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Web development invoice for IT

hey guys Reno here so a big misconception is that you need a lot of money to start your own web design business and yes I know designers do look fancy with their laptops and all that software but it's actually not that expensive because I've been doing this for years and I still almost have no costs so in this video I want to show you how you can start with zero dollars and even keep the cost low once your business starts to grow the only thing you really need is a computer but this can even be an old computer because most of the things we do as a designer happens in the browser and that doesn't require that much from your computer so let's get started level 1 making money without paying for anything so here's a counter and let's see how long we can keep the cost at just zero dollars so what I would do if I had no money is I would just sell designs for a while and this is possible because figma which is the best design tool in the market right now has a free plan as you can see right here and you can have unlimited personal files it seems like you could only have three fouls but these are shared fails so I am still in a free account I have more than three files and I can still create a new design file if I want to and you can even share your designs for free via the link over here so in the beginning I just wouldn't start building websites because building websites isn't free if you don't know how to code and most designers that are starting out just don't know how to code so then the only option I think you have is just to sell yourself as a freelance designer and make your money in that way and if you don't have any clients yet then just go to YouTube just search for figma tutorial and then follow one of the projects don't just start with the basics but follow a project and create a project which you can then put in your portfolio and you can share that with the people you know you can do this in real life and on social media I've always used social media to show the world what I can do and in this way I always got work and I say this because I think a lot of people think that you need a portfolio to get started but that's not really the case your social media your Instagram your LinkedIn profile can act as your portfolio if you don't have a website yet because the goal of your portfolio is to show the world what you can do and social media is a great tool for that so this is how I've always done it but I've also seen people having success with websites like Fiverr and upwork which are freelancing websites where you can list your services and then get hired by companies this all sounds great but the competition on these platforms is really high compared to when you would just use your local network of course this depends depends on the country you live in because in some countries there is more opportunity to make money in your local area than others so if you really don't know anyone with a business in your area that you can help to improve their design then these websites I think are a great start but don't put all your hopes into a platform like this so I would go for the social media route and then sell my website for a few hundred dollars at least when you're starting out so I would just create these kind of posts which I created for living with pixels and just show my work in this way and then sell my designs for a beginner I would advise to never sell your designs for less than a few hundred dollars because otherwise you're just undervaluing yourself in my opinion so for level one the counter is still on zero dollars because we've potentially already made a few hundred dollars but now the following question is how do you get paid do you need to pay taxes do you need to register your business let's see how that works in many countries you don't have to have a registered business or pay taxes for the first few thousand dollars you make and of course I cannot give advice for every country you should Google and see what the rules are in your country I forgot to do this so I had to spend a year in Jill but they gave me some time to read some books that's a joke so in the beginning you can just ask your client to send money to your personal bank account directly or you can create a PayPal address which is also free by the way and then let them send the money to your PayPal on platforms like upwork and Fiverr sometimes there's a payment system already built in so then you don't have to do this so in the beginning you don't have to worry about all that paperwork but there's one paper you need and that is an invoice because the businesses you work for will probably ask for an invoice because otherwise they can't pay you and you can even do this for free what I see a lot of people do is they search for a Google doc invoice template so on websites like this you can copy be a template put your own logo in and then in Google Docs I will open it so you can see it make a copy alright here's the copy you can put in all of your info and then you can export that as a PDF and then send it to a client but I do not really recommend this because there is a much better option which is also free and that is just to use an invoicing platform for example This One invoicing ninja and they have a free plan which is pretty good so if you go to their pricing over here you can see you can have 20 clients plus unlimited invoicing two templates you can upload your own logo all for free or a big one also is Zoho they also have a free plan to create professional invoices and this is much better because these tools calculate things automatically for you so for example how much money you made in a certain period but also sometimes like in this other example squareup.com which also has an invoicing tool you can track the status of the payment in real time so you can connect your bank account to the invoicing tool and then you can see if your client has paid so you don't have to open your bank all the time to see if your client has paid Google Sheets can never do that so I would highly recommend to use a tool like this even if you haven't registered a business you can just send invoices without tax so if you have a client that requires an invoice use a tool like this it's much easier and the features are just a lot