And we get it. Talking about yourself, your achievements, your life story, and how awesome you are is awkward.

But guess what?

There’s another way!

Because (wait for it) your About page isn’t really about you!

And if you’ve tried writing your own About page copy, you’ve probably fallen into one of the traps a lot of other website owners fall into. So here we give you the top copy mistakes that personal brands make on your About page (and share some handy tips on how to fix them). Because we’re nice like that.

Let’s get stuck in.

What are the biggest mistakes personal brands make on their about page? 

1. It’s all about you!

The first mistake a lot of business owners make on their About page is focusing on themselves. It’s making a big song and dance about what an amazing professional you are, when you went to university, what you got your degree in, and… and… and…

Boring!

News flash. No one’s interested.

Obviously, you are awesome – super qualified and great at what you do. We know that.

But do you know what people really care about? Making sure you’re the right person to help them. They want to know they’re in the right place to get the product or service that’s going to solve their problem.

And most of the time, whether you went to university or bagged yourself a gazillion certifications that only really mean something if you work in your field and industry, is irrelevant.

What Should You Do Instead? Tell your readers how you can help them

Turn your About page on its head. When it comes to writing your about page, reframe your mindset from ‘about me’ to ‘How I can help you’.

This isn’t what you’re actually going to name your page by the way. You’ll still call it ‘About’, ‘About Me’, or ‘About Us’, but adding this phrase to the top of the page while you’re writing your copy will help you switch your focus onto your readers – your ideal customers or clients.

So think about:

• What are the problems they are experiencing? (And that you solve?)
• What puts you in the ideal position to solve those problems?
• How do you help them?

Ask yourself these types of questions as you write your copy, and you’ll avoid the mistake of making it all about you. Make it about how you can help them. 

2. You write in the third person

“Bob is one of the most acclaimed speakers in the industry. Since 1995, he has travelled all over the world to deliver his signature talks to large crowds.”

Who is writing this for Bob exactly? His biographer?

Let’s be honest. Writing in the third person may have been the done thing 10-20 years ago. It came across as professional and prestigious. Not many personal brands or small businesses had websites back then, and no one wanted to come across as a one-person band. The trend was definitely to try and make your company look bigger and better – more corporate and sought-after.

But, just like in fashion, things changed. And they’ve moved on.

Website users are shrewd and clever. We can see through stuff. And we can tell the difference between something that comes across as genuine and approachable versus something that seems stuffy and detached.

You may not be aware that you’re doing it, but when you write content in the third person, you’re putting distance between yourself and your reader. You’re almost putting yourself on a pedestal, making yourself look unreachable and unattainable. Which is exactly what not to do as a personal brand.

And people don’t tend to relate too well to that.

What Should You Do Instead? Write in the first person!

If it’s just you in your business, and you’re the one people will work with when they hire you, don’t be afraid to say so. Feel free to use ‘I’  – write content for your About page in the first person. We’re giving you full permission here!

You need to learn to embrace your personal brand, not run away from it. That’s why we recommend your website domain can be your personal brand name! And it’s why we recommend you write in first person.

And if you have a team, you can still write using the first person. Just change ‘I’ to ‘we’, ‘me’ to ‘us’, ‘mine’ to ‘ours’, and job done!

3. You don’t have any calls-to-action to your product or services

Much like your Homepage, which acts as the reception area of your website, your About page should direct people to other pages.

For example, on our About page, we list all the problems our services solve, and under each service, we have a ‘Find Out More’ button that takes people to the relevant service pages. This is where they can read more about each of the individual services we offer and make an informed decision as to whether they’re ready to work with us.

We also invite people to get in touch with us via our ‘Let’s Chat!’ button, which takes our readers to our Contact page.

But if you don’t have any calls-to-action where you let your prospective customers and clients know what you’d like them to do next, your About page may become a dead end.

So what should you do instead?

What Should You Do Instead? Direct people to other areas of your website

Use your About page efficiently by directing your audience to the relevant pages on your website where they can find more information about working with you. Add links to your Product or Service pages, your Contact page, and more of your content, if relevant.

4. You copy your competitors

Another mistake we see people make all the time is to sound exactly the same as their competitors. We see this a lot in the web design world, but it happens in all fields and industries.

Sure, all coaches want to help their clients ‘thrive’ and everyone is ‘result-driven’. But is this really you? Or are you just using terms and phrases that everyone else in your industry uses?

If your website copy reads exactly the same as everyone else’s, how can your ideal clients make a decision as to who they should work with? How do they know you’re different and better for them than any of your competitors?

They don’t!

So what should you do instead?

What Should You Do Instead? Focus on your USP

Instead of trying to fall in line and use overused words and phrases that other professionals in your industry use, be original. Be you! You are a personal brand, after all, and what makes you unique is you.

Ask yourself these questions:

• What’s your USP? What makes you unique and special? Is it your method? Your business set up? Your background and experience? Or maybe your qualifications?
• Why should people do business with you?
• Why should they pick you over someone else?

That is what you want to talk about on your About page, so don’t worry about the latest buzzwords or the overused business jargon that everyone else is using. Being like everyone else won’t do you any favours – we can promise you that!

5. You have zero personality

When people come to check out your website, they want to get an idea of what it’s like to work with you. Are you serious and corporate? Informal and quirky? Straight-talking but hilariously funny?

Whoever you are (and whatever your brand), it’s important that your website copy reflect your personality. The last thing you want is for people to get you on the phone or hire you for their first consultation and find out you’re nowhere near how you come across on your website.

Surprises like that never tend to work out well. After all, people check out your About page to figure out if you’re the right person to work with. And your job is to help them make that decision by the way you come across on the page.

How will you do that?

What Should You Do Instead? Nail your tone of voice

Your copy should help your target audience connect with you. You want to build trust and differentiate yourself from your competitors.

If you want to learn more about how to show your personality on your website, check out our blog post: How to Nail your Tone of Voice.

6. You don’t have any pictures of you!

Another mistake we see a lot of business owners make is to shy away from having any pictures of themselves on their website, and especially on their About page.

Remember – your About page is the place where your ideal customers or clients come to work out if you’re the right person for the job.

How can they choose you if they can’t even see you?

You see, words and images are a match made in heaven! The trick is to make the copy about your reader but the imagery about you. This is so people can see and sense who you are and who they’re thinking about hiring. 

Using stock photos or no images at all is tempting, but it means missing out on the opportunity to build that know, like, and trust factor that’s so important when people are thinking of buying from you.

What Should You Do Instead? Have amazing personal brand pictures of you on your About page

If it’s just you in your business, by all means, show us your face! You can have photos of yourself ‘in action’ while working with a client, speaking from a stage, teaching from a classroom, signing your book – whatever applies. Just make sure people can see you!

And if you have a team, share their lovely faces too! We feel so strongly about this that we even wrote a piece called, Show Us Your Face! And if you’re thinking of hiring a photographer to take some professional pics of you, then check out our blog post, Lessons We Learned From Our Business Photoshoot.

7. You don’t capture any leads

Something a lot of personal brands seem to forget is that your website is the ideal place to capture people’s email addresses, so you can build and nurture relationships with your audience by offering them value, and, ultimately close more sales.

Website traffic is great, but a lot of people won’t be ready to buy after visiting your website just once or twice. They’ll want to read more, find out more about you, and get to know you a little better before they make the decision to go ahead and make a purchase.

You can certainly give them more information through your copy and the awesome content you publish on your blog. But your email list is the place where you can show off your knowledge and expertise and offer your prospective customers or clients loads of value. 

Except… you won’t be able to get your visitors from your website and onto your email list if you don’t give them an incentive to pop in their email address.

What Should You Do Instead? Add a sign-up form to your About page

Your About page is the ideal place for you to add a sign-up form, so make sure you create a lead magnet and ask your readers for an email address. What can you offer your audience that will encourage them to join your email list? What value can you give them? Is there a quick problem you can solve for them? 

Once you’re clear on what you’re going to offer, add a sign-up form where they can easily pop in their email address, and then you can deepen and nurture that relationship via your email list. If you’re interested in using your website to build your email list, check out our blog post on how to create a lead generating website. 

8. You call your About page ‘Your journey’ (or something equally rubbish)

We see this all the time, and it’s probably a side-effect of wanting to be original and show your personality (which we get).

But calling your About page something else – like ‘Our journey’, ‘Our story’, ‘Experience’, or ‘Thoughts’ (or anything else) is never a good idea.

Why? Because people are used to the About page being called ‘About’. It’s an easy, recognisable term. It’s what the page is called.

Your readers head over to your About page when they’re trying to make a decision about working with you. The last thing you want is for them to skip over the page or miss it completely just because you called it something else! 

If they can’t find your About page, they might click the back button and be gone. And that’s not what you want!

So what can you do instead?

What Should You Do Instead? Call your About page by its name

This is a simple one. Call your About page ‘About’, ‘About Me’, or ‘About Us’. You don’t need to be any more creative than this – not with your page title. It’s what your readers expect to see on your website and where they head to in order to find out more about you. Make this easy and straightforward for your audience. 

Want to Learn More About How to Create a High-Converting About Page?

And if you want more tips on how to write an awesome About page for your website, head over to our blog post, How To Write Your Website About Page.

Or download our checklist on how to create an about page for your personal brand…

Martin & Lyndsay

The post The Biggest Copy Mistakes Personal Brands Make on Their About Page appeared first on Content Marketing & SEO Agency | Get More Sales From Your Website.

The dreaded acronym.

The ‘dark art’ that has the power to help you rank high on Google but that nearly every website owner we know seems to dread.

Search Engine Optimisation doesn’t need to be complicated. When broken down into actionable tips and steps and done right, it’s a brilliant strategy to help your ideal customers or clients find you online.

And yet, we see a lot of businesses dip their toes into the murky SEO waters and get things a bit wrong. So here are the 9 biggest SEO mistakes we see people make and how to fix them to make sure you get the results you want.

1. Not doing any keyword research

The first mistake you might not even know you’re making is not doing any keyword research.

That’s right, keyword research is a thing. And it’s definitely a step you don’t want to miss out on.

And if you have, no need to beat yourself up because you’re most definitely not alone. Most business owners do exactly the same because they assume they know exactly what people are searching for online.

And you know what they say about assumptions, don’t you?

For example, if you sell a funky pair of glasses that block blue light to help people fall asleep easier and faster at night, you might be tempted to create a lot of content around ‘blue light exposure’ or ‘blue light glasses’. And that’s great for those customers who already know about your product and its benefits.

But do you know what could also lead to your website? The search term ‘how to sleep better at night’. Because this is something people actually search for. And if you haven’t used it in your website content, you may be missing out on opportunities to be found, to receive an enquiry in your inbox or over the phone, and to make a sale!

And that’s not cool, right?

Plus, if you don’t do your keyword research, you’ll also miss out on loads of extra ideas for content.

So what should you do instead?

Learn how to do some basic keyword research

Keyword research, much like SEO in general, doesn’t need to be complicated. You can keep it super simple and use free tools to start with.

Remember – all you’re trying to do is to work out what your ideal clients actually search for when they go on Google. And once you know what those phrases are, you can create content that answers their questions.

That turns your website into something that’s relevant, useful, and interesting for your readers, but it also gives them more chances of finding your business online.

So how do you go about doing keyword research?

Here are a few tools that can help you:

• Google. Have you ever paid attention to the ‘People also ask’ and ‘Related searches’ sections on the Google results pages? They’re full of interesting terms that real people type or speak into the search engines.
• Keywords Everywhere is a free Chrome extension that gives you trend data and search volumes for the keywords you input. It helps you find out if a search term is popular. And if it isn’t, the tool gives you related keywords and ‘People also search for’ suggestions you can use instead.
• Answer the public gives you visual diagrams full of real questions that people ask when searching for a particular term. It’s really cool – you should try it out if you haven’t already!
• KWFinder is a paid-for tool that tells you exactly how many times a particular keyword is searched for every month. If your keyword is very competitive (i.e. a lot of content already exists and ranks well for that keyword) your chances of ranking aren’t the greatest. So the trick is to find keywords that lots of people search for but that not many other content creators are already using.

Do give keyword research a go. It will definitely change the way you create content!

2. Focusing on one keyword

Another mistake we see a lot of website owners make is to use the same keyword across various pages or pieces of content on your website. 

Say, for example, that you optimised your Homepage for ‘window repairs Liverpool’. You probably went for that keyword because it’s specific to what you do and it includes your location. Perfect.

But you definitely don’t want to use the exact same keyword for your About page, all your Service pages, and 5 of your blog posts. Right?

Unfortunately, putting all your eggs in one basket and trying to rank for that one keyword won’t solve all your problems. Because chances are your competitors will also try and rank for that exact keyword, so Google will have to look at other factors when deciding which results to display first.

Plus, what happens if that keyword isn’t specific enough? For example, while ‘window repairs Liverpool’ is a term people search for, if someone’s looking to have their car window fixed, your website might not be the right fit for them.

People search for specific solutions to their problems. So, depending on what types of services you offer, if you’re not optimising any of your content for ‘double glazing window repairs’ or ‘door window repairs’, for example, you might be missing out on opportunities.

So what should you do instead?

Optimise your content for a variety of relevant keywords

Mix things up and vary your keywords. If you’ve done your keyword research (see how it’s paying off already?), you’ll now have a range of keywords your ideal customers or clients search for, which means you don’t have to use the same one over and over.

If you’ve already used ‘window repairs Liverpool’, you could go with:

• UPVC window repairs Liverpool.
• Sash window repairs Liverpool near me.
• Window lock repairs Liverpool area.

D’you see where we’re going with this?

These are all real phrases people search into Google, and if they’re relevant to your business, they make great choices for your Service pages or your blog content.

By adding more related and relevant keywords into the mix, you give yourself more chances of being found for the products or services you offer.

3. Not optimising your content  

Do you optimise each piece of content you publish on your website? And by that, we mean all your web pages and all your blog posts?

If you don’t, we’ve got bad news for you.

You’re missing out!

Unfortunately, producing a huge amount of content isn’t enough. It’s a great idea and practice for sure. But you need to follow it through by optimising it all.

Why?

Because Google ranks content by using bots and algorithms, and it won’t know what your content is about unless you give it a little helping hand.

And if Google can’t find your website because you haven’t optimised your content, how do you expect your ideal customers or clients to find your business?

So what should you do instead?

Make sure your content is optimised for search

Let’s be honest. Optimisation will add some time to your content creation efforts (we’d say 20-30 minutes per piece of content).

But it’s worth doing. Because it makes the difference between your parents and best friend being the only ones reading your blog (don’t worry, we’ve all been there!) and your ideal customers finding your business on Google.

So once you’ve strategically picked your keywords (again, can you see why keyword research is so important!) include them in the following:

• Page or blog title.
• Meta description.
• URL for the page or blog post.
• Sub-headings.
• Alt-text for the images you added to that piece of content.

This gives Google better chances of understanding exactly what your content is all about and returning it to the search engine result pages. And if you want to know exactly how to do this, check out our blog post – how to optimise your blog posts for search engines.

4. Failing to niche down your content

Another mistake we see a lot of website owners make is to fall into the trap of being too generic. This is the opposite of mistake number 2, where we talked about trying to rank for just one keyword. 

As it turns out, trying to rank for too many keywords (especially if they span over a range of loosely-related topics) isn’t great either.

If you do that, you may not only confuse your audience but also dilute your main product or service. People like to work with specialists and experts. They like to know there’s one or a few core things you sell and are really really good at. 

If you’re a financial advisor specialising in mortgages, you might confuse your audience if you start comparing credit cards or giving generic advice on money-saving.

So what should you do instead?

Choose a niche or topic and go in-depth with it

Instead of focusing on too many topics, choose one topic or a few key ones that relate to your business and go to town on them.

Say, for example, that you want to be known as the local go-to person who helps people with their mortgage. ‘Help with mortgage’ is a broad topic. But when you start breaking it all down and looking at the questions your ideal clients ask, there is a lot of content you could create on this topic.

For instance:

• How to get help with mortgage payments if you’re temporarily unemployed.
• Charities that offer help with mortgage payments.
• Best resources to help with your mortgage when you’ve been made redundant.

And so on.

Once you’ve picked your topic, aim to make it the best resource on the internet for your niche, and you really can’t go wrong.

5. Not having enough website copy

Long-winded web pages full of lines and lines of text are hard and boring to read, right?

True.

But the opposite is also true.

If your core web pages (your Homepage, your About page, and Product or Service pages) don’t have enough content, that could also set you back. Having too little content means your website doesn’t provide a great deal of information to your audience. So will they feel confident enough to get in touch with an enquiry?

Also, not having enough web copy might impact your SEO efforts. Remember when we said that Google doesn’t know what your content is about unless you tell it?

Your website should act as a salesperson for your business – it’s not just the equivalent of a pretty window or a digital business card with hardly any details on it!

So what should you do instead?

Include plenty of relevant information in your content

Your website content should provide value. Its job is to answer your customers’ key questions and help them decide whether they’re ready to go ahead and buy from you.

So, instead of shying away from content, include enough information in the core pages of your website to give your readers what they’re looking for.

Pricing, for example, is one of the main questions your readers might have when browsing your website. Knowing that your product or service is within their budget (or how much it stretches it by) will help them make a decision as to whether get in touch with you or not.

We see a lot of business owners who don’t include their prices. And often that’s because they offer bespoke services and prices vary. But you could always give your ideal clients a ball-park figure. After all, someone who has no idea of how much working with you will cost may be too embarrassed to pick up the phone and ask. And you might lose them as prospective clients.

