WordPress is well on its way to powering 45% of the top 1 million websites, and freelancing opportunities for designers and developers have never been so abundant.
With COVID-19 proving that remote working can work and indeed, in many cases, is more productive than office-based employees, now is the time to give serious consideration to starting up a freelance WordPress business from home and being your own boss.
Why You May Want To Start A WordPress Business?
There are many reasons why you may want to start a WordPress business. Here are some examples:
- You want to turn your web design hobby or side-hustle into a business
- You have developed a few plugins for a project and want to monetise these
- You’ve been made unemployed due to COVID-19 and need to make money
- You commute long hours and are looking to work from home
- You design or develop with WordPress for a company and want to be your own boss
- You hear that WordPress freelancers make good money
Most successful WordPress freelancers I have worked with have grown their business from a hobby or side-hustle into a money-making enterprise.
Being your own boss is tempting for many people, and unlike other businesses, setup costs for spinning up your WordPress freelance business are very modest.
Note: many links provided pertain to setting up a business in Australia, but the primary step outline is similar regardless of what country you are setting up business in.
This post outlines the ten steps you need to start a WordPress business.
- Register a Business Name
- Open a Business Bank Account
- Create Your Business Value Proposition
- Decide What Problems Your Business Will Solve
- Research Your Competitors
- Establish Branding For Your Business
- Craft Legal Documentation For Your Business
- Invest In Business Tools
- Create Your WordPress Business Website
- Get WordPress Clients and Make Money
How To Start a WordPress Business in 10 Steps
Try to complete each step in order as they help you to complete the following steps.
Step 1: Register a Business Name
You may decide to trade as a sole trader under your legal name, a business name entity, a partnership or as a company.
If you are unsure how to structure your trading, ASCI has a great “Help me decide” wizard tool to guide you.
If you are trading using your legal name, e.g. Wil Brown, or an abbreviation of your legal name, e.g. W.Brown, you do not need to register the business name in Australia.
If you want to trade using a name other than your legal name, e.g. Wil Brown trading as Zero Point Development, you need to register the business name with ASIC.
Registering an Australian Business Name costs about A$37 for one year or A$88 for three years. Check the ASIC website for current pricing.
Registering as a sole trader, with or without a business name, is the fastest and easiest way to legally start a business in Australia.
Setting up a company or partnership requires more legal steps, such as nominating people as directors and a secretary and all the legal formalities that go with such an agreement.
The cost of setting up a company is higher, as are the responsibilities in legal reporting.
There are many pros and cons to setting up a sole trader versus a legal company entity, here are just a few:
- A sole trader is quicker to set up
- A sole trader is cheaper to set up
- A company protects your private equity against liability
- A company has more tax advantages
You’ll also have to outline to ASIC whether you will turn over A$75,000 in your first year.
If your business turnover is more than A$75,000, you have to register for GST; otherwise, it’s an option.
Tip: Register your business name on the ASIC website; it’s easy and cheaper than the paid services you see at the top of the Google listings.
Once you have completed setting up your sole trader business with ASIC, you’ll get an Australian Business Number (ABN) which you will need for tax, accounting purposes and other legal purposes.
Step 2: Open a Business Bank Account
If you are going into business, you need to set up a business bank account.
You should not operate a business using your consumer banking account.
If you’re working as a sole trader, then your personal and business affairs are treated as one for tax purposes.
You are your business. So, in theory, you can use your personal bank account for business transactions, as long as your bank allows this.
However, in reality, most commercial banks will insist that you open a separate bank account for your business trading. You could breach legal obligations if you run your business money through your personal bank account.
Having a separate business bank account will also help you track your expenses, taxes and profits, essential data for any business, especially when starting up.
One of my favourite quotes from an unknown entrepreneur is:
“If your business isn’t making a profit, it isn’t a business. It’s an expensive hobby!”
Should you be unfortunate enough to be the focus of an ATO audit, you will thank your lucky stars that you decided to set up a separate business account; otherwise, you’ll be trying to explain and justify every personal expense.
That will increase the time and cost of the audit and could potentially lead to personal embarrassment depending on your lifestyle decisions.
Step 3: Create Your Business Value Proposition
It’s time to focus on why you want to run a business and what purpose it serves.
A company’s value proposition tells a customer the number one reason why a product or service is best suited for that particular customer.
It’s usually a one-liner that sums up who you are, what you do, who you sell to and why they should buy from you.
It’s like that awkward moment everyone has been through when you meet your partner’s parents for the first time, and they ask you what you do.
