Starting a Website Business in 2026: My Step-by-Step Gu… — Transcript

Look, I strongly believe if you drop me anywhere in the world, I would have a six or seven-figure web design agency within six months to a year. Now, let me just get some proof out of the way. This

right here is my Stripe. I'll go ahead and refresh it, and you can see it says $117,000 over the past month. And this is one of the agencies in my portfolio. So, I'm going to show you some sample sites.

I'll show you the exact [clears throat] offer I would run and how I would even get clients, what messaging I would use.

First thing I want to mention is you will not need to know how to code. With AI, this has never been easier, and that's why I'm so confident I'd be able to do this so quick. So, phase one, know

what you're actually getting into. What we're building here is a web design agency that not only generates upfront cash but also generates monthly recurring income. Because at the end of the day, I don't want to start over from

zero every single month. I want a baseline level of clients, so money keeps coming in every month even if we don't sign on anything new. We want clients that stay for years, not necessarily just for months. You want a

system that can also run without you. At the end of the day, you don't want to be a slave to your business. So, let's set up a business that we can eventually outsource as well. And there's really going to be two ways to do this. One is

going to be high-ticket websites for those that can afford it. And the people that can't afford it, we want a downsell, a plan that's going to be a much cheaper plan but still builds on our monthly MRR. Phase two, let's go

into your niche. So, why should you niche down? Well, the more specific you are, the more money you can make. And this is counterintuitive, but it is extremely true. If you sell websites to anyone, then your services are way less

valuable. Versus if you tell a roofing company, "Hey, this is our specialty. We help you book more estimates, book more appointments from your website." Our tests have shown that you will get 17% more appointments from a website layout

that looks like this. You see how this is way more compelling now. And you'll be able to charge a much higher fee for that. So, what is a high-ticket niche?

This is a niche where clients make enough per job or per sale that a $5,000, $6,000, or even $10,000 website is easy to justify. So, let me give you an example.

A restaurant owner needs to sell 200 sandwiches at $5 profit to make back even $1,000. How hard is it to give him 500 sales? Way, way, way more difficult than a roofing contractor who if you help them get one more roof, well, he's

going to make an extra 8, 9, 10, 15, 20,000 dollars depending on the roof.

And that website pays itself off if you literally get him one customer. So, whether you're charging $5,000, $10,000, this is easy to justify. So, best niches to start with. Let's talk about home services or trades. This is the industry

that I am in. This is what I know best. This is the industry that I love being in. It has its downsides like anything else, but this is roofers, HVAC, plumbers, landscapers, contractors. All of these niches, these guys make money.

However, they are not tech-savvy at all. Next, you have medical people like dentists, chiropractors, medical spas.

All these could be good industries. Then you have legal like personal injury attorneys, divorce lawyers, and so on.

So, here's how you can pick your industry. I recommend you pick an industry where the average sale, the average job, the average project is going to be over a thousand dollars. So, a barber shop is a bad example. A

massage studio is a bad example. However, a landscaper could be a good example because that could be thousands of dollars. And guess what? They can do a couple of those every single day.

These businesses are much easier to grow, to scale, and just in general to work with. A big bonus here is if you have any sort of personal connection to any one of these industries. Maybe your dad was a lawyer, your cousin's a

lawyer, you know someone in your family that is in a specific niche, then I recommend you go into that space. If you're stuck on this, just ask ChatGPT, "Hey, give me 10 high-ticket local service niches that I can go in and sell

these services to." And it will give you a bunch of ideas. I also have a spreadsheet that I can link up here on screen. And you can also go by where it says niches by lead price and you can

see what these people are paying per lead. And from there, you can know if that's a good niche, a good industry to go into or not. Now that we have your niche, let's go into the next phase, which is how do you actually get

clients? So, you'll need three things. You'll need a targeted niche. You'll need eyes on you, which is a client acquisition strategy, and you need a good offer to actually convert them.

Step one, and this is one of the easiest ways to do this is you can use a free Chrome extension to download a list from Google Maps. I think this is an amazing way to get started and generate leads

completely for free. So, what you can do is go to Google Maps, just type in that niche plus city. So, example, roofing companies in Dallas, Texas. Then, what you can do is open up that Chrome extension, which is called

trysmartscraper.com, and you can essentially just extract that entire Google Maps listing and download it as a spreadsheet. Now you have a list of people. You have their reviews. You have their website status.

