How to Sell Your Services Online with WordPress

Do you want to sell services online? If you have a WordPress site, it's easier than you think. Our guide will take your service business online fast!

Approximate read-time: 8.5 minutes

Are you a service provider looking to sell services online with your WordPress site. Great idea! And great news: it's not as difficult as you might think.

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If you are looking for a way of managing a service-based business with WordPress, let's be clear: only the best WordPress plugins will do. In this article, we are going to show you which ones can help your online service business sell more.

The WordPress core plugins are great, but to really sell your online service, you'll need a bit more. The right WordPress plugins can extend the functionality of your site, allowing you to create an online store.

In fact, selling virtual products and services is only the beginning. You might find an opportunity for selling physical products too. Everything we cover in this article can be applied to sell anything you want.

Want to sell digital products and digital downloads in WordPress? You can do that! Besides, if you are an expert service provider, that's a great platform to sell anything from Zoom webinars to advanced guidebooks.

Can you sell your services online?

The growth of the Internet has ensured there is virtually no limit to who can sell services online. Consider that selling your service is not the same thing as performing it!

With that in mind, take a look at the list below for some inspiration:

Design services: graphic design, print design, branding, web design.
Professional services: photography, social media, web analytics.
Personal and local services: dog walking, mobile spa, wedding planning.
Expert services: resume writing, coaching, consulting, tutoring, teaching.
Technical services: printing, programming, tech support, audio services.

Want to sell your services online? Start here.

Before you start selling services online

If you are reading this, we guess you are a service provider who already has a WordPress website. But just in case you are still in the planning stage, here's a rundown of what you need to consider before you start selling your services online with your WordPress site.

1. Think about your market and services

Specifically, you'll want to think about what services you are offering and who you are offering your services to. If you can't answer those questions, having an optimized WordPress site won't help much.

2. Create a WordPress website

If you haven't got a WordPress site up and running yet, then you'll need to do that! There is a lot to consider, but it's not impossible. Follow this guide if you need help getting started.

3. Create your service pages

In order to sell your services on your WordPress site, you'll need to describe them to customers. Think deeply about your goals, products, and services.

It could be that you just need a single landing page. It also could be that you need several detailed pages. Whichever it is, you'll need to figure that out before you can start selling.

4. Get traffic (and customers) to your site

If you build it, they will come... not exactly. Here's the truth: generating traffic is hard work. Nevertheless, this is something you'll need to figure out before you can sell your services.

Here are some quick ideas to ponder:

Start a blog
Add search engine optimization (SEO)
Get on social media
Create partnerships
Start advertising

6 steps to sell your services online with WordPress

Let's get into it. As we said earlier, selling your services online with WordPress is all about the plugins.

One of the best things about WordPress is that it's expandable. With a solid WordPress Forms Plugin like Formidable Forms (that's us), you can easily replace dozens of plugins on your site.

In fact, there are a lot of ways to use forms in WordPress. And when you really think about it, you use web forms every single day. Ever heard of a website called Google? That's an online form that most people find themselves using very often.

There's a lot that a form builder like Formidable can do to upgrade your WordPress site. And no matter how you slice it, it's completely free to get started.

Our Formidable lite plugin is forever free and all of our premium plans come with a 14-day money-back guarantee.

Without further ado, here are 6 steps you can take to start selling your services online with your WordPress site:

Set up eCommerce
Add social proof (reviews and testimonials)
Give customers more ways to contact you
Integrate WordPress with marketing platforms
Take advantage of email marketing
Add new revenue streams

1. Sell your services online with eCommerce

What's the best way to sell services online with eCommerce?

Want to sell your services online? Start with the obvious: eCommerce. Luckily there are a ton of great options out there.

If you are selling services, you could set up an estimate or quote calculator to generate leads and give customers an idea about the price of your services.

If you are selling digital downloads to compliment your services, you'll need some forms with price calculators built-in. Those can be built using a WordPress calculator plugin for example.

You'll need to decide on at least one form of payment collection, like Stripe or Paypal.

Maybe you've heard of WooCommerce? It's a popular eCommerce plugin for WordPress. This could be the perfect all-in-one eCommerce solution for you!

2. Add social proof (reviews and testimonials)

If you are selling services, there's no way around it: you need to add testimonials to your WordPress site. Testimonials are an undeniably powerful form of social proof.

A recent report found that 88% of people are looking for positive reviews before buying. So if you are interested in pleasing the vast majority of customers, testimonials are required.

Depending on the nature of your services (or products), you may consider adding reviews to your WordPress site. If so, it's all about driving up that 5-star rating average!

