How to Become a Freelance Squarespace Designer [Video Podcast - Part 2 of 4]
In this episode, part 2 of 4 in a series that we are covering about becoming a Squarespace Designer, we will walk through your internal systems. Everyone uses systems, whether they see it or not. And the systems they use are producing the results they are getting. If you are a freelancer who is constantly stressed, your systems are pushing you in that direction. In this video we talk about the process to a smooth workflow as you land your first client, create internal processes to scale your work, how much to charge, and more!
This episode includes about 4 years of learning in 1 Video. Learn about the pitfalls and challenges you may face as you begin the process of designing websites on any platform, but primarily Squarespace.
Transcript
Welcome. Welcome. Welcome. I don't even have a name for this podcast. But this is another episode of Am I starting a podcast? How to Become a Squarespace, freelance Squarespace designer now. Let me begin again. Hello and welcome. Welcome to this episode. This is Episode Two of how to become a Squarespace freelance designer. If this is your first time here, welcome. My name is David Iskander. I've helped build over 150 websites, I've probably touched over 500 websites, with really amazing companies, really amazing organizations, and helping design websites. My background, you could hear it in episode one. I never I never thought I would build become a web developer, but it has become the work I do. I absolutely love it. My main focus right now is Seo. So if you're looking for SEO help, I have a team that is managing and crushing SEO projects right now. So please look out for us at Spacebar agency.com. Also, we have a weekly newsletter that we send out that you can sign up for and get updates and tips and tricks on how to update your SEO each and every single week. I absolutely love what my team gets to put out we get to help a lot of people. And I'm really, really thankful for that. In today's episode, we're going to talk about a few key things. The first one is this landing your first client, how you get paid clients going from free clients pay clients how you do that, creating your services on your website. And then from there, we're going to talk about a few things you want to do you want to become a circle member, you're going to want to have a process, you're gonna you're gonna want to know how much you're going to charge. Overall, you've also probably realize this, if you have heard Episode One, I have a real big knack, I have a real big push that you work. There's a certain system I like to work by, I don't think it's for everyone. I don't, I don't and I'm not gonna say you need to do this. But it's something that for me built up my confidence as I went through the process. There is so much to this. And it may seem easy to look at a really simple, beautiful website on Squarespace and say, That's cake. But there is a lot to the process for any website to get it built, done right, flawless and to flow design wise throughout. So let's take a look now at these steps. First and foremost, landing your first client. I'm going to talk about my experience. So I'm going to talk about my experience landing my first client, my first paying client, right, so I had built a few websites I didn't want a job I was working at. I did one for a nonprofit, I think I did two for a nonprofit. And so I had a little bit under my belt and I said hey, I could do more sites for people. But how do you find people that need websites? This was tough part of it. What I've learned what I've heard from other Squarespace developers and designers, is that number one, you start marketing yourself as a designer. So what does that look like? First and foremost, you go to a party, you go talk to someone, you say, I'm a Squarespace, freelance designer, I design websites, I create websites for companies, any of those things, is a great place to start. Benjamin hardy who wrote the book personality isn't permitted talks about declaring he uses different verbiage for this but declaring something before you begin I think that's so valuable. And so good, because now you position yourself as that resource. A lot of this comes with, first, the commitment, and then the courage, and then the confidence. And that is the capacity. Maybe the last two are a little bit differently organized. There's like a system for this. There's like the four C's. But first, you want to start with the commitment, and then build into the courage. So go around, tell people, tell your family, tell your friends that you design websites, put in your bio on social media, tell people it is what you do. This isn't faking it till you make it. It's putting it out there that, hey, if you need a website, I can help and then admit, and then you're just clear about where you are in the process. So my first client I didn't, I didn't get from a referral, I got it through a Google ad.
