Now, however, I’ve changed my ways. I know how important it is these days for a website to be findable, and once found, to make a good first impression, otherwise the cost of building the website in the first place is wasted. I’m no longer satisfied with creating a professional-looking website only to let it disappear like a grain of sand in a windstorm or to see it degrade with sloppy copy written by the client. I have taught myself SEO and I have a business relationship with a friend who is very adept at writing for the web.

Here’s why you should sell SEO and copywriting with every website proposal:

• No matter how good the design is, bad copy will make a bad impression which will reflect badly on you, the designer
• Good copy that incorporates the site’s optimal keywords will enhance its SEO
• The more “white hat” SEO out there, the more search engines will begin to ignore black hat practices such as link farming
• A site that ranks well in search engines, which attracts more visitors, can only be good for your reputation as the designer
• If all professional web designers suggest and offer SEO and copywriting/editing to their clients, it will help broaden the distinction between professional web designers and bosses’ nephews who know how to use Dreamweaver and that can only be good for all web designers
• It will make the Internet a more pleasurable place to be!

1. Be concise: The point of a newsletter is to give your client short teasers whether they be articles, promotions or news. Keep each section short and sweet and if there is more to tell, link to a website with the deeper information.
2. Give your readers something: Avoid sending out a newsletter that simply gives them an update on your business; give them reason to click through to your website – whether to find out more information, view more specials, or download a coupon.
3. Use a mixture of images and text: Plain text newsletters can be dry (though you should allow them as an alternative), whereas image-heavy newsletters (or image-only newsletters) can be hard to read and do not allow for obvious hyperlinks. Keep information in text with images for illustration and use hyperlinks to take take your readers to your website.
4. Give a summary of the newsletter: Some campaign software allows you to generate a list of links that click through to the different paragraphs within your newsletter, giving a clear summary of its contents – for readers who want to know what your pushing, and fast.
5. Include a link to view the newsletter online: Just in case they can’t or choose not to view it in their email client. Many campaign tools allow this automatically.
6. Use software which provides tracking: Knowing who viewed your newsletter, who clicked links (and which ones) and which emails bounced can be valuable information for drawing conclusions about the success of your campaigns
7. Always include a working unsubscribe link: otherwise you are sending SPAM and that’s BAD.
8. Consider adding a “Forward to a friend” link – it may be easy for readers to forward an email but this prompts them to do so and it may end up generating you more sales.
9. Proof-read: proof-read, proof-read and get a friend to proof-read again. It can’t hurt your credibility.
10. Test: Make sure your email newsletter works in the majority of email clients including MS Outlook, Outlook Express, Thunderbird, Apple Mail. Hotmail, Gmail, iPhone.

Also, a reminder: you must have permission from your recipients to send them mass communications and the content must be relevant to them – consider setting up multiple subscriber lists for different kinds of communications.

In case you’re wondering which software I use or where you can find something that meets all of these suggestions, I highly recommend Campaign Monitor. It has a sensible pricing system, great features (templates with rich-text editing, fantastic reporting), a range of payment options and is easy to use. An alternative that looks just as good, with different pricing options is MailChimp.

I worked those first eight months from my parents’ house while my partner and I sought to buy a house and planned our wedding.  I spent every spare moment researching, thinking, planning, pitching, writing and proposing.  I was told by other designers that there was plenty of work to go around and indeed, by the time we moved into our new home and got married, business was well and truly – well, not booming, but perhaps popping.

Three years on, I have no regrets about leaving the nine-to-five world and business is still ticking along.  There have been surprises, disappointments and changes of direction; loneliness, boredom and stress. But, Spiral Designs is still essentially my main source of income and still “does” websites. The three years have taught me many valuable lessons: about business, about people and, most importantly, about myself. And I still love it.

So, in celebration of three successful years, I’d like to pass on five hard-learned lessons to anyone considering starting out on their own:

