Thinking of Quitting?

 Hello and welcome to Websites Made Simple with Holly Christie. I’m Holly Christie. I’m your host. I am a website designer and developer, a founder, a mentor, and the host of this podcast. And I’m here to help you.  If you are a website designer or developer to have a successful, a fulfilling career in website design as well.

And it’s, it’s a bit of a funny one website design because it’s usually something that is relatively self taught. Most of the web designers haven’t been to specific business school to kind of learn how to design and develop and run their business. And we all kind of find our way. And it’s one of the reasons that a lot of the website designers who I work with  are full of imposter syndrome, or they feel like they’ve got some gaps in their knowledge.

And whether that’s, you know, to do with running their business, um, in website design or whether it’s to do with building the websites themselves. And that’s what website mentors like me are for, to come and help you with that and to help you really, really enjoy your career.  So while this podcast is aimed at website designers and developers, if you work in the industry with us, if you’re a copywriter or you’re a branding designer, or you’re a photographer, you are likely to get along a lot from it as well.

So welcome to come and join us.  And this episode is all about. About how to bring yourself back from the verge of quitting. And over the last couple of years, I’m recording this in 2025 at the beginning of 2025. And over the last couple of years, it has been a really difficult time in the industry, particularly if you work with small businesses and even actually some medium sized businesses.

You know, along with the cost of living crises and changes in governments and just this. General post COVID.  Kind of workspace that we’ve been left with. It has been a really, really tough market. And I have seen so many people, particularly on LinkedIn, so many website designers and developers, so many copywriters, branding specialists. Um, graphic designers say that’s it. I’m done. I’m out. It’s too hard. And yeah, it really has been hard.

I hear you. I’ve, I’ve been you. I haven’t been on the verge of quitting, but I’ll tell you what you want. Some people go into employed work and you think, Oh, it must be nice. But that’s not what it’s about.  The industry is competitive and whether you’re there in web design, whether you’re joining us as a copywriter, a branding specialist, it’s competitive.

It’s been hard, but the one thing I can say is I am seeing some real changes. Business is really picking up. There’s some great stuff going on right now. And if you’ve been having a wobble about whether to stay in your business, whether you’ve not been sure, I have done this episode absolutely for you because I am here to help support you in having the best career that you can.

You’ll know that I am a really big advocate and support for small businesses. I think the whole world should be made up of small businesses. And I think that so many people have something really. Special that they can bring to the workspace that they can bring to enrich other people’s businesses and other people’s opportunities.

And sometimes we just really struggle to get that out there. And so this episode is going to help you on getting that out there for you. So buckle up  and let’s get started.  So. Your industry is competitive. I know, because it’s my industry too. And that doesn’t mean that there’s not a space for you within that industry.

There absolutely is enough work out there for everybody. And there is enough seats at the table. But, Often it can be really, really hard to get that work to come to us and to get that work to come to us when we want it to come to us with ease. And trust me, I have been that person who, and it was many years ago now, but that person who was in all of the Facebook groups being, you know, waiting for the post to come up to say, you know, has anyone got, can anyone recommend a website designer and wanting to be one of the first people on the post that they would look at my work?

Yeah, I can help you. And. Yeah, okay. It’s one, it’s one way of getting work, but it’s pretty exhausting. And it often means that you’re not actually working with people who are very aligned with you either. So we are going to look at getting those ideal clients in front of you.  As well and getting them coming to you rather than you having to go out hustling and looking for them and it because also by the time someone is looking for a website designer, if they are having to put a shout out into groups and that then they are just going to then be so overwhelmed with the responses that they’re not going to be able to make a really clear, easy judgment on what you want to do is you want to get people at the point where they’re thinking.

Dang.  I really need to do something about my website, or I really need a new website, and I’m going to start to explore that.  Now, part of that is going to come down to your own website SEO, and if SEO is not something you feel fully confident in, You can go and look at my courses, which is courses.

thisdemandinglife.  com. And you’ll see there’s an unlocking SEO course on that. And it teaches you all about website SEO. You can apply it to your own website. You can apply it to your clients websites. You’ll get great scores across Google and the other search engines. And that’s one way of doing it, but it’s not the only way to do it.

And. I come from a marketing background, you may well as well, but if you don’t, what you need to know is that websites were not made to work on their own.  They are part of a marketing strategy, they’re part of what’s known as the trinity of marketing, and that is your website, your email list, and your social media channels as well, and While I say social media channels, it doesn’t mean that you have to be everywhere on social media.

