Update – How Selling Services Makes Money Online
I’ve spoke before about looking hard at yourself and working out what services you could sell to make money online.
Today I want to speak about just how much money I have made selling services online. I won’t go into total detail on all the services I have been trying to push. But instead I’ll focus upon logo and graphic design site, corelogo. To begin with corelogo was set up to mainly sell very low cost logos to people with smaller budgets. Initially I was looking at people spending around $20 per design. This was a great model to begin with as it helped me gauge the amount of demand for such services. I soon realised based off my initial findings on selling over 10 logos for this price there definitely was money to be made online selling such a service.
It was great to have a nice low level income being generated from doing something which I enjoyed and given my background graphics design ticked all the right boxes. However, I soon came to see it was taking way to much time to produce the work on my own. In some cases I was spending over 2-3 hours on coming up with the initial design ideas alone. Now that’s not all bad as I was enjoying this time making the designs, I’d have only been spending the time playing games or doing something not very productive! The businessman inside me was telling me otherwise however, corelogo had to be profitable or it was simply not worth going on with the project as a means to create income.
The first step to making corelogo more profitable was to involve other people.
I’m lucky in that I know a few people personally who are great graphic design artists, and I knew I could depend on them to produce the same quality of work I was producing myself. To begin with they were simply aiding me in producing the designs for free, as I was charging only $20 per piece. This was a great help to me. But I knew it would not last, so I decided to increase the cost of the designs to $40 so I could at least pay them a token amount for the work they were putting in for me.
This proved to me a somewhat bad move at the time. The work dropped off completely. In time the work started to naturally come back, the odd few per month direct from search engine traffic and the main stay starting to come from the various webmaster forums I was advertising on.
Then I took a hard look at the financial spreadsheet, I was not to happy with what I was seeing. based on the hours worked by myself I was making a little over $9 per hour. This needed to change. By now I had built up a nice network of people who were regularly coming back for repeat work which was great. And as my Dad will tell you, business is built upon repeat custom! To increase my earnings there were two options open to me, increase the prices and increase the staff. I decided to do both.
This brings us up to date with corelogo in its current state. We charge $80 per logo design along with all our other services which you can see on our services page.
When new design work is sent in, myself and the team get to work on producing the initial designs based on what the customer wants. sometimes the ’staff’ produce most of the work, however I go over each piece myself before its passed onto any customer, if the work does not meet my standards it will not meet the customers. I like to think of myself as the customer and react as they would when faced with the work. This adds that crucial layer of quality control.
lets get down to some hard facts and figures. To begin with corelogo took too much time to run and made not a lot of money at all, it was more of a personal hobby.
Through learning how to run this type of business and where to advertise it for maximum return I was soon able to increase the amount of people I could sub contract work out to along with the prices for the work we provide.
This has lead to a profit of over $1000 within 8 months, which is not to bad for something that started off as a personal hobby!
The next steps for increasing the amount of money I make online with corelogo are to redesign the site and look at other advertising opportunities, I think I’m happy with the service prices as they stand currently.
I hope you enjoyed reading this, and if it helps you start your own online service based business then my work here is done!
Well done so far and good to read success stories on the web. I am always amazed by the amount of people who complain to me that they are struggling financially but don’t seem to want to try new things. On numerous occassions i have mentioned to people that they try at first like yourself as a hobby setting up some type of website whether it be blog based, product based etc to generate extra income but in 99% of cases they seem happier complaining rather than doing. I have book marked your site as a future reference point for them.