It’s Monday again and as usual I’ll be putting my thoughts out there on a specific topic. As you can tell from the title I’m going to attempt to explain why helping others is important in web-development. This will not be one of my usual point or list-based articles. It will be more of me telling a story rather than laying out points.

A few weeks ago, I added a chat box to my website as an experiment. I wasn’t really expecting much from it. As the days went by and since I am almost always online via a computer on a phone I did start receiving calls/chats. Most people where coming to my site reading articles that I wrote involving a framework I use for WordPress website development called Divi. It seemed logical to me since my other content doesn’t really teach you anything. They mostly give insights into web-development. The people that did jump onto the chat I helped to the best of my ability so that they solve the issue they were facing. Most people would say so what right? I honestly believe that helping these people solve their issue may lead to a potential use of my services.

If I were thinking in a purely business manner one could argue that I lost revenue because I gave out free help for no money and that may be true, but I now know that if these people ever need a developer they will at least consider me as a choice since I already solved a small issue they had so now they trust me. The way in which I act when I give these people the help is the same way I would act if they were paying clients. As such the end result was that these people wanted to thank me for my assistance, so I suggested with no obligation to do so, that they leave me a testimonial on my website if they saw fit. These testimonials were genuine and from real people. As such when someone else needs to solve an issue they will see those testimonials as proof of who I am and what I do, which in turn, may lead to me landing more clients. I also like helping in the support forums for the Divi framework where I do sometimes reference my content, but I also say that the solution is most likely also somewhere in their support forum. My whole point is that helping for free once or twice won’t kill you. It might drum up some business in the long-run

If you have any questions, feel free to email me at info@georgenicolaou.me