241. Make $8,000+ per month - Make websites with Weebly
As you know, many people want to build their own websites and don't know how to start or which tools they need to design a website.
Weebly is no coding, drag & drop visual professional websites created in shortest amount of time.
Here is an article of a web designer who charges $1,000-$2,000 per week to build one website.
Hostgator also has a Weebly builder if you re looking for a hosting provider.
Below you find a copy of the article (author: Edward Williams):
How I Made $130,000 in a Year Building Websites in Weebly as a Beginner With Little to No Coding: The Story of My Web Design Business Taking Aviation Online.
Last year, I hit six figures building websites for customers in…Weebly. A drag ‘n drop website builder. It’s as easy to use as building legos and requires no coding.
Now, if you’re a web developer, you’re probably thinking “WTF is this moron doing.” Weebly is a DIY website builder, that makes building websites as easy as dragging and dropping blocks onto your screen. It’s not a “professional” tool. Anybody can build a website in Weebly. So how am I making money?
But…my results speak for themselves. I’ve built 76 websites last year in 2020, all in Weebly, and I charge about $1,800 per website (the actual figure depends on how many hours I put into the project). I also have monthly subscriptions. In 2020, I ended the year with $130,000 USD in sales.
In this post, I’m going to share with you my entire journey. My secrets, how I got started, how I find customers, and how this all works. I’m going to be as detailed as possible so apologies for the long post, it’s just that a lot of posts here are frustratingly vague. I’ll be providing links to all the tools I used.
It’s a lot of info.
Also, I’m not selling anything. No promotions, no funnel, no landing page, no affiliate links. I’m posting this because I want to inspire others to do what I did. Find problems in the world, solve them, and get money. Lots of people are quitting their jobs and looking to entrepreneurship.
I also just had my coffee and I’m feeling motivated to share my story with you guys.
I’m not a web developer. I don’t really know how to fully code. I started out with a little web dev knowledge and learned some more HTML and CSS along the way, but I’m nowhere near proficient.
Yet, I’ve got 75 websites under my belt and counting.
Quick Introduction — How I Got Started Building Sites
I started making Weebly websites a few years ago, back when I was in high school. I made some bullshit ones, here and there. You literally just drag and drop blocks, there’s no coding involved. There isn’t much learning, either.
But I realized I liked “building” stuff, and it became like a hobby.
When I entered college, I joined a student club. When I joked around about how I make random websites for fun, the club president asked me if I could make a website for the club. I said sure. I did it for free since obviously, the club didn’t have any funding.
So I built the club their website. They really liked it, and I started getting requests from other clubs to build them a site.
But I was studying aerospace in school, and I didn’t have any time, so I declined.
However, the lightbulb went on then, about how I could potentially start a business in this.
Fast forward to February 2020. COVID hit, lockdowns were coming, and businesses were rapidly moving online.
I had just graduated the winter before and didn’t even bother applying for jobs because of the lockdowns. Instead, I decided to go full send with my website design business.
How I Started My Business & Why I Chose Weebly
So it’s 2020. I’ve decided that I want to start my web design business.
My first step was to decide how I’m going to build the websites. I had experience in Weebly, and I decided to use this.
I didn’t use the “regular” version of Weebly. Weebly has a platform called “Weebly for Designers”
It’s exactly what it sounds like. It’s the same Drag and Drop version of Weebly, except oriented at website developers who use Weebly to build websites for customers.
Now, you might be wondering: why on Earth would I choose Weebly?
After all, there are builders like Squarespace, Wix, Webflow, etc. Why Weebly?
Here are the reasons I went with Weebly, and the benefits I got:
Super Easy to Use — Like I said, I had little to no coding knowledge. Weebly was insanely easy to use.
Rapid Website Deployment — With Weebly, I could reuse templates and build a fully branded “brochure” 5-page website in 3 days. Building such a website in a different builder or manually would have taken me weeks.
Customers Can Edit Their Own Website — The Weebly for Designers platform I linked above lets designers like me build “customer portals” where my customers can log in and edit their own website with the easy-to-use website builder. They can add or edit products (if it’s an eCommerce site), add blogs, run the membership platforms, and more. All without calling me.
Ability to Edit HTML/CSS/JS — Weebly is a strange platform. It’s the easiest to use out of all the website builders, but it also gives users the full unrestricted ability to edit HTML/CSS/JS on their websites. I started to learn a little bit of code, so I began making small custom CSS edits to the user’s websites I built.
Why Would Anyone Pay Me To Build Them a Weebly Website? Why Wouldn’t They Just Build it Themselves?
Weebly is super easy to use. So why wouldn’t these business owners just build their own website with it? Why pay me?
First off, it’s important to note that many business owners who try to use website builders like Weebly end up hating it. Especially for those in their 50’s and 60's.
Many just get frustrated. Either some bug appears, or they can’t log in to the website builder because of a cache issue, or they can’t type very fast, etc.
Many of them *want* to have a Weebly website (because they want to be able to edit it) but they don’t want to build an entire site in it. So they’re willing to pay.
Now, many of my customers don’t even know *what* Weebly is. They’re happy with the site I built for them, and that’s the end of the story. They don’t care how I built it.
The websites I build in Weebly are MUCH higher quality than default Weebly themes. Just because someone can build a website in Weebly doesn’t mean it’ll be a good website. You need to have an eye for design.
I don’t have any formal web design training. What I do is I go to websites I like, and look at their styles. Their color schemes, the padding between elements, how it looks on mobile, how they sort content, etc.
Here’s another critical thing I do: I don’t use default generic Weebly themes. Weebly has a bunch of “built-in” website designs and templates.
I don’t use those, because they’re very generic and don’t allow for much customization.
