The publisher of AdventurePossible.com white boarding a web application with his daughter. Too bad she’s going to grow up to realize the software never made it out of the development lab.
This article is for the coding newbie who is considering website design and development as a possible means for making money on adventure travels.
If you know how to hack together a website and sell website design and development services, you may want to move on to the next article.
Otherwise, read on!
Most companies believe they need a website to sell products, market services, or serve existing customers.
In general, sites help businesses reach, engage, convert, and services customers, and the value that they contribute to a business in terms of leads, engagement, or ease of business means businesses are willing to spend on websites as part of their overall sales and marketing strategy.
The need for websites means a need for skilled (and sometimes unskilled) website design and developers.
This creates the perfect opportunity for you because website design and development freelance services will let you make money and travel, building some cash before you head out on the adventure and then serving clients while on your adventure.
Don’t Be Intimidated – Code isn’t Rocket Science
For sure it may involve computer science, but basic website design and development can be pretty easy to learn if you are willing to read some HTML CSS books for dummies, spend hours on W3 Schools, and search stackoverflow.com for answers when you get stumped. YouTube has great free tutorials as well.
For real, this is a completely doable way to start, and it is the very start that I had when I started in the web many years ago.
With some basic HTML and CSS skills gathered through self-teaching or some local community college courses, you can do some pretty cool things on the web that will make you marketable to small businesses who may be in need of website help (i.e. changing page content, styling pages, creating new pages)
After you build some of these skills, then start dabbling in some scripting languages, like PHP.
Open Source CMSs Are Your Adventure Travel Companion
Why is a CMS a great adventure travel companion for freelance web developers? It carries a ton of the weight.
Very few websites, especially for small and medium sized businesses, are completely hard-coded. Most rely on a content management system (CMS), which provides a platform upon which websites can be built and non-technical authors (business users) can add, edit, and delete content.
On top of the content management abilities, the other cool thing about open source CMSs is that a community of users exists that have contributed a wealth of how-to information on the web, which gives beginners a serious advantage when struggling through their first few sites.
And yet another cool thing is the ecosystem of CMS themes, plugins, and other applications that develop around open source CMS platforms.
Themes are basically prebuilt website designs that can be downloaded free or with purchase (i.e. premium themes). They can be used as-is, or with you HTML and CSS skills you can modify that layout, colors, styling, fonts, and many other elements.
Plugins are powerful software applications that can be activated within a content management system, and they provide features and functionality with a few clicks and configurations.
Want to add social media buttons to a site? There’s many plugins for that. Forms? Yep, many options, free and paid, for adding forms to your website. Hero image sliders? Yes. Sitemaps? Yes.
You get the idea.
The common open source (i.e. free) CMSs like WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla run millions upon millions of small and medium business websites, so it is worth picking at least one platform for which to develop some competencies and knowledge, as they can put you way down the path to success.
Picking A Specialization Long Before The Adventure
In the beginning, if you are just getting started out with website design and development, you won’t be able to bill yourself as a specialist as it pertains to languages. For example, you won’t be a PHP developer or a full-stack front-end developer.
You’re going to be a generalist that will likely need to hack together your first few sites until you get a little more knowledge, experience, and training.
Since the skills that you will likely have in the early going will be general in nature, you will need to advertise your website design and development skillset in a general context (i.e. website design, website development), but I do suggest that you pick a particular market to pursue, also called a niche.
Maybe your background makes you particularly adept at understanding the marketing and business needs of doctors, dentists, contractors, car dealerships, hostels, or restaurants.
In whatever you might have a special advantage or knowledge, provided there appears to be a need for website design and development, get specific on targeting customers in that niche
Picking a specialized market will make it easier to describe, find, and target potential customers, which can be a difficult task.
Build A Client Base Before The Adventure
Once you’ve got some idea of a niche in which you want to provide website design and development services, there are countless ways to find freelance clients, from posting ads on Craigslist, to working your network, to cold calls.
Most importantly, start building your client base before you head out on your adventure travels.
Don’t assume that when you show up cold in a new town or country you’ll be able to land new clients right away.
You need to start building a sales pipeline, and you need to start doing it soon.
Don’t wait until you have the skills to build a website. Start building the sales pipeline while you are learning, and see if you can get some early wins to keep you motivated, starting with small website enhancements or bug fixes.
You’ll be average or below average in your skills, but businesses do pay for average or below average skills, and not just at discounted rates.
Even if your web development skills are below average when compared to a web developer with a CS degree from Georgia Tech, you’ll likely seem like a whiz to most small business owners.
Don’t go out and rip someone off, but start selling your skills and abilities at whatever the current level.
I can’t overstate this enough. Don’t wait. Don’t wait until you develop your skills to start selling. Start selling, get some small projects, and use those to keep your education and competency growing.
You can always try posting some Craiglist ads or joining a freelance site like UpWork. In fact, you should try this, but you may find limited success without a portfolio.
I would not rely on posted ads or freelance sites in their entirety, not at first at least, since you will likely find yourself in highly competitive situations that will drive down your rate if you stand out as a newbie.
I encourage you to get out there and find some great local clients around which you can build a core freelance business.