And it’s okay if you’re only on one social media channel. For me, I have accounts on LinkedIn and Facebook and Instagram. But if I had to, you know, ditch everything tomorrow, I would go all in on LinkedIn.  But I do get some work from the other ones as well, which is why I’m on three. But bear in mind, as I say, it’s not designed here to work on its own as well.

And so the first thing, the very, very first step and. You know, I remember there was a quote when I first set up and I think it was Richard Branson who said it and it said the difference between successful people and non successful people was the people who quit  usually quit at the point that they were just about to become successful. 

And the people who succeeded were the people who pushed past that wanting to quit feeling, as well. So, I would say, unless you just think, this is not for me. I, I gave it my best shot, but I’m not enjoying the work, I’m not enjoying hassling for the business, you know, this is not right for me. Then, you know, by all means do quit, and you’re probably best suited somewhere else.

But if you actually really enjoy what you do and you want to do more of it and really your biggest issue is that you’re not doing enough of it because you’re not getting enough clients, then here we go.  So the very first thing to do is identify what you want to do more of. And that will be around whether you’re building websites, whether you want to mentor other website designers, or what stage of it  So, for me, for example, I really love doing service based websites.

I love building them from scratch. I love getting to know the person, what they’re offering, and how we’re going to bring that alive on the website. So, for me, It’s really, really about that. And I’ll absolutely include booking systems. They might have a product that they want to sell as well. You will see, for example, on my flagship website, This Demanding Life, I have, you know, links to my TidyCal where people can book in.

They can buy the mentoring services there. Straight off of there, um, and all these sorts of things as well. And then on my Simply sites, you can go and buy an entire website on there. You can click the button and buy it as a product as well, as you can with the courses as well. So, but the main offering of them for me is they start off with, this is a service.

Here is a sales page for the service and the. Build the website that the pages are all telling a story. You have your homepage and that leads to the about and that leads to the services and then that leads to the, you know, listen to what I have to say in my blog and, you know, get in touch and that sort of stuff.

So for me, I really love websites that do storytelling.  And that’s not to say that I don’t do product websites, but they’re not something I advertise as much as, hey, your service led business is going to do really well in my hands with your website. So identify what it is you want to do more of, because you’ll naturally be more enthusiastic and the more of it you do, the better at it you’ll get.

So that could be that you really like doing online shops, particularly because online shops are essentially just, you know, setting up. Kind of a template and then you’re just populating and maximizing on that template as well. It could be that you really love doing landing pages and you like to get those kind of 9, container pages and, you know, really tell that story of that product through that as well. 

So, really zoom in on what it is that you want to be working on the most of.  And then once you know what it is that you want to be doing more of, have a think about who the people are who are asking for these projects. So, for example, I like working the most on service led stuff.  So I am looking to appeal to people whose work is a service.

So I look at working, I work a lot with HR individuals, with coaches, with copywriters. You know, people who offer their work as a service. They are my ideal target audience. I also particularly like working one to one with people.  as well. So I’m looking for very small business owners. I’m looking for micro business owners.

I work with startups. And if it’s a business, a small business that has, you know, five, five to 15 people, that’s absolutely fine. But I do ask that I only collaborate with one or two people. Um, we don’t want the whole world getting involved with the website build because you cannot appeal to everybody. So once you’ve really identified.

What type of website and who it’s for,  where are these people hanging out? Are they hanging out on LinkedIn? Are they hanging out on Facebook? Are they on Instagram? Are they, you know, on these different, as I record this, TikTok’s been taken down and it’s going back up. But yeah, you know, have a think about on those stable social media platforms.

Where can you appeal to them? And you’re looking to appeal to them in your messaging and your website. But you’re also looking to appeal to them on the messaging and the content that you’re putting up on your social channels as well. And so when we really identify who these people are, who we want to work with, we also want to be really aware of what really what their problem is, what their pain point is, what you’re going to solve for them.

So for example, as website designers, their pain point is  They need a website. Or they need their website worked on more than it currently is. And you have to look at how you’re going to appeal to them to say, Hey, I can help you with that.  And we’re creating content looking at that as well. And we’re looking to meet them with our expertise.

And with the reassurance that we’ve got this. This is safe in our hands. See you next week. And we want these people to come and find us because we don’t want to be spending all our time hustling. We want to be putting some really good, strong messaging out there. And then we want to be getting on with our work because the work is, we didn’t all sign up to be marketers.

We signed up to be website designers and developers and as much as, yeah, we really do have to market our work, but we want to be marketers. Developing our work as well. We want to be building those websites. We want to be making those relationships with clients. We want to be onboarding people and doing all of that side of it as well.

