What WordPress Products or Services Should You Sell?
So, you’re thinking about starting a business around selling WordPress products or services. There are lots of options when it comes to choosing which WordPress ones to offer. Which ones are right for you? Which ones are right for the type of clients you want to have? Let’s break down what kinds of options are available to you and how to begin to plan out your service or product offerings.
WordPress Services
First, services: simply put, this is something a client pays you to do for them. These include designing and developing a website – either through code, themes, or both. Or, you could provide website maintenance – like updating plugins and themes, adding new content, monitoring the site for security, and taking backups. You might want to offer some kind of auditing or remediation service – letting people know where their design could be stronger or how accessible their site is, then fixing whatever can be improved. Or ,you could provide optimizations like SEO, performance, speed, or security. All of these are services that you could perform for WordPress sites.
WordPress Products
Then, you have the option of offering digital products. The WordPress ecosystem consists of hundreds of companies that sell software to be used with WordPress to accomplish certain ends. Think plugins, themes or page builders, or extensions. Keep in mind that you can always provide services AND products if you want. If you’re trying to start simple, stick to just one. But plenty of companies sell products and services at the same time.
For example, if you provide SEO optimization services, maybe there’s a plugin you can sell alongside those services that can assist with determining color contrast or writing ALT tags for images. The limit to what you can offer is only determined by how much time and knowledge you have, or how many employees or contractors you can hire to help you.
Product and Service Upsells
Which brings us to the next thing to consider when picking your services – upsells. Upsells are upgrades or additional services or products you might offer. When someone goes to buy something, is there a complementary service or product you offer that they might like? For example, maybe you provide website design where you build shiny brand new websites for your clients. You might also provide copywriting as an upsell. The client has the option to tack it on to the main project. Copywriting is a great upsell for website design services because the site needs copy anyway. If you provide it, rather than rely on the client to provide it, that may mean that the project moves along a little quicker or the copy and design end up more cohesive. You get more business and the client can save some time writing their own copy. It’s a win-win.
Features and Benefits
So, once you’ve put together a list of the products and or services you want to sell, and have connected main offerings to potential upsells, you can go into more detail by determining features and benefits. Features and benefits will not only help you understand your offerings better, but can help write stellar marketing copy later on.
For each service or product you want to offer, first determine its features. Features are what your product or service actually IS; what it provides, what it consists of, etc. For example, the features of a website design service could include building a custom branding identity, designing and building out a specific number of pages, providing a blog post template, testing for accessibility and mobile responsivity, etc. These are all things that make up the service as a whole. And, they are all things you would not just do on their own. Things you’d do on their own that you then group together is a service package and we’ll go over that in another video.
Once you know the features of a service or product, you should then isolate its benefits. Features and benefits may seem like the same thing, but they’re two unique parts of your offering. Rather than what the product or service is, benefits are how your product or service solves a problem. They answer the question ‘why should I hire you over someone else? What’s in it for me?’ For your website design service, decide what the benefit of each feature would be.
For example, a custom branding identity means the client can make sure all their other properties online are visually consistent. When you test for accessibility as a feature, the benefit is that the client is less likely to be sued for not following ADA guidelines. The benefit of mobile responsiveness as a feature is that the site will load quickly on mobile devices, which means fewer lost conversions or sales on mobile.
What should you not offer?
Consider the things that you absolutely do not want to offer, or cannot offer. For example, perhaps another plugin company similar to yours offers a white glove setup service of the software. It’s fine if that’s not something you want to do. But in order to stay competitive, consider outsourcing things you don’t want to do, or building relationships with referral partners.
Identify Deliverables
Finally, make sure you understand what your deliverables will be. What will you actually give or send to the client that defines the end of the project. For services, this could be a launched public website. Or, it could just be a final design. For a plugin or theme, usually the deliverable is a zip folder containing the necessary files. But, it may also be access to a user account through which the customer can not only download their deliverables, but access support and other resources.
All in all, your services and products should be the things you’re passionate about. When you organize them in ways that make sense, it’s easier for clients to understand and it’s easier for you to meet their needs.
Head over to our YouTube channel to check out our other videos all about building a WordPress-based service or product business and leave a comment letting us know what we missed!
