Without increasing rates, individual freelancers can increase their freelancing income. Here are 10 ways that can be offered to clients
Often freelancers assume freelancing is all about trading time for money. True to an extent but one can always increase freelancing income with additional services that can help boost the overall income of a freelancer as well as move out of the concept of trading time for money.
I will share how you can do it exactly but it will be from a developer viewpoint. However, one can apply the same for any freelancing niche.
Individual freelancing is a great choice of career and you can decide what technology you want to work on, how you want to be working, and from where you want to be working and what type of clients you want to work with.
With so many advantages, it has one big disadvantage which is you cannot scale it up. It is quite similar to a doctor’s profession where he can only serve certain patients in a day. Similarly, individual freelancers have limited hours in a day, and no matter how hard you try, you can only serve certain clients in a day.
So if you can serve only a limited number of clients, you are left with few options to increase your income. One of them is of course to increase your rates. However, you can increase your rates beyond a point. Like for example, a PHP developer won’t be able to charge $1000 or $2000 per hour.
So how do you keep on increasing your income as an individual freelancer?
The answer is to offer additional services to your existing clients. It can help you make more money but more importantly, it will help you scale up freelancing by not trading time for money.
So without much ado here are some of the additional services that you can offer as an individual freelancer.
1. Recommend Business Solutions
Recommend tools that can help boost your client’s online business. Make additional income in the form of either an affiliate commission or being a referring partner to such tools.
You can recommend them various tools and solutions like CRMs, newsletter solutions like Moosend, advertising solutions, Google Workspace, etc.
For stock images and video sites like iStockPhoto, Pond5…
For SEO sites like Ahrefs and MOZ …
And the list can go on and on.
Build a list of tools that can help your clients build their business. Help them and refer them to the right solutions.
Remember, always recommend tools that you are confident about, or else if you just recommend for the sake of commissions, you can lose the client’s trust.
2. Recommend Design
Every website needs a new look. You can refer your existing clients to new design sites from sites like ThemeForest or if your clients are on WordPress refer them to Design Frameworks like Genesis or thesis.
BizTips (every other blog I am associated with) uses Genesis and so it’s very easy for me to recommend Genesis to my clients.
Being a developer, I always recommend my clients to use 99designs like Design Contest Sites for Logo. Every client who has taken up a design contest for their logo has loved the results.
You can grab affiliate commissions for referring the designs as well as get additional work in working on the new design as well. A completely win-win situation for the freelancer.
3. Recommend CMSes
At times, your clients are not sure what kind of CMS is right for them. It works well for me. My clients are predominantly using vBulletin or Xenforo and I recommend them WordPress along with premium WordPress plugins.
For some clients who want to add communities to their existing sites, I recommend Xenforo but I don’t make any extra income recommending Xenforo because they don’t have an affiliate program.
The point that I was making earlier is to recommend good products that you genuinely like and not suggest to them for the sake of commission.
Money should be the by-product of the recommendation and not the only motive to recommend it.
Similarly, there are many clients where I recommend Shopify.
I am sure now you get the point I am trying to make.
4. Payment solutions
Any website may need payment solutions and recommending payment solutions can work really well for freelancers.
Moreover, I have recommended Payoneer to so many clients to pay me. For Payoneer, I make $25 per referral as a client, and once they pay me $25. The best part isn’t the affiliate commission but the better forex rates that help me make more money for the same amount that client pays me.
Look for a specific payment solution that can help your clients. Normally Stripe and PayPal work for all International clients and Instamojo and PayU work well for Indian clients.
Create a list of payment solutions that can help your clients’ needs and try to partner with them for referring clients or develop an API to easily connect the payment solution for your choice of CMS.
5. Refer hosts / CDN
Many of your clients may have issues with their current hosts and you can refer them better hosts. I do recommend my clients to Siteground, Cloudways, and Linode depending on the client’s requirement. My clients just love them.
Moreover, I also refer my clients to Amazon AWS or MaxCDN. Because I use them for my websites, I can suggest exactly which one may be the best for them depending on their requirements.
I do make a commission referring to them, but I am also very transparent about what I will be making for their referral at no extra cost to them. On top of that, I also provide discounts to move the site if they purchase the new hosts using my affiliate link. A win-win situation for me as well as my clients.
6. Frills based HTML
Web design/development can involve additional services where you can offer your clients some good on-page frills added.
On-page SEO is an added service that every web designer can offer. Remember I am not suggesting complete SEO solutions but just additional services like SEO friendly HTML, Rich Snippets Integrated HTML, Open Graph support, Twitter cards support…
The list is long.
As an example, one of my clients wanted to have ratings and reviews to be into Google and the HTML I created had the rich snippets of review integrated into the design changes.
7. Content Packages
I see this as a very underlooked option by web developers and designers.
More often you will see designers add lorem ipsum as content to the final HTML design but you can always upsell with your web design services to add actual content for the site.
Real content for real pages instead of filling an about page or the services page with Lorem Ipsum content.
A content package where you can provide them with some content to get started instead of Lorem Ipsum.
8. Site Upgrades
CMSes are a smart choice for most clients. Each of those CMSes will require an upgrade from time to time.
One can offer your clients a site upgrade option or offer them monthly or yearly charges to keep CMSes and their respected plugins updated to the latest version.
9. Marketing Solutions
Every business needs marketing and online business is no different. You can provide social media marketing solutions or email marketing solutions as additional services to clients.
The services can be as simple as creating a Facebook page to a complete social media marketing solution.
One can argue web developers or designers aren’t good at marketing. The whole point is to learn new skills in things you love doing.
One can even partner with someone to provide those services.
10. Consulting
Provide additional services as a consultant where you can be paid higher for the consultation.
As an example, I provide a lot of SEO consulting services for my clients instead of actually doing an SEO for them. I don’t write content or build links but provide them the complete SEO plan for their website to take it to the next level.
Similarly, for e-commerce, I consult to help them technically as well as to identify the kind of products they can sell.
Final Thoughts
You are an expert in your niche. Look what all you can offer more to your clients and get paid to recommend it.
