5 Quick tips for building local-business websites for profit as an expat

One of the biggest issues for many expats is how to make money living in a foreign land. You might have a part time job or you might have moved with a spouse whose company sent you there, so there are many situations where an expat wants or needs to make some income where they now live.

Not long ago I wrote about making money from websites as an expat, and those tips were more for building websites to become businesses of your own. Another, perhaps easier way of making money is by building websites for local small businesses. I’ve done it several times in different parts of the world and it’s not as difficult as you might fear.

One important thing to think about is what is the local labor market like for technology. In other words, if you are living in Paris or Sydney there will be loads of locals building websites so it might be hard to get going. But if you are living in Chiang Mai or Antigua, Guatemala you might not have much competition so it could be worth a go. Here are some tips to help you get started.

1 – Look for small businesses that can definitely profit from a website

The hardest part of making money building websites for local businesses is getting clients, which won’t be a surprise to many people. When looking for businesses to work with it’s important to concentrate on ones that can actually make a profit from having a website, because many types of businesses really won’t. For example, every hotel should have its own website, even if it’s listed on the hotel search sites too, and most sit-down restaurants can benefit as well, so it’s an easier pitch.

On the other hand, local businesses in places where people don’t look for them on the web are a bad bet. For example, if you are living in Costa Rica near a small shoe store, it’s very possible that they won’t do much extra business by having a website if their customers tend to be other locals that don’t use the internet in that way. Or, let’s say there is an expat poetry club that is free to attend; they are better off just with a Facebook page and it’s not worth it for them to pay for a proper website. The point is, websites are critical for some businesses, but nearly worthless for others, so look for the critical ones.

2 – Look for businesses that already have a bad website rather than no website

This one is a suggestion that should help some people get started, but it’s certainly not a rule. The toughest part of selling your web building services is to convince a business owner that a site will make them money. If a business has no website now, it might take a huge effort to convince them to make the move. However, if you find a business that already has a website that is badly in need of updating, it’s an easier sell.

Depending on where you live, it shouldn’t be too tough to find local businesses with terrible websites. Any site that is built mostly or completely in Flash is a great candidate because you can build a simple HTML site for far less than the Flash version cost them in the first place. A business owner that is unhappy with his current site might agree quickly, while one with no site might never get online at all.

3 – Build simple sites using WordPress

Now that it seems like half of the world’s expats have a blog of their own, that huge group of people is already halfway qualified to build sites for small businesses. If you don’t already have a blog you should sign up for a free one at wordpress.com and you’ll learn just how easy it is. The backend area, which is where you enter the text and upload photos, is very simple and straightforward.

Once you are comfortable with basic WordPress sites you can start experimenting with custom themes, which control the overall design. It’s best to start building simple websites, with a homepage and perhaps 4 or 5 sub pages, and you can find themes that are perfect for your needs for free or at a low cost, and the finished product looks very professional and mostly unique. Be a bit careful with free themes, however, because many of them contain spammy links or harmful code, so it’s probably better to pay $10 for one and then reuse it a few times.

4 – Learn basic Search Engine Optimization and include it in your pitch

The greatest value for a website for a small business is when it allows potential customers who had never heard of you to find you. If someone already knows your Thai restaurant’s name then having a website with a map and the opening hours on it is good, but it’s even better when someone just Googles “(city name) thai restaurants” and finds you as a new customer.

This process is called Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and it’s critical to the success of many websites. As long as you know the basics, and hopefully even a bit more, you can convince potential clients that they’ll be getting new business with even a simple site. If you ignore the basics of SEO it’s easy to be invisible to search engines, so it’s something you need to familiarize yourself with for sure.

5 – Make a clear agreement of what is and isn’t included

Okay, so now you have a client or two and you are ready to build their websites. On your first few jobs it’s probably okay to promise that you’ll do what you need to do to make them happy and complete the job because you’ll learn a lot that way. But once you know what you are doing it will be very important to make agreements as to what is and is not included.

For example, I’ve built a few sites for friends for free or low fees at first, and sometimes they are as easy as you guessed, but other times the client continually wants changes or makes suggestions for new things that would take many, many hours to complete. So now when I do this I specify that “I will build a basic site with the 8 total pages on this list, and anything else will be an extra charge.”

It’s also good to discuss maintenance or tech support for after it’s built. It’s only fair to include some tech support for a couple of months in case something goes wrong with what you’ve done, but if a client decides to add new pages 6 months later and breaks things in the process, you don’t want to fix it for free. Set out a simple agreement for support and maintenance so they know where it stops.

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