Is your goal to build passive income for yourself? That’s what my goal is, and that’s the reason I learned how to start a full-service marketing agency and successfully did it. I will show you how I started mine and hopefully you can take away some valuable information by learning from my experience.
Why Listen to Me?
My name is Isaiah, owner of 360 Brand Boost a full service marketing agency based in Tampa Florida. My journey started 7 years ago when I needed to build a website for my YouTube channel and couldn’t find someone to do it for cheap enough to fit my budget. I learned a lot with that website, which is still operational today and still earns me money. After a while, I decided that I wanted to build a business that would earn me money more passively. For the past few years I’ve been learning all about online marketing and I even got a job as a web developer without a degree.
Getting Started – First Steps in How to Start a Full-Service Marketing Agency
1. Choose the Right Name
Choosing the right name can be pretty difficult. But I do have some advice. First, you should choose a name that allows anyone who reads the name to understand what kind of company it is. Also make the name short and easily readable when typed with no spaces. A bad example would be “marketinggroup.com” because the word marketing ends in g and the word group starts with g, so it becomes confusing at first glance. My next piece of advice is to find out if the name is taken on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and other social platforms. You don’t want to have your handles be different than your company name. Lastly, you can use ChatGPT to generate a bunch of names at once. Most of the names will be pretty bad, but sometimes ChatGPT can come up with the perfect name!
2. Purchase Your Domain
The easiest way I find to purchase a domain is by using Hostinger. You can get a domain there for pretty cheap and it’s easy to manage many domains. That’s why I suggest you get your domain from their. But you can purchase your domain from other places too.
3. Set up Your Hosting
Now you need to set up your environment for your agency website to be hosted live on the internet. The only platform I can recommend for this purpose is Cloudways. The reason is because you can manage all of your clients websites in one platform, you can increase the size of the servers as you go, and you can even decrease the size if you wanted to. Everything is pay as you go, so you get the advantage of very little start up cost and scalability at the same time. With Cloudways you can also send clients invoices very easily, and have the clients be charged automatically on a monthly basis. You don’t want to have to send the client an invoice every month and hunt them down if they don’t pay on time. You want for the client to automatically get charged.
4. Build Your Website
You should know how to do this part, but if you don’t you can find some great courses on Udemy. If you’re just starting out learning about web development in general I would suggest taking the HTML and Responsive Web Design course on Free Code Camp. Once you do that you’ll have to learn about WordPress from places like Udemy and YouTube. Make a number of practice sites by copying others and then building your own.
Getting the First Few Clients
What I suggest for this is to do some work for free, but not totally free. What you can do is build the businesses website for free and charge them monthly for hosting. Most people and businesses are willing to pay $20-$50/month for hosting. You can build 10-20 websites and make a pretty nice passive income. You can also offer other services like social media account management, blog posts, and SEO. If you post in local Facebook groups, post on Craigslist, cold call businesses, email etc. you can definitely get people who would like to have their website done for free. This will be a good way to develop your skills.
Conclusion
Starting a full-service marketing agency takes some careful planning and follow through. If you want to learn more about marketing and making passive income be sure to subscribe to the email list for weekly tips, and information.
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