And  Within doing this, it means that we need to get really clear on the messaging. And as a website designer, you will have your own messaging to appeal to clients. And I promise you, your messaging can’t just be, you need a website. I build websites. That’s, that’s just not strong enough. You need to find what. 

So, for example,  when I first started out, I often worked with people either on their very first website, or people who had had a go at doing a homemade website, or, you know, they had a friend, or they had a teenage child, or someone like that who could build the website, but the website wasn’t doing anything for them, because it wasn’t doing done in a way it didn’t have the expertise, it didn’t have the knowledge of the user journeys, it didn’t have SEO on it, and so their website wasn’t doing anything for them. 

But often people would say, I want to, you know, I’ve got a website or I’m going to home make a website or something like that, and when that has made money, I will then invest in the next website.  But the thing with that is that website is never going to make money because it doesn’t have a right user experience.

It doesn’t have the right, um, SEO behind it. The footer says proudly powered by Wix saying that it’s a free site or, you know, by WordPress is, is those attention to details. And also with website, there’s legal and accessibility compliance as well, which people just can’t know about if they’re not in the industry.

So for me, my messaging. Was always, your homemade website won’t work, 

and this is why your website won’t make you money.  And. That was great early messaging for me. Now, my work has moved on since then as well. And I think for a lot of my work, the fact that I mentor website developers as well as building quite high price websites as well, that has enough credibility within itself, but my messaging still is that your website should be doing a lot of the work for you.

Your website should be bringing you in leads and making you sales. And if it’s not doing that, it’s not working for you.  So take some time and even pause this podcast, take some time and really get working on what your message is. And you will know what kind of intrinsically feels right for you. And yeah, it could be about getting more eyes on the product.

It could be about working really ethically. It could websites, whoever your ideal audience is, who your ideal client is. Think about what messaging is really going to appeal to them. And then you want to meet them with expertise in there. And you really want to be sounding very confident in what you are putting across to those people as well, because no one’s going to choose to work with someone who’s a bit wishy washy or who’s a bit like, yeah, we’ll wing it.

It’ll be fine. We’ll figure it out. Even if you are figuring it out along the way, you know, we don’t know.  It’s not possible to know every single design trend, every single style, every single plugin or functionality or whatever else. But as long as we feel confident that we can access the resources to find out what they are.

And that could be mentoring with a website, mentor like me, or I’ve got a couple of other friends who do, um, website friends that is, who do mentoring, or whether it’s going on forums and finding out what the right one is, whether it’s looking for a plugin and googling,  you know, the top membership plugins or directory plugins or whatever it is that you’re looking for, you need to really have that confidence behind you, that expertise. 

Something I would also say is don’t worry about being the how to person and don’t worry about generating how to content unless your business model actually is teaching people how to do this and how to do that. So you may be a website designer or developer  who actually just supports people websites and.

You know, then, yeah, okay, how to content would be pretty useful. But I made the mistake years ago of creating loads of how to content, how to do this on your WordPress website, how to do that, and I realized no one was actually watching it, or reading it, or clicking on it, because there They weren’t my ideal audience.

My ideal clients were, didn’t want to learn how to do it. They wanted to have a website designer do it for them. They wanted to be able to pass the work on and have that work done. So do really be conscious when you’re generating that kind of content that, you know, You know, it’s not about how to do this and that.

And also, people can become quite afraid of tech as well. You know, people will say, I’m not very good with technology, or, you know, I, I don’t feel very confident with this. And in most cases, it’s not really going to be your job to give them that confidence. You just need to give them that confidence in you, that you are the person to do that for them as well.

So, Bear in mind what your messaging of that could be. So it can sometimes be, I might do something along the lines of like five common mistakes people make  on their websites. And I often create content for my email newsletters that says, you know, this week, have a look at doing this on your website or see whether you’re complying with, uh, website accessibility guidelines and things like that.

So there are times that you can, you know, put some technical expertise within your messaging, but mainly, uh, we look at doing results driven marketing. Um, obviously we do like website reveals and stuff like that. Every time that I have a new website design go live, I’ll do a promo video for it and put it up there because I want people to be able to see all the different types of design and stuff we do.

Um, but when we really. Looking at marketing that is just part of it and part of it is Letting people know what they could have from their website if they invest in a good website designer  And that’s so it could be that generate more leads through your websites or ways to generate through new leads through the websites or, um, different contact methods and just knowledge that kind of taps into people thinking, Oh yeah, I really do need to get that updated on my website or maybe my contact forms not working and actually that’s just the catalyst to, I’ve been thinking of website redesign and I want to talk to a designer about the best way to be contacted through my website. 