For example, my value proposition is this:
“I help WordPress developers and designers get more clients and increase monthly revenue to build a sustainable and profitable business.”
- You know who I serve: WordPress developers and designers.
- You know how I help them: get more clients and increase monthly revenue.
- You know why they should buy from me: build a sustainable and profitable business.
Try not to overthink your value proposition, but do get specific with the target market you are after and your niche offering that will benefit them.
Step 4: Decide What Problems Your Business Will Solve
I suggest you act these steps in order because your value proposition from Step 3 will help you decide what problems your business will solve.
We think about solving problems first because we want to ensure a target market for our solution.
A target audience is people interested in your solution. The target market is the people who will eventually buy your product or service, so we ensure our offerings are things they want to buy.
Many freelance business owners waste time and money setting up a product or service they have come up with in their head that they thought lots of people would like to buy without doing any due diligence.
You can spend months developing a WordPress plugin, and it may be the best plugin you have ever created with the latest plugins and writing to exacting WordPress coding standards.
But if nobody needs what your plugin does, if it doesn’t benefit them in some significant way, nobody will care or buy it.
It’s a harsh lesson, and many have been burned this way, including me.
The easiest way to get started here is to list some attributes of your target market, creating an ideal buyer persona.
As well as age, interests, hobbies, work and other information, make sure you list at least five big problems they face in their business or personal life.
Also, list at least five aspirations they are trying to achieve.
Craft your solutions to solve one or more of their big problems and help them achieve one or more of their aspirations.
Step 5: Research Your Competitors
If you have come up with a product or service that you know people will buy from you and that nobody else offers, very well done – you’ve carved out a unique niche, and you can set any price you like without fear of competition cutting in.
Some people may hit on an untapped niche, but few and far between happens.
The most likely scenario is that other businesses offer similar products or services to yours. They are your competitors.
Remember that physical competition can be different from online competition.
There may be some WordPress freelancers already operating in your local area, and you will be in direct competition with local businesses.
Your competitors may be entities like Wikipedia and YouTube grabbing the top listings for your ideal keywords in the online world. In other words, SEO competition.
You should research any local competitors and online competitors.
Look at what they are offering and to who and their pricing.
Many online tools will analyse a competitor’s website, telling you their top keywords, content, and backlinks.
Use this competitor data to tweak and hone your product and service offerings, perhaps adding a unique selling proposition (USP) or positioning yourself as a top-level expert with a higher price-point.
Step 6: Establish Branding For Your Business
Now is the time to apply a brand to your business with all your research done.
You do not have to do this step.
Many entrepreneurs have successfully gone to market without any branding, only to define it later as they establish their business.
For consistency, I suggest you design a logo, a colour scheme, and a couple of font typefaces you can use on your website and in digital marketing.
You can change this up at any time, but in my opinion, having some branding at the start will help people recognise you and your business.
You can either choose to build a personal brand if you are trading under your name; otherwise, you’ll be branding yourself as a business.
Almost every freelancer has asked themselves the “I” over “we” question.
Using “we” in marketing will make your business sound more prominent than it may be.
Some businesses prefer to work with a more significant company, a team, over individuals.
However, personal branding and using “I” in marketing can set you apart from others in your niche, primarily if you aim to be the number one expert authority.
I have recently moved from “we” to “I”, and it works for my business and target audience.
Step 7: Create Legal Documentation For Your Business
Before you talk to any potential customer or build your website, you need to ensure you have the proper legal documentation.
Legal business documentation includes but is not limited to:
- Terms and Conditions
- Privacy Policy
- Cookie Policy
- Disclaimer
- Code of Conduct
- Ownership Agreement and Copyright Terms
- Client Contract / Proposal
- Master Service Agreement
- Statement of Work
- Project Scope
- Payment Terms
You must, must, must have a legal contract document in place before you start any work with a client.
A legal contract protects both parties in a contractual relationship.
I hear stories from many freelancers who end up not getting paid for their work and have no legal recourse because there was no signed contract.
If you can’t afford to pay a lawyer to draft up these documents, an alternative is to purchase a template and tweak it for your business.
In Australia, there is a popular legal template service called Lawpath.
They offer many business legal document templates which will give you the framework to write your own legal business documents.
Ideally, you should get a lawyer to look over all your legal documents at some point, sooner rather than later.
As a side note, remember that you should take our professional indemnity insurance to protect yourself if things go pear-shaped.
