do it 7 times a year, which accounts for about 3% of your entire amount of days you can be billing for. Consider it an investment into marketing (it can drive leads to you.. hopefully).

Partner with other agencies (#TABforlife)

If you go ‘all in’ on same day websites, partner up with an agency that doesn’t do same day websites, and throw business both ways. You’ll want to make sure to partner with web agencies that charge MINIMUM $5k for a website, thus no overlap.  

• Reaching out to agencies to form these types of partnerships is done countless times each and every day, but offering same day websites is a relatively new concept and may get your 

Have Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) in place

For this offering to work, you need to have your processes in place and you must know them in and out.  The date of development is intense; don’t let disorganization get in your way. That’ll be bad for you and your client whose paying you $3k to be on your A-Game.

I would recommend creating a list of questions/tasks for each of the four stages below.  

Sales - how to close the deal and what to ask to verify they’re a good fit.

What are the clients needs? 

Do they have requirements that make it not a good fit for Same-Day Websites? 

Some questions you may want to add to your own Same-Day Website SOP:

1. What is your goal of this website?
2. What information do you want your website to disclose?
   1. If you have multiple products/services, do you want a page for each one as well as an overview ‘products/services’ page?
3. What type of functionality do you need? (provide options, ie contact form, etc).
4. What pages do you want on your website? 
5. Do you have imagery or can I share a link with you to a repository of images that you can choose from?
6. Do you have a logo? 
7. Do you need search engine optimization for this website? 
8. Do you have a domain? If yes, do you have the login info?
9. After launch, do you want maintenance? 
10. Where are you located? Can you meet in person to work together at all?

Selling is simple

After understanding their needs, tell them they’d be a good fit for your same day website service.  Explain what the program is. Chances are they’ve never heard of anything like this before (at which point in time you can let them know how much ground you can cover in a day, perhaps reference other client sites youve worked on or your own agency site if you built it in a day).

After they agree to doing a Same-Day Website, send them an invoice and when paid, they can select a date for their upcoming development day.

Pre-day Setup - how to encourage customers and yourself to prepare for their big day.

Prepare your client:

Have pre-written emails lined up ready to go, asking for items that are absolutely required as well as assets that can help you cover more ground on date of development.  I’d recommend a company like ActiveCampaign that sends a series of emails prepping the client.  My must-haves were domain login information, # of pages, functionality defined (ie if a contact form, who does it get sent to internally, etc).  My ‘want-haves’ were copy, logos/branding (aka things we can do during the development date, but it will mean we have less time to work on the website itself).

Also, make sure the client understands that during the date of development, that they need to set aside that one day to provide instantaneous feedback on the website project. This is why I highly recommend doing this in person, because when doing it virtual, sometimes the clients get distracted with other things.

Prepare yourself:

Purchase and set up a license with your hosting provider, install theme, plugins, maybe even create the pages and make a first attempt at global header/footer navigation.  Review all documents that customer has provided and start to visualize how the date of development will go.

Same-Day Website day - processes and flows breakdown

You need to orchestrate the entire day and communicate to your client progress. Lay out with them first thing in the morning how the day will progress. 

Review with them what they’ve provided and what is still missing.  Define together roughly how much time will go to each page. This helps because if one page in particular is taking a while, you can communicate this fact and they’ll have understand that they need to make some decisions so that you can move on.  Sometimes I’d take a break on one page and come back to it after we knocked out a couple other tasks.

I started these meetings at 8am SHARP with the client. Usually I got to the office before 7am to have an hour to myself to start everything up. 

Have printouts of the day, objectives, etc. Share with your client too. 

Assign tasks to your client while you are working. Perhaps they can take some time to write in more copy, or find more images through a site like shutterstock, or work on getting their Google My Business account set up. 

Ask client to leave a review online while you are in the process of launching their completed website.

Day after - items to provide client // maintenance // debrief internally/improve processes.

After date of development, send a recap email, covering everything you did. Provide WOM and any other pre-made assets you’ve created to help them run their new website as successfully as they can.

Review your SOPs and make improvements to it.

Future ideas:

Launch a ‘half day website service’ for single landing pages. Need to be careful here; you don’t want a ‘single page’ to be filled with 10+ sections.

Conclusion

Same-Day Websites isn’t for everyone, but when it is a good fit, it can be a wildly profitable, exciting and simple model to run that makes your clients extremely happy. 

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A special thanks to Hans and Termageddon for providing this awesome content to the community! If you don't have a privacy policy or terms of service option in place, then I highly recommend checking out Termageddon and learn how you can increase your recurring revenue by taking advantage of their services — built for agencies!