Instead, I buy premium third-party Weebly themes from a third-party developer (Luminous Themes). They make really good-looking Weebly themes with a bunch of designs and features that you won’t find in generic Weebly templates.
I have a good relationship with the company and I’ve sometimes even contracted them out to make extensive code changes to some more advanced Weebly sites I’ve built.
As a result of me using third-party Weebly themes and not default ones, my Weebly sites look very professional. They don’t look anything like regular Weebly websites. You can’t tell any of my sites were built in Weebly from a visual perspective.
How I Got My First Customer in the Aviation Niche
Web design is a very competitive field BUT it’s also very easy to find a niche and monetize it.
My first customer was actually a local flight school. I had just begun taking classes to get my private pilot’s license right before the lockdowns came.
Like most flight schools, they had a really shitty website. I told my flight instructor on the discovery flight that I’ve gotten into building websites.
She then got me in contact with the flight school head, who paid me to re-build them a site in Weebly.
I built it for them, in Weebly, in under six days. I got paid $1,100 for it + a $36/month upkeep subscription.
They were super satisfied with it and now I had a site in my portfolio. An aviation site.
My biggest mistake with the first website project was I had no contract. Luckily, the flight school people were really kind so no issues there, and it was a very informal deal.
But, always have a contract. I heard of horror stories.
From there on, I generated a Web Design Contract with Signwell
(You just fill in the blanks and it generates a contract you share with your clients. Make sure to cap revisions, you don’t want to get stuck in an endless loop of your client looking for revisions).
Expanding in the Aviation Niche
So now my portfolio consisted of one website in the aviation niche.
Companies like it when they see websites similar to their industry in your portfolio (I assumed). Therefore, I reached out to another company in the aviation space.
This one was a developer of an airplane add-on for Microsoft Flight Simulator (this sim has a MASSIVE add-on ecosystem). They had a really crappy one-page website.
I quickly generated an Adobe XD mockup of how their webpage could look if I built it for them. I asked for an Adobe XD mockup file from Luminous Themes (the company that made the Weebly themes I used) and they provided one, which I quickly edited for the add-on company.
I showed them a mockup of what their site could look like, and they were super on board.
Signed the contract, built the site in about a week (took a little longer because of two revisions, and they didn’t respond to emails quickly), and I made $800 profit (it was a smaller website so I charged less).
For these initial projects, I was sorta making up prices as I went along. I didn’t count hours. These days, I charge by the hour.
They were super happy with the website and even happier that they could edit it by themselves.
Cool. Now I had two aviation-themed websites in my portfolio.
My third customer was an aircraft services company near my local flight school. They also had a really shitty website that didn’t even show up properly on search listings.
I emailed them and did the same thing I did for the last company: generate a mockup of what their website could look like if I built it for them.
I also showed them my portfolio of the other two last websites I built.
They were on board, and I built them their website in Weebly. I charged $1,600 for it because they had membership features they wanted, an online store, scheduling system, blogging and a bunch of crap I didn’t think was relevant but they insisted.
It took me about 4 days to build this site. FOUR DAYS. In Weebly.
They were super satisfied and recommended me to another company, which was in the aviation consulting space.
From there on, the ball kept rolling and I kept building websites.
How I Find Customers
Word of Mouth — The companies I worked for will sometimes recommend me to others, especially on LinkedIn.
Emailing Companies with Mockups — This works surprisingly well. Design a quick mockup in Adobe XD with a mockup template, show it to the company, and wait.
Facebook Groups — Be creative, and join a wide variety of Facebook groups for various niches. Some companies will run their own Facebook Groups, this is a good way to connect with them.
Target Companies in a Niche — Companies like to see web design agencies that have built websites for them in their niche. This is critical. Most of my portfolio is still in the aviation sector though I’m branching out. If a company sees a website you’ve built for a similar company, they’ll be much more likely to convert.
Weebly Groups — I’ll occasionally do custom edits and custom works for users who post in the Weebly forums. Many are desperate for custom help.
The Weebly Platform is my Superpower
The speed of the Weebly platform, and the reusability of it all, let me build websites extremely quickly and hand them off to the customer.
I’ve scheduled myself sometimes five projects at a time because of how quick the process is.
When I share my story, a lot of web developers get mad. They say I’m not a real web developer if I can’t code.
I agree with them!
But, I make six figures. I don’t really care how I do it. We live in a capitalist world. If Weebly lets me build good-looking websites extremely quickly, that’s all I care about.
Weebly is nowhere near as powerful for large complex web apps. But for brochure websites and online stores, it’s far more than enough.
To Summarize, Here are the Tools I Use (none of these are affiliate links!)
Weebly for Designers — What I use to actually build the websites and manage my clients, and what powers the client login system. Using Weebly lets me build websites INSANELY quickly.
Luminous Themes — These guys develop the third-party Weebly themes that I use to build my clients their websites. Using their stuff makes my Weebly websites look much better than ordinary free Weebly themes, and drives client satisfaction. Their customer support is good albeit a little odd — they end their emails with funny jokes and strangely useful life advice.
Signwell — I used these guys to generate a web design contract that I share with my customers before every project. It was super easy to sign the contract.
Adobe XD — I use this for mockup generation.
Figma — If I’m mad at Adobe, I use Figma for mockups instead.
Flux — This guy has awesome tutorials on how to start a web design firm.
Conclusion & My Advice
That’s the end of my post. Sorry, it was a bit of word vomit. But I hope you found at least something useful.
My advice: find a niche, and infiltrate it. Reach out to similar companies, and build them websites. Develop a narrow portfolio of websites within a similar niche, and then slowly branch out.
Starting in a niche lets you grow your business without the extreme competitiveness of the web design market.
So you can also collect your welfare of $1,500 per month plus $4-$8,000 per month from creating Weebly websites.