So don’t be that business! Make sure you always add enough information to your website in order for your ideal clients to make a decision. (And don’t forget to optimise those pages for SEO!) If you’re a service-based business, you can check out exactly what to put on your service page here.

6. Having a slow website 

Here’s one mistake that a lot of people don’t even know they’re making – having a slow website and not doing anything about it.

Why is a slow website even a problem?

Because us internet users expect websites to load quickly. Let’s be honest – we have little patience, and we don’t like waiting around.

But it’s not just that. It’s also a trust issue. If a website takes ages to load, we start thinking there must be something wrong with it or that it must be somehow ‘dodgy’.

And unless you’re a die-hard fan of that brand, what will you do?

Press the back button and go somewhere else.

In other words, if your website is too slow, it may be costing you clients. And to add insult to injury, Google knows if your website isn’t performing too well, which means you have fewer chances of ranking well in the search engine result pages.

So what should you do instead?

Check and improve your page load speed

You can easily check your website’s page load speed with a free tool called GTmetrix.

If you find your website is a little on the slow side, check your plugins. Are there any you no longer need or use? Make sure you deactivate and remove any plugins that aren’t necessary, as having too many will slow your website right down.

Also, don’t forget to compress and optimise all your images by using a tool like TinyPNG.

If you want to find out more about why compressing images is important for SEO, head over to our blog post SEO for Beginners: The Ultimate Guide.

7. Only focusing on on-page-SEO

Have you ever come across the phrases ‘on-page SEO’ or ‘on-site SEO’?

It’s not complicated, promise!

Chances are if you’ve been following our simple SEO advice, you’ve already been doing it. On-page SEO is about optimising your web pages and blog posts to help your website rank higher in search engine results. You do this by including the keyword you want to be found for in your headlines, meta descriptions, URLs, etc., as we already covered under mistake number 3 of this article.

On-page SEO is brilliant!

But there’s another side to the coin, and it’s called ‘off-page SEO’. Following this practice means you strategically spend time and effort to ensure that other reputable websites in your industry and niche link back to your content. Off-page SEO can be extremely helpful and boost your rankings like nothing else.

Because the truth is, there’s only so much you can do on your website alone. Google needs signals from other websites too.

So what should you do instead?

Focus on off-page SEO too

If you want your website to be found online, you need a strategy for ‘off-page SEO’ or ‘off-site SEO’ too.

To encourage other websites to link back to your own website, create helpful content like blog articles, videos, PDFs, reviews, or case studies that others will want to share on social media or link to from their own content.

Often, this isn’t something that ‘just happens’. You’d be very lucky if it does! Having an off-page SEO strategy means you might need to reach out to customers or clients, suppliers or other businesses you work with, and even online authorities or influencers whose audiences could benefit from consuming your content.

Guest posting is another great off-page SEO strategy. Have you got some wisdom to share that a fellow website owner would want to publish on their website? Perhaps you could be a guest on a podcast show? Or have you ever thought about pitching to an online magazine or publication?

There are lots of ways for other websites to link back to yours, which is why we recommend you include off-site SEO in your marketing strategy and come up with a plan to make it happen.

8. Not monitoring your analytics

Another mistake we see website owners make all the time is not monitoring their analytics. If you don’t do this, it means you don’t have a clear idea of what your audience is interested in.

And when you don’t know what content performs well on your website, you might end up creating more of the content that no one wants to read (sorry!). And surely you don’t want to spend time or money sharing something that your clients aren’t interested in, right? That’s a total waste!

Plus, the flip side is also true. If you don’t know what type of content on your website attracts your readers, you might actually miss opportunities to create more of that.

In short, not checking your analytics can really hinder your content strategy. Because unless you know what needs improving, you’ll never be able to do things differently.

So what should you do instead?

Check your analytics and act on the information

All the data you need is right there at your fingertips! All you have to do is check it instead of taking a stab in the dark when it comes to your content creation efforts.

By installing Google Analytics or the Google Search Console on your website you can get in the habit of analysing your website traffic. Check who visits your website, how they found you, what content they tend to consume the most, and how they behave when they’re on your site.

Once you have all this information, you can make better decisions around what content to create next and give yourself better chances of ranking higher in the search engine result pages.

9. Putting your head in the sand 

Completely ignoring SEO is easily done. We know a lot of business owners who’d rather do just that. Because SEO seems extremely technical and complicated to understand or too expensive to outsource. (But it really isn’t!)

You may have also heard on the grapevine (from social media, colleagues, or business associates, etc.) that SEO is dead.

It isn’t.

SEO practices have definitely changed over the last decade. Tactics that used to work 10-15 years ago don’t work anymore. And that’s simply because there’s so much more competition online and because Google keeps us online business owners on our toes by continuously refining and improving its algorithms.

SEO is definitely not dead. In fact, it’s vital for your business.

If you want to be found online, you need to stop putting your head in the sand and pay SEO the attention it deserves. Because ignoring SEO would be the equivalent of setting up a physical shop in the middle of nowhere. How do you expect your ideal customers to find your business if you don’t tell them you’re there?

So what should you do instead?

Buy our SEO Starter Pack 

Our SEO Starter Pack includes a video library that walks you through what you need to know about SEO step-by-step, with planners, checklists, and loads of other bonuses.

So here’s what you can expect when you buy the SEO Starter Pack:

• It includes everything you need to know about getting started with SEO in one place. No more scouring the internet and getting confused by conflicting information!
• It contains easy-to-follow, short lessons aimed at non-techies. We won’t bore you death with one long lesson or bamboozle you with technical jargon. That’s just not us at all!
• The pack teaches you the key parts of SEO – the ones with the biggest impact on your business to help you drive more traffic to your website.

The SEO Starter Pack is now available for $97.00+VAT. You can order it here and access everything right away. So what are you waiting for? Are you ready to use SEO to make a difference in your business?

Martin & Lyndsay

The post The Biggest SEO Mistakes You’re Making (And What to Do Instead)  appeared first on Content Marketing & SEO Agency | Get More Sales From Your Website.

Does the term ‘Search Engine Optimisation‘ make you break out in a sweat?

Well, we’ve got good news for you.

We can help.

SEO doesn’t need to be scary or confusing. When broken down into meaningful chunks of information and explained in plain English, SEO can be easy and accessible.

That’s how we like to see it anyway. This is why we’ve created this SEO Tips for Beginners Guide to help you optimise your own website for search.

So if you’re just getting started with SEO and don’t have loads of technical knowledge, this beginners’ guide to SEO is perfect for you. We’ve kept things simple and avoided including over-technical points that might just overwhelm you and make you want to scream. We’re nice like that.

The article is broken down into easy-to-consume sections to help you get going with optimising your website. We recommend you focus on each aspect at a time before moving on to the next, and we promise it’ll be easy enough. And worth it!

We’ve split this blog post into a few handy sections for you:

1. Tracking your website traffic.
2. Basic keyword research.
3. Main SEO considerations for your website
4. Technical SEO (don’t worry – technical doesn’t mean complicated! Not in our book anyway!)
5. Website pages.
6. Blog articles.
7. Website images.

So, are you ready to go?

1. Tracking your website traffic

How do you know if you’re doing well if you have no idea where you are right now?

Before you get going with your website SEO, you need to figure out what your starting point is. Let’s call this tracking your website traffic. And all it is is a way of monitoring the number of visitors to your website.

Why does it matter?

Because it helps you understand your existing and prospective customers and how they interact with your website. For example, what pages or blog posts are the most read on your website? Where do your visitors spend most of their time when on your website?

This is invaluable information for you because it tells you what works and what doesn’t. And once you know this, you can do more of what serves you well and tweak and change what doesn’t.

So, before you start your SEO efforts, track your traffic. Create some sort of starting point view or baseline that you can refer back to once you’ve gone through each of the sections in this beginners’ guide to SEO. By measuring your traffic before you get started and then after implementing the strategies in this blog post, you’ll be able to measure how effective your efforts have been.

So how do you measure your website traffic?

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a fantastic free web analytics tool that helps you analyse your website traffic. It lets you see who visits your website, how they found you, what content they tend to consume the most, and how they behave when they’re on your site.

Pretty handy, right?

Without getting too technical, let’s just say that the tool works by placing several lines of tracking code into your website. But there’s some good news here.

You don’t need to worry about any of that!

Once you create an account and link it to your website, you’ll be able to access easy-to-read reports that will give you great insight into how your users interact with your website.

If you want to find out more about the tool, Google has a great free course on how to get started with Google Analytics.

Google Search Console

Another similar tool is Google Search Console. It’s a free service that gives you access to information about your website performance and your users.

Compared to Google Analytics, Google Search Console gives you more internal information. For example, things like who is linking to your website, or which queries your website is appearing in the search results for. It also flags any problems with your website that might be holding you back from ranking better.

Signing up is free and easy, and you can read more information on getting started with the Google Search Console here.

Google page speed

Google page speed is another great tool to help you check how quickly your website loads, or your website load time.

This is an important metric when it comes to SEO – the quicker your website loads, the better. The recommendation is a page load time of under 2 seconds, but the faster the better.

Why does it matter?

Because as you know by being one yourself, internet users have little patience. And if a page takes around 3 or more seconds to load, chances are your visitors may start doubting the trustworthiness of your website.

And when they lose trust, they click the back button and go looking for something else.

You can easily test your page speed with a free tool called GTmetrix. It gives you a performance report for your website and highlights any issues you might have, so you know what to look into and improve.

If you want to know more about checking your rankings, you can always check out our blog post – 5 ways to check your search rankings. 

So now that you have a baseline and know exactly where you stand, it’s time to pull your sleeves up and get your teeth into the first meaty bit of SEO for beginners – keyword research.

2. Basic keyword research

Okay, we’ll admit this doesn’t sound very exciting. But actually, it’s not as bad as you think!

So what is keyword research, and why does it matter?

Keyword research is the process by which you look for terms and phrases that people search for on the internet. This exercise is an important step for SEO because once you have those terms and phrases at hand, you can strategically include them in your content.

In other words, this exercise allows you to create content around topics that interest your ideal clients. If you sell holiday packages to Iceland, you wouldn’t dream of writing about ‘how to fill in your tax return’, would you?

Hopefully not. Because that wouldn’t help your business at all.

But keyword research would tell you that people actually look for terms such as:

• Iceland holidays 2021.
• Iceland holidays Northern lights.
• Cheap holidays to Iceland.
• Best Iceland package deals.

You get the gist.

Once you know exactly what terms and phrases people search for, you can produce content around these topics and increase your chances of ranking higher in the search engine results.

Notice that although this process is called keyword research, I talked about terms and phrases. This is because when we run a search on Google we don’t just look for the word ‘Iceland’. That wouldn’t give us what we want at all! The term is too broad and generic, and the results would be useless.

Instead, we type or ask actual questions. These chunks of words are known as longtail keywords, and they help us narrow down our search results.

So how can you use this to your advantage? Where do you find the longtail keywords to include in your website content?

Here are a few tools that might come in handy…

Keywords Everywhere

Keywords Everywhere is a free Chrome extension that helps you with keyword research, and it’s a great tool to start with. Once you install it, it shows you:

• Trend data and search volumes for that keyword.
• Related keywords to the search term you selected.
• ‘People also search for’ suggestions.

A paid-for version is also available if you want more information on monthly searches and competitor analysis, for example. But if you’re just getting started with SEO and want to keep things simple, the free version will do the trick for you.

Answer the public

Answer the public is another awesome keyword tool that helps you visualise search questions through an image called search cloud. Simply enter your topic, and the tool produces a visual diagram full of real questions that people have asked when searching for that term.

Once you decide on a topic for a blog post, for example, you can use the information from the search cloud to decide what to cover in each individual sub-sections. It’s free, easy to use, and a fantastic way to keep things super simple when it comes to SEO. Answer the public is free with an option to upgrade for businesses who need to run multiple keyword searches per month.

KWFinder

KWFinder is a paid-for tool that allows you to find the best longtail keywords to include in your content.

You can even see how competitive and profitable keywords are. What you want is to find keywords that lots of people search for but that not many other content creators are already using.

More competition means fewer chances for you to be found online. But if you do your homework and pick keywords that aren’t overused but still searched for on a regular basis, then you’re winning.

KWFinder offers affordable plans depending on the number of keyword searches per month you need and also has a FREE 10-day trial.

3. Optimising your website for SEO

Okay, so you’ve got your keywords. Now how do you go about optimising your website? Whether you’re planning or re-designing your website, here are 3 activities I’d recommend:

• Plan your website structure.
• Focus on niche topics.
• Limit the content on your Homepage.

So what does it all mean?

Plan your site structure

Have you thought about the way you plan to organise information on your website? For example, what will your users see from the main menu? Will you have sub-pages dropping down from under your main pages?

Making sure that your overall site structure is user-friendly and easy to navigate is important.

Why?

First of all, it tells your readers how and where to find information. But it also tells Google where your most important content is. Because Google isn’t a person – it crawls websites through bots, following links between various pieces of content. This is how it determines the relationship between different elements of your website.

So the way you structure your content (in pages and blog posts) can influence which content will rank highest in the search engines. If you don’t plan this through, your visitors might struggle to find what they’re looking for and leave your website too soon for your liking. This indirectly tells Google that your website isn’t user-friendly, and you don’t want that!

I recommend you take some time to plan it all out. And if you need more information on how to organise your site structure, check out our article: The Ultimate Guide to a Perfect Website.

Focus on niche topics

And no, this doesn’t mean you have to write about obscure topics no one knows anything about! Phew!

It’s quite the opposite, actually.

You want to write content that people search for.

So when researching keywords and planning content for your web pages or blog posts, narrow your topics down. Instead of being broad and generic, be specific and niche.

So in the example of our Iceland holiday provider, if you cater for family holidays, you might want to create content around:

• ‘Best family hotels in Iceland’.
• ‘How to make the most of Iceland with kids’.
• ‘Self-drive itineraries for Iceland with kids’.

People want specific answers to specific questions. And when you create specific content, you’re helping your ideal clients understand exactly what you do and how you help. This puts you in a better position to capture all those specific searches with longtail keywords.

Limit content on your Homepage

Writing content for your Homepage is a big job. And one that a lot of website owners get a bit wrong.

Why?

Because they tend to cram way too much information onto it. And that’s not what your Homepage needs to do for you.

Your Homepage isn’t the place to tell your visitors everything there is to know about you and your products or services.

Instead, think of it as the reception area of your website. Its job is to direct users where they need to go, quickly and efficiently. So don’t overload it. And don’t overwhelm your visitors with content.

You should then have dedicated pages set up for your products and services. And if you’re a service-based business – a page for each service where you go into detail.

If you want more tips on what to include in your Homepage, head over to our blog post: What You Should Put on Your Homepage to Increase Conversion.

4. Technical SEO tips for optimising your website

Although I promised this beginners’ guide to SEO didn’t need to be technical or complicated, there are a few key technical considerations that impact SEO.

And the ones I’d like to talk you through are:

• Improve your page speed.
• Ensure your website is responsive.
• Install an SSL certificate.

Improve your page speed

Did you know that your page speed affects your SEO efforts too?

But first thing first, what even is that?

Page speed is a measurement of how fast the content on your website takes to load. So when someone lands on your website, how long does it take for the information to appear on their screen?

You probably guessed that you want that number to be as small as possible. If the page takes too long to load, your visitors might hit the back button and leave. You don’t want that.

Plus, if your website is slow, you have less chance of ranking well in the search results.

So what can you do to improve your page speed?

• Only use plugins that are absolutely necessary. Too many plugins will slow your website down.
• Compress and optimise your images (more on that later).
• Keep redirects to a minimum. Every time you redirect your users to another page, you add to the overall waiting time.

Ensure your website is responsive

Does your website look good on mobile and tablet?

With more and more users accessing content on their smartphones or tablets, your website needs to look good no matter what device your visitors are using. And that’s exactly what a responsive website is. One where the layout is easy for your visitors to read and navigate.

This gives your readers a better user experience, and when someone finds your website easy and enjoyable to be on, naturally, they’ll want to spend more time on it. And without getting into too many details, that’s a great indicator for Google too.

So if you want to boost your chances of ranking well in the search results, think about design and user experience too.

Install an SSL certificate

Before you run for the hills at the use of yet another acronym, let us explain.

SSL stands for Secure Sockets Layer. But you don’t need to get bogged down into all that.

All you need to know is that SSL protects your website data. It turns your website into a secure environment – for you and for your prospective clients. Because without one, there’s a risk your visitors’ personal data might get stolen. Plus, an SSL certificate protects your website too – from phishing scams, data breaches, etc.

And what’s that got to do with SEO, I hear you ask?

Well, Google and other search engines tend to favour websites that they perceive as secure. And without an SSL certificate, your website will be flagged as ‘non-secure’.

If you’re not sure whether you have an SSL certificate or not, finding out is super easy. Simply check whether your website URL shows as http (no SSL) or https (that means you’ve got SSL!).

To get an SSL certificate for your website (in case you don’t have one) simply contact your host. Most reputable WordPress hosting companies offer one for free and can show you what to do to turn yours on.

5. Your website pages

So now that we’ve looked at some of the work you need to do around the structure and layout of your website, it’s time to look at your website pages.

By these I mean, your About page, your Service or Product pages, your Contact Us page, etc. So what kind of things do you need to pay attention to when it comes to optimising your website pages for search?

Title tags

A title tag (or page title or HTML title) specifies the title of your website page.