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Now, I had been running Google ads for clients for a long time. But one of my best friends suggested to me, he said, Why don't you run a Google ad campaign for yourself? I was like, why would I do that? What would I sell, I got nothing to sell. I didn't know how to I couldn't even think about how I would sell the product or the service. And, and I didn't even think I was qualified. A big part of the selling process too, is social proof. And because you don't have it yet, to really hard to convince people that you have the capability of the skill with no testimonials or reviews. But I tried it, I created a landing page on Squarespace included five or six sections, it included a tagline, the call to action was book a consultation, so they could book a phone call with me or fill out a form. I included what my services could offer, greeting forms, creating pages, contact pages, service pages, integrating social media, all that stuff, included three packages with pricing, which we're going to talk about in a moment of how you set up your pricing included that included a few examples of work. So I did include the site I had built previously, I think even one of the site was my site. So it's one of those things that it's just it's just funny how it works. But I think even the site I use as a marketing example, was my website. And I look back on it now. And I'm like, Oh, my gosh, I don't even know what I was thinking design wise. But it's okay. Like, I think that's the part of this that makes this so much more fun and interesting is I think we all often have this expectation that we need to be somewhere that we need to be at a certain level to get to get the right exposure, and all that. But often, it really starts with the commitment. If you start with the commitment step into it, then things start to create themselves, right, and things start to show up. And you're positioning yourself in a way that these things could show up. So if I never had the landing page, and I never created the Google ad, this person who searched for, for me never would have found me, you know, in either regard, if if I never showed up in the first place, they never would have found me, they would have found someone else. And now that I was there, they were able to find me. And so it wasn't that I had all the work it was that I just tried it and took the risk. So take the risk, and try to find your first client. If it's not telling people around, you make that commitment. Tell those people around you send an email to people like just let them know, Hey, I'm doing more website design. If you or anyone you know needs a site built on Squarespace, I could get it done for them ASAP.
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Now, if you were starting from literally zero, you've never built a site. My first recommendation is go build like one to three sites for free. Just do it. Don't go to the big organization, don't try to do a really complicated site. Just get comfortable with building. The platform is a set of tools. It has a very core set of tools, that if you start to understand how they work, and how they function together, how you set up products, what information you need for products, what information you need for a blog post, those types of things, you start to get a sense of what the build process will look like. So before you even talk about design before you even talk about anything else, you just get get in there and get comfortable with it is a 14 day free trial that you can use, build out 10 sites that way like build, build a site for 14 days on one email, create a new email and do it and do and do it over and over and over again to get yourself moving and this is really going to help especially with the way 7.1 is set up. Once you get a feel for how the design works, the design styles on the website and how the sections work. It basically transpose itself into every single section of the website. So as long as you know, the general principles of every section has its own little settings, and that the design is one system that you define, and it goes throughout the site, those things really help you know, what you're going to be getting into when someone says, Oh, can you build me a store with 23 products? Or can you build me a store with 5000 products, you're going to know that's a huge difference. And that's going to be a lot of work. So keep it very simple. Start, make a website, make it with galleries, make it with blog posts, and make it with products. And that will give you enough experience, fill out all the settings, make sure you go through every single setting and add whatever information in you can go to the design panel, click through every single item in the design panel, get a good sense of it, go to the marketing tab, click on every single thing, there's probably only two or three things you could actually do, which is like the SEO panel, but But beyond that, check in on everything. Don't get caught on the email campaigns, either. That's a whole new thing. Analytics as well. Having a general sense of analytics is fine. But getting a good sense of how the platform is built is your like, number one step, the more you could get it in your head, the more you'll know what's possible and what's not possible. At the same time, talk to people around you tell them that you're a designer, tell them that you are a developer from there, if that's not working, run ads from there. If that's something that you're you're not sure about not sure how to do I would recommend Google Ads first, primarily because you could focus on search queries rather than what's the word you could focus on search queries. Somebody's direct query on an idea versus interest based. So like that's like a Facebook and Instagram model. What are you interested in? Oh, you're interested in Squarespace. Okay. We'll show your ad to people who are interested in Squarespace. But with with Google, if someone types in Squarespace, website developer, Squarespace, website designer, Squarespace website expert, I would target those keywords with what Google calls exact match targeting, or BBM, broad match modifier, I would target at least those three words, I would not do just Squarespace developer, that's a bit broad. And that may be someone who's looking for a coder. And if you're not a coder, then that's definitely not where you want to start getting bleeds. Okay, now, from here, so you do all that, I would also recommend that this whole process is about building the confidence through the work. So you do the first project, it gives you confidence that you can get through the system, through your system through your process, then phase two is, again, you do the work, and you see that you could get through your process and that your process can work. Then from there, you do a third one, you see where your processes is lacking, and you start to develop it further. So you're gaining the confidence by doing it over and over again, start with a consultation, get on the phone, see what they need, make sure you talk about money in that first phone call, do not do not get off that phone call without talking about money, find out what their budget is, ask them. I know that must be so intimidating. But also, if you have your pricing online, like they'll probably have selected a package already. So in any case, figure