Learn more: Best WordPress Testimonial Plugins

3. Give customers more ways to contact you

Sure, you've got a phone number and an email address, but these days that's hardly enough. Many customers are too busy to commit to a phone call or request a call back, especially if they are wary of being sold to. If you want to sell your services online, this cannot be ignored.

One way to stand out is to create an appointment booking form. This way, customers can give you only the info that matters. The result is that both parties benefit when the phone call finally happens.

When using WordPress forms, the doors of possibility swing wide open. For starters, you can ask potential clients to provide as much or as little information as needed. This will help bring focus to any future emails.

Using contact forms lets you send confirmation emails straight from your WordPress site. These can be set up so that both the vendor and customers will also receive emails to confirm.

Our own Formidable Forms allows you to send email autoresponders and notifications in WordPress. You can also use third-party apps like Simply Schedule Appointments.

Learn more: How to Create a Simple Contact Form in WordPress

4. Integrate WordPress with marketing platforms

Here's something that customers and vendors will both like: a concise marketing approach. With focused marketing efforts, you'll only attract the customers who want your services.

Think about how you feel when you receive piles of junk mail. Do you even feel anything? A powerful platform like Hubspot can help keep your marketing on point.

The bottom line: no matter what platform you use, you need to integrate it into your WordPress site. Doing so will give you more insight into your customers. The more you know, the more online services you can sell.

5. Sell your services online with email marketing

Unless you've been living under a rock, you must know about email marketing.

Your inbox must be full of emails from hopeful service providers and online stores competing for your attention. One thing you'll notice: some of them stink.

Most email marketing fails to hit the mark. But the fact remains: email is one of the most cost-effective ways to promote your business. Studies have found that email marketing ROI is as high as 122%!

Like we said before, the key is to only target people who need your services. If you are a MailChimp user, you can set things up to use MailChimp tags with WordPress forms directly.

You can even give users the ability to select MailChimp groups via WordPress forms by themselves. That way, they can tell you what kinds of emails they would like to get.

Of course, sending emails is only half the battle. You'll need to find a way to create an email list for your WordPress site as well. Building an email list takes time, but it's worth it.

Learn more: How to Create an Email Strategy for Your WordPress Blog

6. Add new revenue streams

Selling your services online is one thing. It could be where the majority of your revenue comes from.

But when you think about it, your services are sold by leveraging your expertise. What else could you sell based on being an expert?

Are you a presenter? You can make money by selling virtual presentations, also known as webinars. Streamline the process by creating a Zoom webinar signup form for your WordPress site.

Are you an expert in your field? Try building an online community. To do so, you might need a WordPress membership plugin like MemberPress (which we highly recommend).

Although depending on how complex your community set up will be, you might not need a membership plugin. You could use Formidable Forms together with a plugin like Smash Balloon, for example.

Have you written valuable content? Why not make money from that too? You can sell downloads by creating gated content that is protected by a paywall.

Learn more: 9 Ways to Make Money Online

Bonus: Optimize your WordPress site for selling

Optimize WordPress and improve site load times

If you've spent any time tweaking WordPress, you know it can be easy to have too many WordPress plugins. But as useful as they are, too many plugins can cause problems.

For starters, too many plugins can increase load times. One way to solve this is by uninstalling plugins that you don't need. By doing so, you'll reduce the number of HTTP requests on your WordPress site.

Is your site too slow? Maybe you need to find ways to speed up your WordPress site. There's a lot you can do, but a solid extension like WP Rocket can help speed things up with very little effort.

Re-build your WordPress site

Let's face it: people love well-designed websites. Our mothers always taught us to never judge a book by its cover. Unfortunately, most Internet users didn't listen.

One study showed that up to 75% of consumers judge business credibility based on website design. How's your website looking these days?

If it looks a bit rough, don't fret. It's never been easier to spruce things up. You can use a WordPress page builder like Beaver Builder or Elementor.

Or you could start over by getting a brand new theme. We suggest Astra or Divi as mobile-ready and fast WordPress themes.

Upgrade your WordPress hosting

One more way to guarantee more customers: get a better web host. With a better host, you can ensure your site uptime is maximized. It will also mean faster website loading speeds.

There are a lot of choices when it comes to web hosting. We recommend WP Engine (for managed hosting) or Siteground for a cheaper, but still excellent service.

It's time to sell your services online!

There you have it. With all the above tips, you'll be selling your services online with WordPress in no time. Make no mistake, it will take effort. But once you are set up, you can expect to see a lot more customers.

For more WordPress tips, guides, and how-to's, follow us on the Formidable blog. See you there!

How to Sell Your Services Online with WordPress

Can you sell your services online?