Ray DelVecchio's Blog, page 11

The #1 Reason Why People Fail Online

Because I’m introverted, I’m as quiet as they come – unless I’m talking about an interest/hobby. Then I can’t shut up.

Due to this personality trait, I have a habit of pushing people to create a website. I’m sure some family and friends are sick of it. Heck, maybe even you are!

However, whenever the topic comes up in conversation, there is ALWAYS enthusiasm on their part…

“You know, I’ve thought about it a lot. I’d like to work on something that interests me because my job isn’t doing it. I also follow [PERSON A] on [YouTube or Instagram] and they are pretty cool.”

At this point, I’m thinking to myself, if you had an online presence – I would be your first subscriber. I’m pushing you because I think you’re an interesting person. I want to see you geek out on the things YOU care about. I want to learn from you.

So then they’ll ask for recommendations or tips on how to start. Now I’m geeking out because this is my wheelhouse. I give them examples of websites similar to what they could create. I’ll provide the framework of how people set up their online business. I tell them to bounce ideas off me. I tell them I’ll help them get through any tech roadblocks.

Then a few months go by.

We reconnect and I’ll ask how things are coming…

“Ah, money has been tight and I’ve been busy. Haven’t found the time to get that done. But I do want to start eventually.”

Now I’m thinking, hmm, you’ve been posting to Instagram each weekend at the bar, and you’re building up BAD debt. And you went out-of-country last month, as though you had $5,000 to blow. Plus you didn’t spend one minute while on a plane for 30-hours to push your idea forward.

Hey man, let’s get real. You don’t want to start. Your words are meaningless when your actions demonstrate you DO NOT want to work for yourself. You weren’t willing to sacrifice a few hours let alone YEARS that it’s going to take to build your business.

Here’s the ultimate litmus test. Are you willing to work your ass off 1-year from now if you still have ZERO income?

If the answer is no, you need more discipline and commitment, not strategy and tactics.

Is this kind of harsh? Maybe. It’s also reality.

It took me nearly 5 years to feel comfortable with the money I was making. I lived in my childhood bedroom after college, plugging away on the computer late into the night during the majority of that time to reach my long-term vision.

The entire purpose of my website is to make that timeline MUCH shorter for you.

Time is the only constant we have, and success is not about having the best skills or genius intellect.

My best client is arguably the LEAST intelligent in terms of book smarts. But he has incredible sales smarts because he doesn’t overthink. He simply acts.

Success is about manipulating time to get more done in one day than the average person. That takes a long-term mission that aligns with the tasks on your daily schedule.

Have you had the dream of freelancing, creating a website, or an online business?

Don’t fall into the #1 failure everyone makes at the beginning (myself included):

*** PROCRASTINATION ***

Here’s my best content so you can actually start regardless of your skill level… and by that I mean right now!

Intro to Domains & Web Hosting

How to Setup Your 1st Website

Design a Professional WordPress Website

5-Step Plan to Start Your Web Design Business 

Hope this information helps you create momentum to get the ball rolling downhill.

Your future self will thank you.

The post The #1 Reason Why People Fail Online appeared first on Website Profit Course.

Being an Employee vs. Making a Living for Yourself

Every few years, you think about whether you should commit to your current job, look for a new one, or start your own business.

Who doesn’t dream of living life on their terms? I feel like being a tech entrepreneur is the new rock star.

Then why don’t most people ever attempt to start a business?

I’ve sketched out money over time for an employee vs. an entrepreneur with differences below.

Being an Employee



You are paid for the “learning” phaseShort-term securityA long-term ceiling on how much you’ll makeMoney is binary ($0 or salary)Little time freedom



Working for Yourself



Must invest time & money during “learning” phaseHighly analog (i.e. variable) income curveMuch more time freedomMore risk, larger long-term rewardsYou have total control of growth

The last bullet point hits hard. It means failure or success is your sole responsibility. There is no blaming the boss… that’s you!

