Recurring revenue is what helps me sleep like a baby at night. Getting to the point in my business where I had a reliable stream of income every month to pay the bills has been the biggest transformation my business has gone through.<\/p>\n
While The Website Owner\u2019s Manual<\/a> has been the biggest asset that helped me sign nearly every customer onto some kind of recurring revenue, it\u2019s thinking outside the typical care plan offerings that have helped me charge higher rates.<\/p>\n To help customers get excited about care plans<\/a>, I\u2019m always looking for ways that I can provide them with even more value\u2014 especially if it\u2019s something tangible. By focusing in on what\u2019s important to them, I\u2019m able to build completely unique plans that fit their needs.<\/p>\n The more alignment my care plan can have with my customer\u2019s goals, the more I can charge. Over the past year I\u2019ve implemented this \u201cbespoke plan\u201d strategy, and increased my average care plan by over $50 per month\u2014 which quickly multiplies into a very lovely total.<\/p>\n This has included going beyond “care” and creating ongoing services that help promote and grow their company beyond the mundane maintenance tasks (something I refer to as my ‘Continued Success Program’ when explaining it to my customers).<\/p>\n You don’t have to only sign more customers up to a care plan\u2014 by selling subscription services<\/a> you can increase your plan rates with the customers that already know, like, and trust you.<\/p>\n One of the easiest sales for a web agency to make is hosting. Every website\u2019s gotta have it, and it saves clients hassle if you provide that for them so they don\u2019t have to worry about the technical bits.\u00a0 If you don\u2019t feel comfortable being their \u201ccontact\u201d for hosting issues, consider referring them to a host with an affiliate link that produces monthly commission.<\/p>\n One of the best ways to protect a website from failure is to have regular and complete backups. You can set up an automated system to schedule backups and store them for your customers. This can be done for free and generate extra revenue every month.<\/p>\n As the populace becomes more aware of the dangers online\u2014 getting clients to understand the importance of security becomes easier.\u00a0 There are both free<\/a> and paid solutions<\/a> for website security that you can mark up to keep your client\u2019s website safe.<\/p>\n Keeping plugins up-to-date is an important part of owning a WordPress website. You can setup a system like MainWP<\/a> or ManageWP<\/a> to make updating plugins a breeze and give your clients peace of mind.<\/p>\n As web developers we end up using a mix of both free and paid plugins. Luckily for us, many of the paid plugins come with developer licenses that allow you to deploy these on your client\u2019s website at a discount (vs paying for them 1 site at a time). You can pass these discounts down to your customers and still make a healthy profit.<\/p>\n Uptime Robot<\/a> is a free tool that will ping your client\u2019s website every 5 minutes to ensure it\u2019s online and send you a notification if it goes down. This is especially important for high-traffic sites or eCommerce stores.<\/p>\n Most reliable hosts have moved to offering free SSL certificates\u2014 but someone still has to install it and make sure it\u2019s working right? You can charge for that, and having a SSL is just about mandatory in today\u2019s world.<\/p>\n Privacy policies are pretty much legally required on most sites today. Our buddies at Termageddon<\/a> offer a fantastic way to keep your clients protected and grow your recurring revenue through their agency partner program. They offer several different types of policy documents depending on your needs.<\/p>\n You can offer to split test (or A\/B test) different versions of landing or sales pages for your clients to improve their conversions. SplitHero<\/a> offers a dead-simple service with pricing that makes it easy to come away with pockets of profit.<\/p>\n The best part about digital marketing is that it can be updated almost instantly. Offer to give you clients a set amount or unlimited updates to their website to keep it fresh and from becoming outdated over time. I love using Project Huddle<\/a> to manage all this. I can keep track of all the requests and my customers love how easy it is to use.<\/p>\n We know keeping a website up-to-date is important, but businesses rarely invest enough resources in producing new content for their website. Offer to write blogs<\/a>, or implement new content on their website for them! If you aren\u2019t a copywriter you can always outsource it and mark it up slightly for your time.<\/p>\n Website performance is beginning to play a more critical role in search engine results success. Offer to perform regular performance checks and implement enhancements (like image optimization, caching, etc.) to ensure you client\u2019s website is performing at its best.<\/p>\n The easiest way for a client to grow isn\u2019t always more traffic\u2014 it\u2019s often much more effective to convert the existing traffic at a higher rate. You can do this through a variety of ways like split testing<\/a>, improving UX, or placing more prominent calls to action.<\/p>\n Install HotJar<\/a> on your clients site and send them regular reports that show how visitors are behaving on their website. This can lead to other recurring work like conversion optimization, website updates, or performance optimization.<\/p>\n Create a custom dashboard using Google Data Studio<\/a> to display analytics information in an easy-to-digest format for your customers to have a better understanding of their website\u2019s use online.