1. Planning a business is essential but don’t expect things to go as planned - they may take different, even better paths.  A little gem I learned about life from a book on writing (The Little Red Writing Book by Mark Treddinick) goes: Write a plan, don’t stick to it.  I think the same applies to business.  I started out with a simple, seemingly sensible goal of selling websites in the form of templates.  I wanted that to be my niche. I learned that if a client is willing to pay a person to create a template (rather than buying a template online), then they want it to be completely custom.  Where I did find a niche was in coding up sites for designers.
2. What looks simple is complex and what looks complex could be done with your eyes closed.  Even today, I still over- and underestimate projects either because of technical complexity I did not anticipate or because of problematic clients. Nothing is ever as it seems.
3. Learn when to say no. Say “no” to work that is not part of your businesses’ offerings. I may say that I’ve learned this lesson but even recently I disregarded (or rather, forgot) my own rule and was promptly reminded why it’s important. I tried to help a client with email problems on her computer and it took up 2 hours of my time, for which I did not bill her, and she ended up needing help from elsewhere (to my embarrassment). I don’t know Microsoft Office, I don’t use windows, and I don’t do technical help. I should have said no.
4. Don’t panic during the quiet times. Take the time to enjoy the benefits of running your own business, pay yourself back for the long hours you have worked.  Don’t feel guilty about going to the beach or relaxing with a book.  When you get that out of your system use the time for learning, organising, catching up with administrative chores, thinking about the future, etc.  I tend to do a lot of thinking when times are quiet, and the thought patterns often lead to white papers or blog posts (such as this one!).  And don’t worry, the work should come back; if it doesn’t it might be a good time to think about marketing, offering new services and other ways to attract business.
5. The customer is not always right. I like to think that customers come to me for my expertise – because if they knew all about building websites they’d do it themselves (though many do try and wretchedly fail). I won’t ever argue with a client but I will do my best to give them the benefit of my experience and knowledge. If I think something they want is stupid, I’ll tell them (in more words of course, and more politely!) and I’ll tell them why.  You have to keep customers happy but I’m more concerned, in my business, with keeping their customers happy.  If I can convince my customer that I’m doing right by their customers, I can win them around.

Of course, I have learned a lot more about running a business than just these five points but I think they are good advice for anyone starting out as a freelancer or with their own business.  And they didn’t come from some tedious business textbook.

1. I ordered a new mobile phone online the other day and was told it would take 2-3 business days.  Well, ok, today was the second business day but I’m sure that somewhere I saw that it would be due today – of course it never came.  I eventually logged into the site’s order tracking system to find that the phone that it has been “Awaiting Shipping” all day.  Does that mean it will be shipped and delivered tomorrow?  When, coincidentally I will not be home for most of the day? Or will it be shipped tomorrow and arrive some other day in the future?  When will I get my phone?!?!!

2.  My husband and I took some prints we bought in Amsterdam to be framed on Saturday.  The framer promised they’d be ready at 2pm today.  I went at 3pm, to be safe, and no… “5pm?” he says.  Argh. The traffic will be terrible at that time.

3. And this is the worst of all.  I went to bed last night after a quick check to my email, all good, no problems.  I awoke this morning to find no email working.  Checked my websites, all I got were directory listings.  Ditto with all of my clients’ sites.  Checked the databases – still there (phew! so I backed them up!) but no email accounts!  It has taken me all day going since first opening an Urgent ticket with my hosting company (whose support is based in Russia) to get everything running again – including two complaints from me to a supervisor to get some action because all I would get is useless responses or questions like “we’ll look into it” or “which email is not working?”.  They got the websites up late in the morning and only now, at the end of the day, are the email accounts back (however, they’re “locked” by some process so I still can’t use them).  And did I get an apology?  No!!  I get told that it must have been my fault, I must have deleted the email accounts myself in Cpanel.  What?!?!?  Oh yes, I was sleepwalking last night and somehow logged in to CPanel and manually deleted 15 email accounts.  Oh and all of the files on the filesystem.  Needless to say, I’m moving from this hosting company ASAP – probably to somewhere Australian where people can understand what I’m saying and work in the same timezone.

Ok, rant off my chest.  But there’s a lesson here: keep your promises, keep the customer informed and never blame the customer!!

Download “Making the Most of Your Website”  here.

Read it here: gettingreal.37signals.com

Two such examples that I’ve come across, which were novel but I’m not sure how effective, were businesses that I’d never heard of before. One is “Messages on Hold Australia” and I first heard about this in a book on the how to’s of starting a small business in Australia, but then I saw it in action. This company uses Ambush Marketing to get their name on TV at major sporting events such as the Formula One Grand Prix. I noticed such an ambush on TV whilst watching a football (AFL) game at Subiaco Oval – they stationed employees behind the goal posts with giant hands and waved them along with the cheer squad after every goal.

The second novel idea that I came across was for a security company (funnily enough, I forget their name and their specialty). I was driving behind one of their cars, which had advertising plastered on it – not too distastefully. What caught my attention was rows of magnets adhered to the vehicle’s hatch back door – ready for interested parties to take and display at home. Now, how many of these magnets will find their way into the hands of interested parties I can’t say, but I thought it was a novel idea.

Short of spamming email distribution lists generously donated to me by friends and relatives with other small businesses, I’ve yet to implement any other marketing but I’m thinking about it all the time. Hopefully word-of-mouth will keep me going for a while yet.