better so we are still at zero dollars which is pretty cool because we're making money we're designing we're sending invoices and it looks like a professional big company and we haven't spent a dollar so things are happening in your business you have a client here you have a client there you're making money but now the next problem occurs which is chaos there are so many things going on this client wants this this client want that and you all try to save it in your mind and it slowly is making you stressed and frustrated so now you are ready for level 2 in your business which is better man management you're gonna treat this thing like a real business the truth is that every project is different some clients are really easy and some clients are not really easy to work with but this also means that every project has different tasks and in order to manage all of that you need some sort of system to manage all of those tasks so when I started out I use Google Sheets I thought that this was a great idea I would just put in all the tasks I needed to do for this project and then I used colors to mark them off when they were done or when I was working on it and then I would share this link with the clients so that the client could see my progress which I thought would work out as motivation to actually finish it and most of my clients were already using Google Drive for their photos and for texts for the website so I was like everything in one package what's better than that but there were some problems with this approach first of all is that every project had a different sheet right because this sheet was shared with this client and then I had another sheet for another project so you don't have an overview of what's going on in your business but also I couldn't prioritize what was most important today because everything was in a separate list and another problem is that the sheet was actually better for my client and for me because some clients can be very demanding and when you give them the freedom to see your progress some of them will act like they are your boss and the reason why I started this is because I wanted to have freedom but here I was sharing what I did with everyone and I felt like I now had 10 bosses so I also wanted to create some distance between what I was doing and the client they don't have to see everything that you're doing I mean some days I just don't work on a project but some clients just think that you need to work for them every day because they paid you and it's just it's just a mess so I just wanted some distance so I started searching for free project management tool and the first one that I found was Trello Trello is super easy you have columns and you have tasks within those columns and then you can easily move tasks around for example like this to do doing and done or like this you could have a one column per client and then you can have a card like a visual design feedback and you could just easily add tasks like this and then to prioritize what you have to do first you just click and drag and put it on top so then you can see what tasks are on top and you can easily decide what you want to do that day and I love Trello because it's free and it's super simple to use but I still found myself having a little bit too much chaos so then I started to look to a more professional tool which also had a great free plan still has which is Asana and in Asana you can create projects so you can create one product per client and then you can add all the tasks in here you can assign people to it and you can assign a deadline so let's say that you want to change the logo tomorrow you put it on tomorrow and then if you click on my tasks over here here you will get all the tasks that you need to do today or that you need to do tomorrow or that are already due in the past which I found worked really good because you sit down once and you think about what would need to happen now then you put it in there and then you don't have to think about it anymore because you just click on my tasks and you start working so that created some peace in my mind so that's why I like Asana if you work alone the free plan is great I've I've used this for years without paying a limited task unlimited projects it's just a super great plan and if you want complete Freedom over your project management tool and you already know what you want and these tools don't give you what you want I would recommend notion because notion is a tool where you can create your own kind of system it's super customizable it's like Elementor Pro but then for your project management tool if that makes sense so you can do anything you want like here you have the Trello you can create a list you can create projects so this is like a combination of all but the learning curve is also a little bit higher and they have a great free plan as well so isn't it cool that we now are designing websites with figma for free we are sending invoices for free and now we are managing our projects like a pro for free so at this point we've made a few hundred dollars and we are ready for the next level which is designing and building websites so until now we've just done design but when you can combine designing and building websites you are a lot more valuable to companies and this means that you can ask more money for the things you're doing so now we're going from the hundreds of dollars to the thousands and not everybody will be able to sell for a few thousand in the beginning this is of course practicing but everybody understands that designing and building is more valuable than just designing but like I said in the beginning building websites isn't free but we have already made a few hundred dollars so we can use that money to invest in a a building tool and one other thing which is hosting so in order to keep your website Live 24 7 you need someone to host your website this is a company that just keeps your website Live 24 7 and of course you have to pay a little bit for that and this is just a few dollars per month you also will need a domain name which is the name of your website which will link to the hosting where your website fails are a lot of companies offer domain and hosting in one package so that it's easily inconvenient domains usually cost around one dollar a month and hosting a few dollars so four or five or