So, many of you will know that I created Olive out of a need to condense all website maintenance requests from all clients into one place, I was fed up of juggling emails and trying to track the email amongst all others that would tell me exactly what I needed to complete for the client, and so, Olive was born.

Since the launch, I have been using Olive with my own clients, it’s worked extremely well in simplifying project tasks and keeping it all really organised and up to date for both the client and myself. The biggest feedback I’ve had so far is that clients love being able to see the status of their projects without the need to email or call. Which also makes my working day quieter and enables me to get more done, bonus all round!

When I introduced Olive to my clients I knew it wouldn’t be easy to tear them away from their habit of emailing everything in, I sent out a brief email to them all, explaining what Olive was and how it could help them, I also gave them 2 free credits as an incentive to start using Olive - and from that point on, aside from the odd email that has slipped the net - every job has come direct from the client into Olive, which has been great and much more streamlined.

When I sent out the email introducing my clients to Olive I also took the opportunity to get some more maintenance contracts on board, offering unlimited update packages for clients who’s sites need a lot of updating, I had 3 clients come back to me and say they would like to go onto an unlimited maintenance package, you could set this at whatever you wish, say £200 a month, then simply add the client as an “unlimited” client in Olive. For clients who did not want to go onto a rolling maintenance contract, I gave them the option of using Olive on a pay-as-you-go basis, this has worked extremely well too and there is always the ability to up sell your unlimited maintenance package if their updates become more frequent.

So here’s what to do to get more clients generating monthly revenue for you:

1. Send an email to all your clients introducing your new client management system (Olive but hopefully re-branded to your own business by now!)
2. Add all your clients into Olive giving them a bonus incentive of a few credits to get them going - include their user names and passwords in the email and include your olive domain http://example.oliveapp.com.
3. Highlight the benefits of fresh, up to date website content (and SEO services if you provide them).
4. Clearly explain the benefit to them of using Olive to add their projects - ie. 24/7 project status updates, direct contact with you the designer etc.
5. Clearly outline your packages and what services you offer - unlimited monthly maintenance package ie. £200.00 per month or they can buy credits directly as Pay-as-You-Go customers, alternatively if they prefer to be invoiced you can let them go into negative credits and invoice them at the end of the month for what they’ve used.
6. Timestamp your email - this means offer them something that means they need to answer your email shortly , eg. first month half price to the first 5 unlimited maintenance signups before September.
   
7. Take a look at enrichment - these guys make a living out of website maintenance and can give you some ideas as to what you can offer your clients with Olive, there’s no reason why you can’t do the same.
   

The main thing with clients is you need to be clear with what you are offering them, tell them what you might think are obvious findings ie. fresh content = better seo rankings and tell them exactly what benefits it will bring to them, having your own client management system really makes you stand out from the sea of other designers and is an excellent springboard for your clients to start pushing more work your way.

If you would like a copy of the email that I sent to my clients just send me an email to sarah at oliveapp.com and I’ll push it your way.

I’d love to hear how you are currently using Olive with your clients - feel free to post comments below.

Olive was released on Monday and thankfully, there haven’t been too many bits and pieces pop up, we’ve fixed a bug whereby some people couldn’t upload their logo correctly, we also sorted out the login so that some users logos didn’t sit right overlapping the login box. There was also another bug some of our American friends were getting whereby Paypal wasn’t linking in dollars properly, this has now been fixed and our friends across the pond can now enjoy Olive with their clients bug free.

Features that are coming to Olive soon;

• Automated emails that go out to you when you have a new job to be viewed.
• Automated emails that go out when a job is updated by you or the client.
• An email that gets sent to the client with the username and password created by you.

We are also pleased to announce out of the few people that have posted on Get Satisfaction we have replied and resolved the issues they have been having within a matter of hours.

We’d love to hear how you are getting on with Olive and how your clients are finding it. I will be posting up my success story with my own clients over the next few days, Olive was born out of a necessity to use it with my clients too, so I couldn’t wait to get my hands on it and start using it! I’ve currently got 20 clients on mine, the majority using pay as you go and it’s been fabulous, I’ll be posting up a run down of how exactly I got mine on board and how I marketed it next week.

In the meantime, if you find anything we should know about do email me at sarah at oliveapp.com.