The Captain Coder Podcast

One of the most common questions that gets asked by new website freelancers are “What should I charge?”

Especially if you’ve worked mostly for other companies or you’re just relatively new to the industry, it can be hard to know what your price points should be.

After all, if you look on job boards like Upwork (where you’re competing against people from all over the world), customers want to pay as little as $500 and upwards of $10,000 for a website.

Where exactly do you fit in?

In today’s episode, I’m going to walk you through the seven factors you need to take into account with pricing your websites and then the options to charge for those websites you’re building.

Want to hear a secret that no customer will tell you?

They really don't care how you do what you do. It's true!

In fact, they really only care about what they actually understand - what they're going to get out of how you do what you do.

Here's the somewhat sad truth about humanity - we really just care about ourselves. Our problems, our needs, our businesses. While yes, it can be great that you're using PHP to make their website, they don't care. They don't care if their website runs off the latest javascript library either. They do care, however, what the website you're building is going to do for their business.

In today's episode, I'm going to break down exactly what your customers care about and how you can communicate to them in a way that will improve your sales and even your reviews. Let's get started.

Do you ever feel like the content you're creating is falling on deaf ears?

I think one of the hardest concepts in marketing to grasp is how to speak to an ideal customer, target audience, following a buyer persona - whatever you want to call it.

It's literally the first thing I take my students through during our Digital Marketing class because if you're not speaking to the right people, all of your other marketing efforts are a bit moot.

But where in the world do you even begin with creating a persona and following through on that?

Today, I'm going to take you through the exact steps to create a buyer persona, decide on the pieces that you need, the right things to focus on with your personas, and how to discover what your target audience actually wants. The best part? This process will work for your own business and when you help clients with their websites and marketing.

Mentioned Resources:
Hubspot Interview Questions
Buzzsumo

As "user friendly" website builder programs like Wix and SquareSpace have grown in popularity, it probably feels like it's almost impossible to find someone willing to pay more than a few hundred dollars for you to build them a website. But that doesn't have to be the case.

In fact, I consistently charge clients thousands of dollars to build them a website and I rarely get pushback on my prices.

Want to know how I do it? Of course you do!

I'm going to walk you through the common objections you'll face from prospects and how to answer them; what you're actually creating for them (hint, it's not necessarily a website); how to work for the right clients, and how you can communicate your overall value to capture those prospects.

I believe so strongly in building websites following digital accessibility best practices that I literally made it the second episode of this podcast.

But I taught digital accessibility to my MBA students just a couple of weeks ago, and I noticed some common misconceptions around the concept itself and why it's important.

I also noticed that most of my students cared less about building an inclusive website and more about what building a website that way could do for them.

That's not terribly surprising is it? After all, don't most of us just care mostly about what something can do for us?

Sadly, the answer to that is yes.

As we enter the final month of the year, I thought it was a good time to cover this again and talk about what Digital Accessibility does for you and the businesses you help. After all, when you're following best practices for accessibility online, you're doing a ton to improve your overall UX and on-page SEO, too.

It's worth the time investment, I promise.

Mentioned Resources:

• Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.1 (WCAG)
• Moz Article on Anchor Text
• Generic Link Text Guide
• Rev - Transcript & CC Generator

I’m going to go on a bit of a rant today, but I promise if you listen all the way to the end, you’re going to learn the number one way to improve your sales and repeat customers.

Literally, the number one thing that has kept my clients coming back to me, referring me to their friends and contacts, and giving me great reviews.

Want to know what that is?

Of course you do!

Listen to today's episode to find out.

When you’re building a website for a client, there’s a lot of things you need to think about. Their objectives and goals with the website, whether they need to make direct sales or get more calls, how they intend to earn an ROI for their investment – all things that you have to keep in mind before you build.

But the cool thing about a website is that it can do more for a business than just be a sales and marketing tool.

It can also help to automate processes in a business and make that small business owner’s life just a little bit easier.

When you work hard to make your client’s life easier, well, I don’t have to tell you that that can turn them into an incredibly grateful client that becomes a referral machine.

But mostly, it’s about giving your clients the ability to get more out of their website. If you’re taking the time to rebuild a website, now is the perfect time to find ways to help simplify your client’s life and provide better customer service interactions through simple automations.

The best part? Most of the items you automate can be done relatively easily, especially if you’re building within a WordPress website.

I’m going to break down for you just what you can automate and the questions you need to ask your client to decide what they need for their own businesses.

There was a younger developer in one of my Facebook groups a few weeks ago. She was expressing frustration that her clients “didn’t understand” that they needed to provide her the copy and tell her exactly what they wanted her to build. She’s just the web developer who’s going to build it for them.

Oh sweet honey child, if only that were true.

In today's episode, I'm going to break down what your responsibility as "website builder" really is and what you can do to get there.

Do you put a lot of care into your own projects for clients, but often find yourself neglecting those same processes when it comes to your own?

I'll admit, I'm 100% guilty of that. I'm starting a new project for myself that I'm hoping to have live by the end of the year, and I decided that I needed to follow my standard process. But not only that, improve on it!

That got me to thinking. As I work through this personal website redesign, what decisions need to be made or thought about before you write a single line of code, think about a design, or write any copy?

Let's dive in to the 3 key decisions you'll need to make and think about before you build a website. And the best part? These decisions will set you up for website success like nothing else.

When someone comes to you to build a website, you're the expert. But what does that mean about more complex issues like privacy compliance laws? Are you in charge of that or is your client?

There are multiple privacy laws in effect throughout the world, and most of them all boil down to one thing – being able to opt out of having our personal data and behavior being tracked across the internet.

Consumers want to feel like they have some privacy left online. Honestly, while us marketers and website designers and developers are concerned about data loss, we should be more concerned with providing great customer service.

That includes allowing people to opt-out of being tracked. Making these shifts today, and allowing your browsers to have this level of control over their data, will only work to build their trust.

In this episode, we’re going to explore what exactly should be on your plate, 3 easy steps you can take to make a website compliant, and what your client can be responsible for, or at least help you out with.

Mentioned Resources:

• GDPR Cookie Consent plugin
• Solivagant Legal Privacy Policy templates