And things like that. And. So the other thing I want to just remind you before we go is that there is always a lead time on this and going back to that  saying about, you know, the definition of success is someone who hasn’t given up when it’s gotten hard is that it. It takes a long time, a, for you to get comfortable with your own messaging, but b, for people to really become aware and that messaging to be consolidated within their minds as well.

And remember, every time people go on their social media or they Google a term or something like that, they being hit with hundreds of different types of information as well. So think of the content that you are creating around your website design business as building blocks. It’s like you’re building a wall and every time in this wall of content, this wall of expertise, and every time that you lay another brick upon this wall,  that it’s cementing the idea with people that you have that structure that you’re solid, you’re safe, you’ve got a great foundation and you are going to be the person to work with them as well.

And it takes time to build that wall. So, I would say often if I am changing my messaging or I really want to push one of my services or something like that, you’re usually looking at a three month lead time from when I first sign up. Start with this messaging to start making that traction and waves and getting good responses and getting inquiries around it.

And often I find that if inquiries are quiet, I’ve often dropped the ball on the marketing around three months or two months before that as well. So anything you do, uh, I know we’ve put in the title of this episode, if you’re thinking of quitting, Give yourself three months at least. And also depending how, you know, how strong you are on your marketing with things, it can take longer than that as well.

It’s like I launched my mentoring service a year ago and a year ago in the first three months it was really quiet and I thought why is it so quiet and it turns out that three months before that I hadn’t really been doing my marketing and I kind of. picked it up and put it down and then in the last quarter of the year and the first quarter of this year it’s just been crazy the amount of mentoring that I’ve been doing and sometimes it just takes a long time to get that message across but that message really will get across there.

And if you are Really kind of stuck for work and you don’t want to quit the industry, but that look at collaborating with other website designers. And I really want to say this with a note of caution. I get maybe 50 DMs a week from website designers saying, you know, let’s work together. You bring in the work and I’ll do the work.

I’m like, no!  Bringing in the work is sometimes the hardest part of the work. Go and do your own work. You know, go and do your own marketing and stuff like that. It’s really important that you’re not spamming other website designers saying, hey, choose me, choose me, choose me. You know, you do the hard bit and I’ll do the work.

And we’ll split the, uh, you know, we’ll split the money.  Um,  You know when I said at the beginning of this episode that there are enough seats at the table for everybody, there is enough work out there for everybody. So I would say really make sure you are not looking at your fellow website designers as competition, look to them for collaboration as well.

And again, that doesn’t mean jumping in and saying to them, you know, choose me, choose me, choose me, but look at where they can fill the gaps that you Don’t want to do so much like I say I don’t particularly like doing product based websites So I will often ask other website designers. I’ll either recommend other website designers Uh, out and out, or I might bring in white labelers to do that work as well, particularly if I’m really busy.

So, you could look at what your area of expertise is, and then you can look at collaborating with another website designer, um, who has a different area of expertise to you as well. And I do that, usually make really good friends with these people as well, and they become part of a really strong, really stable, really great network.

And the other thing I would say is if you are on LinkedIn or Facebook or Instagram with other website designers as well, and you’re commenting on their posts and it’s great. You know, we all want that to support each other. Make sure you are not trying to sell your own services off their posts. And I sometimes, I’ll put a lot of work into a post, particularly if I’m creating carousels and videos and things like that.

And the last thing I want is some website designer jumping on there and saying, Oh yeah, you could do it like that, but I could do it this way. Choose me. People look me up at this for that. And they will just get deleted and blocked. Um, I may or may not contact them and say this is why I’m doing it. Um, but yeah, make sure everything you do is really, really collaborative.

And remember that there are enough seats at the table, find your area of expertise, get really clear on who it is you’re serving, who that’s for and where you can meet them, where they’re at, which is the need for a website designer.  Thank you so much for listening. If you think that it would be a benefit for you to take this a little bit further, I have a course on my courses website called how to get clients for your website design business.

It could not be any clearer. It is a bite sized course. It’s got some workbooks, which will really support you. And it takes what we’ve talked about today. Even further, it’s affordable at 45 pounds.  That’s in English and I also offer one to one, uh, website mentoring as well for website designers and you can look me up again on my website, thisdemandinglife.com. And until next time, have a great time in your website design business and go and get those clients.