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out what they what they are willing to spend on this project and get started. I did my first website, I was lucky, I think I'm really lucky. With the first client, I had paid 1500 bucks. Plus he paid 250 for a logo that I would never show off. I wouldn't ever show off that logo now. But he paid 1750 for his entire project. And that's a really good starting point. If you could start a website for 950, a five page website for 900 bucks 950. That's a really good starting point, especially to get you going. If you are an agency and you hear that you may say oh my gosh, that's so cheap. But getting started you want to get there's going to be black, there's going to be things that you don't have a full sense on the about page might look different than completely different than the contact page, you almost it could maybe almost feel like a different website. So as you go through this process, build up the confidence, start with the 950 or start at 500 or even 300. Obviously, just get clients because you want the experience of getting a client committing to a client setting deadlines with a client and moving the project forward. One of the biggest things I'd recommend too is that you want to you want to Take control of the project, never let the client guess where the project is. And also be ahead of the client. That is a million times going to save you energy, your commitment your your time, if the client has to lead the project, you're in a bad spot, you want to lead the project. This is why when you lead the project, the client will give you directional Okay, yeah changed out, adjust this accordingly. But when the client leads the project, they become the design expert. And that gets really hard because then you're getting asked a lot of monotonous tasks, a lot of things and processes that just don't make sense design wise started going off the radar. So I really recommend that. One other thing I recommend is once you build that first site, or those first few sites, and you're starting to test it before you send it to a client, before you send it to the person paying you or the organization you're doing the site for for free, I highly recommend highly, highly recommend. Go to Facebook, get into a few Squarespace community groups, I think the main one out there right now is called Squarespace community, go there, post the website and ask for feedback. There are experts there that will literally for a few minutes, review the site and give you direct, great feedback. Go in there, see what they're saying. And they'll be able to guide you to fix some things. So that so that your process gets cleaned up. That is a really, really amazing process that I would highly recommend for anyone who's starting out. The next thing is this, I would I would highlight that becoming a Squarespace circle member is a really good step. So basically, a Squarespace circle member happens that that happens, you could become a Squarespace circle member, once you've built, you have three paid accounts on your on your profile. So once you have three clients, you could become a circle member, once you become a circle member, you get a six month trial period. This is huge. This is huge, because when you're working with a client having to rush through a 14 day trial period is really tough. And the way I actually deliver projects to clients, I don't deliver a project fully, I don't give them back in access to a new website until I've received final payment. So by that point, we've built the first draft, we've done the first revision, we've done the second revision, so the site looks, looks in shape, it looks like it's where it needs to be. And it looks like it's just about ready to launch, there might be a few tweaks here and there. But basically, it looks just ready to launch. At that point right there is when I would then ask for final payment, and then I would grant
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access to the site for them before that I do not so use that as a part of the whole. But if you have a trial, the reason I bring that up, if you have a trial website, that's only 14 days, and your client has to pay for it, you have to give them access. And I personally feel like giving them access to pay for and then revoking access is a little weird I I feel that that can cause problems in the long run. So you can, this is a way to combat that. So you're not dealing with that. So you get a six month trial. Somehow there are clients who want to take longer than six months to launch their first site, but you get a six month trial. And that will help you so much. Also, it gives you a few extra perks, I think you get like 10 or 20% off. Squarespace isn't really good with any kind of whatsoever. affiliate programs, they don't really have, they kind of have something like that right now. But it's not that great. So for now, that does give you two main perks, which is the six month trial. And I believe it's 20% off the first year, the yearly membership. Now, I kind of started touching on this a moment ago. But I do want to talk on about having a process. We're almost done here, I have two more major points here. And then one final final goal, but have a process I just explained to you my process a little bit. But now I'm going to go through it in full detail. So if you were a client, and we hopped on the phone, I would say something like this, if they asked me what my process was. So our process is really simple. Nobody