Unequal success comes WAY down the road. I think that takes 3-5 years. You need enough interactions with customers to build your wisdom, plus you must learn multiple skill sets to run a business (i.e. sales, marketing, accounting).

There are legitimate reasons to stay in your job, however. You have to be smart about leaving a job if you have bills to pay. Starting small is better than going “all-in” with a mortgage on the line.

Being an employee could be your best option if it meets these 3 requirements:

1) The company mission aligns with your passions

2) You are paid well enough

3) There is evidence you’ll get promoted by doing a great job

If that’s not you, please consider starting your side business that you’ve thought about for months or years.

There is never a perfect time. The best time is now!

Beginners – Create Your Website in 8 Minutes

Freelancers – Get Local Clients & Make More Money

The post Being an Employee vs. Making a Living for Yourself appeared first on Website Profit Course.

Web Design Bulletin: Growth with Email Marketing & in the Garden

Cool Tool, Service or Resource

Mailchimp Email Marketing – https://mailchimp.com

Staying connected with customers via email is one of the cheapest ways to grow your business from an audience of people who already know and like you.

If you are a web design freelancer, email marketing is the perfect “add-on” service to increase your income without finding new clients.

Mailchimp is my preferred platform because they offer a free plan up to 2,000 subscribers and their service is easy to use for beginners.

Web Design Example

Dolins Garden Center – https://www.dolinsgardencenter.com/

It’s gardening season! Here’s a picture from my vegetable garden in New Jersey. It’s one of the best ways to unwind after a day on the computer. There are plenty of analogies between growing plants and growing your business.

I chose the company above (from St. Petersburg, FL) because their website is an accurate representation of 95% of local small business websites you’ll discover. A few highlights:

It is built on Wix (which is inferior to WordPress, in my opinion)It’s 5-pages (Home, Products, Delivery, Newsletter, Contact)Their “newsletter” is a 1-page blog (they don’t collect or send emails)Every picture looks small and/or oldNot mobile responsive

Despite all these shortcomings, I *guarantee* their website gets a lot of traffic, because they’ve been around over 40 years, cemented their status in their local neighborhood, and they have 123 customer reviews on Google – 10x compared to most competitors.

The reality is this business will be successful without any online marketing strategy – they are past the “make or break” phase. But their website has so much room for improvement.

How to Find Clients

After finding Dolins Garden Center, I did a quick Google Search for their company name and found a handful of gardening directories. Here’s one example that shows all garden centers in Florida.

Garden Centers & Nurseries in Florida

Do you see the unlimited potential when you commit to one business type instead of taking on ANY project? Work smarter with step-by-step training and community support to start your side-business today!

The post Web Design Bulletin: Growth with Email Marketing & in the Garden appeared first on Website Profit Course.

The “80/20 Rule” Will Make or Break Your Business

If you don’t know about the “80/20 Rule“, it’s a fundamental law of the universe that you can use to your advantage.

Simple guideline: 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes.

If you translate this to freelancing, it means:

80% of your “busy work” comes from 20% of your clients80% of your income comes from 20% of your clientsYour highest paying clients often micromanage less

Here’s the tricky part – you must work with enough people to understand the difference between an ideal client and a client from hell. It’s rarely black and white, there are always shades of gray.

Another example of this principle is the timing of your work.

I’ll have an open schedule for 3 weeks. Then in a 24-hour span, I’m hit with 5 requests from clients, a random tech issue pops up, all while I have a full calendar.

Instead of thinking “poor me” or “I can’t do this”, view these situations as the way of life, and create better systems to manage it all.

Get “80/20” results faster with web design freelancing ← Learn how to shorten your business learning curve and make consistent money!

The post The “80/20 Rule” Will Make or Break Your Business appeared first on Website Profit Course.

This is How Business Owners Choose a Web Designer

You will notice trends when you investigate who built the websites for small businesses near you.

