In recent years there has been a shift in how digital professionals and agencies view their businesses. For many, gone are the days of looking for the next project. Whether as a solopreneur or in a growing business adding recurring client revenue has become a priority. It’s easy to understand why this shift has occurred. Current client relationships are easier to maintain and expand than bringing new clients on board. While there is almost always a desire to add new clients and new projects, finding recurring revenue in existing client relationships is key to building a business with a strong foundation.
So, what are the most effective ways to add recurring revenue to your own business? Believe it or not, there are lots of options available to offer your clients. Even better, most of these services can be combined to create an even larger ongoing revenue stream for your agency. Here are five ways digital agencies and freelancers can expand their operations, thrill clients, and generate even more cash flow. We will cover each in greater detail in future posts.
- Website maintenance and support – Let’s start with one of the most common ways that digital agencies create ongoing revenue streams. Most websites need ongoing maintenance to keep them running optimally. From software patches to security scans, keeping a website healthy is a necessity for your clients.
- Website hosting – Years ago digital agencies and web professionals stayed far away from hosting because delivering the service was typically more trouble than it was worth. However, in recent years more and more hosting providers have created reseller and partner programs that make offering hosting to your own clients a breeze. Additionally, these hosting providers can handle most of the server maintenance and upkeep on your behalf, making this service a potentially high-margin way to make your clients even more sticky.
- Marketing – Search engine optimization and managing social media accounts are the two most common ways to offer ongoing marketing services. While some would say that SEO is more complex than offering a simple service to your clients, it is important to remember that most businesses don’t have ANY optimization happening. Using an SEO plugin or making sure site pages are keyword-optimized is a very valuable service that clients universally need to grow their own businesses. Even a small amount of improvement can be worth it. Social media posting is often the same; simply having a presence is an order of magnitude better than no presence at all. Offering to help clients build and manage their Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Yelp pages can provide a big benefit to their business…and additional revenue for yours.
- Data and analytics – Just as most client websites don’t have proper maintenance and optimization going on, they also often lack any insight into what visitors are doing once they visit their website…or if anyone is even visiting at all. Adding Google Analytics or another tool can be a huge benefit. Helping clients understand what that data actually means can be even more valuable. Our experience is that most digital professionals are already tracking user behavior on client sites. So why not monetize that service by sharing the data with your clients?
- Lead generation and conversion – One underserved area of the digital market is in helping clients convert that user traffic into leads or orders. From chatbots to collecting information on website visitors, most business websites have lots of room for improvement when it comes to converting traffic. Services like LeadLander help provide this service without requiring you, the web professional or agency, to learn a new bag of tricks.
Your clients need even more help than you are currently offering. They engaged you in the first place because they have business goals that you can help them with. Think about that for a moment: they choose you to help their businesses in some way. Now is the time to open your mind to the reality that you can probably be helping them even more. And in doing so you have the chance, the opportunity, to grow your own business as well through ongoing streams of revenue. The five ideas above represent the path from keeping a site safe to driving new traffic to measuring that traffic to turning it into customers. And your clients could likely use a hand in each part of that process.
At LeadLander we work with marketing agencies every day that are using recurring revenue to strengthen their organizations. From website maintenance to search engine optimization, from content creation to managing pay-per-click campaigns, sources of ongoing revenue are almost limitless. If you’re looking a new way to stand out from the competition and add new sources of revenue, our team would love to chat. LeadLander gives agencies like yours a way to help clients grow their business while also growing your own. Click here to speak with a member of our team about a new way to add more revenue.