Once you are traveling, you may have to rely more heavily on online advertising sites and marketplaces to get new clients. If you have a solid portfolio by that point, you can probably protect your rates from being eroded by heavy, lower priced competition.
What About Your Day Job?
If you have day job, keep it. Website design and development freelance work is an awesome part-time job.
You can work nights and weekends to stuff cash in the adventure travel kitty until you are ready to bail on the full time gig and head out on the adventure.
If you find yourself in the same awesome position in which I found myself when the income from my website design side business surpassed my income from my day job, then by all means, quit your day job and start designing or developing web full time.
Need Help Getting Your First Client?
Here’s one you can do right now. Open up a new tab, go to Google, search for something like “{your town} electricians” or “Dentists in {your town)”. Make the search local (If you’re from Tacoma, search “Tacoma Italian food,” if you’re from Dallas, type “CPAs Dallas”).
Beware that some industries are under intense sales pressure from website design and web marketing (i.e. SEO, PPC, content marketing) companies, including some of the industries I have mentioned, like contractors, lawyers, and restaurants. If you can find a niche that is a little off the beaten path, then that will likely give you some better results with this tactic.
Start filtering through the website starting with page 2 or 3 of the search results. You don’t want page 1 because those companies are probably doing the web well. You want websites that stink so horribly that even you could make dramatic improvement with your basic skill set.
Find ten companies or so. Take notes. Jump over to LinkedIn and find someone that works in marketing, administration, or general management for the business.
Send an email (you may have to guess the email address) or pay LinkedIn to send an InMail.
Make the email content personal and super simple. Like two sentences simple.
Reach out to this person and tell them that you are ramping up a freelance website design and development business, and ask if they need any website changes or fixes.
Follow up with a call to the business and ask for the person by name (sales tip: knowing the name of the person you want to speak with always gives you a better chance at getting past a secretary. Versus asking for “the person in charge of”.)
Don’t stop at only ten companies. Hit ten companies per day for the next 10 days. That’s 100 companies in a week and a half, and I would bet that at least a few conversations and sales leads will come out of the effort.
Don’t worry about how things turn out in the first few encounters. Go ahead and accept that they will probably go poorly.
You’ll surely step in a pile of dog crap or perhaps fall face first into it, blowing up a perfectly good lead.
If you you are like me, you may get embarrassed, but so what. Shake it off.
No matter the outcome, the conversations will help you grow your selling skills and market knowledge, and it will move you further towards a path of building a client base that will follow you on the adventure.
The Exit Plan For Adventure Travel
So you’ve hacked together a few sites by now, and hopefully you have a few happy clients and several prospects in the pipeline. Awesome.
Now you’re thinking about leaving on your adventure.
The idea behind building a client base is that you have an existing client base that you can take with you, a few folks that might throw 10-20 hours per month your way for website maintenance, changes, improvements, etc.
However, when you leave, you can’t lose them. Long before you leave, start minimizing the time you spend in front of clients.
You want it to be super normal for them to do business with you without seeing you, sending you work orders and paying invoices without the need to meet in an office. This way little changes when you head out on your adventure.
For new clients in the pipeline, try to sell them without seeing them. Don’t go meet them in coffee shops, office, or home.
Close the deal over the phone, and then deliver an awesome project result.
The idea here is that if you can sell a client over the phone and then deliver remotely, you’ve just landed a client that you can carry with you on your adventure travel trips.
Prior to leaving, be transparent about your adventure travels. Let clients know that you are leaving, but reinforce that you will provide a similar level of quality and service that they have come to expect.
You will certainly need to manage some expectations about changes, such as response times. If you are gliding down the Mississippi River on a kayak, you are unlikely to be immediately available when a client emails or calls.
So be open about what your doing. Keep them engaged, and keep solid communication by phone, email, and perhaps Skype when you have a project ongoing.
Don’t Get Discouraged – Stay Focused on Adventure
While website designers and developers are in demand, you will still face rejection and moments of dejection.
It will be hard to get started in the business. Don’t let anyone tell you it is easy. Prepare for hard work and dig in.
If no one will hire you for your first gig or if you consistently get people asking for a web design portfolio that you don’t have, then put your website design and development skills to use on your own projects that you can proudly and confidently show other people.
Start a travel blog, a website about your adventures, a dummy ecommerce store. Whatever. Just build a site or two that you can use to show off your skills.
Don’t let any rejections or stumbles get you down.
Be motivated by the fact that you are learning a portable skill that will let you work from anywhere in the world with internet.
A Lot of Passion for Both Web and Adventure
I have a lot of passion about the web, and in particular website design and development.
I have made my living leading web design and development projects.
I started with small website design projects for lawyers, dentists, and other professionals.
I graduated to flagship website redesigns and complex CMS implementations for multi-billion dollar, globally recognized brands with websites reaching millions of visitors per month in multiple languages across several continents.
Today, I still hustle on the side with the occasional freelance website design project.
I love the web, but it doesn’t mean you will.
However, even if you spend a little time exploring website design and development only to decide that it isn’t for you, it will still be time well spent.
The web is an increasingly central and critical part of all of our lives, and it helps to have some perspective on the languages, technologies, and mechanisms of the web.
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