Two things happen when you care.
1. You enjoy work.
2. Your clients love you.
In a world filled to the brim with mediocre designers offering mediocre client service, try really caring about your clients and their particular needs. Consistently over-deliver. It will make you happier and richer.
(It’s not something you can fake.)
A money-back guarantee works both ways.
It’s more than an agreement. It’s a promise that we will part friends – either we make you a kick-ass logo or it’s free.
When either party uses it to screw the other, it becomes pointless.
My issue is with clients who view money-back guarantees as a ticket to hire several logo designers for the same project, then select a winner and demand refunds from the rest. These folks are a very small minority of course, but they appear on my radar occasionally. It gets my blood boiling each time. If you want free logos, go to logologo.com. If you prefer hiring a logo designer, paying him/her for their time is the right thing to do!
As a designer, I think the best strategy is to issue the refund and politely thank them for trying your service. Then vent on your blog and move on.
My company created a web site called LogoLogo.com which I reported on a few months back. Quite simply it’s template logos given away for free.
One of the metrics available to us, and to you, is the number of times each logo is downloaded. Couple that with the ability to arrange logos by popularity and you have a machine for determining what logo shoppers want.
It is relatively easy to talk about logos, to look at logos, to evaluate logos and to criticize. Creating logos is harder. It takes more time, skill, blood and sweat than any other logo-related activity. That’s why there is money in logo design once you decide to put your back into it.
Edit:
Re-reading this after posting, I realized that I’m not making my point clear. A designer asked me for a job the other day. I’m not hiring, so I directed her to places online where designers can sell logos and I advised her to upload 10 good logos a day for the next 6 months. Every day. That will take her to about 1,800 logos for sale. By then she will be making more money from logo sales than the best salary I could offer her. The only question is: Can you create and upload 10 good logos a day, every day, for 6 months?
Stop looking for work, logo designer. There is plenty for those willing to really work.
Perhaps the time has come.
LogoLogo.com is a new site we’ve started through an affiliated company of ours. Free logos. Really free. We’ll see how it goes. For now there isn’t a concrete monetization plan. Many ideas, but nothing implemented or even decided yet. We will let the site build a little momentum and come back to ways to make money off free logos.
I am sometimes jealous of those who sell domain names. There’s only one “example.com”. Scarcity is built in.
With logos, not so much. But scarcity is built into every endeavour where creativity is required. There is only one of you, right?
In art this is more pronounced. There is only one Dali. Only one Duchamp. Only one Matisse. No reason why this can’t be true in design. There is only one [_insert your name here_] and when you get to the point where people insist that YOU and no-one else create their logo, you can start charging what you are worth.
How do you get there?
I’m still working on it, but differentiation is 90% of the recipe. Balls make up most of the remaining 10%.
At Biz-Logo we send out an (almost) automated email to every client two weeks after finalization of their project. Just a note to say thanks and to make sure that they were able to use the designs we sent.
That’s the easy kind of after-sales service. The technology-driven, automated kind.
Most clients respond “No problems here, love it!”, but about one in twenty struggle to implement the designs – for example, the logo we created does not fit the available logo area on the web site template they bought.
You could see this as an opportunity to up-sell, or you could see it as an opportunity to delight the client with “above and beyond” after-sales service.
It surprises me that some companies choose neither. They choose the “not my problem” option.
Right. Not your problem. It’s a problem that a client has – someone who has bought from you before and now needs your help again. It’s called an opportunity.
I was on the Google forum again. Many webmasters there complain about lost search engine rankings. Sometimes I’m one of them. But we need to remember that we are talking about Internet business here, with the emphasis on “Internet”. It changes. New competitors and new spam techniques pop up like daisies and search engine algorithms need to keep pace.
So do we.
Option 1:
Try to keep up with SEO “wisdom”. Good luck with that.
Option 2:
Focus on long-term. Build something of value that puts you head and shoulders above whoever is #2.
The key here is “head and shoulders”. If you are not the clear leader in your field, narrow your field. On the Internet you can do that. Pick a discipline within your field and specialize. Be the obvious #1 in that niche. Pick with your heart and the money will follow.
I truly feel for the masses of logo designers who try to sell logos online. You can see the enormous amount of time that each (well, most) invested in building their logo design sites. Months of building and rebuilding and refining – for what? For a site that won’t work.
Before you build your logo design site, look through existing logo design sites. There are thousands. Look at their depressing Alexa rank too. My estimate, based on the Alexa numbers, is that most of those sites attract between 30 and 100 visitors per day (Alexa rank 1,000,000+), which probably translates to 2 or 3 sales per month.
If you are serious about selling logos online, you will need a plan. You need to get people on your site. If you don’t have a plan yet, sell your logos at LogoGround until you do. Put up a basic one-pager site in the meantime, but don’t spend months building an awesome web site that no-one will visit.
After we gave him a special discount and delivered more than he paid for in less time than promised, a new LetterLogos.com client asked for more. We politely asked for more money, to which he responded by telling us what a useless, dishonest bunch we are.
He asked for a full refund, which I provided. Then he asked for more designs, which I decided not to provide.
I guess we could’ve stuck with him a little longer, doing a little more work without compensation, but there has to be something that tells me it will be worth it. Some indication that the potential business outweighs the hassle.
On the surface it seems counter-productive, but it’s worth firing clients. Some clients are more hassle than they are worth. Their projects are the ones that keep you up late. That make you miserable. That make you wonder what’s on TV. Fire them. You can’t please everyone. Focus on the clients that appreciate you. They are more fun to work for and, as a rule, they bring more business your way in the long run.
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