And you can also categorize that list by people that do have websites and people that don't have websites. And at the beginning, you only want to reach out to the people that do not have websites and ideally, they do have some positive

Google reviews. And I'll show you exactly what to say to these people. But this is going to be one of the best ways to get started. Then you're going to take that list and you're going to run that list through clearoutphone.io.

And essentially, what this will do is just give us the people that have their cell phones linked up. We don't want to reach out to people that have landlines.

We don't want to reach out to office lines because then we're going to get the receptionist. I want to speak to the owner. Then what you can do is import that into GoHighLevel. This is the cheapest way that I have found to

actually get clients. Inside gofreetrial.com, you can run SMS campaigns. So, what we're going to do is text these people because we have their cell phones and give them an offer that they cannot refuse. You can say something like, "Hey, I noticed you

don't have a website. I actually built one for a business like yours. Want me to send it over?" I'm going to show you a live screenshot right here of us doing this SMS campaign. And I'm going to be

honest, most people say, "No, I'm not interested." Or, "Hey, I have a website." Which is another issue. They have a website, why isn't it linked? So, you can still call them and offer them a Google Business Optimization Consultation. It's now they can just pay

you a fee for you to link up their existing website with their Google Business. Because if we can't find it from that spreadsheet, their customers also can't find it. And now every single person that responds, "Yes, I'm interested," you are going to call them.

I would recommend you even call everyone that says, "No, I'm not interested." And now you're going to book a Zoom demo session. Now, before you freak out, we do not have anything built. Sometimes I'll say, "Hey, I built you a website

already." But all we're going to do is just show them a website template. It doesn't matter if they like it or not.

If they like it, great, we can implement that. If they don't like it, you can say, "Great, we'll build you something custom." And I'll link up on screen here one of our lower-ticket websites where we'll charge $300 a month in port

something like this. And then this is going to be our higher-ticket website that we will charge anywhere fr

out to mass amounts of people, you can use another tool. It's called Outscraper, and you can search entire states with this. But if you want to get started with Smart Scraper, that's going to be more than enough. With

tryoutscraper.com, you can also categorize by people that do have websites and people that do not have websites.

Next, we have cold calling. So, three goals on every call. You need to identify their pain. No website, bad reviews, maybe they're not ranking well.

And again, we can also sell new websites to people that have existing websites. Next, you want to identify their goal.

Do you want more customers? Maybe you want to look more professional. Maybe there's something broken on your website. Maybe your freaking contact form doesn't even send you the form submissions in your email. If you want everything imported into your account

and just copy and paste everything that we've built with a click, you can now do that. It's working like crazy, not just for me, but we've proven that this works for people with all kinds of experience levels and backgrounds. In fact,

GoHighLevel themselves rated us the number one course because of the results that we get for people and the support that we give. I'm going to show you A to Z how to get clients, deliver results, grow your business, and then even hire

employees to run it all for you. I'll even talk to you on Zoom and answer questions to make sure that you succeed.

If you want all this for free, go to laptopceo.com or check the link in the description.

And the third step is we want to identify the decision-maker, right? Don't waste time on the receptionist like we mentioned. So, aim for 50 calls a day minimum when you are starting. But ideally, you want to do 100. And I

recommend you do both. You do the SMS campaign and you do the cold calling campaign. This is the best way I've seen to get clients. Now, method number three is going to be the meta advertising campaign. The offer here is going to be,