But where does that go?

When you do a search on Google, the title tag is the clickable headline that tells you what the page is all about. They help us make that initial decision as to whether we want to click on a link or not.

Unfortunately, I see a lot of business owners who forget to attach meaningful title tags for their web pages.

Please don’t be one of them!

Use the title tag to say what the page is all about and include the keywords you found during your research. Make them relevant to your niche and business, and, if applicable, to your location.

For example, if you’re an accountant in Manchester, the title tag for one of your Service pages might read, ‘Tax return for small business owners in Manchester’. Or something along those lines. It’s niche and specific. And says what it does on the tin.

Meta descriptions

The meta description is the text that displays underneath the clickable headline when you get results through Google.

Why does it matter?

Now, think about your own behaviour as a user. When you do a search, you quickly scan through the results, and if something looks interesting and relevant, you might go and read the 3-4 lines of text that sit underneath. Just to make sure you want to click on that.

That’s the meta description.

Just like with title tags, a lot of website owners forget to fill that in. So don’t make that mistake.

Use those 3-4 lines of text to tell the reader exactly what the page is about. You want to entice them to read.

If you want more detail, check out our blog post on how to optimise your blog posts.

Headings

Hopefully, your web pages aren’t just a great wall of text, right?

They have lovely sections and sub-sections that guide your readers through the content of the page.

Great.

Those sections have headings. And you probably know the drill by now – make sure you pick meaningful headings.

The headings on your pages tell your readers what each section is all about. But they help with SEO too, so make sure you include your keywords in there.

Just a quick word of advice. When you do include keywords in your headings, try and make them look organic and natural. Don’t force it. If a keyword doesn’t fit that section, it doesn’t. The last thing you want is for your page content to read a bit odd and put your prospective clients off.

For more information on how to create an awesome service page for your website, head over to our article, The 9 Essentials of a High-converting Service page.

6. Your blog articles

Everything we talked about in the context of web pages and including relevant keywords applies to blog posts too.

So, for example, if you want to optimise a blog post for ‘portrait photographer in greater Manchester’, include that long-tail keyword in:

• The blog title.
• The Alt Text of your images (more on that later).
• Your sub-headings.
• The main text of your blog article.

But when it comes to blog posts, a few other things are worth thinking about, including:

• Word count.
• Internal links.
• Sub-headings.

Word count

Now, this might not sound like great news. But it’s the truth, so here it goes.

Short 200-word articles don’t cut it with Google anymore.

This used to be the case 10-15 years ago, but not anymore.

Why?

Because Google’s job is to serve its users. When you do a search on Google, you want to see great and relevant content. You don’t want to sift through links and links just to find that none of them answer your questions. Because that’s frustrating, right?

But longer and more in-depth pieces (just like this one) probably have the answers you’re looking for.

And let’s face it – competition on the internet is huge. Lots of companies and business owners just like you produce loads of content on a daily basis. And if you want your business and your content to stand out, in-depth and detailed pieces of content are the way to do it.

HubSpot did some research around this too. Finding that 50 of their most-read blog posts in 2019…yielded an average word count of 2,330. 

So when writing blog articles, we recommend at least 1,200 words or more. This might sound hard to do, especially if you’re not too keen on writing.

So pick topics you know about and that your prospective customers want to read about. Show off your knowledge and expertise, and you’ll start to build trust with your readers while encouraging them to spend more time on your website. This tells Google that your website is worth visiting and gives you better chances of ranking higher in the search results.

If you need some inspiration around what content to create, head over to our article, How to Plan 50 Pieces of Content in 30 Minutes.

Internal links

Internal links are links that you include in your own blog post that send your users to other pages or articles on your own website.

Why do they matter?

Because they tell both Google and your readers how your content links together. Remember that Google isn’t a person! Google reads your content through bots – they don’t see your website the way we do. They read lines and lines of code. And internal links help search engines understand how various bits of information on your website relate to each other.

Plus, internal links are great for user experience. By linking to existing content you’re giving your readers more information. But you’re also inviting them to spend more time on your website. This is called dwell time, and the higher it is, the more Google sees your website as trustworthy and interesting.

So as you write your content, think about ways to organically include links to other relevant pages or articles you created before. You’ll notice that we’ve done this in this article too!

Sub-headings

When writing blog posts (and especially longer pieces), it’s always a good idea to break the information down into sections and paragraphs.

A sub-heading is the bit of text that introduces a new section of your blog post. In WordPress, you can format your sub-headings as Heading 2, Heading 3, Heading 4, etc, depending on how many sections and sub-sections you have.

Each of your sub-headings gives you a chance to include your relevant keywords, which (you guessed!) helps your SEO efforts.

So once again, look at the list of longtail keywords you found while doing your research and include them organically in your sub-headings. Be creative but don’t force it! If you use the same exact keyword in each of your sub-headings, that might look a bit odd to your readers!

For more information on how to write killer blog posts, head over to our article, How to Write a Blog Post that People Will Actually Read.

7. Website images

And last but not least, a few words on images. Your website visitors don’t expect to come to your website and just read text. Imagine how boring that would be! Images play an important part in your website user experience and SEO efforts.

You’ll use a few on your website pages and possibly even more in your blog posts. Because remember – your readers don’t want to see walls and walls of text with no interruptions! Think about their visual experience too by leaving plenty of white space on the page (to let the text ‘breathe’) and by adding relevant pictures.

I always recommend you use plenty of photographs of yourself and your team if you have one. But if you need more images and pictures for your web pages or your blog posts, you can find plenty of free or paid-for stock pics on websites like Pixabay, Unsplash, or Pexels.

Re-sizing your images

Before adding images to your website, you should always re-size them. If your images are too big, they might slow down your website and impact your page speed.

For example, images on this blog post are no bigger than 1200px wide. There’s no reason for them to be huge (like 4000px).

You’ll also need to compress your images so they load quicker. To do that, you can use a free online tool called tinypng. This will help you compress your images without losing any quality.

Optimising your images

Whether you add images to your Homepage, your Service or Product pages, or your blog posts, don’t miss the chance to optimise them. You can do this by accessing the file properties and including your keywords in the image title and the Alt-Text of the image.

The Alt-Text is a bit of copy that’s used to improve the accessibility of your images. You can think of it as a chance to describe to someone who can’t see what’s in the image.

But this bit of text also helps Google bots ‘see’ that image. Because the only way they can do that is through text, it’s important you include your relevant keywords in there too. Doing this gives tells Google that a particular piece of content is relevant for someone searching for that term.

What Now? Grab the SEO Starter Pack!

And there you have it – the Ultimate SEO Tips for Beginners Guide.

We hope you enjoyed our SEO for beginners tips, but if you want to really invest in SEO, then check out our SEO Starter Pack. Perfect for non-techie business owners, it’s a practical, easy-to-understand bundle of resources to help you get higher search rankings and more website traffic.

The SEO Starter Pack includes:

• a video library that walks you through how to do SEO step-by-step,
• a comprehensive SEO checklist for every web page or blog post you create,
• keyword research training,
• an interactive SEO planner,
• and lots of added bonuses too!

Martin & Lyndsay

The post SEO For Beginners: The Ultimate Guide appeared first on Content Marketing & SEO Agency | Get More Sales From Your Website.

The good news is that there are tools you can use to help you grow your business and website The bad news is that researching, reading reviews, and testing out different products can take a long time. And it can hold your business back.

Luckily, we’ve tried everything! And in this post, we share six areas that will help you improve your website and grow your business. And for each area, we give you a list of tried and tested tools that we’re happy to recommend, so you can spend less time researching and more time growing your business.

Some of these links are referral links that we earn money for or awards. In all honesty, this does not bring us a lot of dough – enough to buy cat treats. And we wouldn’t recommend anything that we don’t use ourselves. We’ll let you know if it’s a referral link you’re clicking on.

1. Creating high-quality imagery and graphic

If you want your website to look professional, you have to use great photos, images, and graphics. If you’re planning a photoshoot for your website, you might enjoy our podcast episode How to prepare for a photoshoot for your website.

But having professional photos of yourself might not be enough. Sometimes you need to add text over an image or re-size it to fit in a certain area of your website. And unless you’re a skilled graphic designer (or have one you can call on a regular basis), you might need to use photo editing software.

Canva

A tool we always recommend is Canva (if you sign up, we get awards and stuff). It has a free version with a lot of functionality, and a paid-for version you might want to upgrade to if you need to. It’s much easier to use (and much cheaper) than Photoshop. And it’s perfect if you want to create images for your blog posts, for example. You can easily overlay text onto existing photos or simply add nice graphics to your website to make your pages look more interesting.

Placeit

Another tool we use regularly is Placeit. Placeit allows you to take a screenshot of something – an eBook cover, for example – and place it onto a device like an iPhone, an iPad, or a laptop. So if you want to create the mock-up for a downloadable PDF or lead magnet, you can create a professional-looking, tangible product in minutes. At the time of writing, you can subscribe to Placeit for about $29 a month and get unlimited downloads.

Deposit Photos

When it comes to stock images and photos, our go-to website is Deposit Photos (referral link) We know, we know, we do tell people not to fill their websites with cheesy stock images, but sometimes, a stock image is a necessity.

2. Videos 

Video is a great tool to improve user experience and build trust with your audience. But it’s also great to improve your SEO efforts, as when watching videos, your users spend longer on the page. And this tells Google and the other search engines that your content is worth consuming.

There are different ways you can use video on your website – you may want to record yourself talking to the camera or do presentations, for example. But whatever you decide to do, where can you host the videos?

YouTube

The obvious choice is YouTube. It’s free, and it’s incredibly easy to set up. You just create an account, upload your videos, and you’re done.

However, you need to be aware of the fact that after playing your videos, YouTube will advertise other content that may or may not be appropriate or relevant to your audience or your business. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. But just bear in mind that you’re not fully in control of the user experience you’re providing through your website.

Loom

We love loom! If anyone has a question in our membership about, well, anything, we hit the loom button which starts recording our screens and us immediately. To see an example of how Loom works, watch below…

Vimeo

A great alternative to YouTube is Vimeo. They have a free plan, which only allows you to upload a small number of videos per week. If you need more, their cheapest plan is quite affordable at £6 per month at the time of writing. Unlike YouTube, Vimeo won’t advertise other content.

Wistia

Another tool we’ve been using, which offers professional, attractive designs is Wistia. At the time of writing, it’s $99 a month for about 10 videos, which is a lot more than what we originally paid for a few years ago.

The tool certainly comes with a higher price tag. But if you have the budget, if video plays a huge part in your business, and if you require the professional look this software offers, Wistia gives you an extra edge.

3. Email marketing

Another tool you might need to integrate with your website when growing your business is an email marketing tool. Companies like MailChimp or ConvertKit allow you to build a database of customers by capturing contact information for people who visit your website. Through email marketing, you can build better relationships with your customers (or potential customers) and contact them and market to them on a regular basis.

But which one is right for you?

MailChimp

You can have a free account with MailChimp for your first 2,000 subscribers. The functionality of the free version is limited. But if you’re just starting out with email marketing, the software probably has everything you need.

ConvertKit

We now use ConvertKit, which, at the time of writing, comes with a $29 a month price tag. Their interface is modern, clean, and very easy to use. It enables us to group our subscribers into lists. So we know whether people might be interested in a website redesign, in joining our membership, or having a website critique, for example. Plus, with our plan, we get additional support from ConvertKit, which is always handy.

Keap (used to be Infusionsoft)

Another piece of software that a lot of online marketers recommend is Keap, which used to be known as Infusionsoft. Plans start at around $99 a month at the time of writing. So it’s quite an expensive tool if you’re just starting out, have a small number of subscribers on your list, and don’t need access to complex functionality. The software is definitely more sophisticated, so if you need to set up complicated marketing funnels, it might be the one for you.

4. Website design

Another important element to consider when taking your business to the next level is design. At some point, you might need more control over the design elements of your website, even if you had your website professionally designed. And for this,  you might want to consider using a page builder.

Page builders allow you to build on an existing theme or template and with drag-and-drop functionality. You can add or amend design features in minutes, especially if you don’t know any coding and feel that what’s the standard WordPress editor functionality may be too basic and bland.

We don’t normally, but a lot of website designers use page builders nowadays. With a page builder, you can literally create design elements and templates in minutes. And the added advantage is that the website owner can then use the same page builder and continue to make changes themselves.

We shared more information about page builders over on our post How much does it cost to build your WordPress website? If you’re interested, go check it out!

Elementor

Elementor (affiliate link) is the page builder we recommend to all our members inside the Make Your Mark Online membership. It has a free version with basic features, but the Premium version will give you everything you’ll ever need. With just a bit of practice, you can add pricing tables, testimonials, quotes, and create attractive pages in a matter of minutes.

Other alternatives to Elementor are:

• Thrive Themes, which starts at around $67 per year at the time of writing.
• And Beaver Builder. This is a more advanced page builder (with a steeper learning curve) and is used by a lot of developers.

5. Taking bookings on your website 

Do you want to start taking bookings through your website? A tool a lot of our clients use is Calendly. It allows you to set up your diary, block times out, and allocate times to certain appointments, so your prospective clients can book directly into the tool.

If you run discovery calls, coaching calls, or other consultancy appointments, you can manage your diary without having to go back and forth exchanging endless emails with your clients. If you upgrade to the paid-for version, you can then set up different types of appointments with different durations and take payments through your website. We use a similar tool called Acuity Scheduling.

Alternatively, you can install a booking plugin onto your website and integrate it with a payment provider like PayPal or Stripe. A popular online booking and scheduling plugin that comes highly recommended is Bookly.

6. Taking payments on your website

And last but not least, if you’re a service-based business and need a way to take payments through your website for online programmes, courses, or memberships, for example, you can set up products on your website for your services or packages. You then sell them in the same way you would on an eCommerce website that sells physical products.

If you want to see an example of this, check out our Website Critique service on our website. When you buy the product directly from our website, you get an email confirmation of booking and payment, and within 7 days, you get the actual video with the critique. And an invoice is automatically generated, so you don’t have to remember to do this manually.

PayPal and Stripe

When it comes to payment providers, the most popular options are PayPal and Stripe. If you have a PayPal account, you can set up a ‘Pay Now’ button on your website in minutes. Stripe is also easy to use and has cheaper fees than PayPal. Just make sure you have an SSL certificate installed on your website that allows you to capture customer card details.

Other payment providers

If you’re looking for something with more functionality, another option is Sam Cart, a shopping cart system that processes customer transactions on their website. And they have awesome checkout pages!

We use a tool called Thrive Cart, which, with an upfront fee of approximately £500 is quite expensive. But it allows us to set up quick sales pages, send people the link, and take payments via credit or debit card. So if you don’t want to use PayPal or Stripe or add buttons to your website, Thrive Cart is a solid, robust tool that ensures your customers’ data is secure.

And finally, you can install a shopping cart plugin to your website, like WooCommerce, which allows you to set up virtual products through your website shop.

Would you like us to help you with your website? 

If you’re ready to improve the experience you provide to your existing and prospective customers and position yourself as an expert in your field, we have plenty more advice and tips to share with you! if you’re after a WordPress website that ranks, gets you traffic, and delivers you more sales, we’ve got what you need.

It’s time you stop faffing about with your website and make changes that will help you close more sales. If this sounds like music to your ears, come and check out our signature membership, Make Your Mark Online. With our easy-to-use and edit page templates, our video courses, our weekly live Q&A and a private Slack group, we’re here to help you get results through your website. Come and check it out!

Martin & Lyndsay

The post The best website tools we use to help save time and money appeared first on Content Marketing & SEO Agency | Get More Sales From Your Website.

The decision to have our first website professionally designed cost us our business. And we don’t want anyone else to make the mistakes we made!

Unfortunately, we’re not unique. Many business owners we speak to have had a bad experience with a web design agency.

So here’s what we did (or didn’t do) and what you should do instead.

Our first business

About 8-9 years ago, we both had full-time jobs and a dream to live the entrepreneurial lifestyle.

So we started a business on the side.

We spent all our spare time (mainly evenings and weekends) building our online business – selling cushions and home furnishing on eBay and at the odd local event. Yes, Martin was actually a pretty good cushion salesman.

It wasn’t easy, especially when we were both working full time, but we loved it. So when the time felt right, we decided to take things one step further and invest in a professionally-designed website.

We had big plans.

We wanted our own online shop that people could buy from, no matter where they were in the world.

Hiring a web designer

Decision made, we didn’t waste any time. Instead of asking around for recommendations from friends and family, we looked at a few local businesses and hired the web designer with the best-looking website.

We paid £1,400 for the job (which at the time was all the money we had in the world), and he built an all-singing-all-dancing online shop that would make us millionaires.

Financially, this was a real struggle for us. With money tied up in stock sitting idle in our spare room, we had put everything we had into this one investment.

It wasn’t a great position to be in. But we were young and excited and we had a vision!

Can you blame us?

But things went horribly wrong.

The mistakes we made with our first website

1. We didn’t do enough research before hiring a web designer

Hiring the web design agency with the glossiest website is a mistake we see a lot of people make.

Don’t get us wrong – we hired a nice guy, and we enjoyed the process of working with him. But had we done our homework, we probably would have gone with someone else.

Why? Because he wasn’t the right fit. We needed a cheap website that showed us

2. We chose the wrong platform (Content management system) for our needs

At the time, we didn’t even know you could build a website on different platforms!

And unsurprisingly, (considering we had skipped the research part of the process) we found ourselves with a website built on OpenCart – a platform we found really hard to get to grips with.

