If you are looking to sell a website to someone within your niche, you would need to follow a step-by-step process. Getting a customer to sell anything to them requires effort, unless you get really lucky. The same goes for selling websites.
If you know how to sell a website and you're also good at selling, you can build an entire business out of your workflow. You can launch as many websites as you like and sell your websites one by one to different clients from the respective industries.
The business of selling websites differs slightly from a business where you sell web design services. If you are into selling websites, you can create websites using ready-templates offered by website building platforms, such as Strikingly.
Image taken from Strikingly
But if you are a website designer, you would want to create your own website designs from scratch, or at least customize the ready-made templates you get from various sources. This will add value to your services every time you sell a website to a client.
Either way, you would need to follow a process to make sales.
The 4 Steps You Need to Take to Sell a Website
If you are the type of person who plans everything carefully before proceeding with it, especially in business, then you have come to the right place. An organized person would take the following 4 steps for generating leads and selling websites. Each step needs to be properly understood and executed. The way we have explained the steps here will make it easier for you to figure out how to sell your websites.
1. Create a Marketing Funnel
A sales or marketing funnel is the path you create for your audience to follow, from the time when they first hear about you until the point when they finally buy from you. A marketing funnel used by any business reduces wastage in advertising costs and brings your customers closer to purchase in a smooth way. An example of a marketing funnel would be someone offering career consultancy services. They create YouTube videos to give tips on career enhancement, and invite the audience to follow their LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook pages. On these social media pages, they regularly post updates about their website, and constantly encourage their followers to get in touch with them. Once somebody gets in touch with them through their website or social media, they have a free 20-30 minutes consultancy session with them, and at the end of that, offer them to sign up for a longer, paid, personalized career coaching session. This is where the prospect finally makes a payment if they choose to take on the coaching.
The same process can be applied for a business of selling websites. When you have to sell a website, you cannot straight away find someone who is looking to buy or build a website. You would need to throw your net to a vast audience and keep pursuing them through different phases to influence them to buy from you.
2. Communicate With Your Leads
Once you can generate some leads to sell a website, the sales job is not yet over. Now you need to start your one-to-one communication with the leads and see what their specific requirements are. This is where your communication skills really come in handy.
At this stage, you need to make it clear to the lead what and how you can do for them. Focusing on the value you can offer, position yourself as an expert who can solve the other party’s problem.
An example of an action you can take at this stage is allow your lead to get some valuable piece of content as a free digital download, such as a free video series or an ebook that’s about their specific niche, in exchange for getting their email address. For instance, if you build a website on Strikingly, you can easily insert a subscription form for your site visitors to submit. Once you have their email address, you can continue to stay in touch with them by sending newsletters and marketing emails as part of your outreach campaign.
Image taken from Strikingly user’s website
Through your marketing emails, you can continue to display your skills to your subscribers. Consider this to still be an initial stage to sell a website. Show them any positive testimonials that you have received from your clients so far. Add pictures in your newsletters and emails, showing screenshots of the projects you have delivered so far. Entice them with the variety of work that you can deliver. And when they finally get in touch with you personally, listen to their requirements carefully.
3. Deliver Your Proposal
Once you know the exact requirements of a prospect, you can now develop a personalized proposal for them. When you are selling websites, you need to be very particular about what exactly your client wants. You cannot be taking risks trying to guess the features, style and design a client is looking for on their website. You need to ask them straightforward questions, and clarify with them what is it that can and cannot be done within a certain price range.
However, this is still not the time to talk about the very technical aspects of the website. Discuss the layout with them and get them to approve it. The technology or tools you use for web development is irrelevant to the client when you are trying to sell a website. They just need to know what the website will look like at the surface, and what they can do with it, i.e. the features it will have.
Image taken from Strikingly user’s website
4. Follow Up Until You Make a Sale
At times, a client is fully satisfied with the service you can offer or the website they can get from you. But they still tend to procrastinate their buying decision for several reasons. This is where following up with them regularly becomes so valuable.
When you know that a prospect is definitely looking for someone who’s sling websites, do not give them too much of a chance to buy it from a competitor of yours instead. If they are not getting around their buying decision, try to find out what the reason for their delay is. Negotiate with them on the price. Maybe you are not using the most effective pricing strategies. Maybe you cannot fulfill any other of their needs. Do whatever it takes to close the deal at this stage and sell a website.
How Strikingly Can Help You in Selling Websites
Strikingly offers full-fledged and ready-to-use website templates.
Image taken from Strikingly
If you are confused about how to sell your websites, you can use Strikingly to get your business off the ground. What do we mean by that?
Check out the different website templates that Strikingly offers. See how they are built and to what extent you can customize them using your own web designing skills. Create unique versions of each template you select and showcase them to your audience. If you use our Pro Plan, you can get rid of the Strikingly branding too, so that the designs that you customize become your own web designs.
This will save you a lot of time to build and sell your websites, as you won’t be developing anything from scratch. You can take on projects from more clients at a time, and deliver them efficiently, without having to hire an entire team of web designers to work for you.
To sell a website effectively and keep your client satisfied, you need to produce quality work and on time. If you create all websites entirely on your own using no templates, you might end up swamped in work and not be able to satisfy all your clients. When a business is new, it is useful to take help from such ready-made tools, while providing added value by applying your specific skills and expertise.
At Strikingly, we are always up for supporting our users to help them achieve their business goals. If your business goal is to sell a website to a particular niche alone, you can use our templates that are designed for that specific niche. We currently have templates available for the following layouts.
- Business, corporate or brand websites
- Websites to showcase services
- Ecommerce websites
- Blogs
- Personal websites
- Event websites
- Portfolio websites
These categories can fall into any industry or niche. If you are creative enough, there are actually no limitations to adding your unique touch and tuning these templates to suit your clients’ needs.
If you have any questions regarding our templates or services, you can contact us any time through our live chat support. We are always there to resolve our users’ queries and make their path to success easy for them.
