Online Earning Tips: Top 5 Practices

Developing a website should not be your last transaction with a client. Since you’ve established trust (and assuming you delivered a quality website to your client) you want to continue driving value from the relationship with passive income opportunities. From over a decade of experience in building a thriving digital marketing agency, I’ve outlined the top five passive income best practices for web developers like you.

1. Do Not SPAM Small Businesses

If you want to destroy your reputation out of the gate, then you'll purchase a mailing list and start pushing your wares to people you don't know. You'll quickly be entered into the "Spammer Hall of Fame" and find all of your future emails landing in the junk folder. As someone who has resold email marketing software for over a decade, I can assure you that this approach simply doesn't work and opens you up to federal investigations and fines.

Besides the legal implications, most purchased lists are filled with fake email addresses and spam traps that will red flag the email account from which you send and obliterate your sender score. In essence, only promote your products and services to those familiar with your web design business.

2. Web Service Packages: Increase Your Revenues with Service Bundling

If you've ever walked into a fast food restaurant like McDonald's, you've experienced the power of bundling. Why purchase a hamburger, fries, and drink separately when you can save money buying them all together. That is a psychological pricing trick that plays in any business: "It's not what you spend, it's what you save."

Instead of a piecemeal approach where you sell one product or service at a time, consider bundling your in-house services with passive income streams.

Because small business owners are short on time and technological expertise, the easier you make it for them to get up and running, the more value you deliver. You'll find that bundling your services will create more "stickiness" with your clients and reduce the amount of questions you receive when submitting an itemized proposal because of the perceived savings.

3. Confirm Affiliate Program Expectations

Passive income is an amazing thing! Receiving that monthly check is a great feeling, but you need to be realistic when considering the requirements of their affiliate program. As an example, one of the platforms I resold in my early days was promising a 50 percent commission for every sale, but there was a catch: I had to continue adding 10 new clients each month.

At first, I took on the challenge and began promoting the platform to my entire network of business owners because I was convinced this platform would bring them value. The first few months went well, and I was closing 12 to 15 new accounts per month. The clients were happy, and the money was rolling in. I'd finally found my cash cow!

On the fourth month, the well ran dry. I was like a Tupperware host with no party. I didn't dare go back and peddle the same platform to my network for fear of being a profiteering pariah. As a result, I went from a reseller commission of 50 percent to 10 percent, and that program lost its luster soon after.

The moral of the story: don't be fleeced by that shiny carrot of a commission because strings are attached. Instead, choose an affiliate marketing program with the most accurate affiliate tracking and receive fair commission payouts!

4. Whitelabel Reseller: Spotlight Your Brand

Over the years, I've hitched my company wagon to many different brands from fledgling startups with no brand recognition to industry leaders like Google and Constant Contact. Each relationship has its own branding requirements, and I've definitely tested the waters to see how I could weave my own branding in the mix.

In running your own online business, you'll want to lead with your brand because your clients are "buying you." For that reason, it's ideal for you to find a whitelabel web hosting reseller that gives you the opportunity to spotlight your own brand.

Fortunately, Verpex provides whitelabel servers as a standard and allows you to customize your hosting reseller business free of charge. You can also brand the control panel for your customers with your logo, color scheme and even more customizable features to reinforce your brand throughout the hosting experience.

5. Research Your Passive Income Partners

It’s important that you research your potential passive income partner to make sure that their reputation and digital brand presence add value to your own web development firm. Let's say you want to build a revenue stream around Reseller Hosting with Verpex.

The first thing you'd want to do is go to Google and search for "Verpex Reviews." If the company is legitimate, you'll see a number of sites with glowing four and five-star reviews from current customers and resellers. (Of course, there may be some lower review scores, too, but that just adds more legitimacy because it’s impossible to make everyone happy.)

Don't stop there! Click into those sites and read through the reviews. Take note of the locations of the reviewers, the length of their testimonials, and any responses from the company. If you see too many reviews piling in at one time or from a similar geography, then keep digging.

Once you've checked the reviews, take a look at the company's website. Does it look professional? Is it something you want your brand to be associated with? In some instances, you may even find a platform like Verpex that allows you to whitelabel with your branding, so all roads lead back to your web development agency. (More on whitelabeling below.)

Passive income helped me to build a solid foundation of cash flow for my online business, and it continues to afford us the opportunity to grow our team and help more small business owners. I made mistakes along the way, partnering with shady startups and chasing grandiose commissions with strings attached, but those experiences helped me learn the passive income best practices I just shared above.

You, too, will hit snags along the way as you experiment with different passive income platforms and solutions, but don't fret. If you follow the tips above as you navigate the myriad passive income opportunities for web developers, you'll be on your way to building a bigger, better web development company.