Do you happen to be an agency owner? Then these monthly recurring revenue sources can literally save your agency and build a rock-solid foundation. If you want to break free from feast and famine cycles, continue reading and take this post as inspiration.
Chances are, that your agency could benefit from earning more recurring revenue. After all, which business can have enough predictable, stable income? I ran my agency for multiple years without any monthly recurring revenue sources and constantly struggled. Some nights, I would lie awake and worry about paying the bills coming in next week.
That is why I’ve made recurring revenue a huge focus of the 2020 WP Agency Summit.
Speakers like Nick Adams from WP Buffs, John White from True Mtn, Agnes Talalaev from WebARX, Pritesh Vora from WP Remote, and many others talk about selling retainers and building recurring revenue. All of them have one thing in common, they walk the walk and don’t just talk the talk.
If you haven’t seen the webinars with WP Buffs and WP Remote yet, I highly recommend you check them out. Click on the links above or on their logos at the bottom of the post to head over to their virtual booths. They have embedded the replays of their webinars, so you can still watch and learn.
Let me give you an idea of the types of services you can potentially add to your offerings:
- Website security monitoring
- Unlimited website edits
- Flat-rate graphic design
- Charging for your projects based on retainers
- White-label SEO services
5 Monthly Recurring Revenue Sources Explained
Website Security Monitoring
One potential stream of recurring revenue could be selling website security monitoring. The selling point for your customer would be quite straightforward. Remember, they invested money into their new website and digital brand. So they will want protect it from data-loss, hackers and malware. After all, these measures protect their newly built asset.
Your customers could protect their website themselves. They too can create backups, install updates, use uptime-monitoring, or do malware checks. But as soon as you explain what is involved in those tasks to your customers, you will see their faces turn blue. Anybody who is not a developer will be overwhelmed with the technical challenges of website maintenance.
Instead, offer to take care of these services for them based on a monthly retainer. There are software tools and service providers you can leverage for reselling security services. Platforms like WebARX or Blogvault that let you offer website security services easily. You can package up a few tools, even utilizing free ones like MainWP.
It doesn’t have to be hard to add this offering to your monthly recurring revenue sources.
Unlimited Website Edits (Even If You Are A Freelancer)
Many service providers in the WordPress industry will offer unlimited website edits based on monthly retainers. After all, any website owners needs website edits sooner or later. So why not add that to your monthly recurring revenue sources?
The crux is in the detail. Implementing a service to offer unlimited website edits can be daunting. Or it seems outright impossible if you are a freelancer or a small web agency. It is easy to think that only companies with plenty of staff spread across the globe can sell unlimited website edits.
But you’d be wrong. In fact, you can add a retainer for website edits to your monthly recurring revenue sources TODAY. Or as fast as you can aquire your first customer. If you are providing website maintenance already, you can add unlimited edits to your packages.
Take advantage of white-label partners like WP Buffs, GoWP, or MintWP. These are just three examples of companies you can team up with in order to add recurring income to your WordPress agency. Any of these companies can handle the websites of your customers on your behalf.
Adding Flat-rate Graphic Design To Your Monthly Recurring Revenue Sources
Similarly to the maintenance services, you can work with white-label partners to sell graphic design services even if you are no designer. I won’t walk you through that concept again (please re-read the section above) to not bloat this article.
Companies like White Label UK or Deer Designer (their CEO Thiago Carvalho speaks at WP Agency Summit 2020) let you on board remote graphic design teams into your business. Essentially, they have designers you can hire remotely to create the designs you need.
However, there is one big difference to how you work with the remote graphic design teams compared to remote WordPress maintenance teams.
While WP maintenance teams can take on communication with the client for you and free up massive amounts of time this way, graphic design teams usually do not do that. Graphic design is a more complex and feedback-intensive process than website maintenance.
Therefore, you will often find yourself communicating with your customers to get the specs for the designs you are selling them. You will be forwarding them links to review documents (e.g. via InvisionApp) that you receive from your design team. And you will find yourself briefing your remote design team instead of your customers directly talking to your white-label designers.
White-label SEO Services
SEO can be a fantastic addition to your monthly recurring revenue sources. Selling SEO is a proven way to keep a customer engaged and it makes sense because it helps your customer get eyes on their newly-built website.
Again, there are countless SEO agencies who offer white-label services and could potentially serve as your remote team. For example, you can talk to SEO Brothers, White-label SEO, or The Hoth.
They are all priced quite competitively, for example, a 1,000-word article from The Hoth is just $70. I am pretty sure you can find some of your existing clients who can benefit from having content written for them. You likely already experienced those customers who commit to blogging just to fail with writing articles after two weeks.
Creating content is hard for your customers because it is not their primary business. But it could become yours by simply reselling SEO services 😉
Bonus: Data privacy and GDPR services
Surprise, I do have a sixth way to increase your number of monthly recurring revenue sources – reselling services around GDPR, data privacy and cookie laws.
Don’t worry, you do not have to be a lawyer to take advantage of this opportunity. In fact, that exactly is the beauty of what I am about to tell you.
I have friends that made $1k in one hour by simply selling their existing clients on the privacy policies of Termageddon. Here is a screenshot from a Facebook group I am in:
He is not the only one reselling Termageddon and making a good income from doing so. If you cannot offer lawyer-written policies to your customers, I highly suggest you take a look at Termageddon or speak with Hans or Donata.
If you want to take it one step further, you can resell the tool iubenda. With their platform, you can set up not just policies but also full-fledged GDPR and Cookie Law solutions for your clients. I am working on a training series around iubenda that will be delivered for free via email, which should release in late November 2020. In the meantime, feel free to check out their virtual booth at WP Agency Summit and learn more about their Partner Program.
There you have it Executing just one of these suggestions can potentially add thousands to your agency’s bottom line. I hope you are able to take advantage of these tips.
Leave a comment below if you have any questions – I am here to help you!
Best,
Jan