Step 8: Invest In Business Tools
You will need two toolsets to operate your WordPress business; Business Operations Tools and Business Administration Tools.
Business Operations Tools
These tools help you run the day-to-day operations of your business – the work you do for clients that bring in the money.
Here are some business operations tools you may want to consider:
- Project management – I use Jira to support the Australian software company Atlassian. Alternatives are Asana, Monday or Trello.
- Customer Relationship Management (CRM) – I use ActiveCampaign. Alternatives are Hubspot and Pipedrive.
- Email Marketing System – I use ActiveCampaign. Alternatives are MailChimp and Constant Contact.
- WordPress Page Builders – Elementor, GeneratePress with GenerateBlocks, Beaver Builder or Oxygen.
- Productivity Suite – I use Google Workspace for email and office productivity. An alternative would be Microsoft Office or OpenOffice.
- Cloud Storage – I use Google Drive for my primary storage, which is included in Google Workspace, but I also have Dropbox as some clients prefer to work with that service.
- Real-time Collaboration: I use Google Docs and Sheets for real-time collaboration part of Google Workspace.
- Communications: I use Slack as my primary real-time communications tool. Otherwise, all communications will go through project management software.
- Support – I use Zendesk to handle ongoing client support and maintenance via email support tickets. An alternative would be Helpscout.
- Adobe Creative Cloud – I use Photoshop and Illustrator a lot on web dev projects. An alternative to Photoshop is GIMP.
Business Administration Tools
These tools help you run the administrative side of your business – your profits, expenses, taxes and other legal obligations.
Number one on the list is an accounting service.
You will be issuing invoices to customers and paying business bills, so you need to record all that activity for tax return time and your business reports.
In Australia, all individuals must submit a tax return every year.
At the very least, every year, you need to tell your accountant your overall turnover, expenses, and GST collected and paid if you are GST registered.
Most accounting services will allow you to generate quarterly BAS statements or financial year profits and losses reports to help with your tax returns.
I use Xero for all my business accounting purposes, and many of my business colleagues use Quickbooks.
Here’s a list of other business administration tools you may want to consider:
- Sales Pipeline – I use ActiveCampaing to track my sales pipeline. See the above business operations list for other CRM alternatives.
- Time Tracking – I use Toggl to track my time on projects and admin tasks.
- Cloud Backups – I use Backblaze to securely backup data from all my devices to the cloud/.
- Online Security – I use Norton 360 to protect my devices and web browsing securely. I also use their VPN service when I need to test country-specific issues.
- Password Security – I use LastPass to securely store and share my passwords and generate new secure passwords.
Step 9: Create Your WordPress Business Website
You now have everything in place to create your business website.
Domain Name
Starting at the beginning, you will need to decide which primary domain you want to run your website.
Sometimes you may not be able to get an exact match to the business name you want to trade under, and you may have to get a bit creative with your domain name choice.
Ultimately you want to make sure that your domain name is easy to communicate.
One key measure I like to suggest is, can you tell somebody your domain name over the phone without the other person asking for any clarification? If you can’t, it’s not an accessible domain name to communicate.
I often get asked if the Top Level Domain (TLD) matters for SEO, e.g. .com vs .net.
It doesn’t matter to Google what your website TLD is.
However, there is a perception of trust from humans over TLDs. People are more trusting of .com and .com.au than they would be of TLDs such as .info or .biz and others like that.
Web Hosting Provider
Once you have your domain name sorted, it’s time to choose a hosting provider.
There are thousands of them!
A general rule of thumb is that you get what you pay for with hosting providers.
Prepare to pay A$20+ per month for website hosting. Anything less, and you’re not going to get the quality and support you probably need to start a new business.
Here are some web hosting providers that I have worked with recently. You can determine which costs and quality service you need:
- Wordfiy – all my business websites run on this provider. They also offer FREE developer accounts that you can use as a client staging area.
- Siteground – I have many clients who run on this provider.
- Conetix – Australian based, and I have clients who run enterprise-level sites on this provider. Excellent support.
Website Design
If you are starting up a WordPress business, you should probably design your website using WordPress!
It’s also probably a good idea to create your website using the toolset you plan to create a client website.
Using the tools, you’re going to use on client sites will allow you to familiarise yourself with the build tools and any issues or questions that may crop up during design and development time. You’ll be armed and ready to respond to those client support questions.
A note of warning! Your website will NEVER be fully complete or sufficiently “good enough” to meet your requirements.
