One of the best ways to create a steady flow of business for your agency is by increasing the amount of recurring revenue generated every month. This is called Monthly Recurring Revenue and is commonly referred to as MRR. ?
Unlike one-time projects that require a constant search for new web design clients, MRR adds predictable revenue to your business by providing your customers with value month after month.
This not only deepens your client relationships but also allows your agency to scale just like larger companies. To scale like a large company, though, you need to think like one. ?
How can you provide value to your clients on a regular basis?
How can you bundle that value into a package that’s sold as a monthly subscription?
Fortunately, this isn’t quite as hard as it sounds. And, to make it even easier, here are six ways you can start generating recurring revenue for your agency this month.
1. Offer WordPress Care Plans
It’s a lot of work to keep a website up and running. From managing updates to creating regular backups, WordPress maintenance can be a headache for a business owner. Care plans are a natural upsell to any design project and are a great way to keep a client engaged with your agency for years to come. If you’re looking to automate aspects of your WordPress care offerings, look into tools like InfiniteWP or MainWP which allow you to fast WordPress updates, uptime monitoring, and security functionality from a single dashboard. Alternatively, companies like WP Buffs offer white-labled options where they do the work under your agency’s name at a discounted rate.
2. Manage Social Media Accounts
For many businesses, social media is just as important as their website. In addition to aligning your client’s social media branding with their website for a one-time charge, consider offering ongoing social media management for a monthly fee. Social media profiles need a constant stream of content which can be difficult for a business owner to keep up with. Fortunately, your agency can use a tool like Buffer to manage multiple social media profiles from a single dashboard. This makes it a breeze for you and provides your client with tremendous value.
3. Create a Course and Sell Your Knowledge
Often, agencies will provide client’s with a basic walkthrough of the WordPress Dashboard when launching a new project only for them to completely forget everything you’ve shown them. Who can blame them? WordPress isn’t their language. Consider using an online course platform like LifterLMS to sell your knowledge. Creating an online course can take time but it’s easy to scale once created. Customers will appreciate being able to learn directly from the experts who built their website and that it’s more affordable than paying an hourly fee for something they’ve asked you before.
4. Resell Web Hosting (And White Label It!)
Without hosting, websites don’t service much of a purpose. It’s important to educate your clients about how web hosting powers their website. Your agency should consider purchasing a Virtual Private Server (VPS) with cPanel/WHM or use a tool like GridPane to build a WordPress hosting business on top of DigitalOcean, Vultr, or Linode. You’ll not only be able to market it as more reliable than shared web hosting but you’ll be able to charge a premium by bundling services like uptime monitoring and malware prevention. Some agencies include web hosting with their care plans but many offer it as a supplementary add-on as well.
5. Help With Ongoing Content Marketing
Most businesses want to include a blog in their website project, but don’t realize how much time it takes to regularly create content. Your agency should consider offering content marketing service plans. These will not only help boost your client’s SEO (which is often used to judge the success of a website) but provides business owners with ongoing value by taking content creation off their plate. If you don’t have in-house writers available, consider hiring a freelancer through Fiverr or Upwork to work on a per-article basis. There are thousands of excellent writers around the world that your agency can leverage for content marketing.
6. Curate Client’s Email Newsletters
Email marketing is an important channel for many businesses. But, just like content marketing, it takes quite a bit of work to curate content consistently. If your agency is already managing their website and blog, a great addon can be regularly sending out an email newsletter. Much of this work can be automated using email marketing software that can utilize pre-designed, customized templates that pull content directly from a blog using the default WordPress RSS feed.
Summary: Project-Based Work + Recurring Revenue = A Profitable, Less Stressful Agency
Large companies are great at bundling products and services together. By thinking big, your agency can be great at it too.
What are you waiting for? ?♂️
Start creating predictable, recurring revenue today to support your agency’s growth well into the future.
You’re already an expert with WordPress, web hosting, and content marketing – why not boost your bottom line while providing deeper value to your clients. This is not to say that project-based isn’t essential, but built a natural pathway for your web design clients transition to additional recurring revenue streams.
Are you planning to or already generating recurring revenue for your agency? Leave a comment below to join the conversation & let us know how ?