six so at this point we have to spend some money but we can easily make that money back by letting our clients pay for it let me explain so your client needs a website and you have learned how to build and design website you watch some tutorials you know how to do it and they want a website well why should you pay to keep their website live that doesn't make a lot of sense to me because it's their website at the end of the day I think that you should get paid for the design part and the building part so the work that is required to build the whole thing but I don't think you should pay to maintain and and have the website live forever in the same way as you have to pay for your own domain name and hosting if you want your own website so you could just tell your clients like hey you should buy domain and hosting and then I can start building the website because you need hosting and domain in order to start building the website so let's take a look at a example for example hostinger is a company that has affordable hosting it's a super nice company and they offer WordPress packages and as you can see they have a plan for one website it's uh two dollars per month if you pay for four years and it's four dollars per month after that and the domain needs to be added so at least I would say they're paying around five dollars per month to have their website live we're not looking at the discount right now I'm just looking at the actual prices of the packages but as you can see if you pay a little bit more more around seven dollars you can have 100 website hosted on this plan so this means that they are paying around five dollars per month to have their website live but if you would buy the 100 website package and you would charge them five dollars for them it would make a difference it would actually make it nicer for them because most clients don't want to mess with hosting they don't understand what it is so they are super happy if you manage that so you could say like okay you can buy it yourself or you can buy it from me you're not gonna pay more and I manage it and the thing is when you have 10 clients paying you five dollars per month that is fifty dollars per month which pays for your website packet you can even easily go to a higher more performing package with that money so it's just much smarter to convince your clients to do that via you so that you make a profit and the Beautiful Thing is here that when you have a few clients paying that then you don't have to pay for your own hosting as well for your own portfolio website right because at some point you want your own portfolio website and your clients will pay for that you can use the same trick for your website builder because right now we just have hosting we need that but we also need something to build our website with for example Elementor Pro and they have a 25 website package so if your client would have paid this individually they would have paid uh 59 because Elementor is going to increase the crop the price of the single package 59 which is around five dollars per month but if you buy it for them you only need four clients to pay for your subscription as well then you can use Elementor Pro as well to build your own website so if you just charge your clients ten dollars which is exactly the same that they would pay if they had to buy this offer themselves because again you are not responsible for their monthly cost to keep their website live you should just get paid for the building and the designing right so in this way you're making Pro profit and your clients pay for your software and it's a great deal for them because they don't have to mess around with with everything they don't understand and they still pay the same what I do personally is I charge them twenty dollars per month because I offer a little bit more I also offer a security plug-in and I have some more advanced plugins that I also buy with this method and I update to their website each month so that is also nice for them so they just pay me 20 per month and I tell them like hey if you would have bought it yourself it's around what is it 15 16 and for that four dollars I would just update your website and most of them are super happy to do that because for most businesses that that small amount is is nothing and it's just nice that somebody manages that for them so be smart use this method guys because you just paid 200 and maybe 100 for the hosting so the counter is on 300 but after a few clients it's back at zero it's great and by the way I do have a discount code for or hostinger which is 10 off so if you want to get hostinger and you use the code living with pixels at checkout you will get 10 off your purchase which of course is nice the links to this page and the discount is in the description below I do not have a discount for Elementor Pro but they just reduced their pricing uh this plan originally was around a thousand dollars it's now 400 so even if you exceed the 25 you can upgrade to this plan and then you will have a thousand that is more than enough for many many years to come and as you can see you only need seven clients times at this amount in order to pay for your big Elementor plan and only four clients to pay for your expert plan these links are also below by the way there is one other option though which I want to mention and the reason why I don't recommend Elementor free is very simple with Elementor free you can only edit the inside of a page but once you want a menu a footer a blog or any kind of post or a contact form you will need Elementor Pro so Elementor free is more to taste Elementor but it's not the real deal I do not recommend to build whole websites with just Elementor free and yes you can use some add-ons but then you're working with 10 different tools and it becomes a mess problems will occur so everything you need is an Elementor Pro I think there are some competitors now which are becoming better but Elementor Pro is still in terms of features the the best option in the market for hosting hostinger is Affordable but if you want the best of the best for hosting then I would recommend siteground um which is the more premium hosting provider super good support and fast secure hostinger by the way I've tested it it's also fast but siteground is like the more premium option so I also wanted to say that so let's