Today, we're going to discuss how to actually go about finding somebody and how to be able to afford them even if you have very little money, or worse, are dead broke. You are really going to love some of these methods.
Okay, you've decided that you want somebody to do your site design for you. You're great with advertising and know a lot about your niche but when it comes to HTML and graphics, you are like a fish out of water. It's just not your thing.
The first thing you do is go to Google and look up “Web Site Design.” You will find quite a few listings. Web designers are a dime a dozen. Because of this, prices have come down quite a bit over the years. You can probably get a sales page done for about $200.
When inquiring about the company's services, make sure you ask all the questions you can think of. Ask them if they handle graphics as well as HTML design. Just because somebody knows HTML doesn't mean they can do graphics as they are two different animals. They may tell you that they outsource the graphics part of the design. If they do tell you this, please understand that you're going to be paying more for this service than you would if the company did their own graphics. Why? Think about it. If they're outsourcing, then they have to pay that person to do the work. If they want to make a profit on you then they have to charge you a little extra for the work that's done. If you could have gone directly to the person who is doing the graphics, you would have ultimately saved some money. Just keep this in mind.
Okay, but what if the company gives you a quote and you just don't have the money to pay them. What do you do? Well, there are several things you can do depending on what the company you're planning to hire will agree to.
The first thing you can do is offer to pay them, whatever the cost is, out of your first sales. In other words, as soon as you start to get money coming in, you'll send them their payment. Not many companies will agree to this but new start ups might. Give it a shot.
Another thing you can do is offer to place an ad to your subscribers for their services. Now, obviously if you're dead broke, you probably don't have much of a list. But let's say you're not broke and have actually had some success but right now you have a cash flow problem. You can certainly then offer to send that ad to your list. If it's 5,000 subscribers, the company may just agree. Why lose potential sales over $200?
Finally, you can offer to place their link on your site when its done saying “designed by…” This will be free publicity for this company and just might turn into a lot of sales for them if the site they designed for you is a real killer.
In our next post on outsourcing, we'll go over a few more tips and things you can do.