My side project is managing several clients websites on a subscription based service. My buddy and I started a web design agency for small companies. It was just us two and we bootstrapped everything and were in the process of building several apps for the dozen or so architectural firms we were working with when he died suddenly of an aortic aneurism. It was such a shock to me and so I just shut the company down.
Several clients begged me to keep going because we did such a good job doing the SEO, their sites were generating a ton of great leads and we had built a way to track the leads and send out first response emails with a phone call follow-up with 2 hours of the firm getting the email. Because of the fast turn around, they were beating other firms to the punch and we unknowingly had created a significant business advantage for them.
Those 4 clients pay me for 8 hours of work a month at $65.00/hour. If you do the math, I'm clearing about 2K/month just to manage their sites, send out analytics and make content suggestions. It was a nice side hustle to have a few years back when I was laid off and was able to lean on this income until I got hired again.
Can you clarify what you mean by “leads” here - is this the sort of “we found fifty names and emails that might be interested”, or is it a landing page that collects a email and phone number for when someone enters them?
I am not trying to accuse you of something weird - it’s I hear a lot of lead generation as a basic business need and I never quite understood the real mechanisms - I only get the slightly passive landing site approach or cold calling
They were what sales people would refer to as "qualified leads". We had two simple questions they would answer before submitting the contact form. It really helped to define what clients were looking for and their expectations. This made first contact a lot more productive, and allowed the firms to get clients into their design process and get a commitment a lot faster. For many of the firms we were working with, this meant better leads than the ones they getting on various other platforms like Houzz and then they started investing more in their content as a marketing approach then they did before.
Several clients begged me to keep going because we did such a good job doing the SEO, their sites were generating a ton of great leads and we had built a way to track the leads and send out first response emails with a phone call follow-up with 2 hours of the firm getting the email. Because of the fast turn around, they were beating other firms to the punch and we unknowingly had created a significant business advantage for them.
Those 4 clients pay me for 8 hours of work a month at $65.00/hour. If you do the math, I'm clearing about 2K/month just to manage their sites, send out analytics and make content suggestions. It was a nice side hustle to have a few years back when I was laid off and was able to lean on this income until I got hired again.