Hi guys,

 

You can read my intro here

 

As I stated in my introduction, I wish to move away from web design to providing services to web designers. I have a large portfolio of web design domains (like 'bestwebdesign.co.uk') etc, which I could easily utilise to bring in hundreds of leads. I also own a high PR site with backlinks from BBC / Wikipedia and the like.

 

I am not sure what to do with these, I have many thoughts and what it really burns down to is what do my fellow web designers need?

 

I was thinking of a site collating all the best articles / inspiration. However is this really even useful?

 

I was also thinking of creating a 'team' to satisfy all the leads I can get - where the team would do the design and I could focus on client interaction / seo / etc.

 

Or should I just sell these leads to designers? I know many talented designers who can't get the work and would pay for them. However it would probably make more financial sense to create my own business around these leads.

 

To put it simply: If you could have a service that doesn't exist out there, what would it be? A better showcase, featuring articles free psds etc? A lead generation service? Or something entirely different?

 

Thank you, Ashton

No thoughts?

My honest thoughts...

 

Just having domains with (something)webdesign.co.uk ain't going to produce leads all by themselves. You will need to pour in a lot of time optimising the sites and getting them up in search engine ranking and give people a reason to pick your company over the millions of other companies out there. So to get these 100s of leads you will need a unique reason why these people would come to you and not others.

 

Showcase/article sites - the web is saturated with these types of sites, from css galleries, blog sites like smashing magazine, web designer depot 24ways and designers that simply have blogs as a hobby/side project, to communities such as forrst and dribbble. Then there are a lot of sites that simply use feeds from most popular sites to create a collection of great articles, resources and inspiration, give the viewer a brief description and then a direct link to the full article on the site it came from. Again you would need to come up with something that is different enough for people to want to go to your site over the 1000s of other sites. Obviously unique articles will help, but it would be a lot of work when you start off having to write all the articles and create a strong following that would mean that others would want to freely contribute to the site.

 

A lead generation service, again there are so many of these, the company I work for gets a few calls a week from companies promising great leads and amazing opportunities for a low cost per lead. So yet again your idea would need a very unique selling point so designers and design companies would opt to use you, after all they are simply paying for a chance at a job, and not a guaranteed job...there needs to be a big intensive to do this.

 

If you could have a service that doesn't exist out there

I wouldn't share my ideas on a forum if the service didn't exist and I thought it should, instead I would invest my time and money building it up myself

 

It may seem like I have just shot down all your ideas, but really as they stand they aren't unique. Even if you do take an existing idea for your business, to succeed in such a saturated market you need something unique about it. So if these are things that you like the idea of, look at what is out there and think of how they could be improve to make it easier for designers/people to use and interact with.

Thanks for the reply Dizi,

 

After speaking with business partner, I think it is best we go onto using these ourselves, and any leads we would sell, wouldn't be sold in advance, payment would be commission on completion.

 

Thank you for taking time to make a detailed reply. I have copied your reply down and will refer back to it.

Or should I just sell these leads to designers? I know many talented designers who can't get the work and would pay for them. However it would probably make more financial sense to create my own business around these leads.

Haven't you just answered your own question there? If you know that many people who would pay for leads then that's a business opportunity worth looking into.

 

To put it simply: If you could have a service that doesn't exist out there, what would it be? A better showcase, featuring articles free psds etc? A lead generation service? Or something entirely different?

I concur with Dizi, showcase/tutorial sites are ten a penny, with many of them rehashing the same old tired content. There may be room for some very niche sites covering specialised CMS's or software but you'd have to do your homework to find the real opportunities.

 

In all honesty showcase site don't really reflect the "real world", yes most showcase sites look nice, they're supposed to, but the most successful sites rarely, if ever, are the type to feature in such sites.