Yes, it's basically like a webhosting contract with infinite runtime that can be canceled monthly. Your ROI will be later, but overall you'll get clients that will share their experience with you and push word of mouth about you forward.
But to do this, you'll have to create a basic setup for yourself with cheap hosting, cheap but good looking multi purpose themes for wordpress or likewise static site generators. Basically cutting costs for infrastructure and setup down to 0 for yourself (webhosting reseller accounts on Plesk or cPanel or Directadmin are great for this as you can get them for 10-20$/month or even less).
With Plesk Onyx or Obsidian, you also have full wordpress integration which makes managing those sites even easier.
Just bootstrap everything down to 0 or a little bit above 0. Split initial payments up to yearly costs. Divide yearly costs by client amount and multiply it with 3 (you can also multiply it with lower or higher numbers, but I've always multiplied it by 3 to get the basic monthly costs - 3 because my expectations are 1/3 of the real stuff).
For the contracts, work with prepaid payments and possibly let a lawyer set them up. There are also cheap online services where you can pay a little monthly fee so you can use their contracts including a few customizations that they'll do just for you.
Pay attention to details, eg. make the contracts human readable. The easier to read, the better to discuss with your client.
Few small statements that you can read to a kid and the kid will understand it. If the kid understands it, your clients will understand it too.
Another big topic is: Make your clients love you and love your work. No matter if you are using the same wordpress theme for 100 clients or just for 1, make every client feel special with their own website.
Try to act with your clients like you'd do it with your grandma. Take care of them and they'll be careful with you in return.
Create a few packages (around 3) from which your clients can choose. Include the amount of work that can be done per month in those packages. Start with little work (1-2 hours per month) and work your way up to 10 hours/month with prices around 200-400€ monthly. Try to calculate with 2-5 clients to cover your basic monthly expenses (if you're self employed or freelancing or just doing work beside your daily job).
Include a statement into your contracts that the client can't collect hours if they are not used during the month. For higher packages you can add a statement that the client can move 1-2 hours per month to the next month, but not to the following months. So moving 1 hour from March to April is ok, but moving the same hour again from from April to May is not ok.
So to sum it up or TLDR:
- Take care of your clients as they'd be your grandma (shitty grandmas don't count, get rid of them asap!).
- Create a few pre-defined packages (around 3).
- Include monthly support hours.
- Rent a cheap reseller account (Plesk Onyx/Obsidian preferred if you're working with Wordpress, otherwise cPanel or Directadmin) to host your clients websites.
- Create a cheap and basic setup for yourself (CMS, multi purpose themes, ...).
- Calculate your monthly costs that you need to cover.
- Let a lawyer or online service create a custom contract for you.
- Accept monthly, semi-annual or annual payments. Also think about a non-refundable prepaid system. This will get you money upfront.
- ...
I'm a little exhausted right now, I could write loads more, but I hope this works for the beginning and gives you a little bit of advice. You can always ask here or send me a PM if you need more details.
😊