"Hey, we'll build you a free website. You just have to pay for the back-end software." The back-end software is GoHighLevel. Or some people need a custom site, so you can sell them a $5,000 custom website. So, you want to

target local home service businesses. You can lead with the free website hook. Now again, it doesn't matter. We have had people that come in from ads where we say, "Hey, we'll build you a free website." And then on the call, if they

genuinely want something custom, we'll sell them a $5,000 website. I'm going to play an ad for you that we are actually running right now. Contractors, if you've ever paid thousands of dollars to some scammy lead generation company, then hear me out. We charge $297 a month

and that's it. There's the price, let's just get it out of the way. Now, what do we deliver for that? First thing is your website. And don't tell me you already have a website because your website probably doesn't convert. It probably

doesn't build trust. So, we need to install a smart website that automatically follows up with everyone that interacts with it. So, this is just one of our ads. Typically, when I sit down, I will film about 10 or 15 of

these. Now, here is one of my students' results. He spent about $4,200 on Facebook / Instagram ads. Now, again, I can give you my results, but you might think they're atypical. So, let me give you a student's results. And then he

made back $3,500 recurring from that one campaign. And now, all this guy does, he's not a web designer, is he sells these lower ticket websites. And you might think, "Oh, well, he lost a little bit of money." However, that's just the

first month. The second month, when those $300 per month payments came in, he [snorts] was making over $7,000 per month from those clients that he signed.

This is huge, and not one client canceled. So, the math is spend once, collect the money forever. All right, so let's go into the offer. So, I like the entry point of I built you a free website. I think this is the best foot

in the door offer, and all the client has to do to claim this offer is pay 300 bucks per month. Now, these are not custom websites. This is a template that we import. And here's what they're going to get. They're going to get their

website hosted on their GoHighLevel account. If you want to host the website somewhere else, you can also do that.

They get missed call text back. So, basically, every single person that calls their phone number, and they don't answer, it automatically just sends them a call. Remember what we talked about roofers. If you help a roofer just get

an extra one customer, he could have made an extra freaking $10,000. That is why this works so, so well. Next, we have review requests. So, we automate a lot of the five-star reviews that our local businesses have. Now, again, they

signed up for a website, but what they're really paying for is a better online reputation. So, let's go above and beyond. Let's not just stick with websites. Let's do everything and anything that we can to help them. So,

we get a list of their past customers, and we will do an SMS campaign and ask them to leave us a review. And the page that we go to is this page right here.

So, if they select five stars, it goes to Google. If they select two stars, it just pops up a form. And that form goes nowhere except that person's inbox. So, now, they can only get five-star reviews. And guess what happens?

Their business listing gets published, gets ranked much higher on Google. And that is another huge benefit of this service. Then we also do appointment booking automation. So, instead of just having our websites be a contact form, and then what normally happens? Someone

fills out the contact form, it just goes to a thank you page. Hey, thanks for filling this out. We'll reach back out to you shortly. This is a waste of freaking space. What we do for clients is after they fill out the contact form,

it forwards to a calendar page, where that person can book on the client's calendar. So, now, your roofing client, your whatever business client can wake up, and appointments are automatically on their calendar. It's an extra page you have to create, which can be done in

literally a few minutes, and is a huge value add for that client. So, this is why they never cancel. The automations run 24/7 and actually make them money, right? They're not just paying for a website. They're paying for a system

that generates leads while they sleep. them maximize the amount of customers they are getting from that same website.

Then, we have the high-ticket upsell. Look, not every client is going to want a cheap $300 per month template, where all you do is just replace some content, replace some images, and send it off.

They want something custom. So, again, this is a template of a five to $10,000 custom website that we made, and we did this all inside Cloud Code, and then we took that and imported it into GoHighLevel and hosted it there. You can

host yours wherever you want. That's how we do it. Best part is, because we're doing this in Cloud Code, though, the entire thing could be built, all the content, all the pages, everything in 20 minutes or less, and then we just host

it inside of HighLevel. So, client doesn't know that it took 20 minutes, nor do they care. They actually like the fact that it was done so quick. And this is part of our website in a day model.

