My Top 6 Sources for New Web Design Projects (You Might Be Surprised)

I ran my web design agency for nearly a decade, and in that time, we won hundreds of new clients and website projects. It wasn’t easy though, and to win that many projects, I needed to become good at sales.

I also needed to know where the best places to find new clients and web design projects were. In this article, I share my top six sources. You might be surprised by what I reveal, starting in reverse order:

06. Being In a Shared Office

Basing your web design agency in an office can have many benefits, especially as it can help you present your business as being more professional and established. But if you can base your business in a shared office space, this can also be a great source of new clients and web design projects.

The simple reason is that you’re usually surrounded by other businesses, who themselves often need new websites (or they know someone else who does). In a way, it’s kind of like networking, in that you get to meet new people and build relationships, as these places are usually busy and bustling hubs of entrepreneurship.

Committing to an office also helps to build trust, as it demonstrates that you’re established and therefore less likely to just disappear.

It will come at a cost though, as basing your business in an office will obviously be more expensive than just working from home, but in all the years I based my web design agency in a shared office, the work we got from it always outweighed the expense.

05. Word of Mouth

Running a web design agency is not easy, but if you do your best and try to do everything right, or at least as well as you can, then you should start to build a strong reputation. This was certainly what I tried to do with my agency, and over the years, it paid off, because a lot of our work came as a result of other people recommending us.

The importance of this can’t be overstated. Those other people didn’t need to recommend us. We weren’t incentivising them to do so – they did it off their own backs, and that says a lot.

We may not have done everything perfectly all the time, but we always tried to do our best, and this made us attractive enough that other people felt confident to make those recommendations.

04. Existing Relationships

This one is closely related to the last point, but as well other people recommending us, we also won a lot of new business from clients that we already had some kind of existing relationship with.

To give an example, we had had one client who I worked with at three separate organisations. So, that same individual worked for three completely different organisations, and at each one, when they needed a new website, they came to me.

This just goes to show the strength of building strong relationships, and why doing a good job really matters. If you can do good work and build people’s trust, then those people will come back to you again and again, meaning you’ll reap the benefits of your hard work for years to come.

03. Our Own Website

Being a web design agency meant we had to lead by example with our own website, so this was something that we always invested in, and, over the years, it was a good source of new business enquiries.

However, it also wasn’t as easy as you may think. We obviously needed to do a lot of work to make sure our website was full of relevant content and that it was optimised for search engines, but ranking well was always a challenge. Web design is a highly competitive industry, and as you’d expect, our competitors were also good at making their websites rank well.

We certainly got our fair share of new business enquiries through our website, but it was never as high a volume as I would have liked. The ones that we did get were always high enough value to make it a worthwhile investment though, and we also complimented our organic search with PPC, which also paid for itself over the years.

02. Networking

Face-to-face networking is often compared to Marmite in that you either love it, or you don’t, and you may be grimacing as you read this but for us, going to real world networking events was always a strong source of new business.

I don’t just mean random, one-off events every now and then though. I committed a lot of time going to the same events and building long-term relationships, and over the years, it paid off, as so much of our work could be traced back to networking in some way or another, either directly or indirectly.

It wasn’t always easy to quantify though, as networking isn’t usually an instant source of work. It’s highly unlikely that you would just go to a one-off networking event and walk away with a brand-new client or project. Networking doesn’t really work like that. It can happen, but it’s incredibly rare.

Networking is about building relationships, so it’s something you need to do consistently over a long time. But if you can stick at it and put in the hard yards, you should reap the benefits for many years.

01. Referral Partners

This might surprise you, but referral partners were consistently our top source of new business. This is where we built strong, symbiotic relationships with other agencies who were in a similar field to us, but where we didn’t do the exact same thing.

A good example is SEO agencies. We never offered direct SEO services to our clients, and so we built strong, collaborative relationships with SEO agencies who didn’t offer web design services.

They would recommend us when their clients needed a new website, and we would recommend them when our clients needed SEO services. It was simple yet incredibly powerful, but we still needed to build trust, as those partner agencies needed to be confident that by recommending us, their clients would be in safe hands.

Key Takeaways

I think there’s a lot that you can learn from all of this:

1. Places that usually sell themselves on being able to generate new business for you, like online business directories, and even social media, were actually never that strong for us. Perhaps it’s because those places tend to be quite oversubscribed nowadays, and also quite impersonal.
2. There isn’t really a ‘silver bullet’ or magic way to generate new business. There’s no replacement for hard work and investing in yourself, and it also takes time.
3. People still buy from people. Relationships matter, and they were the most important part in most of this. You need to build trust with people.

We still needed to be really good at what we did. Those relationships and recommendations wouldn’t have happened if we weren’t worth recommending.