Little things, like organising postage, for example, felt really complicated. And we had to spend a lot of time and effort learning things to just get it to work for us.

Plus, we hadn’t realised we didn’t have the experience or expertise to be able to update our own website. And teaching us how to update and optimise our newly-built website wasn’t something our web designer offered.

But the real point is – we didn’t ask! And we didn’t ask because we didn’t know we’d need training and support!

Also, as we later found out (when we eventually heard about this thing called search engine optimisation) that OpenCart isn’t the best when it comes to SEO. (And that’s a big part of why we now only build websites on WordPress!).

So in hindsight, we would have definitely hired a different agency to build us a website on a platform that was right for us.

But we hadn’t done our homework, so we didn’t know!

3. We adopted a build-it-and-they-will-come mindset

Big mistake.

We thought we had it all figured out.

We’d just need to throw money at this amazing web designer with the glossy-looking website, and people from all over the world would flock to our website.

We’d make lots of money.

The end.

Except that’s not how it works at all.

People didn’t come.

Because we didn’t realise that once your website is made, you need to start driving traffic to it.

And unfortunately, with our capital tied up in stock and our savings used up for the website, we had nothing left. We didn’t have another penny to invest.

When we eventually asked our web designer to help us with SEO, his monthly quote was completely out of our reach.

Plus, it’s only after our website was built that we realised our business was operating in a very competitive niche/.

We were selling products that were available on big websites, like Amazon and eBay (and probably thousands of others). And we had no way of differentiating ourselves – we hadn’t given our visitors any reason to buy from us!

Not to mention that competing on price against the biggest online giants on the market meant we had no profit margin. And that just wasn’t sustainable, especially when we had exposed ourselves financially in such a big way.

And that’s when the realisation hit us.

We were not going to be millionaires and live on a beach, sipping cocktails after all.

Not while selling cushions online anyway.

4. We thought building a website was the end goal

We hadn’t realised how much work it would take to build AND grow a website.

And we made the mistake of thinking that the website was everything – the end goal. Instead, we should have seen it as the beginning of our business.

Your website is the heart of your business.

But you’ve got to pump blood to it.

And that’s web traffic.

Once your website is live, how are you going to market yourself? Because your website is really just the starting point, and we didn’t know that!

5. We got too excited about our business

We loved our business so much that we put our heart and soul into it – we went to the extent of naming our cushions! To tell you the truth, we were so enthusiastic about our products that we wrongly assumed the whole world would be!

The bottom line is that we had fun with it, and we were really excited. But it meant we let our hearts rule our heads, even when it came to big business decisions like hiring a web designer!

6. We obsessed over the details

Instead of looking at the bigger picture, we focused on the details – literally down the colour and size of each button!

But with no website visitors, the details were pretty useless.

So what should you do instead?

1. Download our Website Buyer’s Guide

We learnt so much from this experience that we vowed we’d help other people avoid all the traps we fell into.

So we created our Website Buyer’s Guide, for anyone who is thinking of getting a new website or having their re-designed. You can download for free here. It’s our gift to you to help you avoid the costly mistakes we made.

2. Do your research before you buy

Find out what platform is right for your needs before you buy.

Consider things like:

• Is the platform easy to optimise for search? Will I need help with this or is it something I can do by myself?
• Will I be able to update and maintain my website once it’s live? Who will make changes and how?
• Will I need training and support? And if so, who will provide that help?

3. If you’re brand new in business, DIY your website

There are times when hiring a web designer is the right choice. But there are times and situations where it definitely isn’t.

If you’re brand new in business and haven’t tested the viability of your idea and model yet, you should DIY your own website. All you need at the start might be something like Shopify or a WordPress template.

And if you’re struggling, try to find someone who will help you move forward one step at the time, much like we do in our membership, Make Your Mark Online.

If you want to find out more about why you shouldn’t hire a web designer when you’re brand new in business, listen to our podcast episode: Should you DIY your website?

And when your business is established and you have regular customers and clients, by all means, consider hiring a web designer if that’s the right move for you.

4. Focus on driving traffic to your website

Once your website is live, that’s when the real work starts. Because even if your website looks amazing, you can’t convert traffic if you don’t have any!

So get the blood to the heart.

And you do this by:

• Creating and executing a content marketing strategy.
• Optimising your website for SEO.
• Engaging in social media marketing and/or email marketing.

If you want to convert traffic, you have to drive that traffic in first! And if you’re unsure about how to start, keep things simple. Think about what your buyers might want. Write helpful blog posts and promote the heck out of them.

5. Don’t invest in something you can’t afford

If you have to put your last pennies into something (a website or anything else), it’s probably not the right time to invest. We really struggled financially as a result of hiring a web designer at the wrong time for our business.

And eventually, this decision cost us our business.

So when making business decisions, and especially big buying decisions, try to use your head instead of your heart!

Would you like our help as you create your own website?  

So there you have it – the honest mistakes we made on our first website. If you enjoyed this blog post, you can also listen to our podcast episode 9 – Why our website failed miserably.

We learnt a lot from the experience, and that’s what led us to where we are today. We understand what you’re going through at the very early stages of your business, and we can help you avoid the mistakes we made.

If you want to find out more about the ways we help, check out our membership Make Your Mark Online, where we can support you in creating a website you can be proud of.

Martin & Lyndsay

The post 6 Mistakes To Avoid When Hiring a Web Designer (and What To Do Instead) appeared first on Content Marketing & SEO Agency | Get More Sales From Your Website.

In this post, we talk about why SEO is important for personal brand website owners like you and give you some tips on how to increase your chances of ranking higher in search engine results.

But first, why does SEO even matter?

Why does SEO matter?

As consumers, whenever we’re looking to buy something (a product or a service), we tend to do our own research. And when we’re ready to make a purchase, credit card in hand, we head over to Google (or Bing or Yahoo) and check out the links for the top results.

So why does this matter to you as a business owner?

When your website appears at the top of the Google search results, you have an opportunity to drive more organic traffic to your website – i.e. traffic that’s not driven through paid-for advertising.

Search engine optimisation, or SEO for short, is what allows you to increase your online visibility, and, in turn, your sales. But in order for this to work, you need your website to come up in the search results on the first page of Google when someone types in a query that is related to your topic of expertise.

So what can you do to improve your chances of claiming those spots at the top of the search results?

User experience and SEO – is there a difference?

SEO can often become a technical and complicated topic. But it doesn’t have to be. [bctt tweet=”When you focus on delivering a great user experience to your audience, you’re ticking most of the SEO boxes because great user experience is exactly what Google aims to deliver.” username=”@Jammy_Digital”]

So if you want to get into ‘Google’s good books’, adopt a user experience mindset. In other words, focus on what a great website looks like in the eyes of your users, and you’re already setting yourself up for success when it comes to ranking.

How do smaller, service-based business compete with big corporates to rank higher on Google?

If you’re a small business and worry about how you can compete with bigger companies with larger budgets and more ‘SEO power’, here’s the good news.

By focusing on a specific niche within your industry and concentrating your efforts on creating a website that’s interesting, engaging, and valuable, you’re more likely to rank on the first page of Google for the specific search terms (or keywords) that relate to your business. 

If you create the right type of laser-focused content that is relevant to your users and your business, you have more chances of coming up at the top of the search results than some of the bigger companies that cover much wider areas and topics.

Let’s use an example to explain this. If you type a question into Google, you’ll want to find the best possible answer. Google wants to provide you, the user, with the answer that most matches your search criteria. So if a larger company doesn’t have the right type of content to answer that specific question but you do, your content may be picked over the bigger company’s.

Of course, other factors such as how old your website is or how much traffic you get also play a part. But ultimately, the best solution that Google finds is what gets presented first in the search results. This is why it’s much easier to think about SEO from a content perspective – always aim to answer your prospective clients’ questions in the best possible way. 

There are things you can do to optimise your website and increase your chances of ranking on the first page of Google.

1. Treat your service pages like your homepage

A lot of business owners we meet make the mistake of putting a lot of effort into their home page, but then neglecting their service pages. But when you think about it, by doing that, you’re missing opportunities. Every single page of your website (and, specifically, your service pages) can be optimised for search. And so can your blog posts! If you want to know more about this, read our article How to Optimise Your Blog Posts.

So if you offer a range of different services, create one page for each of your services and optimise each page individually.

To rank well on search engines, you’ll need to think about the content on these pages. What would your user be searching for? Try to give as much information as possible about your service (while still keeping your writing succinct and clear). Examples of things you could include on your service page are:

• An overview of your service
• Who the service is suitable for
• The main benefits of your service
• How much it costs for your service
• Case studies and testimonials related to your service
• The process/how you carry out the service
• Frequently asked questions about your service
• Related content such as blog posts, podcast episodes, guides etc.

2. Don’t forget about longtail keywords on your service pages

When you create individual pages for each of your services, you get to include the relevant keywords in each of them. This isn’t just great in the eyes of Google, but it’s fantastic for your users too, as they get to only consume content that’s relevant to what they’re after. 

As an example, let’s say you offer both editing and proofreading services. Having a page completely dedicated to your proofreading services allows you to include (and potentially rank for) different search terms or keywords, like ‘proofreading London’ or ‘proofreading service rates’, etc.

Including other, related and more specific keywords is a smart move because if you tried to rank for the search term ‘proofreader’, you’d struggle to get to the first page of Google. The term is too broad and generic, and too many other websites are ‘competing’ with each other to rank for that keyword. Plus, the search isn’t specific enough! What is the user trying to do? Find out what a proofreader is for a school project? Or trying to find a proofreader to hire?

So here’s where our advice of ‘niching down’ comes into its own. You might struggle to rank for ‘proofreader’, but you’ll have better chances of ranking for long-tail keywords (i.e. longer phrases or sets of words), like:

• How much does a proofreader cost?
• What does proofreading include?
• How does the proofreading process work?
• How long does it take for you to proofread my work?

Think of specific and targeted keywords that your ideal clients are likely to search for and build your web pages around those terms. 

3. Get Good at Content Marketing

Can you use your blog content to help you rank higher?

Absolutely!

Take us, for example. Over time, we’ve created blog posts that answer questions that our prospective clients ask us all the time. We’ve written blog posts, like:

• How Long Does It Take To Build A Website?
• Why You Need a Maintenance Plan for your Website
• Why New Businesses Shouldn’t Spend 1000s on a Website

By going deep into your content efforts and by creating regular blog content that is optimised for several keywords, you can increase the number of visitors that land on your website

How Do I Come up with Content Marketing ideas?

So how can you come up with ideas for content? Once again, think about your users (and user experience first).

Make a note of the questions that your prospective clients ask you on a regular basis and answer them through your content. If one person asks you, chances are that other people will want to know as well, so answer your questions ‘at scale’.

And if you’re just starting out and aren’t sure about what questions your audience might have, use Google! Have you ever noticed the section at the bottom called ‘Searches related to’?

Or you can use other free online resources to work out what keywords people are mostly looking for. A great tool (with a free trial) that we always recommend is KWFinder. You enter your chosen keywords and see how many people search for it each month.

Our top tip here is to create content for long-tail keywords that sound just like the questions your prospective clients may ask you. Things like:

• How much does a proofreader charge?
• What is included in a proofreading package?

Because these search terms are much longer and more niche, they’re likely to have less competition. In other words, less content has been written to answer those specific questions, which means that if you go after those keywords, you have a better chance of ranking.

Create in-depth content that answers your customers’ questions

Our most-successful blog posts go into a lot of details. And that’s not surprising, as, in the eyes of Google, longer pieces of content provide an in-depth answer to your search query. If you think about a topic from a user perspective and make a list of all the related and relevant questions someone might have on that topic, you’ll easily come up with a longer piece of content.

Also, in-depth content gives you opportunities to include more than just one keyword. And when the additional keywords are also terms that people search for, you have better chances of ranking!

Our most successful piece of content, (that gets more traffic than our homepage) is ‘Why Am I Not Ranking in Google, and How to Fix It’ 

This was as a result of constantly being asked this question. The blog post is over 3000 words, but it breaks the question down simply. 11 reasons why you’re not ranking in Google, with an explanation, then an explanation of how to fix it.

So think about the main question you want to answer with your blog post and then break it down, like the chapters of a book. You’ll then turn those related topics into sub-heading (just like we’ve done in this blog post) and include any related keywords in the sub-headings.

If you’re using WordPress or any other Content Management System, you can assign heading tags to these individual subheadings. These can be set as Headings 2, Headings 3, Headings 4, etc. And by doing this, you’re telling not only organising your content nicely for your users, but you’re telling the search engines how your content is structured, which can help you increase your ‘SEO power’. It’s a win-win!

If you want more details around how to optimise your blog content and your website pages for SEO, head over to our blog post: The Ultimate SEO Checklist for your Blog Posts.

Finally, Should I hire an SEO company?

And last but not least, here’s a question our clients ask us all the time. Should you hire an SEO company?

The answer is that it depends. If you have the budget and your business can afford it, you can. But it’s important that you first have a solid understanding of the SEO basics and are clear on what you’re paying for and what you want to achieve.

If you find yourself in a crowded market with a lot of competition and are struggling to stand out, hiring a good SEO company that helps you build high-quality backlinks to your website (through reaching out to influencers, guest posting, etc.) could work out for you in the long run.

But any good SEO company should either recommend content marketing or do it for you. By creating the right type of content (either as a page on your site or blog post) and optimising it, you will see an increase in website traffic. 

Would you like some help with your content marketing and SEO strategy? 

If you’re looking for some support with your content marketing or SEO strategy, why not join our membership, Make Your Mark Online?

In January, we’re starting our 90 Day Challenge, where you write one piece of content a week for 90 days and we’ll review it, telling you what you need to do to improve it for SEO.

What is the Membership About?

If you’re after an ‘agency-level’ website (but without the agency price tag) and want a WordPress website that ranks, gets you more traffic, and delivers you more sales, that’s exactly what we help our members do.

We offer video courses, weekly live Q&A calls, a private Slack group, and member-only resources which include a handy SEO planner. Come and check it out, and if you have any questions, just give us a shout!

Martin & Lyndsay

The post How to make your service-based business website rank higher on Google appeared first on Content Marketing & SEO Agency | Get More Sales From Your Website.

You do that with a Big, Bold Statement.

Often called your ‘Value Proposition’ or ‘You statement’, the Big, Bold Statement is what it says on the tin. It’s the big, bold message you publish on your website for your visitors to see. It defines exactly what you do so your users know they’re in the right place.

Why is it important to have a Big, Bold Statement on your website?

We review a lot of websites in our FREE Facebook group. And one of the main issues we come across is that business owners find it really difficult to explain what they do.

It’s important to remember that your visitors (i.e. your potential customers and clients) won’t initially be spending a lot of time on your website. You only have 3 to 4 seconds to make an impression!

So you need a clear, defining Big, Bold Statement that helps them work out:

• where they are,
• what services you offer,
• whether you have the solution to their problem,
• and whether they should stay or hit the back button!

So your job is to make who you are and what you do abundantly clear to your website visitors. Explain it so clearly that a 5-year-old would get it.

Seriously.

Don’t make your web visitors spend any brain calories trying to work out what you do. It’s not a puzzle. And they don’t win a prize. So don’t be vague or fluffy with your Big, Bold Statement!

Where should the Big, Bold Statement go on your website and how long should it be? 

Your Big, Bold Statement only needs to be a few words long – 10-15 words at the most. That’s because people need to immediately, at a glance, be able to understand what you do.

And it should sit in the top third of your website.

This section of your website is also referred to as:

• ‘above the fold’,
• ‘the top third’ or ‘the first third’,
• the ‘slider section’,
• or the ‘feature area’.

We call it the hero section. And it’s the first thing you see when you get onto any website before you have to scroll down the page to see the rest.

That’s where you want your Big, Bold Statement to go.

So how do you put together a Big, Bold Statement?

Here are 9 ways to help you do just that.

1) Ask a Question

This method works no matter what industry or business you’re in, but let’s use an example to explain what we mean.

Let’s say you’re a speaking coach – you help people with their presentations and with speaking on stage.

If you use the question method, your Big, Bold Statement could be something like:

Does the thought of public speaking make you want to cry?

Your question immediately draws your website visitors in. By asking it, you’re telling your audience you understand the issue they’re facing, and at the same time, you’re illustrating what you do.

When coming up with the question to ask, speak directly to your visitors – remember that it’s about them.

Ask the question you know your ideal customers have been asking themselves. You want them to nod in agreement as they read it.

2) State a Promise

Can you make your ideal customers or clients a promise? Going back to our speaking coach example, you could use:

Feel more confident on stage in five weeks or less.

or even,

The only speaking course you’ll ever need.

Now, that is a promise.

It’s Big, and it’s Bold.

It allows you to explain what you do by promising something to your visitors. It’s your way of standing your ground as the expert you are.

Just be mindful of not falling into the trap of using fluffy marketing lingo though! One of the biggest mistakes we see people make with their Big, Bold Statement is that the language is too vague.

“I can make you prosper.”

is a promise. But it doesn’t tell your readers the first thing about what it is you help them with!

3) Use your Unique Identifier

What makes you unique? Do you have a niche? A Unique Selling Point, or USP? Something that allows you to differentiate yourself from your competitors and specifically describes your products and services?

Then find that ‘thing’ and feature it in your Big, Bold Statement.

Say, for example, that you have your own methods of teaching people. Your Big, Bold Statement could be something along the lines of:

I am the creator of the seven-minute speaking formula.

