1. Design for Your Niche
One of the best things you can do as a web designer (or any creative freelancer, really) is to carve out a highly specific niche. For instance, you could design websites for:- Real estate agents
- Female-owned businesses
- Restaurants in your city

- The company name sounds like it should be working for law firms.
- The design is super buttoned-up — traditionally-structured, muted color palette, and minimalism at its best.
- Copy is professional, honest, and straight to the point.
2. Answer Their Questions
Think about how much time you spend dealing with objections as you talk to prospective clients. That’s either because their expectations haven’t been set properly before meeting with you or they’re a bad fit. If you use your website to answer those questions, though, you can significantly decrease the amount of time you spend on sales calls with prospects. One way to do this is to explain in the simplest terms what your clients get. Here’s how I handle this for prospective copywriting clients:

3. Create a More Impressive Portfolio
There’s absolutely no question that your website needs to include an awesome portfolio of websites. Just make sure that any samples you include in your portfolio:- Are 100% something you’re proud to show off;
- Are relevant to your target audience;
- Are consistently designed.

4. Establish Trust
As a web designer, you have to build trust with clients if you want them to pay top-dollar for your services. While you can certainly do that throughout the web design process, why wait? Use your website as a vehicle for establishing trust now. One way to do this is with your portfolio. Another way to do this is by including testimonials or, at the very least, logos from clients who are happy to connect their brand to yours. Interactive Strategies uses a dedicated banner on its home page to show off brands who’ve trusted them:

5. Simplify Next Steps
If you’ve been doing this for long enough, I bet you can anticipate what prospective clients’ next steps are after they’ve visited your website. For my business, I know that they’ll see my site and then reach out for pricing. However, I know that I can’t actually answer that question during a first phone call. I have to review their needs, business, industry, and a whole host of other details before I can provide a quote. So, I give them two options:- Fill out a contact form if you have further questions;
- Schedule a 15-minute call with me through Calendly.

Design Your Website to Sell While You Work
Would you like to stop spending so much time on job boards, social media, and in search trying to find new clients? You already know how to build websites to help your clients sell their businesses, so why aren’t you doing the same for your own?Suzanne Scacca
Suzanne Scacca is a freelance writer by day, specializing in web design, marketing, and technology topics. By night, she writes about, well, pretty much the same thing, only those stories are set under strange and sometimes horrific circumstances.
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