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As a freelance web designer
there are a number of different methods for creating income than just making websites. Some of those are more passive than others and there are quite a few that won’t generate income immediately but could easily lead to more business. Understanding these methods and their benefits for your business can help in slow periods of web design work or even completely change your business model depending on the profitability.
A lot of the ways that you can diversify your web design or web development business completely depend on your skill set and personality. Being outgoing and not limiting yourself to a very narrow skill set are the best ways to take a step forward in ensuring that your business will not only succeed but grow.
Web Design Blogging
As the most recommended method of diversifying your income it is widely used and less widely successful. It depends on if you can stay focused on blogging and provide unique, and desired content. Simply rehashing what others have said in your own words won’t make you a successful blogger. It takes passion, skill and a lot of hard work to be good at blogging.
After that, you have to convince others that you do indeed bring worthy information to the table. Then comes getting advertisers that are willing to pay you to have their brand on your blog. Blogging does come with one other added benefit beyond just advertising for web designers. With blogging you can generate traffic and help your website in the SERPs and therefore generate more interest to your core business.
Web Design Consulting
You already do this with most of your clients by providing valuable information about how you can help them with their project. Expanding beyond this to help others with your knowledge can easily provide another avenue for revenue. Simply making suggestions to improve a website is valuable information for others and you shouldn’t always give it away for free. Other web designers and developers may be interested in knowing how you do this or that and be willing to pay for that information. This is one of those skills that does require quite a bit of experience and it isn’t for everyone.
Teach your web design skills to others
You can do classes or seminars locally, nationally or potentially internationally. If you consider yourself pretty good at a specific skill and you think others would agree, share your knowledge. Libraries are a great place to start, they usually allow you to rent a conference room for pretty cheap and don’t have a problem with you charging people to attend your event. They’ll even promote it on their website for you, which could help but you should promote it on your own as well.
Another great place to have an event is at a Coworking Collaborative. Typically places like these have conference rooms and classrooms available for rent with a large audience of people interested in technology, web design, web development and marketing. A lot of the collaboratives will even promote it for free within their membership which could easily fill your seats if you have a good topic.
Create a web product
Depending on your experience you could develop a product that would generate either recurring income or interest in yourself and work. This requires that you not only have a decent idea but the skills to implement that idea. You could always partner up with others that may have the skills you lack and need your skills to complete the project. There are project collaborative services such as Blellow or CollabFinder that can help you find others that may be interested in working with you without having to pay someone. Although, you would probably want to cut them in on any profits that might be generated. Obviously.
This is probably the best way to generate passive income, but requires a lot of work initially in not only development but coming up with a good idea and being able to spare the resources to develop the idea.
Photography
Most creative people can easily diversify themselves into other fields, photography being one of those that a lot can easily get a hang of pretty quick. I’m not suggesting you should go out and offer to do a wedding or graduation but taking photos and then putting them for sell on stock photography sites can create some extra passive income if you are decent and take enough pictures. You will probably need a good camera for this, your typical point-and-shoot isn’t going to cut it.
Hosting Services
There are a ton of services available that will allow you to resell hosting. You can easily have this as an addon to your customers and make a profit each month or a one time upfront kickback. You want to be careful with this though, taking on hosting will add extra work for you if you are offering it as your hosting. If the site goes down or there is some other hosting-related trouble you had better be prepared to provide that customer service or you could ruin your relationship with your client for something that is beyond your control.
You could also either buy a server or lease one and essentially be a host for your clients and charge them whatever prices you want. You need to have quite a bit of server administration experience to be able to do this. Anything goes wrong and it would be your responsibility to resolve. Not to mention the added work of monthly collections for hosting. A service like InvoiceMore could help with this a little though.
Another way to make some income with this without the extra duties is to recommend a host to your clients and send them your affiliate URL. You will still make money off them going with the host but they will be aware that if something happens it is the host at fault and not you.
Stock Art
If you are good at illustration this may be a great way for you to generate some extra income. You can create various illustrations, icons, or general stock art that other may be interested in purchasing and putting them on some of the stock art websites. Again, this requires a pretty specific skill set in order to implement and be successful at. A few good sites to work with would be iStock Photo or Fotolia.
Writing Articles
This is a little different than blogging, in that you would be writing articles for other websites whether blog or otherwise. There are a ton of website’s out there look for talent to write articles for them, most offer a per-article payment that can help generate income and others look to hire on a more full time basis (a fixed number of articles a week typically) but would still give you the ability to keep up with your freelance business. This would not only generate some extra income but it would also raise your clout among other like-minded professionals which can further help your core business model. You can find some writing jobs at FreelanceSwitch or Problogger.
Selling virtual goods
You can create and sell virtual goods on several different services, such as SecondLife, There.com or Kaneva which can help you to make a decent extra income if you can get a grasp on the tools used to create them combined with a good eye for design. Depending on the service you can create buildings, clothing, cars, and much more and generate real monetary income from selling them.
Learning another skill
If you are a designer and haven’t branched out to learn CSS/HTML or a programming language you can make yourself more valuable by learning another skill. Depending on what skills you have there are a multitude of different options that can open up doors for new projects for you. Whether it be flash, ruby, PHP, CSS, HTML, python, logo design, or simply learning to design a website for those of you that are programmers.
There are several other ways that can help you to generate more income online that may not be listed here such as selling stuff on ebay or getting into an MLM scheme (not recommended). Let me know if you have found other ways to diversify yourself as a freelance web designer and make money online whether passive or simply generating alternate income streams.
Topics: CSS, Design, Flash, Freelancing, Open Source, PHP, Programming, Web Development