This doesn’t just tell your visitors what you do. It also gives you a valuable edge that makes your people perk up and listen.

4) Create a Power Statement

This is the type of Big, Bold Statement we use on our own website.

Make your mark online.

This is our Power Statement, and (in case you hadn’t noticed) it’s also the name of our podcast and our membership!

Underneath that, we’ve added a ‘supporting statement’ that reads:

a website you can be proud of.

Let’s break it down for a second.

With our Power Statement, we aim to appeal to our ideal clients (people who want to make their mark online) by triggering emotion in them. The supporting statement helps us clarify how we do this – by helping them build websites.

Our Big, Bold Statement speaks directly to our ideal clients by evoking emotion. And at the same time, it provides the clarity our ideal clients need to understand what we do.

That’s why this method is so powerful.

However, out of all the methods we teach, we find this is the one people struggle with the most, as it’s easy to fall into the trap of being too vague.

So our speaking coach may want to say something like:

Make them believe. 

It’s powerful, it’s emotional, and it’s likely to stop you in your tracks. But without a supporting statement, it doesn’t really say what our coach does.

So they might want to add:

 turning mediocre presentations into magnificent ones.

or even,

public speaking training for CEOs.

That’s how you get the perfect combination of emotion and clarity. When you get this right, a Big, Bold Statement that’s based on a Powerful + Supporting Statement can be extremely effective.

5) Use a Customer Testimonial

Did a client give you an amazing testimonial that perfectly sums up what you do? Then why not use that, word-by-word, as your Big, Bold Statement?

For us, this could be something like:

The best website I could have ever dreamed of.

Our speaking coach could use:

I’ve never felt so happy after leaving the stage.

or,

Public speaking has never felt so achievable.

As long as the testimonial is clear and specific enough (and tells people what you do), this emotive approach can work really well.

Up until recently, Chris Marr of Content Marketing Academy used a testimonial on his website, CMA Live, and it was this:

The best marketing conference I’ve been to in 25 years.

Isn’t that perfect? It tells you immediately what you’re getting but also gives you enough social proof to help you make an informed buying decision.

6) The Exact Statement

Just say exactly what it is that you do – it’s as simple as that.

Using our speaking coach as an example again, they could say:

Public speaking, training, and workshops.

It’s obvious. It’s simple. And it’s effective.

But it also makes it abundantly clear what it is you do.

Just stating the facts is much better than going for something too complicated that could potentially end up confusing people. It may not be the fanciest of approaches, so if you’re pressed for time, just do this first, and then go back and refine your Big, Bold Statement later when you have a better idea.

7) Who You Help

The original idea for this particular method of coming up with a Big, Bold Statement came from Michael Port and his book Book Yourself Solid. And it’s as simple as answering this question – who do you help and what do you help them do?

The speaking coach in our example would say:

We help CEOs master public speaking.

or,

Helping academics to deliver memorable presentations.

This is a particularly great way of illustrating what you do if you have a niche. When your ideal customer or client lands on your website and sees this, they’re going to feel really special. And that’s all you can ask for!

8) Who You Help+

With this method, you’re combining the Power Statement with the Who You Help statement to enhance it and clarify it.

Our speaking coach could use:

We help CEOs deliver outstanding presentations that inspire action.

So with this Big, Bold Statement, you’re telling someone what you’re helping them with (‘deliver outstanding presentations’), but you’re also letting them know how helping them will affect them (they will be able to ‘inspire action’).

That additional bit at the end (the ‘plus statement’) is impactful. It adds that extra punch which gets people in the heart (in a totally good way!).

9) The Guarantee

Do you offer a guarantee with your services? Not every business does, but if you have the right kind of product, this can be a good way for you to come up with your Big, Bold Statement.

Here’s what our speaking coach might say:

Deliver outstanding presentations or your money back.

This works because it gives your visitors confidence. If you’re prepared to stand behind your product in such a big way that you’ll give money back if they don’t get results, whatever you sell must be pretty good!

So which method is right for you?

There’s no right and wrong here. Jot down a few ideas, try a few methods, and test your Big, Bold Statement out.

Ask your friends and family, check with your followers on social media, or ask your email subscribers what resonates with them the most.

Remember that your Big, Bold Statement isn’t set in stone – you can always change it when you come up with a better one.

Would you like our help? 

You may have got your big, bold statement sorted, but what about the rest of your homepage? Download our homepage blueprint for personal brands, which tells you EXACTLY what to put on your homepage.

Better still, if you want our help, week in and week out, as you build your personal brand website, check out our membership, Make Your Mark Online (or MYMO, as our members call it!). You’ll get access to our best advice and to our thriving community as well. What’s there not to like?!

And if you’d like to hear us talk about how to come up with your Big, Bold Statement in more details, go and check out our podcast episode Why You Need a Big, Bold Statement and How to Create One.

Martin & Lyndsay

The post 9 Ways to Create a Big, Bold Statement for Your Personal Brand Website appeared first on Content Marketing & SEO Agency | Get More Sales From Your Website.

Our B.R.A.N.D. framework for Personal Brands

We’ve come up with a simple way to explain what a perfect personal brand website should look like. It’s a framework we use to create every single website we build. And we call it the B.R.A.N.D. framework.

You do not have to be a techie to follow this framework, in fact, we created it with non-techies in mind.

B.R.A.N.D. is an acronym and is based on 5 core areas that each website should have:

1. B for Build trust.
2. R for Relevancy.
3. A for Authority.
4. N for Noteworthy.
5. D for Direction.

So let’s break down every single area in more details.

1. Build trust using your website

Building trust is the first and most important aspect of the entire framework. We need to trust the people we buy from. If your visitors don’t trust you, they’re not going to stick around long enough to buy from you.

It’s as simple as that.

So when someone lands on your website for the first time, they’re probably going to ask themselves a few questions. Things like:

• Do these people know what they’re talking about?
• Will they try to sell me something?
• Does this website look secure?

Your job is to reassure your visitors. And you do that by building trust.

So how do you actually build trust with your audience through your website?

1.1 Building Trust: Branding 

Does your website look and feel like a nice place to be? Does it ‘look the part’? In other words, is your website ‘aesthetically pleasing’?

Now, when you’re building a website yourself this can be difficult. After all, you’re not a designer, right? How can you design a beautiful website if you don’t have the skills?

The likelihood is, you’re website is not going to look the same as a website designed by a professional agency BUT this does not mean your website won’t be successful.

In this case, we recommend you find a good WordPress theme that you like (there are thousands out there) and stick within the parameters of the theme. I.e. don’t change too much! What you want is something clean and professional.

You can edit fonts and colours to match your branding. You can add your logo. And, most importantly, you’ll be able to add your images and text which will really help you stand out.

Ultimately, this is about avoiding a crappy looking website that looks like the 90s threw up on the page. No one trusts those websites! So, keep it simple, stick to a theme and use other methods to stand out!

Example of Good Website Branding

It’s no secret that we love Col Grey’s work. His website is a great example of good branding – bold, memorable colours, consistency of fonts and text, plenty of white space, great use of shapes and consistent use of images.

You instantly feel at ease on Col’s website. You know you’re in the hands of a professional. 

1.2 Building Trust: Images

One of the best ways of making your reader feel at ease is by using images of yourself on your website.

But a lot of people feel nervous about using their face on their website. Will it make you look egotistical? Or self-absorbed? 

Hell no!

The purpose of having your image on your website is so your reader can see who they’re potentially going to work with/invest in. It’s for their benefit, not yours. You’re not self-centred for putting your images on your website. Far from it.

Using images of yourself and your team throughout your website gives the reader a sense of who you are. We actually recommend business owners invest in professional photography BEFORE they invest thousands and thousands on a website. It’s amazing what you can do with a half decent theme and some good photographs.

We’ve written an article with some tips on how to get some amazing photographs for your website.

Example of Good Website Imagery

We love Teresa’s images on her website. As soon as you land on her homepage you feel at ease and welcomed by Teresa. It automatically builds trust and a connection.

1.3 Building Trust: Testimonials and Case Studies

Do you have any testimonials or case studies that tell a story? Testimonials and case studies can be a great tool to help you build trust with your audience. Remember though, your visitors know that testimonials can be manufactured. So don’t share testimonials that simply say how good you are! (We know you are!)

Instead, feature examples of customers or clients who came with you with a problem and experienced a transformation as a direct result of buying your products or services.

If you want to find out more about how to get great testimonials from your clients, head over to our blog post How to get client testimonials for your website. Or you can listen to episode 17 of the Make Your Mark Online podcast.

Example of Good Website Testimonials

Chris Marr, at Content Marketing Academy, features fantastic testimonials on his website. They aren’t just the standard ‘Love it’ testimonials, they are real stories and experiences that give detailed results.

1.4 Building Trust: Security 

And last but not least, in order to build that trust with your visitors, make your website is fast and secure. If your website takes over 3 seconds to load, your visitors may get impatient or suspicious. They’ll be wondering whether they’re being re-directed elsewhere and asking themselves why it’s taking so long. More often than not, they won’t wait for your page to load.

They’ll click the back button.

So get yourself a nice speedy website. If you’d like to buy a speed up service, we recommend TechCrunch.

Also, get an SSL certificate to make sure your website is secure. And by all means, always comply with any applicable mandatory requirements, including GDPR or privacy policy, for example. Tell people what you’re going to do with their data (i.e. you won’t sell it the highest bidder!)

2. Relevancy and why it’s so important for your website

When someone visits your website,

• are they clear on what you do?
• Can they see how relevant you are to them?
• Can they see how you can help them get from A to B? Solve a problem they have?
• And can they immediately tell whether you’ve helped people like them in the past?

If your visitors don’t understand how you can help them, they won’t stay on your website long enough to listen to what you have to say.

People don’t want to waste their time.

And you don’t want to waste yours, so get to the point quickly and show your ideal customers and clients exactly what it is that you do.

Show them that you’re relevant to them.

Here’s how.

2.1 Relevancy: Your Big Bold Statement

A big, bold statement is the first sentence or phrase someone will see when they land on your website. It’s usually situated in the first third of your homepage, and it’s where you should clearly state what it is that you do. If you don’t do this right, your visitors won’t know whether they’re in the right place.

Your big, bold statement doesn’t have to be overly creative or clever. In fact, sometimes it’s best to avoid this and just clearly state what it is you do.

If you want to find out more about what Big Bold Statement, you can listen to episode 5 of the Make Your Mark Online podcast – Why You Need a Big Bold Statement and How to Create One.

Example of Good Big, Bold Statement 

Mike and Callie at Membership Guys are so clear about what they offer and who they help. Take this big, bold statement you see as soon as you land on their website ‘Proven Practical advice for successful memberships’ – couldn’t be more clear!

2.2 Relevancy: Images and photos

We already mentioned photos and images in the context of building trust with your audience. But photos can also go a long way to show your readers that they’re in the right place and allow them to connect with you.

Take us, for example. Some people might want to work with a huge agency with a big team. They can clearly see from the get-go that there are two of us. They’ll know straight away that we’re not right for them.

A lot of people use stock photos to try to hide who they are, but using images makes it clear whether you’re the right fit for your end-user.

Example of good images and photos

We love Sara’s images on her website. She shows herself in her home office at her laptop and drinking coffee, looking very relaxed and so approachable! These images show the reader immediately shows the reader who Sara is and what she does.

2.3 Relevancy: Testimonials and Case Studies 

Testimonials and case studies might help you build trust, but they also show the reader the type of clients you work with. So if you’re targetting well-known speakers, make sure you only feature them in your testimonials and case studies! It’s also a good idea to cull old testimonials that might not be a reflection of who you work with anymore.

Example of a good case study/testimonial

We love Lauren Pearman’s case studies such as this one. Lauren puts the focus on her client, not herself. She talks about what they want to achieve and how she helps them do this through photography. But best of all, Lauren shows exactly who her ideal clients are through her case studies. It’s very clear to see the types of people that she works with.

2.4 Relevancy: Website Copy 

One of the best and most obvious ways to convey to reader what it is you do and how you help is through your website copy. But it’s amazing how many people get this wrong. They focus on ‘fluff’ – when they were established, the entire work history to date, or they use generic terms like ‘we’re professional and friendly’.

Your copy should focus on the reader, not you. It should show them who you work with (and who you don’t work with), and it should people how you help and why it’s beneficial for them to hire you.

Example of good website copy 

John Espirian is the king of good website copy and making the complex, simple. In the example above, you can see how John helps solve a problem for his clients with the phrase, ‘Let’s help your clients go from “umm, what?” to “ahh, I get it now”. There’s no ‘extra fat’ in John’s copy, it’s concise and most importantly, it demonstrates to the reader who he is, what he does and how he helps.

3. Authority building for your personal brand

Being seen as an authority in your field or niche is fundamental because, in order to buy from you, people need to see you as an expert.

People want to know things like:

• Are you qualified to help them?
• Can you be trusted?
• Have you got any proof of things you’ve done in the past?
• Is working with you a safe investment of their money?

So how do you build authority on your website?

3.1 Authority: Big Hero image

We talked about images before. They can help with trust and relevancy, but also with authority.

If you’re a speaker, use images of yourself speaking on stage, for example. If you’re an author, have a photo of yourself signing books.

Use that Big Hero image on the home page of your website wisely – it’s a great opportunity to tell your website visitors that you’re an authority.

Example of a good authority image

Love him or hate him Gary V does showcase his authority in this image on his website. His back is turned away from the reader, which gives us a full view of an engaged audience. It speaks to his authority.

3.2 Authority: Media badges and social proof

Have you been featured on The Guardian, the BBC, or the Huffington Post? Have you appeared in a well-known podcast?

Then add those media badges to your website.

This tells your audience that you’ve received ‘the stamp of approval’ from well-recognised sources, and it will help you build trust with your website visitors more easily.

Similarly, if you have a good number of subscribers on your email list, you could add a section on your website that includes something along the lines of: “Join another 500 like-minded business owners who are already on our list”.

This boosts your social proof and makes you come across as trustworthy.

Example of good social proof

Amy Landino is an international speaker and YouTube expert. Her website does a great job at reflecting her level of expertise and authority. Amy uses the logos above subtly on her website, but it works to show what an authority she is. We also like how she’s worded it ‘Brands Who Trust Amy’. Nicely done!

3.3 Authority: Signature Programmes 

If you offer any sort of coaching or consulting, then having your own ‘signature programmes’ can really help you be seen as an authority. These programmes are your proven steps to success. They’re based around your experience and what’s worked for you and what hasn’t. And they’re usually given a name that’s unique to you.

Example of good signature programmes

Janet Murray delivers her own signature programmes that help people build their audience and grow their business. She named the above programme ‘The build your audience’ programme. Only Janet offers this unique programme and with it all the training and resources. Having your own proven programme such as this one helps show your authority in your industry.

4. Noteworthy

• Are you noticeable and memorable?
• Interesting and entertaining?
• When people land on your website, how will you make sure they stay long enough to listen to what you’re saying?
• Can people relate to you?

Because that’s all we all look for – human connection. And if your visitors can’t connect with you, they’ll just find someone else to connect with.

Truth is, you’re not going to be loved by everybody.

But that’s fine because you don’t want everybody to be your customer. You just want a selected few.

So how are you going to use your website to relate to your ideal customers and clients on a one-to-one level? How are you going to show people that you’re noteworthy?

4.1 Noteworthy: Your Tone of Voice

What’s your personality?

One of the biggest mistakes people make with their website copy is making it boring and stuffy. A lot of people get their personalities across on social media, but when it comes to web copy they go formal.

Make sure you show people who you are. Yes, not everyone will love you, but it doesn’t matter about the people that don’t like you. They aren’t your customers.

If you’re still struggling with this, check out our article on how to create your tone of voice.

Example of Good Tone of Voice

We love Amy’s site from Joy Junkie. You can immediately get a sense of who she is from her copy. Her personality just shines through and you will remember her! She writes very much like she might talk and it feels like you’re having a real conversation with her when you read her words.

4.2 Noteworthy: Your story 

Do you have an interesting story to tell? One that your readers will connect with? If so, then your story is definitely going to help you to stand out and make you memorable.

So make sure you tell your story well – don’t be scared of adding a bit of character and personality to it.

But make sure it’s a genuine story too. A lot of people feel the pressure to tell something amazing. But keep it simple and real. None of this I had $1 in my pocket and now I’m a millionaire with a Lambo crap.

Example of a Good Story

Patt Flynn tells his story of how he started Smart Passive Income. What we love about this story is that it’s humble, simple and something we can all relate to. Patt talks about how he struggled in his career after the 2008 economic crash. He talks about how he set up his business so he could be closer to his family and work around them. There’s no ego in his story. And no Lamborghinis!

4.3 Noteworthy: Images and videos

By now, you’ll have noticed that images come up a lot when talking about the features a great website should have. That’s because they are a key element for creating a great personal brand website. Use them to be memorable and stand out and create a sense of who you are.

Think about your brand values – are you fun, cheeky, humourous, serious? Let this show through your photography and use props if you want to help you.

Example of a Good Personal Brand Photography

Andrew and Pete nail their brand. Everything they are is reflected across their website, and in particular in their photography. Their photos are fun, relaxed and relatable, just like Andrew and Pete themselves!

4.4 Noteworthy: Colours 

Your brand colours are often what will make you memorable. There are many things to consider before choosing your brand colours…

• Who you are and what you stand for – for example if innovation is your thing you wouldn’t pick something super traditional looking like maroon
• What your competition does – sometimes, it’s good to go against the grain of your competition (think someone with expertise in plants going pink rather than green!) But this is a risk. It will make you memorable but sometimes it works and sometimes not!
• Colour psychology – red symbolises passion or danger, pink symbolises femininity or happiness. Think about what the colours could mean to your audience before you choose them.