If you stick with one industry, you’ll see the same few names over and over.

In order of importance, this is how most business owners choose a web designer:

Recommendation by another professional they trustSomeone they know personally, through a friend or relativeSomeone local who can meet in-personSomeone specializing within their business industrySomeone they can speak to over the phoneA big website template company – GoDaddy, Squarespace, Wix, etc.Freelancer who builds websites for any small businessPrice shop over long-period and pick the lowest costDIY

The main factors that separate you are personal communication, genuinely educating your clients about how the web works, specializing within an industry, and familiarity with your local area.

With this in mind, have you:

1) Determined a business niche you want to work with?
2) Put together a list of leads within this industry?
3) Considered your pricing structure?
4) Reached out to a business in the last two weeks?

If the answer is “YES” to all of these, you’re on the right path.

If not, click the link below to kickstart your freelancing business today!

Join the Business Plan Membership for Tools, Training & 1-on-1 Help ← WATCH VIDEO TOUR

P.S. The #1 question about the membership is whether you can personally get in touch with me. The answer is YES! Either post to the private member forum, or submit your question for the Monthly Member Q&A.

The post This is How Business Owners Choose a Web Designer appeared first on Website Profit Course.

Are You Good Enough to Charge for Web Design?

When you start off your career as a web designer, you may wonder if you are good enough to charge for your services.

Do you value your time? If your answer is yes, then you need to charge.

The two core reasons you are asking yourself if you should charge for web design are your ability and your mindset.

Your Web Design Ability



Can you deliver a site in 2-3 weeks?

Some projects may drag on longer than 2-3 weeks, especially if it’s your first client, or the client is an unknown and you don’t know what to expect from them.

If you feel with minimal back and forth you can complete a website in 2-3 weeks, that’s good enough.

You don’t need to complete a site in a day or two. You will likely encounter a couple of problems along the way and you need to have faith that you can handle those unexpected problems.

Will you manage it long-term?

Managing websites long-term can be great because it can result in recurring income.

At the same time, envision yourself a year from now and whether or not you want to be managing someone else’s website. If you just want to make a buck here and there, then managing a site long-term may not be the best choice.

What is your relative skill to the potential client?

You can’t compare your skill to every other web designer or freelancer out there. You have to look at your skill relative to the skill of the potential client.

A lot of my clients are home service contractors that lack strong computer skills, which makes it very easy for me to manage their websites. They never question my work whether it’s the design aspect or the code side of things. They always defer to my judgment.

In many ways, your skill level doesn’t matter. You just need to go after clients that are lower on the rung than you and aren’t looking to spend top dollar for a long-time expert. Most importantly, they need to have the willingness and ability to pay you.

WordPress plugins are your friend

When I was not as well versed with WordPress and dialed in with my process, I had many requests from clients that I was not sure I was able to accomplish. We ended up agreeing to a project and I figured out how to accomplish them through various WordPress plugins.

I thought that project requests would take me hours and hours of work. However, I was able to find a plugin after searching for about 15 minutes that ended up taking care of the function that I needed to put in place.

Plugins are definitely your friend if you are using WordPress as the platform to build your websites. If you are looking for the best WordPress plugins for 2019, I put together a comprehensive list.

Your Mindset



You will never get “permission”

Everyone that gets into business is going to doubt themselves at the beginning. A lot of people look to get “permission” from someone and don’t feel they are good enough unless somebody validates their work.

You have to be the person to validate your own work and has the belief that you have a valuable skill to offer people. It will take time and working with a handful of clients to get a feel for them. If you can get over this need, then you will feel more confident in your skills and be more successful.

When I started I thought that every client was head and shoulders above me, smarter than me, and knew more about business than me. I felt very comfortable with the computer side, but felt like they would be judging my work. However, I came to realize they did not know what I was doing and they valued my work.

Your time is worth money

Once you work with a couple of good clients, you should be able to feel that your skills are valuable and your time is worth money, especially when you are solving someone else’s problem.