<\/p>\n Track the ranking of your customer\u2019s most important keyword phrases using software like ahrefs<\/a>, Moz<\/a>, or SEM Rush<\/a>. This can lead to other recurring services like content creation, search engine optimization, or link building.<\/p>\n You likely have more knowledge than you give yourself credit for\u2014 and certainly more than your customer has about the online space. Put that to good use by offering monthly or quarterly consulting calls to help improve your client\u2019s digital marketing & online presence.<\/p>\n For the clients who like to get their hands dirty, you can offer one-on-one training sessions to help them learn new skills. I like to conduct these over Zoom calls and it\u2019s an easy way to earn a few extra dollars and reinforce your value.<\/p>\n Just about every business needs ongoing graphic design services. Even if you\u2019re not a graphic designer you could hire a service like Deer Designer<\/a> who offer unlimited design jobs for a flat monthly fee. You can spread these across multiple clients and make easy money for nothing more than \u201cproject managing\u201d a few requests per month.<\/p>\n If your client has a website, they likely have some sort of social presence. You can help improve their marketing by posting for them, coaching them on what to post, or outsourcing a white-label partner to take care of it for you.<\/p>\n Almost like an insurance policy, you can offer to fix and remove any malware that makes its way onto your client\u2019s site. You can do this yourself (if you have those ninja skills) or pay someone to do it for you.<\/p>\n There\u2019s actually about 5 sub-services that could go under email marketing. Offer to setup, train, create templates, or completely manage email marketing for your customers. I often will just set everything up, create some templates and provide ongoing support and training for a flat monthly fee (and I never have to write any content!).<\/p>\n Become a funnel creator and help your clients get more warm leads from their website! This can often require other ongoing services like email marketing, creating landing pages, and content creation. Win, win, win!<\/p>\n Setup ways for clients to generate more online reviews and offer to manage those reviews by responding to them. It\u2019s an easy thing to do, and sometimes your client is unlikely to keep up with on their own. It\u2019s easy to prove the value of online reviews (just Google the statistics!).<\/p>\n You can create citations or directory listings by hand or hire a service like BrightLocal<\/a> who will handle it all for you for next to nothing. I like to promise a minimum number each month and let them trickle out.<\/p>\n Services like CallRail<\/a> allow you to track calls to a business and better understand where their calls are coming from (which can be very valuable data!). You can even have all the calls recorded and offer to review the calls and ensure quality.<\/p>\n Broken links are bad for UX and Google don\u2019t like them \u2018neither! There are plenty of ways<\/a> to scan for broken links and it\u2019s an easy fix in most cases. This is great for bloggers or sites with lots of external links that may change unknowingly.<\/p>\n You don\u2019t have to get all black-hat to build quality links\u2014 and links still have value! This goes hand in hand with citations but you can take it up a notch by finding and pursuing other opportunities (like blogs that rank high for your customers target keywords).<\/p>\n The statistics on abandoned carts are mind boggling. You can setup a sequence to try and recapture those leads and improve your eCommerce client\u2019s conversion rate. It\u2019s like having a second chance\u2014 and your customers will love that!<\/p>\n This is one you don\u2019t see often, and I\u2019m not sure why! You can audit<\/a> your client\u2019s competitors to find out what they are doing successfully and where they fall short which will help you create a strategy to outrank and out-convert them.<\/p>\n Customer with a blog? That\u2019s likely a customer with a lot of comments\u2014 and unfortunately a lot of the time they are spam. Your customer isn\u2019t going to want that on their site and you can ensure it doesn\u2019t happen. Customers will<\/i> pay for that!<\/p>\n Pay-per-click is a complementary service to building a website. Even if you don\u2019t have the PPC chops to pull it off, there are plenty of white-label agencies who would be glad to help. You might not make a killing, but it can lead to building more landing pages and conversion rate optimization services.<\/p>\n Much like email marketing, this is a big topic\u2014 but there are plenty of services you can offer that fall under SEO, and giving your customers the opportunity to continually rank higher is something they will love.<\/p>\n Some additional ideas in the SEO family:<\/i><\/p>\n If you’re not feeling super confident, my buddy Pete Everitt has a fantastic course<\/a> on becoming an SEO wizard.<\/p>\n Companies often think their job is done once the sale is complete\u2014 but that couldn\u2019t be further from the truth. Offer to setup after sales nurturing email sequences to encourage repeat business and referrals for your clients. If you’re unsure on this one, Funnel Packs has a great package<\/a> that covers all the details.<\/p>\n Who doesn\u2019t love saving time? Zapier makes us all happier! Even the smallest of automations can make you look like a wizard and your clients will fall in love with the time saved. It requires a bit of knowledge (I highly recommend James Rose’s Zapier Mastery Course<\/a>) and some creative thinking, but you can leverage this into a recurring service they won\u2019t ever want to live without!