Example of a Good Personal Brand Colours

When I go to conferences and say I’m from Jammy Digital, I often hear people reply, ‘You’re the guys with that green and pink website, right?’ Yup! Our weird combo of bright colours does make us memorable to a lot of people. They’re also very much a reflection of us and our brand.

4.5 Noteworthy: Your Opinions 

We all have our own opinions about industry, right? We work in it every day and we live and breathe what we do. Sometimes, you might go against the grain of your industry or work in a unique way with your clients. Part of you brand values might be honest and transparancy. In which case, stating clearly how you work or what makes you different can work well. It makes you memourable and unique.

A Good Example of Sharing Your Opinions

I always remember this website from A Little Bit of Something. They really do get their feelings across on their website (and we can certainly relate!) Again, some people might hate this, but it doesn’t matter, because their target audience will love it. It creates strong emotions either way. Remember, it’s better to be loved and hated rather than forgotten.

5. Direction

Direction is the last piece of the puzzle and the fifth component of the B.R.A.N.D. framework.

If you want your website to perform well, you need to consider how you’re directing people from page to page. Because if your visitors don’t know what to do next, they’re going to do nothing.

Or click that dreaded back button.

When people land on your website, they want to know things like:

• What do I do next?
• Where do I start?
• How do I get in touch?
• What services do you offer?

We’ve written more about how you can use your Home page as the ‘reception area’ of your website, directing people to where they need to go, especially if you have more than one audience. Check out our blog post How to Appeal to More Than One Audience Using Your Website.

So here’s what you can do to help people navigate your website easily.

5.1 Direction: Menu items 

Use obvious phrases on your menu items to help your readers go where they need to go. Don’t call your menu items something vague or obscure that people aren’t familiar with like ‘my journey’ for ‘blog’ – you’ll just end up confusing them!

Example of Good Menu Structure

Amy’s website is so easy to use and follow. Amy has clearly thought about the pathway her end-user will follow. Amy has a simple and clean menu structure, no obscure names or complicated dropdowns.

5:2 Direction: Buttons and Calls To Action (CTAs)

Use colourful buttons and clear Calls To Action or CTAs. Make sure your CTAs are prominent and enticing and include them in the body of your content as well. If you’re going to ask your readers for their email address in exchange for some in-depth content, for example, the best time to ask them is while they’re consuming your content.

But also use language and tone of voice that helps you direct people to where you want them to go in a non-intrusive way. Use words like ‘get’ and ‘grab’, for example, when you’re asking people to download a free resource. Or ‘click here’ to help hop onto the next page on your website.

Example of Good Buttons and Calls to Action (CTAs)

Ann Handley makes it really clear what you need to here. There are four clear pathways to her services, each with a bold-coloured button to click. This may seem obvious, but it’s amazing how many websites get this wrong!

5.3 Direction: Promo Area on Your Homepage

The ‘promo area’ of your homepage is usually under the big hero section. It features 3 or 4 different options for your end-user to choose. This could be your services, blog, about page etc. You’re the best person to decide what goes here, but it’s a great way of directing people from your home page to the next page.

As we’ve said before, think of your home page as the ‘reception area’ of your website. People will visit the home page looking for more info about your services, your blog, your contact page – and your job is to direct people there.

Example of a Good Promo Area

When we worked with Janet Murray, she did a great job of streamlining what she offered and coming up with three key areas for her audience to visit on her website. We created this within the promo area. It creates a clear path of where to go.

5.4 Direction: A Learning Centre 

For those with a lot of content or content on different formats – such as blog posts, video and a podcast, a learning centre can prove helpful to your visitor. Instead of trailing through all of your content or only seeing your most recent content, a learning centre allows you to search through content easily. You can break down content via the format, the topic, the date published, your most popular pieces etc.

We wrote a more in-depth article about how to create a learning centre here.

Example of a Good Learning Centre

Pete at Meaningful Money has had over a million downloads of his podcast which has spanned over 14 seasons! He really did need a learning centre for the amount of amazing content he produces. Now, it’s much easier for his readers to find what they are looking for.

5.5 Direction: Contact information

And last (but certainly not least!) have visible contact information for your business. If you rely on people getting in touch with you over the phone, have your phone number at the top of the page and a button that says, ‘Get in touch with us’. Make sure it’s mobile friendly too, so people can just click on the number and call you straight from mobile.

Would you like some help to build your own personal brand website? 

So this is our B.R.A.N.D. website framework. We use religiously to build personal brand websites for our clients. But we also share this framework inside our signature membership, Make Your Mark Online, where we help personal brands build and grow a successful business website. All the videos in our membership library are based on these 5 key components. And this framework can work for any website, not just personal brands.

So if you want to find out more about each individual area of the B.R.A.N.D. framework and understand how it can apply to you, check out our membership community. The doors are currently open, and it’s been amazing to see so many of our members get great results with their websites since they joined in October last year.

If you enjoyed this post, you can also listen to our podcast episode How to create the Perfect Personal Brand Website (ep 30).

Martin & Lyndsay

The post The Ultimate Guide to Creating a Personal Brand Website (with examples) appeared first on Content Marketing & SEO Agency | Get More Sales From Your Website.

What’s a Learning Centre?

Have you ever come across a Learning Centre on someone’s website? Maybe, just like on our website, you may have spotted a menu item called ‘Learn‘.

The term Learning Centre is something we originally picked up from Marcus Sheridan, author of They Ask You Answer. Since then, we’ve not only built one on our website, but we’ve created Learning Centres for our clients too.

First thing first, what’s a Learning Centre?

With the information all in one place, it becomes really easy for your website visitors to find your content and consume it in the way they prefer. Literally, at the click of a button.

If you regularly create any type of content (be it blog posts, podcast episodes, videos, PDFs, etc.), you’ll need a Learning Centre.

Problems with a Blog

A website blog in the traditional sense is a page on your website that houses all of your written content. It’s a fantastic way for you to generate traffic to your site and show your visitors how knowledgeable you are. However, when it comes to accessibility and relevancy of content, a website blog poses a few problems.

1. Your latest piece of content isn’t always relevant to your website visitors

If someone lands on your website today and clicks on your blog, they might see a blog post about a topic that’s relevant and interesting to them. But someone else who happens to find your website on the same day might feel that your latest article isn’t helpful.

And what do you think they’re going to do when that happens?

Click away.

Sadly, they’ll never find out that only a few weeks prior you had published something that was exactly what they were after!

Because of the way a blog is set up, you (the business owner) cannot pick and choose what type of content is displayed when you want it to. Different visitors may want different information from your website. And because your website blog displays your content in reverse chronological order, it may not always be easy for your readers to find posts that are relevant to them.

2. People don’t like clicking through lots of pages

As much as we’d like to think that our website visitors will click onto the next available page of our blog until they find what they’re looking for, the reality is that not many people will do that.

Think about it. When you’re online, do you ever click on the second or third page of the Google search results?

Probably not.

And if people don’t take the time to wade through pages of content when it comes to Google, are they likely to do that on your website? Chances are they might miss that epic piece of content that you took weeks to create and is now collecting dust on the fourth page of your blog, where no one will see it.

3. Older posts don’t tend to perform as well

People presume that older posts are less accurate. This is something that’s been shown over and over again. When you type something into Google and see results from 2014, you’re not likely to click on them. Not if you have the option to access something that was produced later.

You may have content on your blog that’s evergreen and still relevant. But people will just assume that because it’s older it’s not as accurate. And they will skip through that.

4. You can’t showcase your best content

The other problem you have with a blog is that it doesn’t allow you to showcase your best content.

We know what our best content is. And we also know what content drives people to get in touch with us. But with a typical website blog that displays your content in reverse chronological order, your prospective customers and clients aren’t able to access your best content unless you organise it differently.

And this is where a Learning Centre would come in handy and solve all of these issues.

Should a Learning Centre replace your blog?

We’ve given you so many reasons why a blog in the traditional sense doesn’t do your content much justice, that you’re now probably thinking you should swap out menu items and have a Learning Centre instead of a blog.

No, you shouldn’t.

Please keep your blog.

Do not get rid of your blog under any circumstances.

And here’s why.

Yes, a blog might display your content in reverse chronological order, but people still access content via your blog because a blog is what they know. A Learning Centre, on the other hand, is still a new concept to a lot of people. If you swap your blog out for something that a lot of your visitors haven’t heard of before, you may not get as many clicks on your content. And you don’t want that.

So keep your blog in the main menu item, and then find a place to put a Learning Centre page as well. If you don’t want to call it Learning Centre, ‘Learning Zone‘, ‘Learn‘, or ‘Information Centre‘ are also good alternatives. Whatever you want to call it, as long as you use it as a way for your visitors to access your content in a nice, easy-to-use way, you’ve got one.

To give you an idea of how we encourage our visitors to use our Learning Centre on our website, have a look at our Home Page. As you scroll down it says ‘Visit our Learning Centre’, and it links to our blog, our videos, and our articles.

How do you create your own Learning Centre?

The answer will be slightly different according to what it is that you do. The Learning Centre page for an e-commerce shop will be different from a service provider’s, for example.

But all learning centre’s should be:

• User-friendly
• Give people content in a way they like to consume it.
• Easy for people to filter through your content.

You can create a learning centre based on what your target audience needs and what you offer, but here are some examples of what you can include.

1. The search field

This is the single most important element of a Learning Centre. A search field is a place where your readers can type in a word or a phrase to find out more information about a specific topic.

When your readers search for something in this field, they’ll be returned with all the relevant pieces of content that relate to that topic. This doesn’t just include blog posts. If you have podcast episodes or video content on your website, this can be displayed as well.

From a design point of view, your search field is the biggest part of your Learning Centre. It’s right there at the top of the page, or ‘above the fold’ as we say. You don’t want people to miss it.

Plus, it’s a great handy feature for you as the business owner. We use it all the time to quickly find our own content and signpost people to it!

Example of a Learning Centre search field

We can’t talk about a learning centre without, of course, talking about Marcus Sheridan. On his company website, River Pools, he provides the reader with everything they’ll need to make an informed buying decision when buying a pool. For people to search through all his content (and there’s a lot of it), River Pools provides an easy search field. You can even use it to filter down by resource or topic.

2. Links to popular topics

Another element you want to include in your Learning Centre page are links to popular topics.

Let’s say someone is browsing your website, but they don’t yet know what you do and how you help people. Sure, you have a search field at the top of the page, but at this stage, they’re not entirely sure what they should be searching for.

So how can you help your users?

You can help by giving them some prompts.

And you do that through the links to popular content you provide.

Example of links to popular topics on a Learning Centre

This is a great example of a learning centre for an ecommerce website by Picture Frames Express.

They break down their learning centre by particular topics, which the customer or potential customer can easily sift through. It’s all their helpful information in one place.

3. The ‘Most Common Questions’ section

This is the bit where you answer the questions that people ask you on a regular basis. Having some of the answers on this page means that when someone decides to get in touch with you, they’re already familiar with the way you work. It’s a bit like the self-serve checkout! It’s great for your users, and it saves you time.

If you don’t yet have a lot of content on your website, consider using an FAQ plugin or an accordion-type setup to display your most common questions. That way, when a reader clicks on the question, the website just shows them the answer with a couple of lines of text.

Example of ‘Most Common Questions’ on a Learning Centre

Rachel from All Things Inc has over 1250 blog posts teaching people all about internal communications. Rachel joined our membership community, Make Your Mark Online, and made use of our free, plugin, learning centre template. We LOVE what she’s done. Especially the section ‘Most Common Questions’. She answers each question on this section with a link to an in-depth article. Really helpful stuff.

Example of ‘Most Common Questions’ on a Learning Centre

Another great example of this is from Debbie Ekins who produces amazing content for Eagle Leisure, a hot tub and spa supplier. Eagle Leisure answer their readers’ most common questions with links to blog posts and videos – an amazing way of delivering excellent customer service.

4. Give people access to the different types of content you provide

Do you offer content in a variety of different formats? For example, do you share articles on your blog but also have a podcast or a series of videos? Then give people the choice to consume your content in whichever way they prefer.

The worst thing you can do on your website is to just show the content in one format (or in the format that you prefer) because that may not be the way some of your prospective customers or clients like to consume it. Some people prefer video. Others prefer reading. And vice versa.

Example of ‘Most Common Questions’ on a Learning Centre

On our website, we offer our readers the opportunity to consume our content in different ways. Now, this sounds like a lot of work, but we actually repurpose a lot of our content into different formats. For example, this blog post was previously a podcast episode!

5. Include links to recent content

Another element you might want to include on your learning Centre page is recent content. So, for example, you could include links to your three most recent posts, podcast episodes, or videos.

This isn’t always necessary, especially if you already have a lot of content. But if you’re still building your content library, this is definitely a nice-to-have.

Example of ‘Most Recent Content’ on a Learning Centre

We loved designing Superfast IT’s website. They provide IT support to business and have so much helpful content on their website. They list their most recent blog articles on their learning centre, encouraging people to click through.

Reading resources

This is a section where you can add any guides, tools, or resources you want people to be able to access. So if you have any free giveaways, this is the place to showcase them on your website. Otherwise, your visitors might miss them. This is a great opportunity for you to add value to your readers but also potentially build your email list.

Example of ‘Free Resources’ on a Learning Centre

We love Yva’s learning centre over at Content Boost. Yva uses her reading resources as lead capture tools on her learning centre page. The design is fab, and it’s really easy to access them all in one place.

Your Best Resources

By selecting your best resources, you’re directing your reader to your best converting content. This could be more information about how you work or a particular product. Of course, it’s got to be helpful, but it’s a good idea to highlight these pieces of content.

Sara also joined our membership community, and made use of our free, plugin, learning centre template. We love how she’s highlighted her best resources here. Her blog post series, advising people how to batch write their blog posts, is so helpful! But she’s also featured information about why you should hire Sara, and more about podcast repurposing (a service Sara offers). This is a smart way of offering helpful content that also sells you at the same time.

Would you like a FREE Learning Centre template?

As most of you know, we run a monthly membership called Make Your Mark Online (or MYMO for short). This is our signature membership community where we help personal brands build and grow a successful business website.

Recently, we’ve done something really special for our members. We built them a Learning Centre template free of charge that they can just plug into their website and customise to match their branding and preferences. It literally takes two minutes to do this. And of course, we have a video inside our membership walking our members through how to set it all up, step-by-step.

If you’re interested in becoming a member, the doors for the membership are currently open! It’s been amazing to see so many of our members get great results with their websites since they joined in October last year. So if you want to find out more, check out our membership, and we’ll see you on the inside!

Over to you

Have you ever heard of a learning centre before? Is this something you’ll consider doing now? We’d love to know your thoughts!

Martin & Lyndsay

The post What is a Learning Centre and why do you need one on your website? appeared first on Content Marketing & SEO Agency | Get More Sales From Your Website.

Every year pretty much every business owner sets themselves new goals, new targets to hit and areas to expand or grow.

But often, we don’t set ourselves any goals for our website.

Our businesses are growing and changing, yet our websites remain static.

This is a huge mistake.

Having no goals for your website means the part of your business that’s viewable to the world is out of date and inefficient.

In this podcast episode, I talk about goal setting for your website and how to measure website success. This includes measuring and improving…

– Web visitors
– Page views
– Bounce rate
– Number of enquiries
– Rankings
– Conversions on sales pages
– Email subscribers

Resources

Make Your Mark Online Membership 

Facebook Group

Martin Huntbach

Web designer & marketer for small businesses. Martin is an experienced search engine and web design specialist, with over a decade of experience working with large corporations to small businesses.

jammydigital.com

The post Ep 26 – New Year’s Resolutions for Your Website appeared first on Content Marketing & SEO Agency | Get More Sales From Your Website.

Every year we hear the same thing from business owners and personal brands:

‘This year, I’m going to sort my website.’

But then clients and customers come first and the sliver of time you do have to work on your website is taken up by procrastination.

What’s my colour scheme? 
What should I write on my homepage? 
How do I do this bloody techie thing! 

If this sounds like you, you are not alone! We see business owners vow each year to sort their websites only to go into the next year with the exact same one.

You know your website is important. You know that you can’t continue with the website you’ve got and that #WebsiteShame is holding your business back.

So 2019 is the time to get it sorted! 

In this four-part series, we’ll be outlining the four key pillars to website success so you can get your website live ASAP in 2019.

In this final episode, we’re talking about how you can create content that converts your readers into paying customers.

In this episode, we’ll cover…

– How to plan your website content
– What to consider for your homepage content
– What you should include in your content
– How many words you should include
– What to include on your about page
– What to include on your services pages
– Mistakes you want to avoid

Resources

Make Your Mark Online Membership 

Facebook Group

Worksheet Website Content

Transcript

Welcome to Make Your Mark Online podcast, where we help personal brands build and grow a successful business website. Please welcome your hosts, husband and wife team, Martin and Lyndsay.

Welcome to episode 25 of the Make Your Mark Online podcast. This actually episode four of four in this little mini-series. As you know, 2018 is now over and 2019 is here. Part of what we’re trying to do with this podcast and with the Facebook group and the membership as well, is to help as many people as possible create a highly successful website. The problem is, is that quite often you’re just not sure where to start, especially if you’re doing it yourself, and especially if you’re trying to redesign your website from scratch. It feels like a little mountain to climb. This is why throughout this little mini-series, we’re helping you plan your new website.