Hey, we'll go all hands on deck and get this website built for you in the next few days. And most web design agencies used to take like a freaking month to get stuff live. So, we're just also much, much faster. So, for service

delivery, there's two ways you can deliver the service. You can do it yourself inside of, let's say, the GoHighLevel website builder. You can use Cloud Code, or you can use WordPress plus Elementor. It's very easy. It's pretty drag and drop. If you want to

custom code it yourself, I guess you can do that. Kind of a waste of time, but up to you. Option B is the better one. This is where you outsource it. I recommend you go to Upwork, and you can search

things like WordPress Elementor website builder, or just web designer, web developer. And pay them whatever fee they want. Even if it cost you $1,000, right? $1,500 to get this beautiful custom website built. But you charge the client 5,000, you can collect that money

in between and have AI write all the content. Now, to be clear, even if you're charging thousands of dollars for a website up front, you always want to onboard them into GoHighLevel. Because the math freaking works. Charge $5,000

up front, and then those mini $300 per month payments absolutely add up. You want the recurring revenue. Traditional web design agency, just if you make two sales for $5,000, cool, you made $10,000. But guess what? The next month,

you're starting from zero. This used to be me when I started, and trust me, this is horrible. One month, you feel rich, then you feel freaking broke, and you're starting over from zero. So, you want this to compound. After 40 clients,

let's say you're going kind of slow and you're not taking my advice here. You're not sending 100 SMS messages per day.

You don't want to do 100 cold calls per day. You're taking your sweet time with all this. Instead of signing one client every couple days or one client a day, you're only signing three new clients per month. Well, you're still making

$900 per month. There are people that will invest 150, 200,000 dollars into a property, into real estate to make $900 per month. You just did it in your first freaking month. And let's say it takes you one whole year, 12 months, to get to

40 clients at only $300 a month. You will be at $12,000 per month, which is an income that allows you to live literally anywhere in the world that you want. That's also assuming you don't get any custom web designs where they pay

you 5K up front, or 4K up front, or even 3K up front. This is just on monthly hosting. We're being very, very conservative. And the clients from one month are still paying in month 12. Will you lose some clients? Look,

probably. But it doesn't really matter because you have an acquisition system to always get more. Now, I did show you my proof already in my Stripe accounts, but I will show it to you again. As you can see here, it is refreshing.

So, we have this income coming in every single freaking day. I have two agencies in my portfolio, and both started with free strategies, and then we transitioned into paid strategies. So, let's talk about phase seven mistakes that you should avoid. Not outreaching

enough. Most people, when they don't get success, the problem is they just don't reach out to enough clients. They literally call 10 [snorts] people. They get scared because they all say no, and then they freaking give up. This is not

the way to do it. You need to do outreach in the beginning. This is your job. If you are a web designer, you want to make money with websites, you need to get good at sales. It is just the

freaking truth. If you have a job, you're in school, send this on your phone during your breaks. Next is negotiating your prices. A lot of web designers are uncomfortable with what they charge, right? If you're worth $500, you're worth $5,000, or $10,000,

don't take $480. Clients who negotiate are the worst to work with. If they are price conscious, take their fee and divide it up into months. For example, you want to charge $6,000 for a website.

Don't divide that in half, and then just let them pay that. No, divide it into six months. Say, "Okay, look, no problem. You can't afford the 6K right now. That's fine. Pay me $1,000 per month for six months." How about that,

John? This is a much better way to do things. Next is revision limits. If you don't set limits, your clients may, this actually doesn't happen as often as you think, but your clients may reach out to you non-stop with, "Hey,

can you replace this? Can you do that? Can you do that?" Just have it in your contract, so it kind of protects you a little bit. Step number four is caring too much about the sale. Look, if you're

too desperate, and you're just too like nervous and fidgety, and I get it. In the beginning, you will be like that.

But you will evolve past that, and just be calm, be relaxed, ask for the money, be okay with silences, and this will help you get more sales. I have other videos on my channel regarding sales.

You can check those out after this one. Only charging up front fees. This is the biggest problem that web designers actually face because a lot of them are just so used to charging up front, and then they have no monthly recurring

revenue. This is the place I used to be in. I would make 5,000, 8,000, $10,000 one month, and I felt rich. I would text my mom and tell her, "Yo, you can quit your job next month because I'm rich." And then the next month, I

would go back down to zero, and that's not a good feeling. So, make sure you have monthly recurring revenue coming in. You're already doing the hardest part of this, which is getting clients.

You might as well build a business that eventually, if you don't want to sign more clients, if you no longer want to do outreach, you can still travel, and you're still making a ton of money. If you want me to go more in-depth on how

to actually get clients with this business model, you can check out this video next.