<\/p>\n Create a members area your VIP clients can access for premium articles, training, and resources. Rope this area off on your website and offer a monthly access fee so they can get to your best content.<\/p>\n I can come up with ideas for landing pages for just about anything. It\u2019s a great way to help your client promote new things, or places to drive paid ads to. Try offering 1, 2, or 3 pages per month for a flat fee.<\/p>\n Adding a CDN is quick, easy, and dirt-cheap. This can help offload some of the work from your server, and deliver big assets (like images) from elsewhere. I’ve used Bunny CDN<\/a> and paid pennies a month for a single site.\u00a0 This is a great solution to improve performance on photo-heavy websites (like photographers).<\/p>\n Much like offering an SSL certificate, what I offer in this scenario is nothing more than getting things setup in Gsuite, tech support for simple questions, and the convenience for my customer not having yet another bill to pay (it’s all included in mine). Sure, you can’t mark it up much, but each little dollar adds up.<\/p>\n How many times have you encouraged a customer to keep up with the blog, but they fail? Using Content Snare for an online portal<\/a> to collect content could be a great addon service that helps instruct and motivate clients to get their content written.<\/p>\n When clients decline your maintenance plan, it\u2019s not because your plan isn\u2019t great\u2026 it\u2019s because they don\u2019t truly understand how much work it takes to maintain their site on an ongoing basis.<\/p>\n Even if you do your best to explain this, you risk sounding like a salesperson pushing for another buck on something they don\u2019t think they need.<\/p>\n But what if you could help your clients understand the challenges they\u2019ll face without<\/i> you having to make \u201cthe pitch\u201d<\/i>?<\/p>\n Delivered to you in the form of an easily customizable & reusable document, The Website Owner\u2019s Manual<\/a> (or \u2018WOM\u2019 as its come to be known<\/i>) is the perfect way to communicate the benefits of a care plan in a tangible way.<\/p>\n Inside, your client will be provided with all the information they need for the proper care & maintenance of their website. This includes technical details (like their host, domain registrar, DNS records, logins, & more), a maintenance schedule (for daily, weekly, monthly & annual tasks), and a troubleshooting guide for the common problems WordPress websites face.<\/p>\n While any client will appreciate such a helpful document, it\u2019s true power lies in its unique ability to inform clients of all the maintenance required for proper website upkeep.<\/b><\/p>\n Since most clients don\u2019t have the time or expertise needed, your maintenance plan becomes the perfect solution saving them from themselves.<\/p>\n We\u2019ll provide you with the customizable template<\/b> and email scripts<\/b> we\u2019ve used to convert thousands of dollars in recurring revenue<\/b>, along with training videos<\/b> that will teach you how to implement this into your agency\u2019s process.<\/p>\n Have you considered outsourcing your care plan duties?<\/p>\n For some this could mean being able to scale their offerings and open up care plans to more and more clients. For others, this is a way to take the mundane tasks of updating websites off their plate so they can focus on things they\u2019d rather be doing.<\/p>\n For me, this has opened a whole new door of revenue. I have, for years now, denied<\/span> offering maintenance on sites I didn\u2019t build (because I didn\u2019t want the hassle of \u201csomeone else\u2019s stack\u201d). But being able to outsource those customers I can still bring them on as a client, get paid, and NEVER LIFT A FINGER!<\/span><\/p>\n That\u2019s all thanks to MaintainPress<\/a>! We recently had MaintainPress’ owner, Jeffery Patch, on the show<\/a> to talk about managing care plans (especially when you begin to scale).<\/p>\nHere are 38+ things I offer, I have offered, I’ve seen offered, or am considering offering as ways to increase the value in my care plan and increase my recurring revenue.<\/h3>\n
1. Hosting<\/h4>\n
2. Automated Backups<\/h4>\n
3. Security<\/h4>\n
4. Plugin Updates<\/h4>\n
5. Plugin Licenses<\/h4>\n
6. Uptime Monitoring<\/h4>\n
7. SSL Certificate<\/h4>\n
8. Privacy Policies<\/h4>\n
9. Split Testing<\/h4>\n
10. Content Updates \/ Changes<\/h4>\n
11. Content Creation<\/h4>\n
12. Performance Optimization<\/h4>\n
13. Conversion Optimization<\/h4>\n
14. Heat Mapping<\/h4>\n
15.Analytics Reports<\/h4>\n
16. Rank Tracking<\/h4>\n
17. Consulting<\/h4>\n
18. Training<\/h4>\n
19. Graphic Design<\/h4>\n
20. Social Media Management<\/h4>\n
21. Malware Removal<\/h4>\n
22. Email Marketing<\/h4>\n
23. Lead Generation<\/h4>\n
24. Review Management<\/h4>\n
25. Local Listings \/ Citations<\/h4>\n
26. Call Tracking \/ Recording<\/h4>\n
27. Link Scanning & Fixing<\/h4>\n
28. Link Building<\/h4>\n
29. Abandoned Cart Recovery (eCommerce)<\/h4>\n
30. Competitor Research<\/h4>\n
31. Comment & Spam Monitoring (Blog)<\/h4>\n
32. Paid Advertisement (PPC)<\/h4>\n
33. Search Engine Optimization<\/h4>\n
\n
34. After Sales Nurturing<\/h4>\n
35. Automation<\/h4>\n
36. Member-Only Access to Resources<\/h4>\n
37. Landing Pages<\/h4>\n
38. Content Delivery Network<\/h4>\n
39. Email Hosting<\/h4>\n
40. Setup a Client Portal<\/h4>\n
Have you seen The Website Owner\u2019s Manual?<\/h2>\n
Don’t have time for all this?<\/h2>\n
\n<\/span><\/p>\n