If you look at website development not through a programmer’s eyes but from the marketing side, one thing becomes clear pretty fast: not every type of website is equally interesting for a web studio to sell. So how do you sell websites and actually make money on them? Somewhere the ticket is tiny, somewhere the client struggles to understand the future value after the new site goes live. So let’s squeeze the useful part out of web studio promotion without dragging it out.
A developer usually thinks in terms like “code the layout,” “hook it up,” “connect the API,” “finish the functionality.” A marketer looks at it differently: who is the buyer, what pain do they have, where do you find them, what is their budget, and what else can you sell after the first release. So let’s break down which websites are actually worth selling.
- Landing pages won’t make you much money
- Business card websites for companies
- How to build and sell business card websites
- E-commerce websites — now we’re talking money
- Finding clients by solving their pain
- Web studio advertising
Landing pages won’t make you much money
The first segment is basic landing pages, or “landos,” as developers often call them. And this market probably isn’t where we want to be. For web studio promotion, this segment isn’t particularly attractive from the start: the advertising economics often just don’t add up.
The reason is pretty simple:
- the barrier to entry is low,
- competition from website builders and AI is massive,
How are you supposed to sell custom websites when the client often isn’t looking for a business solution at all, but just wants “a cheap little page”?
Today that landing page gets built on WordPress, tomorrow on a website builder, and the day after that the client decides Instagram is enough. And honestly, how do you sell Tilda websites when every school kid can already throw one together?
In the end, the developer competes less on product quality and more on price and deadlines: “Can you do it in three days?”, “Why is it so expensive?”, “Someone else promised me the same thing for $100.”
There is one situation where this can work and clients may actually start lining up. You can package the landing page as a full marketing tool: analytics, CRM, forms, integrations, a quiz, call tracking, a proper offer structure. Then the ticket goes up.
Still, that strategy is tied less to the web studio itself and more to specialist expertise. And at that point it is basically a different product. So I wouldn’t build an entire lead generation strategy around simple landing pages. It makes more sense to keep them as an extra service or as an entry point for bigger development work. A sort of lead magnet. You catch the client with a $100 entry offer through a lead form, explain the value properly, and then upsell a business card website.
Business card websites for companies
Business card websites are already more interesting. Companies order them when they need a proper online presence:
- showcase products,
- services and company structure,
- publish company information,
- articles and documents,
- price lists and certificates,
- case studies.
And the website shouldn’t just be “thrown together” because the director said the company needs one. Ideally, it should already follow a marketing structure: solutions → benefits → our work → reviews → trust → contact.
This segment is mainly low to mid-market. Very large companies usually have their own web developers or entire in-house teams and close these tasks internally. And that’s where the main question comes up: how do you actually find a client for a website?
How to find clients for a business card website? The most obvious and still reliable pool is small and medium-sized business. And you don’t have to look only for companies with no website at all. Plenty of businesses want to update what they already have: audit the current site, change the design, finally sort out mobile responsiveness, speed things up, improve SEO. Some clients may simply want to get rid of the interface someone built for them seven years ago and nobody has dared touch since.
How to build and sell business card websites
This is where lead generation starts to look normal. There is a clear funnel. In other words, finding clients becomes direct work with a more or less warmed-up audience. A slightly higher ticket and a more complex product require personal interaction. No Google Ads campaign for a web studio is going to magically close a high-ticket, multi-part product on its own.
So where are the clients for a web studio? There is Opendatabot and similar services. Basically, anything working with open company registries. And if there’s nothing suitable or you don’t feel like spending money at the start, go parse Viber, business directories and marketplaces. Pick the business categories you need and work with them directly: targeting and organic SMM, outreach, calls, email campaigns, your own databases. In advertising, don’t push some vague “we build websites.” Push actual pain points: outdated design, no mobile version, no leads, poor visibility in Google, weak lead form conversion. At the end of the day, show them a new business integration and how it can be plugged into the website.
You can go even further and track newly registered companies. Set up automatic alerts. A company gets registered, the manager gets a ping and reaches out: shows previous work, explains online presence options and offers website development.
And I would build the developer’s own landing page so the client sees several product options. Something like:
- a cheap entry option
- the one we actually want to sell
- a deliberately less attractive option in terms of price versus features
- the most expensive package under the hood.
Don’t make the sales manager spend an hour later explaining the difference. A good landing page for a business card website should do part of that job on its own. That makes finding clients much easier.
E-commerce websites — now we’re talking money
The e-commerce segment gets much more interesting financially. Your target audience here is small and medium-sized business. They usually don’t keep a full-time developer on staff. A permanent development team is simply too expensive for them.
Large businesses may have in-house developers. Medium-sized companies often use another setup: their own technical specialist or Project Manager runs the project, while an outsourced company acts as the implementation team — in simple terms, the hands doing the work.
And an e-commerce website rarely ends with “built it and forgot it.”
An existing store always needs something:
- new functionality,
- payment or delivery integration,
- product import,
- CRM,
- filters,
- checkout changes,
- analytics,
- a new design.
Something gets outdated, something breaks after an update, and sometimes the previous developer built things in such a way that the next person opens the code and just sits there in silence for five minutes.
SEO here also can’t be treated like a button that says “add traffic.” A store may have hundreds of similar product and category pages, so without proper structure, semantics and real page value, you can quickly end up with a pile of weak or duplicated content.
The store itself is still a straightforward product: catalog, product page, cart, checkout. And the key landing pages are already built according to marketing logic.
Finding clients by solving their pain
Back in the landing page section, we already touched on the idea of a turnkey website with full SEO, analytics and advertising. Great strategy when the client comes looking for something cheap and ends up leaving half their wardrobe behind. The marketer’s advice to a developer is pretty simple: your own website should sell website development at least as well as you promise your client’s website will sell their products.
At the top — the USP. Then — what exactly you solve, benefits, cases, technologies, trust, examples of stores, the development process and a clear CTA. The same four product offers can work here too: affordable, core, comparatively unattractive, and the most expensive one. The client starts to understand on their own which budget range their request belongs to.
Where do you get clients? From the same open sources. Choose companies connected to retail and commerce and you get a pretty specific audience for targeting, outreach and sales work. As for where to find website clients, you can separately track recently registered businesses. For example, this is how I look for clients — we parse directories, databases and marketplaces, especially seller sections. Oh, and one more thing: in Meta Ads you can target page admins. In many cases, page admins are either decision-makers or people close to them.
Web studio advertising
How to find clients among sole proprietors and very small businesses? That audience usually comes with a lower ticket. At the start, they often aren’t ready to invest properly in development. So it is better to approach them with a project that can later scale through extra plugins, modules and additional solutions. Larger companies are mid-ticket and above. They are ready to wait and order more complex products. Naturally, they are harder to find too. We don’t recommend splitting web studio promotion into ten tiny audience segments right from the start. The budget gets smeared across them, the data becomes thin, and the admin work becomes a pain in the neck.
Better to combine the audience, bring them to one properly built landing page and let the client identify their own level through the offer and pricing.
And the main thing: don’t sell “a WordPress website,” “an OpenCart store” or “200 development hours.” For the developer, that is the stack and the workload. For the business, it is just a bunch of words and numbers.
A business buys a channel, a sales point, a company presence, leads, convenient catalog management or a fix for an old website problem. In other words, the client is looking for a SOLUTION, not the process. That is what should go into the marketing and into the USP. Which framework you eventually use to solve the task — in most cases, the client honestly couldn’t care less.