However, there are definitely circumstances when free work is OK.

You have to figure out whether it is a good long-term opportunity. Can you grow with another small business, or is it for something you believe in such as a non-profit or a friend? These can be great opportunities to learn how to work with somebody else and hone your skills.

With that in mind, don’t just take on any opportunity. If someone comes to you because they know you can build websites, and they pitch you randomly with a bad idea, it’s probably not worth your time.

Make sure any free opportunities you take on are decent and something you are interested in.

You must get over “impostor syndrome”

We all feel in one way or another the “impostor syndrome” where we fear we are going to be found out as a fraud. It’s impossible not to feel this since it’s a human thing that we all experience.

I think impostor syndrome can sometimes be worse in a job where you have one boss above you that is always looking and judging you.

When you are a freelancer building websites and you get to the point where you have multiple clients, your risk if diversified. If you have an issue with one client, it shouldn’t drastically affect your overall business.

I guarantee if you have 10 clients, 2 will be bad making you question yourself, but 2 will be great and you will build a strong relationship with that lasts long-term.

The latter subset of your client base is all that matters to move your business forward. Unfortunately, most people focus on negative ones.

The bottom line is that when it comes to business, activity is what wins. People fail in business because they overthink and don’t act. I have seen this with my own clients. I have to fight it in myself.

My “smarter” clients are not always as financially successful as the ones who do the core things that they need to do relentlessly to make money. The intelligent people waste time by thinking about every last step, even coming up with hypothetical problems which may never occur.

What To Do Next?

If you are still unsure of the entire process, I put together a membership where I offer my entire business plan.

I’ve turned it into 8 training modules with worksheets to keep you on track. All the modules have downloadable tools and templates to help you launch your own freelancing business.

If you have any questions as you go through the modules, there’s a private member forum where I respond to each inquiry and a “Q&A with Ray” video each month.

Join Membership Today!

The post Are You Good Enough to Charge for Web Design? appeared first on Website Profit Course.

7 Phases of a Local Web Design Client

It’s tough to predict how a client’s website will perform after it’s launched. When you explain how much traffic is reasonable to expect, be conservative instead of selling a pipe dream.

Here are the realistic phases for the success of a local client website:

1) Website Creation

Reaching an agreement is the FIRST obstacle to overcome. Once that’s over, your next duty is getting content from them to build the website… and it’s usually NOT easy. Be specific when dividing the responsibilities between you and your client.

2) Google Indexing (3 – 6 months)

After the website is live, Google finds it and adds it to their massive index of web pages. At this point, it’s going to compare your client’s business with their competitors to determine where it should rank. This fluctuation is sometimes called the “Google Dance”.

3) Traffic (6 – 24 months)

I usually tell clients it can take 6 months or more until the website gets traffic. A lot depends on whether the business is successful already offline and whether they had a website before. Otherwise, the work begins here. I ALWAYS let clients know driving traffic is a joint effort between them providing new content and you doing SEO work on the back-end. All of my clients that follow this advice see year-after-year improvements (sometimes doubling traffic).

4) Leads

Gather data and see how many visitors are converting to leads. An easy way to track this is through a contact form. I often BCC myself (with my client’s permission) to get an understanding of both the frequency and quality of leads.

5) Reviews

Most good customers won’t leave a review online. The cold truth is the majority of people leaving reviews are those who spit venom and want revenge on your brand. This is why you have to create a system to encourage positive reviews (hint: upsell this service)!

6) Referrals

Referrals are the bread and butter of every business. Often small companies fail because they don’t figure out a predictable method to acquire new customers outside of referrals (like online marketing). Every new visitor through the website can turn into a happy customer who refers a friend. Why not amplify this by creating a referral program to promote on your client’s website?

7) Ads

There are two types of clients interested in advertising: those who have money to spend and want to grow, and those who think ads are an “easy button” to getting rich with a small budget. Managing a client’s expectation is crucial to gaining trust and keeping them long-term! Ads should be part of an overall strategy once you have enough data to know your website produces leads at a certain rate.