It’s a trick that your mind plays with you. Make sure you don’t spend a year creating the “perfect” business website – it doesn’t exist.
Just make sure that your website covers the basics that promote your business, allows for content marketing, shows off your skills, products and services and allows prospective customers to contact you.
Here’s a fundamental structure that you should aim to launch your website:
- Home page (obviously!) clearly stating your business value proposition above the fold.
- Contact page with a form and phone, address, email and social media links.
- A Portfolio area to share your client work.
- About page to share your story, vision and value proposition.
- Services and products page.
- Blog area where you can continue to share knowledge and skills and help your target audience through content marketing.
- Connect Google Analytics and Google Search Console to your website, so you can track visitors and deal with any SEO or other technical website issues.
You can add bells and whistles later, but that’s all you need to start.
Step 10: Get WordPress Clients and Make Money
Ah, this is the holy grail of WordPress businesses – how to get clients and make money.
This process will be more straightforward if you have followed the steps above, created your value proposition, and understood your target market’s pain points and aspirations.
But don’t be under the delusion that this is an easy process. In some ways, this is the biggest challenge facing WordPress business owners and can ultimately lead to either success or failure.
There is no one simple recipe for success to get paying clients, or at least I haven’t found one – please tell me if you do!
First, you have to understand that people are at various levels of awareness and trust regarding your solutions.
Some people call this the ladder of awareness or simply sales funnels.
Here’s a simple sales funnel example called AIDA.
AIDA is a traditional sales funnel, but it works very well as an introduction to understanding content marketing.
The idea is that you need to build trust and authority and offer what your target market needs and desires to push them down the funnel from top to bottom, where they buy your stuff.
If you are starting up a new WordPress business, you likely don’t have any trust or authority in your niche.
Most of your target audience will be hovering around the very top of the sales funnel. They are aware that they have an issue and that you have a solution, but that’s not enough to convert them into a sale.
You need to spin up your content marketing and create content for all levels of your sales funnel, gently nudging them down to the bottom to take action.
This process is not a quick win, but it does work.
It’s all about offering value to the people at different funnel stages, building trust and authority with your audience and warming them up to be prospective leads and then customers.
And once you get a bite, how do you handle your first client experience?
The processes outlined above are at the core of my WP Accelerator course.
WP Accelerator
WP Accelerator is a course for WordPress designers and developers that want to take their WordPress business to the next level.
It’s an 8-week structured personal coaching course with 1:1 coaching from myself.
We start by defining your value proposition and niche and work step-by-step to build up your business and put the processes and strategies to get paying clients and beyond.
Tips and Advice on Running a WordPress Business
If you are looking for a quick win or the fast track to owning a multi 7 figure WordPress business, you’re in for a bit of a shock.
Yes, setup costs for spinning up a WordPress business are much lower than other companies.
Yes, WordPress is a vast and growing market with the potential to make a good living.
However, running a small business is hard. It requires focus, strategy, energy and hard yakka, and at times, you will feel like giving up.
But it can be done.
I’ve run a successful freelance WordPress business since 2005 in three different countries.
Like anything else in life, you need to plan and implement strategies for success.
The WordPress ecosphere is constantly changing, and you need to be involved in it to stay in tune.
What works this year may not work next year, or something new may come along where you have to adapt your strategies to fit.
For example, WordPress is on a crusade to make the website editing process more accessible and to extend the capabilities of the core WordPress app.
We can see this in the move to block development and Full Site Editing (FSE).
Blocks bring new skills to learn and designs to adapt to designers.
For developers, this means new frameworks and coding techniques to learn.
If you want your WordPress business to be successful, you must engage with the WordPress community to understand what is going on.
Attend WordPress online meetups, network at in-person meetings, listen to podcasts and follow some WordPress design or development influencers on social media.
How To Get Visitors to Your Website
New WordPress business owners often ask me how to get traffic to a new website. It can be a daunting task starting from zero.
There are generally two ways to get traffic to your new website.
- Paid Advertising
- Organic content marketing
Paid Advertising
Paid advertising may not be an option for you, but it is a sure-fire way of quickly pushing traffic to your website.
You will need a good value offer that your target market will want to sign up to get.
Something around the value of A$100, but you’re going to give it away for free in exchange for an email address.
Types of value offer that convert well are:
- Templates
- Step-by-step guides
- Checklists
- Webinars
Create a landing page that describes the benefits of your offer and the solution it solves, then create ads to push traffic to your offer.
