Have you ever come across a client who says: “I just want a website out there, that’s all… Just to have my product, contact info and a couple of pictures. I don’t have time for anything else”

Old fashioned

Some clients come up to you very sure, with their minds set on very specific requests. But when they start telling you what they need you suddenly feel a dèja vu and you’re back in the late 90’s when people used to flood their websites with keywords, sit back and hoped for a miracle.

Visit counters, guestbooks, a hundred links on the frontpage, a million keywords, and animated gif icons are some of the things people used to have on their websites back in the day. Now these are nothing but big donts.

Call of duty

As freelancers it is our duty to try to educate our clients and explain to them the whys and hows of today’s best practices. For example, instead of a visit counter, you can provide your client with valuable statistic data from Google Analytics.

You can build a better relationship with a client who has a better understanding of your work. The more they know, the more they’ll trust your recommendations. For instance, this client of mine had no idea about the existence of Facebook and its advertising features. Maybe it was luck, but she fell in love with the whole idea the minute she saw it in action.

Some other clients, depending on their needs, will go for other social networks to help their business grow. But the idea is to walk them into the wonderful world of social media, and help them taking full advantage of the services that best fit their business needs.

Rewards

As a bonus, you’ll be increasing not only your scope of consulting services, but opportunities to provide further services in the future.
Take for example, if you teach your client how to use a Wordpress blog chances are, you’ll end up designing its theme. Same case with Twitter backgrounds, and so on. Anyways, you’ll know how far you can go.

I hope I’m not being too ambitious with this… or am I? What do you reckon?