We’re going to be focusing on four key activities that will help you get your website live quicker so that you can get 2019 off to the best possible start because seriously, we want you to make your mark online in 2019 and stop fluffing around and putting off the website stuff because it will be holding you back. So let’s do this together.

Now this podcast is sponsored by the Make Your Mark Online Membership. This is our signature membership community where we help personal brands build and grow a successful business website. Now the doors for the membership are currently closed but we will be opening them again later on this month, but get your name in there. Join the wait list at makeyourmarkonline.net and we’ll notify you as soon as the doors open.

Now before we get into the show, we have a little announcement to make. As you know, Lyndsay went off on maternity leave last month getting everything ready for our brand new little boy who was due to arrive on the 22nd of December. On the 21st of December he decided to make an appearance a day early. He’s called Lucas Michael Huntbach and we’re so happy that he is nice and healthy and so is Lyndsay as well, and they’re both doing really well. As you might expect, he’s got us wrapped around his tiny little fingers, but we’re loving every second of it. I’m sure you’ll be hearing his cries in the background on this podcast and I’m sure he’ll be making a few Facebook Live appearances in the Facebook group as well so be sure to check that out.

Like I said, I’m going to be covering the podcast for the next few months while Lyndsay’s on mat leave and then we’ll see how things go and then potentially in season three, she will be coming back and maybe even Lucas as well. Who knows? So something to look forward to. But thank you so much for all of your kind messages and support in the Facebook group and privately as well. We’ve even had some of our listeners send us gifts as well which is so amazing. We’ve never received so much handwritten notes and postcards and chocolates and even little baby presents which is fantastic, so I really appreciate that.

So let’s get into the show.

So in the past three episodes we’ve discussed three major elements that will help you get started with your website. First of all, it was understanding your goals for the website and then it was how to structure your website based on those goals, and then it was what to do when you start to think about design. We gave you three different things that you can do to make your design planning easier.

In this episode, the final episode of the mini-series, we’re going to be helping you plan your content. So what content will you need to have in order to launch your new website? I’ll be honest. We review a lot of websites. We do it in our Facebook group. We also have lots of people pay us privately as well for our website critiques. One of the major issues is that there’s a real lack of content. Most of the websites that we review need to improve their content. We’re not talking about blog content necessarily. I’m talking about content for your main pages.

Quite often the mistake that people make is there’s just not enough content there in general on the different pages and it’s quite vague and broad. What we want you to do is to go a little bit more specific and actually talk about the questions that people might have and actually go into a little bit more detail for the specific services.

We said this in the past couple of episodes as well is that on some websites, when they talk about, “We’ve got all of these services. You can hire us for this or this or this,” but they don’t go into the details of what’s included. They just say, “These are our list of services. Please get in touch.” It’s not really enough.

That’s why it’s so important that we dedicate a full episode to this topic, which is plan your content and have some rules to follow so you can make sure that when somebody does land on your website that they are potentially going to fill out an inquiry form or get in touch or give you a call or at least join your email list, for instance. That’s what we’re going to be going through in this episode.

Now in episode two of this mini-series, which was two episodes ago, we actually spoke about the structure: the structure of your homepage, the structure of your website, as in what pages you’re going to have and how many pages. You should have a list of pages that you need to produce content for, so that’s a good place to start in regards to planning out the content for those pages. But we’re going to go through a few of those in this episode anyway.

So let’s start with the homepage. This is an extremely important page and quite often it’s the most highly trafficked page. It should act like a little bit of a reception area. It should be when someone gets to your homepage and they are directed to the next pages that they’re supposed to go to or that are most relevant. So it’s really, really important that you get this right, the language that you use, the content, the wording, everything really. It has a job to do. It has a role to play and it’s very important that you take your time to plan this page.

Everything from your big bold statement, supporting statement: what content are you going to have for this? Things like the buttons. Are you going to say, “Find out more.” Are you going to go to, “Click here,” or “Check them out”? You can use some quite interesting language with your buttons, so this is your opportunity really to get a blank piece of paper out, actually plan out what kind of content that you’re going to have and spend some time on mapping that out. What’s it going to look like? Have you got any text on your homepage? What’s that going to sound like?

Quite often we find that the mistake a lot of people make with the homepage is they don’t have any content whatsoever, or on the flip side, they go into a little bit more detail than they need to. So for instance, we see this a lot with the promo area, or the promotional area where you’ve got your three key services or your four key services. Quite often we see people go into a little bit detail than they need to on these ones, whereas generally you only need a line or two to convince somebody to find out more, to click on a button. So that’s something that we see a lot of.

You might just need to ask somebody a question on those things, but you do need to plan out what that question is going to be. You do need to plan out what your big, bold statement is going to be. Is it going to be a power statement? Is it going to be a question? Is it going to be a guarantee? We spoke a lot about this earlier on in the podcast, I think it was episode nine. We’ll link to it in the show notes. But it’s definitely one of those key messages that you need to get across on your website and we gave you nine ways to come up with a big, bold statement.

Again, everything on your website is an opportunity for you to build up more trust, come across as more relevant. You can even position yourself as an authority with the language that you use on your website. You can make yourself stand out from your competitors. If you’re the kind of business that swears in your content, then fine, let that be your differentiator as long as it’s authentic. You can obviously use the language and the content on your website to help direct people to where they’re supposed to go. But you need to do something and you need to plan it out. It’s not enough to just copy what other people do because you’re not going to stand out and that’s not going to position your services differently from your competitors. This is why it’s so important to plan out your homepage and the other pages as well.

So what other content might you have on your homepage? You might have a section of text. You may have to come up with maybe 100 words for a little section of text that you’ve got on your website template that’s something that you need to fill out. This might be something like, “You may have struggled to find somebody who can edit your book or who can design your logo and we can help.” You’re actually talking about the problems that people are facing. You’re automatically tackling the questions that somebody might have. You’re not just saying, “We’ve been in business for all these years. We’re amazing. We’ve won loads of awards.” You’re actually talking the problems and concerns that somebody might have in the hopes that they’ll stick around longer and then click on that “Find out more” button or they’ll subscribe to your email list.

That leads us on nicely to that content. What’s that going to look like? Is it a question? Is it a concern? Are you talking about the pain points or are you talking about something exciting that you want somebody to get from your website? Do they need to fill out their email website? This is your opportunity to put it all down on paper. This is why this episode is so important because you know what goals that you’ve got for your visitors and for your website. You know what pages you’re going to have and obviously in the previous episode we talked about design, which will bring it all together as well.

Now this is the content that’s going to really get people on your side. The content has the power and the words that you use have such a force that can help people buy from you a lot quicker. That’s why people pay so much money for content writers. It’s just so important. Even if you’re hiring a content writer or a copywriter and a technical writer, whoever it is that you go to, ideally you still need to plan it out and that’s why this episode is so important. So think about all of the places on your homepage that you’re going to need to create content for and then use this time to map that out. What does it look like on your template? Did you find a theme that you like the look of? How many sections of text does it have? What would you put in those sections of text?

Actually get the demo of a theme in front of you and then mark out all of the words, where they are, and then what you would replace them with. It’s really important that you do this, especially for the homepage. And remember, you shouldn’t really need to do any selling on your homepage. It’s all about convincing people to stay on your website for longer, click through to another page and then you can go into the content a little bit deeper. Then you can educate them on the individual pages.

Nobody goes to your homepage and decides, “Oh, this is the person for me,” the first time they land on your website. “I’m going to ring this person or get in touch and give them loads of money.” People visit your homepage to make sure they’re in the right place, to allow you to build up a little bit more trust and to allow people see you as more noteworthy. Then they’ll go into a little bit more detail and then they get in touch and then they might join your email list and then they might buy from you. So it doesn’t all happen from the homepage which is why you don’t need a lot of content on there, but the content you do have is extremely important to get people through to the service pages which we spoke about in the past. They’re very important pages. These are the pages that will help people buy from you.

Chances are you’re going to need to have an “about” page. Most websites have them. They are very important pages. We’ve never built a website without an “about” page and whenever somebody says, “Do we really need one,” we always say, “Yes, yes, yes. You do.” It’s really important that you have an “about” page because people like to know a little bit more about who they’re working with. They don’t necessarily want to know about your background. They just want to know if you’re trustworthy.

That’s why so many people visit the “about” page. They want to know who you are, they want to know are you capable of helping them solve their problems. So be aware that it’s not all about you. A lot of people think it’s the page where you can actually just brain dump your previous work history onto a page in the hopes that people will sit there and read it with a cup of coffee. It doesn’t quite work like that. Yes people like to get to know you a little bit more and a little bit about your personality, but just a little bit. Easy enough.

The rest of the “about” page should be about what they are having an issue with. With us, it’s does your website make you feel like putting your head in the sand? Do you have website shame? Are you struggling? Have you hired web designers in the past and you’ve not gotten the website you wanted? Have you lost money before? These are the reasons that you want to work with us. That’s what is should be about really. It’s about the problems that your potential customers are facing and how you can help.

Quite often when we write an ‘about’ page, because we do occasionally write content for our clients, we write at the top rather than “about me” or “about us”, we actually reframe our minds by writing “about how we can help”. That just sort of flips that switch in our heads that allows us to create content that’s customer focused rather than business focused and that helps. We always have a little bit of information about the people behind the business which is definitely something you should have, but more than anything, as soon as someone gets on the “about” page it should be. “You’re probably struggling with this. This is why I can help. This is what I’ve done in the past and this is why you should care. This is how it relates to your problems and your business. Get in touch.”

Again, that’s something else that you need to have. You need to have call to actions on your pages. Every page should have an action you want somebody to take. It should have a call to action. Your “about” page is no different. Every page is a sales page on your website, it’s just that you need to be tackling the problems that people are facing.

So an “about” page is very important. We have, I think, close to 800 or 1000 words on our “about” page because we have a lot of problems that crop up that people are talking to us about. “We hired this web designer. It didn’t work because of this. It didn’t work because of that.” We’ve just collated that information and put it on our “about” page. It doesn’t look like there’s a lot of text on there, but there is actually quite a lot and it allows people to get to know us a little bit more, but it also allows people to get to know our processes and a little bit more about what they’re going to get when they work with us. So an “about” page is really important. Take the time to plan out the content for this page. Take a look at our website if you need some guidance as well and what we’ve done, but it is very important.

Next we have the service pages. This is where it gets really interesting actually because when we talk about content, we talk about website content, quite often people think about blog posts and writing really in-depth blog posts. Get lots of traffic to your website and then the money will start rolling in. But we’ve actually found that service pages are the ones that generate the sales and the inquiries. You might get lots of traffic via these big long form blog posts and in fact you do want to do those. We definitely do them as well to draw in the traffic and draw in the numbers, but to actually get somebody over the finish line, to actually get somebody to fill out that inquiry form or get in touch, the service pages are absolutely vital.

It’s very important that you have a page for each dedicated service. If you offer all these different services, you need a page for each individual thing. You don’t just want to have a vague broad statement that says, “We offer these services and we are great at delivering service. The customer service is fantastic. Read our testimonials.” What you want is you want to split your services into individual pages.

You want to write at least 500 words plus if you can. Our service pages are probably again, close to 800 or 1000 word mark because each individual service is different. You’re not going to speak to every single person the same way which is why you need to talk about the individual services, the problems that people faced in the past with these services, and why you’re different.

Show a little empathy. Show people that you care about their individual problems. When you don’t have an individual service page for everything, what you’re essentially saying is, “These are the services I offer. I’m not really going to tell you anything about them, but I want you to give me your money anyway and then we can talk about them.” It comes across a little bit arrogant and maybe a little bit lazy sometimes when we see this. That’s why it’s so important.

People have questions. People are doing more research than they ever have done before. That’s why it’s so important that you go into detail about the services. Don’t be afraid to talk about the processes. You can even talk about pricing if you’re really brave, which is a good thing. That’s what we like to do. But you absolutely need to be talking to that person who is looking for that key service. It’s just not going to work anymore by having 300 words on a service page that just lists your products and services. It’s definitely not going to work. It’s not going to allow me to learn more about how you are different from your competitors and why I should work with you as opposed to them.

This is quite often what we see a lot of websites do when we’re reviewing them. So go deeper into that service, specific problems that your customers are facing, what questions would prospects have before working with you. These are the kinds of things you need to be talking about on the service page. Are you addressing these? Don’t just talk about you’re here, people talk about features and benefits and getting a little bit more clinical about it here. But a lot of websites we see that do go into a bit more detail, they tend to focus on the kind of benefits all through the content, so, “You’re going to feel better. You’re going to live a happier, healthier life. It’s going to be incredible.” They avoid talking about the specifics of the service as well.

So don’t forget about that. Don’t just get your copywriter head on and just talk about benefits, benefits, benefits. You do need to give some information away as to what somebody’s actually going to get when they pay you that money. We were reviewing a website not long ago and for the life of me, I couldn’t work out what I was actually buying because they just kept saying, “You’re going to get more clients. You’re going to get more sales. It’s going to be amazing.” It’s like, yeah, but what am I actually getting? What is the tangible thing that I’m going to get when I give you this money? What am I getting back? I don’t just want this kind of dream life that you’re trying to sell me. I want to know the specific things that I’m going to get.

That’s why people care about specifications of cameras and TVs. When you’re buying things you want to know the specifics sometimes. It’s okay to know that you’re going to feel great after it and it’s going to be amazing and you’re going to live a happier life, but you still need the benefits and the features as well. They go in tangent. So don’t just focus on selling the big dream at the end of it. You do need to give people some key information and that’s why service pages are so important.

A few other things to be aware of: make sure that the content sounds like you as well. Would it be the kind of thing that you would say if you were sat with a client and they were asking you questions and you were answering them? Or does it sound like you’re putting on a little bit of a writer’s mask? You don’t want that to stop you from sounding like yourself. You want to be authentic. So ask yourself, does this sound like me? Write out the content for the pages, give it to a friend or family and say, “Does this sound like I wrote it?” If it does, then great. Keep doing it. But if not, you may want to revisit it because at the end of the day, people want to know that they’re getting to work with you.

If they speak with you on the phone or meet you face to face and they read your website, if it all sounds like the same thing, then fantastic. Nobody’s going to get any surprises when they pick up the phone and they start working with you and they start talking to you. They’re like, “This doesn’t sound like the person on the website at all.” That can be a good thing or a bad thing, but it’s best to keep everything consistent.

Another thing, avoid the fluff and get to the point quickly. What do you want people to understand? People’s attention span isn’t as good as it used to be, especially on the internet, which is why you need to get to the point quickly. So say what you want to say and say it quickly, but obviously be authentic as well.

So there’s a few tips there, but like I say, if you need any additional help with the service pages, then feel free to check out ours. Share a link to a Google doc perhaps in the Facebook group and we can help you with that as well.

Other pages you might need: contact pages. There’s not generally a lot of content on a contact page. It’s best to get straight to the point. If somebody clicks on the contact page, generally they want to get in touch. But just be aware that when you do have content, make sure it’s authentic and make sure that you’re giving people clear direction. Just accept that people don’t want to be messed about. They want quick answers, quick communication and you want to make it easy for people to buy from you as well.

So use regular language. When you’re labeling your menu items, don’t use fancy words for your blog. Don’t use the “journal” or “our thoughts”. Get to the point. It’s a blog. It’s an “about” page. It’s your service pages. Try to not have anybody think too much when they get to your website. It’s really important.

So again, use this time to plan out the different core pages on your website: what you’re going to talk about, what do you need to sell, remember your goals, remember your structure and how this content is going to fit into all of that as well. It’s really, really important. I felt it was especially important to have a dedicated episode to this.

Again, there’s lots of other podcasts that we’ve done, lots of other episodes that we’ve done that break into these different sections in more detail, but this is your opportunity to plan it out before you touch your website. Before you actually start building anything it’s best to get an idea of what content you’re going to have on the different pages and take a few hours at this stage to plan what content is going to go on those pages. If you’re not writing it, then write down bullet points based on what we’ve gone through in this episode and then give it a content writer. There’s plenty of content writers in our Facebook group. If you’re struggling, then we can give you … We can tag a few people in there and you can reach out to them yourselves.

This is just so important that you’ve got this right. Far too many times we have people launch their website and they’ve not got anywhere near enough content and then they come to us and they struggle because it’s not working. They’re not getting the visitors. They’re not getting the conversions, and quite often this is one of the reasons which is why it’s so important.

So that concludes our four part mini-series on planning your website for 2019. Just by using these four key principles you can dramatically speed up the process of getting your website live sooner.

So I hope you enjoyed it and please let me know if you’ve got any questions at all. I hope to hear from you in the new year to find out what you’ve been getting on with following these episodes. Like I said, ask if you have questions at all. If you do need some support with this, some guidance, and you just need a helpful community to help you get your website live quicker, then check out the membership. Check out the website at makeyourmarkonline.net and join the wait list. As I mentioned, we will be opening the doors later this month, so make sure you’ve got your name down.

So I hope you found that episode useful. Let me know how you get on with exercise and don’t forget to download the worksheets to help you with this as well. If you didn’t already know, we have a free Facebook group. We’d love you to join. If you head over the jammydigital.com/facebook. We try to do regular training. We do website critiques every week. We’d love to help you get better results with your website as well.

So that’s it for today’s episode. I wish you a happy new year and we can’t wait to help you get massive results with your website. We’ll see you next time on the Make Your Mark Online Podcast.