take a look at the calendar we have invested like 300 but after a few months building a few websites having a few clients you already made that money back so we are back at zero you see this business is super low risk to start still let's now go to level four which is making your life a little bit easier so you've used these methods and you've started to make a few thousand dollars and now you're like okay the costs are not that that high I know let's just invest to make my life a little bit easier and then the first thing that I would recommend for you to invest in is a password manager because you're dealing with passwords all the times for your accounts for your client accounts and you want a solid option one password in my experience is the best I've already tested three different platforms and I think one password is really good and the interface is just really nice it also has an app you can log in with face ID uh the pricing you should click on personal and family uh is three dollars a month I have this package so not that expensive as well it's just a nice Professional upgrade uh for your business the next thing I would recommend like I already said is security because you're dealing with WordPress websites and WordPress websites are not the most safe websites uh there are on the planet like if you want to 100 a secure website you should have something that doesn't have a login right that is something you can achieve with coding for example so there are security threats that's just the case in my experience my client websites have been two times now actually three I think in the in the last all of those years so it's not that bad when it happened two times I was like you know what I'm gonna invest in a security plugin to make the risk lower for that to happen there are all kinds of features in a security plugin to make it safer for example you can hide the login page because uh Bots but also hackers will try to get into your website by going to the login page because every login page of each WordPress website is the same it's just a domain name slash wb-admin so you can hide that it auto blocks people that are trying to log in too many times and I still need to make a video on this which I want to do but for now all I can say is that it lowers your risk of getting I have learned by the way that hosting is also really important uh when it comes to security I didn't know that but a good hosting provider also keeps out most of the threats so you are lowering the risk with a plug-in like this which is by the way the second biggest security plugin on WordPress so that's also pretty pretty safe but do not buy some kind of weird hosting company in some country or some friend who has a server it's nice but it's not that safe for your clients so you should I think take some responsibility in that and pick a hosting company that is worldwide that is good something like siteground or hostinger to already avoid the risk so this is um 199 they also increase their pricing which of course I'm not a fan of but it is what it is um it's 2.99 that is the price per year so divide that by 10 and then by 12 and it's around two and a half dollars per month per website you also have another big plugin which is we're friends which is actually the biggest security plugin on WordPress but this is also not uh the cheapest one and from my experience this slows down your website a bit so that's why I prefer eye themes even though it has become more expensive because back in the day this plan was for unlimited so people who have bought it before that's smart but security is important so this is a step you take when you are ready on another level and then the last upgrade which I think you should make when you care about your time is a new laptop yes I know that's not why you clicked this video and I know that a lot of our tools are in the browser so you might think that it doesn't make a big difference but when I switch to a new Macbook oh Lord even even youtube.com was faster it's it's unbelievable and why I recommend apple is because because with their new Chips uh it's not that expensive anymore I know Apple has this image that it's super expensive and yes that is true for many of their products but for the new MacBooks and all their normal computers it's actually not that expensive because they don't run on Intel chips anymore they now have their own chips which are M1 and M2 and therefore you can get a Macbook for around twelve hundred dollars which is super super fast so the MacBook that I have is the MacBook Pro and then the 14 inch and then the pro Max but I have that because I create videos right and I want to render the videos fast and that's why I have a good MacBook but for most people I would recommend the MacBook Air and why a Macbook and not a computer well because you can take that laptop and go to a meeting to a client which I do sometimes and when you have a computer that's not possible sometimes you just want to hook it up to a monitor and show what you've done so that's why I recommend the MacBook Air with the M1 chip or the M2 Chip as you can see I it's around a thousand dollars or twelve hundred dollars for the basic version but as more than enough for our browser work okay so this business model as you can see is quite low risk you can make a lot of money by using the method of letting your clients pay for your software but I don't want to paint a picture that you should go in this because it's low risk and you just want to make money because I think there are too many people in this market that are just here to get money but if you don't have a passion for design then I would not recommend to go into this because you're gonna spend a lot of time designing and and if you don't enjoy that then I don't think you can produce good work so the passion is also really important but showing that this is accessible and a really good business model even for beginners I think is important so if you want to get started with web design you should check out my channel because this is what my channel is all about I'm starting to make figma videos I have a lot of videos about Elementor Pro so check out my channel and the video description if you want to learn more and then for now now I want to thank you for watching and hopefully I will see you in another video a living with pixels [Music]