Ready to take your freelancing skills to the next level?

Here’s your step-by-step guide to make recurring income with local web design clients:

Join the Web Design Business Plan Membership today!

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How to Manage Your Time as a Freelancer Working From Home

One of the most overlooked skills working from home is balancing & scheduling your time. I’ve confessed many times it’s a constant struggle for me.

After college, this was a normal day:

Get up at 12 PMImmediately check email (reactive vs. proactive)ProcrastinateWork mostly after 10 PM (while procrastinating)Go to bed at 4 AM

Over time, it became unsustainable and depressing to not see the sun. It took a full year of dedicated effort to flip from a night owl to a morning person.

RELATED: How to Become Better at Work (& Life)

Today at 33, my most productive hours are still when it’s dark – it’s just 6 AM now! I love the lack of distractions when everyone else is asleep.

It is easy to slip back to old habits. One late night sets me back for days.

The other massive tension that I constantly feel is working during the day when it’s beautiful outside. This is a big reason why I’ve never wanted a regular job. Humans need more nature in their lives.

While difficult to maintain, my ideal schedule is:

Get up at 5 AMWorkoutMake coffeeCreative work (6 – 10 AM)Check emailOutdoor activity (11 – 2 PM) “Manager” tasksSTEP AWAY FROM THE COMPUTER

If you do have a 9-5 gig and you’re freelancing on the side, it’s even more important to block out sections of time early in the morning, during lunch, or at night to push your goals forward.

Momentum is the most important thing in business. You should prioritize doing something every day, even if it’s 30-minutes. The WRONG approach is to spend 6 hours a day on top of your job, effectively burning yourself outwithin months.

Think long-term (6-12 months) when managing your time and planning your to-do list!

Want to join a community of people who want to make money at home by freelancing?

LEARN MORE: Web Design Business Plan Membership

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How to Handle a Client Who Wants to Edit Website Themselves

I got a great question today about clients that want to edit their website after you build and launch it.

Has this ever happened to you?

I’ve had 3 clients request this ability. Of course, I said “yes” and invested a lot of time making step-by-step tutorials for each of them.

Only 1 actually did it.

It was a good lesson. If a person doesn’t have above-average computer skills, it’s extremely unlikely they will take the time to learn WordPress.

As a side note, this is a big reason I began publishing videos on YouTube. It is much more fulfilling helping people who actually have the self-motivation to master web design!

Today, I NEVER take on a website client unless they want me to manage it 100% for them (with a monthly fee, of course).

Learn more about my pricing strategy and how to make money freelancing:

Join the Web Design Business Plan Membership today!

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The #1 Reason for Inequality (from a Billionaire)

Yesterday I was listening to a podcast and a 2-minute segment made me pause and grab my notebook.

The interview was with Howard Marks, an investor with a net worth of almost $2 billion according to Forbes.

Now, I know nothing about investing, nor had I ever heard of this guy.

But he said something so true, and it’s a massive factor in whether you succeed or fail when working for yourself…

Stocks go up 9-10% per year on average since we’ve been measuring them.

However, when you zoom in on the specific cases, it’s rarely close to 10% per year increase. People’s individual experience is often MUCH better or worse.

What causes the wide fluctuations? Human emotion.

People swing daily from too positive and optimistic to negative thoughts, both of which cause irrational decision making.

Howard Marks also added a funny quote from Warren Buffett (paraphrasing):

When I see a burger on-sale, I want to buy it. Investing is the only game where people shy away when prices are low and are eager to buy when prices are high.

Those who get what they desire have a steady, long-term growth mindset and a singular focus.

Those who lose dwell on their fears and never take a step, or conversely have too much overconfidence from a short-term win and get humbled.

RELATED: 5 Things I Wish I Knew About Freelancing

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