wants 10,000 emails back and forth for their website. So we do a process. That's four steps. The first step is this. It's the intake form and the deposit, you're going to fill out this questionnaire that we have. And it's basically a collection of all your content. You'll send over photos, you can use Dropbox, you can use Google Drive, anything that works for you, but then you'll fill out all the content get that to us. Give us your inspiration, what you like what you don't like your brand, all those things Need to collect all of that and get that, and you'll send that over to us. Alongside that we're going to do, we'll have a 50% deposit to start the project. Once that's with me, I'll do the first draft. And as I do the first draft, I'll give you a date to expect the first review, so you can see the website. So that's step one. Step two is the first revision. And instead, step two is I'll send you the site to review, you'll take time to review the whole site. Now, you're not going to send me a few notes or, or you're not going to send a few notes back and forth. And we're going to do one page. And then next page, the next page, you're going to review the whole site. This eliminates a lot of chaos and eliminates a lot of emails, I'm going to send you a Word document, you can use that word document to fill out for every single page, all your notes on the website. And then if there are any outstanding questions that I have, you could answer those questions as well, then you'll send it to me, and then we'll do the same thing. Again, I'll send you a date when you can expect the work to be complete. Usually, that's in about three to six business days, depending on the size of the site, and the project. And then from there, we go to Step three, which is the second revision. At this point, it's more of a minor revision, most things should be in top shape. But with the adjustments we just did, there might be a few outstanding things. So again, I'll send you a new word document, you'll review that you add your notes to that document as you review the website. And once you're done with that, you'll send that to me. And we'll do that last process again. And once all that is said and done, we're basically ready to launch. And the last two steps for launching is getting the site paid for and getting your domain connected to the site. But before we do that, we need to finalize the invoice. And once we finalize the invoice, I'll be able to give you ownership of the website. And so that's step four, which leads which I call training and launch. So we'll get to that point, I can train you once I get you in the back end, which is right after the deposit. And so basically we'll at that point, second revisions done. Step four is I'm going to get you trained. And then we'll plan a launch day, the launch day will be on whatever day you prefer, which will set up your domain. If you have a current site will move your domain, whatever that looks like to get your site up and running. Wow, okay, that was a bit of a mouthful. Truthfully, I actually haven't said that in four months, six months. I don't build websites right now. But at this current phase, we mainly do SEO work. However, those are the four steps. Those are the four steps of the process. Honestly, this is the part I want you to get to when I landed that first client, I was really thankful. But when I got on the phone with him, I had no
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idea what I was talking about. Somehow I convince myself and I knew that this was the process. I don't know how maybe I talked to my friends, or something that like clued me into this. But once I started that first project, I tried to keep a really good flow with the client so that we follow these four steps. And from every project subsequent every project after that I was able to continue and keep this process. The good part about a process is if the client says, Oh, can you just send me access? Now? You say, Oh, sorry, that's not part of the process. So you're not pointing at yourself and saying, Oh, no, I don't do it that way, you could say that. But you're not pointing at yourself, where you may be feeling stuck in a way or it's like, this is my own personal preference, it doesn't come off like that. There's a business process that you've agreed to, in this in this structure of in this invoice and the scope. And so once we begin, we're in motion, and for you to jump ahead of it isn't possible. So maybe the client will say, Oh, I'm so busy, I'm just gonna send you the notes for the homepage. And then we'll get to the other ones later. Just finish those up, and then send them back to me. Oh, client, I'm so sorry. But actually, the process does not work that way. Once you finish the notes for the first revision, then all for the whole website, and then I'll review them and get into doing them and give you a date when you could expect them to be done. If you're going to take three weeks or six weeks to just do the first revision, I would charge I would charge for that. I would charge for that I in the beginning I did it. But over time I got to a point where I said this is not going to work. I can't sit here for six months waiting for you to get your act together. We start the process. If there's a certain timeline after a certain point, you either will pay more or or the project will get cancelled. I'm not going to sit here and wait for y'all. But that's me venting with clients. But with that said with that said as you begin as you begin, you don't have to worry too much about that. But I do all those all those fine details. I do recommend having a process make it clear. And so that way the client knows where they're at step one, before I begin any work, I needed to pause it and all your content. Step two is that I will need, I will send you the first draft. Step two will be you'll do the first revision, you'll do the whole site, not part of it, I don't want 20,000 emails from you. Step three, second revision, step four, training and launch. And that gets the site up and running. And the cool part too, is once you make these things the first time, you use them over and over again. All right, now my final point, how much to charge. I probably talked about this a little bit here and there throughout this chat. But let's let's get to the specifics, what I value the most. And again, this is my own personal story that's worked for me to go from charging. First I was 