The Captain Coder Podcast

If you're helping clients create the content for their website, you have to do the necessary keyword research. After all, if no one is searching for the way you're talking about things, you won't get that organic traffic. Keyword research for on-page SEO can feel overwhelming, though. It's hard to know where to start and frankly, a lot of us get bogged down in trying to please...

The main goal of any website is to drive conversions of some kind. If you want to command the premium fees for the websites you're building, you have to be providing the value that matches those fees. About the only way that you can provide value with website design and development? Make it convert! For many of your customers, conversions can be direct product sales. But if you're workin...

This episode is definitely geared more for the web developers, but it's certainly applicable to anyone who's building websites. There's a trend in our job market right now to stick to what's on our "responsibilities" list. With web developers, that means we think we code and we only code. We get told to specialize and not learn too much because we can't be a jack...

So you want to charge more money for the websites that you're building? Then you know that you have to provide the value to be able to charge more. Well, you should be anyway. We talked in episode 40 about adding value to the websites you're building and the first thing on that list was to improve your upfront planning. Yea, the super boring part of any web design process (and I love pla...

You're probably a web designer and web developer because you like the work, but isn't it nice when the work is actually profitable? There are a lot of web design business gurus on the market. I'm certainly not the only one trying to help website agencies make more money and provide a better product. But what I typically hear from those other "experts" is that you should si...

Does social media and posting for your web design just utterly baffle you? One of the things I hear the most from students is that they're never sure how to talk about themselves. When you're working for a company and you have some emotional distance, social media management can be a lot easier. But how do you talk about a business that is 100% about you? Especially in the beginning when...

Last week in episode 37, we talked about where you can find web design clients . The problem is, now that you've found them, how do you actually make those sales? I'm certainly no sales professional. I am, quite frankly, an awkward, stereotypical web developer who's never been the best an interpersonal communications. But my sales closure rate is ridiculously high. Want to know exac...

Whether you’re new to freelancing as a web designer or web developer, or you’ve been doing this for a minute, you know that one of the toughest parts isn’t doing the job you love. It’s finding the clients to work with you and pay your rates. We’ve talked a lot in this podcast about how to take care of clients, but I bet a few of you have been asking back – “Yea, that’s great, but where do I find p...

It's the first week of 2022 and chances are you told yourself this is going to be "your" year. This is the year your business grows. This is the year you start to scale. This is the year you're going to get your shit together. Look, if you're a web designer or even a developer, chances are that you might be a bit on the creative side. And creatives, well, we're not so...

Let's talk about building websites for other businesses. Chances are, you started building websites for one of two reasons - you either like to code and love creating a full project, or you're a designer who had clients asking for websites. The thing is, no matter if you're a web developer who turned to freelance or a graphic designer who creates websites for their clients, you&apos...

One of the most common questions that gets asked by new website freelancers are “What should I charge?” Especially if you’ve worked mostly for other companies or you’re just relatively new to the industry, it can be hard to know what your price points should be. After all, if you look on job boards like Upwork (where you’re competing against people from all over the world), customers want to pay a...

Want to hear a secret that no customer will tell you? They really don't care how you do what you do. It's true! In fact, they really only care about what they actually understand - what they're going to get out of how you do what you do. Here's the somewhat sad truth about humanity - we really just care about ourselves. Our problems, our needs, our businesses. While yes, it can...

Do you ever feel like the content you're creating is falling on deaf ears? I think one of the hardest concepts in marketing to grasp is how to speak to an ideal customer, target audience, following a buyer persona - whatever you want to call it. It's literally the first thing I take my students through during our Digital Marketing class because if you're not speaking to the right pe...

As "user friendly" website builder programs like Wix and SquareSpace have grown in popularity, it probably feels like it's almost impossible to find someone willing to pay more than a few hundred dollars for you to build them a website. But that doesn't have to be the case. In fact, I consistently charge clients thousands of dollars to build them a website and I rarely get push...

I believe so strongly in building websites following digital accessibility best practices that I literally made it the second episode of this podcast. But I taught digital accessibility to my MBA students just a couple of weeks ago, and I noticed some common misconceptions around the concept itself and why it's important. I also noticed that most of my students cared less about building an in...

I’m going to go on a bit of a rant today, but I promise if you listen all the way to the end, you’re going to learn the number one way to improve your sales and repeat customers. Literally, the number one thing that has kept my clients coming back to me, referring me to their friends and contacts, and giving me great reviews. Want to know what that is? Of course you do! Listen to today's epis...

When you’re building a website for a client, there’s a lot of things you need to think about. Their objectives and goals with the website, whether they need to make direct sales or get more calls, how they intend to earn an ROI for their investment – all things that you have to keep in mind before you build. But the cool thing about a website is that it can do more for a business than just be a sa...

There was a younger developer in one of my Facebook groups a few weeks ago. She was expressing frustration that her clients “didn’t understand” that they needed to provide her the copy and tell her exactly what they wanted her to build. She’s just the web developer who’s going to build it for them. Oh sweet honey child, if only that were true. In today's episode, I'm going to break down...

Do you put a lot of care into your own projects for clients, but often find yourself neglecting those same processes when it comes to your own? I'll admit, I'm 100% guilty of that. I'm starting a new project for myself that I'm hoping to have live by the end of the year, and I decided that I needed to follow my standard process. But not only that, improve on it! That got me to...

When someone comes to you to build a website, you're the expert. But what does that mean about more complex issues like privacy compliance laws? Are you in charge of that or is your client? There are multiple privacy laws in effect throughout the world, and most of them all boil down to one thing – being able to opt out of having our personal data and behavior being tracked across the interne...

If you've been building websites for any length of time, chances are you've had a client ask you about running Google and/or Facebook ads. After all, running paid ads through Google, Facebook, and other online platforms can help you accelerate your clients' marketing and leads generation. Unfortunately, paid ads on digital platforms can feel pretty overwhelming and unless you set up...

Were you or a client personally victimized by the Facebook shutdown of 2021? Chances are, the largest social media sites being down for several hours affected your own business and also your clients'. Ads stopped running, posts couldn't be published, and some companies lost their entire web presence because they rely only on Facebook and Instagram to do business. Which is the biggest mis...

The age old debate in marketing has long been how do you switch up your strategies when you're a B2B company or a B2C one. If you're dealing with businesses as your main customers, surely that's so incredibly different than when you're selling directly to a consumer, right? Well, frankly, that's kind of wrong. Cause the thing is, whether you're a B2B brand or a B2C on...

Want to hear a secret? Everyone, at times, finds digital marketing overwhelming. While in theory it sounds great to learn about social media marketing, video, content marketing, email marketing, websites, SEO, and more, what it can do is cause overwhelm. There are so many options to choose from. There are so many opinions, so many methods, so many things changing every. single. second. In today&ap...

When we think of stories, we think of heroes and larger than life moments. We think of fictional characters and people we might want to be like.  But how in the world does that translate to a brand and marketing? That’s actually one of the hardest parts about storytelling when it comes to marketing. You have to take this seemingly inhuman thing – a company – and give it humanity that we can and wa...