I find that Facebook ads work very well for this and Google PPC not so much.
Be prepared to spend between $250 to $1000 a month if you want to drive a good amount of traffic to your website and review the campaign initially every month to make sure you are getting a return of investment (ROI) for your ads and keywords.
Organic Content Marketing
Organic content marketing is a long-game approach.
Unless your content is fantastic and blows your target audience’s minds, you’re likely to start seeing some results over six months or more.
Use popups on your website, embed the links in your blog content and jump on social media, forums, and groups to answer questions linking them back to your website content.
Networking at events, online and physical, can help drive traffic to your website and appear on other people’s webinars and podcasts.
How To Make Money With WordPress?
This article talks about starting up a profitable WordPress business, not a side-hustle.
Here are a few WordPress business ideas you implement to make serious money either by setting up as a freelancer or as a “digital agency” of just you to begin with:
- WordPress designer
- WordPress developer
- WordPress plugin developer
- WordPress SEO specialist
- WordPress security consultant
- WordPress digital Marketer
- WordPress site maintenance and support
The WordPress Business Startup Costs You Need To Consider
As I’ve mentioned throughout this article, the costs of setting up a WordPress business where you work from home are low compared to other professions.
Here is a list of costs that you should probably consider before you spin up a new WordPress business:
- ASIC business name registration
- Domain names
- Website hosting
- Accounting software
- Yearly accountancy fees
- NBN internet connection
- Phone costs
- Office costs to hire meeting rooms for 1:1 client consults
- Yearly fees for all software licenses (best to make a spreadsheet list)
- Design costs for branding assets (logos, business cards)
- Paid advertising budget
- Cloud storage
- Professional indemnity
The above list is not a complete list of costs. I track my expenses in my accountancy software, but I also have a spreadsheet to track my monthly income, expenses and cash flow.
How To Market Your WordPress Business?
I’ve talked about using paid advertising and organic content marketing strategies to market your WordPress business in this article.
I’ve also talked about engaging with the WordPress community, which is key to marketing your business and getting known in your niche.
Take every opportunity to market your business to friends, family and business colleagues.
Write blog posts, record videos, and then jump on social media to promote your content.
Network in-person and practice saying your business value proposition naturally until it flows off your tongue naturally. Have a story that you can tell people about how you got to where you are.
Research your competitors to see what they are writing and talking about and create better, more engaging and valued content.
There are 1,000’s ways you can market your WordPress business, but please make sure that you have a strategy in place and goals you can measure to make sure you’re heading in the right direction.
How To Compete With the Big Boys?
If you’re starting on a new WordPress business venture, in reality, you can’t compete with established experts in the market.
If your target market is vast, it will be difficult for you to carve out trust and authority and become an expert to compete with the big players.
You’ve probably heard me say the work niche quite a few times in the article already.
Niching isn’t for everyone, and if you’re happy piggybacking on the big players and generating a livable income for your business, that’s fine.
However, if big agencies already saturate your target market, it’s probably time to niche down and try to appeal to a smaller, more specific audience.
When I arrived in Australia in 2012, I quickly applied to speak at WordCamp Sydney 2012 – it was an excellent opportunity for me to plug myself right into the heart of the local WordPress community.
I met an attendee, a designer, who specialised in creating sites for dentists in NSW using WordPress.
She spoke the dental lingo. She knew their problems, aspirations, and exactly what they needed to run and grow in their dental practices.
She was an expert in her niche, and her niche was particular.
Common Myths About Being Your Own Boss
This is all too much – where do I start?
Phew! You made it to the end of the article. It’s a big one, that’s for sure.
You may be confused or overwhelmed by all the stuff I’ve covered and a bit scared if you really should commit to starting up a WordPress business.
Perhaps you already started your WordPress business a few years ago, and it’s just ticking along, paying the bills but starting to feel like it’s not going anywhere, maybe even becoming a bit of a burden.
What can you do?
You can join my WP Accelerator course, of course!
The course is specifically designed for developers and designers at the start of their journey to build a WordPress business.
If you haven’t started yet, I lay out the foundations you need to put before launch.
If you’re already started a WordPress business but feel it’s floundering and not going anywhere, jump into WP Accelerator and learn the processes and strategies you need to put in place to grow your business.
Next Steps
Starting a WordPress business can be exciting and scary. It can be successful or struggle to grow.
I’ve been through the process, and I’ve created the WP Accelerator course specifically for you to grow your WordPress business into something successful.
Sign up for WP Accelerator today.