1750, which was nice. But to charge like 750. For my smallest site, going all the way up to paying to getting paid over $15,000 for a website on Squarespace, is this and multiple times, I've been paid 810 12 711 11 and a half 1314 for sites on Squarespace. This is my process, I would start at free, if you need to, I would start at three, or maybe $500 for your first sight. That is a joke that is very cheap. I know. I know, I know. But the point isn't the money, the thing that you're going to learn through all of this is the experience. And it's so worth it is so worth it. I've learned that as you deliver more than what the client is paying for, you could then use that to land bigger clients. So it's not for the client, it's for your next project. And it's not for the client that you currently have. It's for the next one. So if you can deliver more than what your client should get, you can use that later. And the client is a perfect, it's, it's what they call a forcing function, it puts you in a position that if you do not deliver, there's going to be a problem. It puts you in a position that allows you to really optimize yourself, in a way, you get to optimize your time and energy and focus because you're like I have to deliver the site. Yes, it's only $300 for a seven page website, but I have to deliver it at par at a good level. There's someone else who's depending on this, you have all those forcing functions working in your favor to build you up, you have deadlines set. And then that leads to now you have a seven page website to show the next client, it's really a thrilling experience. Because I remember I was doing
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a private school website, they had a limited budget, they were paying about $2,000, the work was probably around three to $4,000 worth of work. And I remember we did revisions and things were just not working, we had already done two revisions, and things were just not flowing as they needed to be. But it was also because I wasn't a great designer yet. And so with that said, I had my own struggles to work through the site was the one page looked like it was a different website, another page look like it was a different website, the homepage look like it was its own website, there was a lot of work that needed to be done. But it taught me a valuable lesson of how to make the headers consistent across the site to make it feel really nice for the client. So if I have a homepage with a background image to really nice if I do that across all the pages, it makes it feel consistent. The way I built the site, some pages had it some didn't. So it felt a little bit lacking you could say and that's not a general rule or principle for all sites. But it was something that I learned that for a lot of small businesses, that's actually perfect. header images, a background that fills up the whole space, some texts, their contact about us, whatever, and everything else below the fold. That works that works for a lot of businesses. So learning that process was really valuable. So okay, at this point, final note, this is a bonus in this process if you learn how to code Awesome, awesome, awesome, awesome. Eventually, if you want to be a Squarespace designer, you will want to learn CSS and HTML at the bare minimum. At the very bare minimum. Those are two things you're going to want to learn. You don't have to start with it though this is like a big myth that comes in the way of this and, and the myth is that you have to know how to code to even start developing sites. The point of Squarespace is drag and drop. But a lot of people struggle with design. A lot of people don't have the time and and this is an opportunity where a lot of people are looking for the confidence in others to help them support their business. I get praised paid fairly consistently, I get paid fairly consistently from people who want me to work on their site, because they just want the confidence of a professional to look at it. It's literally just that they just want the confidence of a professional to look at it. So they hire me for the help. And I love that I love that I can come in and say this is great changes, adjust that move that fix that and we'll be good to go. It really helps in the process. So the goal of this is to get you to the point where you get paid to learn and the more you get paid to learn, the more projects you do, the more money that comes in, the more money that comes in, the more confidence you gain, the more confidence you gain, the more projects you can do. And it's a cycle that keeps growing and growing and growing. Now this may lead to you getting brought onto something like the Squarespace marketplace or other marketplaces where there are projects flooding in that you can be a part of, but initially, start with your internal circle, make that commitment, write the commitment on paper, send the commitment, your top 510 15 friends, send it to people around you put it on your LinkedIn, whatever, put it on your Instagram, whatever it takes to get started. Alright, with all that said, Thank you for listening. If you have any questions, please let me know. You could go to Spacebar agency COMM And you could learn more about our work, you could sign up for the newsletter if there was one call to action at the end of this. I would say go to Spacebar agency comm sign up for the newsletter letter become part of the community, we send out a weekly update every single week, it would be a great place to start on SEO. And if you have any questions, go to the site, email us send us a message, we make it really easy to contact our team. And I would love to hear from you. In Episode Three, I'm going to talk about basically the 8020 rule, but on four or five or six different examples. So I'm just going to go in hard on ways to grow your business quickly. Because once you get your groundwork set, and you get processed that your proposal set and even you design process that you could start building sites quickly, I could literally build a site that I love in just a few hours if not less than two hours. And that's because I have so many systems in place where everything is ready and at my fingertips for me to launch as soon as I need to. So that's what's coming in Episode Three. I look forward to chatting with you there. And with that, have a great rest of your day wherever you are in the world. Peace.
Let's go. Cool. Oh, I'm still recording here. Okay.