Martin Huntbach

Web designer & marketer for small businesses. Martin is an experienced search engine and web design specialist, with over a decade of experience working with large corporations to small businesses.

jammydigital.com

The post Ep 25 – Planning Your New Website Part 4 of 4- Website Content appeared first on Content Marketing & SEO Agency | Get More Sales From Your Website.

Every year we hear the same thing from business owners and personal brands:

‘This year, I’m going to sort my website.’

But then clients and customers come first and the sliver of time you do have to work on your website is taken up by procrastination.

What’s my colour scheme? 
What should I write on my homepage? 
How do I do this bloody techie thing! 

If this sounds like you, you are not alone! We see business owners vow each year to sort their websites only to go into the next year with the exact same one.

You know your website is important. You know that you can’t continue with the website you’ve got and that #WebsiteShame is holding your business back.

So 2019 is the time to get it sorted! 

In this four-part series, we’ll be outlining the four key pillars to website success so you can get your website live ASAP in 2019.

In this third episode, we’re talking about 3 key design elements that will dramatically improve your website.

In this episode we’ll cover…

Website Photographs/ Imagery
Your Colour theme
Website Themes

In this episode, we’ll cover…

• • Should you use photographs or stock images?
  • Where to find ideas for your colour theme?
  • How to find great themes and what to avoid?

Resources

Make Your Mark Online Membership 

Facebook Group

Deposit Photos

Shutterstock

123rf

Coolers

Picular

Dribble – Colours

Worksheet

Transcript!

Welcome to the Make Your Mark Online podcast, where we help personal brands build and grow a successful business website. Please welcome your host, husband and wife team Martin and Lindsay.

Welcome to episode 24 of the Make Your Mark Online podcast. This is actually episode three of four in this little December mini-series. Now, as you know, 2018 is nearly done, and 2019 is right around the corner. And part of what we’re trying to do with this podcast, and with the Facebook group and also the membership as well, is to help as many people as possible create a highly successful website. The problem is that, quite often, you’re just not sure where to start, especially if you’re trying to redesign your website from scratch, and it feels like you’ve got a mountain to climb. And this is why, throughout December, we’re helping you plan your new website. We’re going to be focusing on four key activities that will help you plan your website, and getting it live quicker, so that you can feel better about getting your head into it and actually starting to look at the tools and the tech behind it.

Before you do any of that, we’re going to go through the four important elements that you need to do before you get to that stage. Because seriously, we want you to make your mark online in 2019 and stop faffing around and putting the website stuff off, because I know it’s holding you back, okay? So let’s do this together.

Now before we get into the show, this podcast is sponsored by the Make Your Mark Online membership. This is our signature membership community, where we help personal brands build and grow a successful business website. The doors for the membership are currently closed, but you can check out the details at MakeYourMarkOnline.net, and you can actually joint he wait list, and we’ll let you know as soon as we open the doors again in January. So let’s get into the show.

So in the last two episodes, we’ve discussed two of the major elements that will help you get started with your new website. First of all, it was understanding your goals for the website, and then it was how to structure your website based on these goals. How to structure the pages, how to structure the home page. Both of these episodes are really, really important. They both come with worksheets, as well, so feel free to head over to those episodes and then download the resources.

In this episode, we’re going to be talking about design. The fun stuff. Although I would say, if you haven’t listened to those episodes, do those first. This might be the fun one, but those two are very necessary, because you have your goals, you have your key services identified, you have the map for your new website, and now, you need to know how it’s all going to be pulled together in terms of the design, so that we can make it look nice and professional.

Okay. So what I’ve done with this episode is I really had to think about the three most important elements that will impact your design, or the design of your new website. And these three sections are photography, and the imagery on your website; the colours, which is kind of the branding and the style; and then thirdly, the theme. Now these three elements, if you break them down, and you just do these three things … there’s plenty more you can do. You can talk about fonts, and you can talk about all that, but these three elements, from experience, are probably the best ones to get started with, because the majority of the website will be taken up by one or more of these three things. These three items are going to help you plan your website and get it live quicker, and yeah, we’re going to go through those now.

Okay, so the imagery on your website. Should you use photographs? Should you get stock images? Should you use vectors or animation on your website? This is such an important element that I don’t think I could ever stress it enough. You can clearly see some websites have not been designed by a professional. Some of them scream, “I have just been down by the designer, or the actual, the business owner.” And photography and photographs and images is the quickest way for you to show people that you have not invested in your website, because it’s just so important. Once someone lands on your website, what are they going to think? What are they going to feel? And chances are, they’re going to immediately see some imagery on your website, and it’s really important that you have a strategy behind it, otherwise it may potentially look like it’s kind of been Frankensteined together, bits and pieces added at different times, and you don’t want people to be on your website and not feel like they’re in the right place. You want people to feel welcome. You want people to feel at home on your website. And you don’t want to put people off, because it’s the easiest thing for people to spot whether or not you’ve invested or you haven’t.

And that doesn’t necessarily mean you need to invest. It means you need to have an system and a structure. And yeah, we actually did an episode a few weeks ago now about photography for your website, so we’ll leave a link to that in the show notes. But this is kind of a quick start guide, really, in regards to photography for your website and the images. They can either make or break a website. I think I mentioned that. And like I said, I can’t stress this enough. It is one of the most important elements. So, yeah.

Now should you use photography or photographs of yourself? You know, the higher that you’ve got somebody to take for you, or should you use stock images? So this is something that you’ll be able to tell me based on your budget, based on how much you’ve got to invest. Or whether or not you know someone who can kind of get to take photos of you. But more that anything, if you’re a personal brand, you’re going to have to have a picture of yourself on your website somewhere. It just so happens that on most personal brand websites, the halo section, the big home page image that you see as soon as you land on a website, usually has an image of the person who’s running the business. You know, the coach, the consultant, the speaker, the author, the business adviser. Whoever it is, whoever you are, and whatever you do, if you’re a personal brand, generally speaking you would have a picture of yourself there.

That being said, quite often I stumble across some websites where they have a picture of themselves, but clearly they’ve taken it themselves, on kind of like a smart phone. Maybe they’ve cut out the background, and it looks a little bit amateurish. So, just because you’re including an image of yourself doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s going to come across as professional. And when I say professional, I just mean it’s got a certain level of quality. You know, we’ve all been on websites before where it looks as though the website’s been built by the person, and they kind of just cut out an image, it looks a bit awkward and strange. So at some point, you might want to think about hiring a professional photographer. We found it one of the best investments that we ever made, and it’s something that we’ll continue to invest in as time goes on. Yes, we have a really nice camera, and yes, I could potentially set the timer and take pictures myself, but I’m not a photographer. I stick in my lane, and I just do what we do best. I would not trust my own skills with, even though I’ve got a quite decent camera, I just wouldn’t trust myself to do photography myself. It would just look a lot better if I got somebody else to do it, a professional.

So just bear that in mind. That being said, there are some instances where you can’t use a picture of yourself. Maybe you’ve got a small team. Maybe you’re just not sure about it yet, and you just want to get the ball rolling. You want your website live, and maybe you’ll think about that later down the line. That’s fine.

If you do need to use stock images, we do have a few rules to follow, one of which is to keep it consistent. So if you do want to use a series of stock images throughout your website, then make sure you’re being consistent with the style of them. So, we’ve been on some websites in the pas where there are photographs on one page, and then on another page, they’ll have kind of cartoon images, or vectors, as they’re called. And this is kind of a bit awkward, really, because you want that consistency. You want people to not kind of land on every new page and it has a different kind of image theme, if that makes sense. So try to keep it consistent. If you are using photographs, generally stick to photographs. If you are using doodles or vector images or icons, then use them, as well.

There are some occasions where they work well together. You know, if you have been on any home pages, for instance, you may have noticed they’ve got a photograph of themselves, but they’ll still use a few icons around. That generally is okay. But I just want you to be aware of it. Be conscious of it when you’re buying stock images or downloading them.

And that leads us on to the next point, which is, invest a little bit of money. If you’re not spending £500 on a professional photographer, then you can at least spend 50 pence or a pound on an image every now and again. This is your website at the end of the day. If you’re not paying a web designer, then generally, you’ll have to provide the images yourself. And even if you are paying a web designer to build your website, generally speaking, you don’t want to leave the images to them if you don’t have to. You can provide them with some images that you like, and then let them decide which images they want to use. But you want to keep it consistent, and generally speaking, you might have to buy a few images. The main reason for that is if you use free stock images, other websites have used them, as well. Other business probably don’t want to invest in photography because it’s cheap and it’s easy to just download a free one. The problem is, I’ve stumbled across websites in the past that have a lot of similar images.

There’s this one image that just keeps, I just keep finding it on every website. It’s just kind of a standard office image with people talking, but it seems to be overly used. And that’s the risk that you have with stock images. The best thing that you can do is actually get a book, buy images. So if you go to DepositPhotos, for instance, or ShutterStock, or 123RF, then these three websites will allow you to buy packs of images. And at the end of the day, it’s a really thing for your website. You want it to look good, so try to keep it consistent. Try to spend a little bit of money on photographs if you can pay a professional photographer. But just be aware, it’s about making sure that your website looks good. That is important. We talk a lot about SEO, and we talk a lot about content, but the images on your website and the design is equally as important. So don’t skip this step. It is important.

And also get to know tools like Canva, you know, free online tools that you can actually use to edit the images. Sometimes, you need to create an image of a specific size. So get to use Canva, go on YouTube, learn a couple of tutorial videos, and actually just get used to some of these tools, because it’s going to help you further down the line.

You’ll also want to avoid any kind of clearly stock type images. You know the ones I’m talking about, with the big, cheesy grins, and the people with he thumbs-up. You know, those kind of images are clearly stock photos, and it’s best, if you can, to avoid them. Try to find ones that could potentially have been photographs, actually taken by a photographer who you’ve hired. Things like taking a picture of the desk with people’s hands if they’re signing things, if they’re drawing, if they’re sketching, if they’re educating, they’re teaching in a classroom, for instance, or a workshop. Then you can find lots of images of people in that kind of scenario.

Generally find if you zoom in, you’ll get nice little sections of images. You might not need to use all of the images. But you can play around with them. And like I say, you might need to get to know image editing tools like Canva. But hopefully, you got a few tips there in regards to images. Where possible, get a photographer. Get them to take photographs, and check out the episode that we did a few episodes ago about what to do when you’re planning your photo shoot for your website. We give you lots of extra tips away there, as well.

And finally on this one, don’t copy anybody. If you see an image style that you like, you may be tempted to coy their style. We get this quite a lot with our blog images. We spent quite a lot of time coming up with a style that we wanted, and we buy stock images. But people still try and copy what we do, because they like the style, which is nice and flattering, but we’re seeing an abundance of these blog posts being published now, where then everybody using similar sort of images, and sometimes it doesn’t come across very well, especially if you’ve tried to copy because you like the style, but we spend a lot of time editing those images so if somebody does copy, then it might not come across, it might not look as good as you expect. And that goes for you copying other people, as well. Just try to avoid it, and come up with your own style. It’s probably going to be better for you.

Now moving on to colours. colours is such an important topic, and that can, again, make or break your website. It can have such a big impact if you get it right, and it can have such a negative impact if you don’t spend any time on it, much like all of these things, really. Sometimes it’s about just learning a little bit, and then researching, and having a few tools and tips, but quite often, people get colours wrong. So I’ve got a few resources here that you’ll be able to use. Again, you don’t have to be a designer to use these tools. You just have to give yourself a better chance. If you’re planning your website, knowing what colours you want to use and the style, and kind of what those colours mean, is going to have a big, it’s going to play an important part, going to play an important role in the website and how it’s designed.

colours have a unique ability to make us feel a certain way. colours have various meanings. The colour red can mean danger, but it can also mean passionate. The colour blue can also feel cool and cold, but it can also make you feel relaxed. So there’s lots of different colours that, lots of different meanings for those colours. But, what’s important for you is that you find a colour scheme that represents your business, and what you want people to feel.

So, again, without kind of going to university and doing a degree in regards to colours, there is a kind of quick step guide that I’m going to give you now, and you may already have a colour scheme in mind, you may already have colours within your logo that you need to keep, and that’s completely fine. That’s going to make your life a lot easier. But generally, we like to have five colours to play with when it comes to building a new website. You know, the main kind of three colours that we use, and then a couple of extra ones that kind of, more middle of the road colours that are consistent with the rest of the website. But three kind of, or two or three main colours that add an overall brand elements. You may also need kind of this accent colour, like you’ll see people have a certain colour because they want the buttons to be a certain colour, maybe orange or green, that kind of thing, to add to the mix.

So yeah, you want kind of a nice colour scheme that complements. You want the colours to complement each other, but you also want a couple of stand-out colours. One specifically is important to highlight the areas of your website that you need to highlight. So a few different resources. If you don’t know what colour scheme you want go with, then you can actually use a website called Coolors. So we’ll even link to that in the show note as well, and you can actually browse a series of colours. You can browse through unlimited colour swatches, while you can actually lock in certain colours. You can lock in a few colours if you like a couple of them but you don’t like the others. Then you can mix and match, and you can find a colour scheme that’s going to work well for you. Again, this is nice, it’s a nice tool, because it’s free. If you go to Coolors.com, I think it is, you can actually just press the space bar, and they’ll just give you a new series of five colours, and like I say, you can lock some in. So you can just kind of spend ten minutes going through that, and get a few really nice ideas about colours that you like, five colours that you can imagine being on your website. So that’s a really, really good tool.

There’s also a tool called Peculiar, and again, I’ll leave a link to that in the show notes. This is where you can actually search for keywords, words like relaxing, words like winter, you know, general words like sunset, those kind of words that will give you a series of colours. So if you are a marketing guru, and you don’t want to be seen as kind of relaxing, and meditation kind of theme, then you would put a different kind of word in there. You would put hard work, or passionate, something that outlines who you are, and like I said, colours can help you in so many different ways. It can help differentiate you from your industry. Some people, if you are a health and wellness coach, for instance, you may see that there’s a series of websites out there that kind of use green and pastel colours, you know, relaxing colours like that, whereas you mIght be a health and wellness coach that wants to stand out in the industry. So this is an opportunity for you to type in words that you are associated with. So again, great little tool. It’s kind of the search engine for colours, and so have a play around with that, as well.

Another great tool for getting ideas is Dribbble. So Dribbble is a website that is great for inspiration. But if you go to the colours page, then you can actually type in specific colours that you like. You know, if you like a colour, if you have a colour in mind, like it’s in your logo, for instance, and you’d like to have that colour as well as finding other colours, then search Dribbble, and have a look at all of the websites out there that use a colour similar to that colour that you’d like. What you’ll notice is that as you scroll down the page, they’ll start introducing new colours, so you may find that if orange is your colour and you’ve got a certain tone, some of them might use blue, some of them might use another colour, and you can kind of get an idea based on inspiration from existing websites that are already using that colour.

And again, you don’t want to copy people, but it’s nice to get as many colour options as possible. But more that anything, find five colours that represent your business, and how you want people to feel, how you want people to think about you, and like I say, it’s extremely effective if you get your colour scheme right. People like to comment on our colour scheme quite a lot. They recognize it when they’re scrolling through Facebook, and they see a blog post that someone shared on LinkedIn. They can automatically recognize it as a Jammy Digital blog post. So, it’s great in so many ways, but these are a few tools that you can use.

If you don’t know anything about colours, then feel free to share a couple of colour swatches in the free Facebook group. That’s what it’s there for. If you are in the membership, naturally you can add a thread in there and ask us about that. But you’ve got a few tools there that you can use. Again, you don’t have to have gone to university to at least start the process of finding colours. As long as you’ve got a really nice scheme that represents who you are and how you want people to feel when they get your website, and then you’ve got a couple of punchy colours in there that will ask people to do what you want them to, call to action buttons on your website. So hopefully, you found that part useful.

The third and final thing is the theme, the actual theme and template that you’re going to use, potentially, for your new website. So this is important, because a lot of websites out there use templates, use themes that have not been custom-built for their website. They do this for a few reasons. One, it’s really cheap. You know, you can get a theme for free, you can pay a little bit of money and get a good one, and there’s lots of online help and resources out there that will allow you to do your research before you buy anything.

A little secret in the web design space, when it comes to templates, is that a lot of web designers actually use templates to build websites. So if you ever went to a web designer, and you hired them to build you a new website, some of them might use a template. Now, it’s not necessarily a bad thing if they do that, but it happens a lot, especially if you’re paying kind of a low fee for the website. Generally, what happen is you pay them, tell them what you want, and then they’ll go out and find a theme that does what you need it to. So, it’s not necessarily a bad thing, but I just felt like I wanted to tell you, just in case you didn’t know. If you’re thinking of building your own website, or you’re thinking, “I’ve got £500 to spend, or maybe even £1000 to spend with a web designer, I might as well just get them to do it.” Just be aware that they may be getting a template, a theme, that you could buy for yourself for a fraction of the price. So just be aware about that.

Again, if you can’t do it, that’s fine. Hire a web designer to do it, but it’s best to ask them, are they using a template, which template are they using, and is it something that is within your budget. In some instances, this is a good thing to do. In other instances, we’ve known people who’ve not been told that they’re using a template, and then get a bit frustrated with the amount that they’ve spent, and the web designer’s just used a cheap theme and they didn’t tell them about it. So definitely something I want you to be aware of.

Another thing I want you to be aware of as well, when you’re looking for a theme, is try to find a pre-made theme. And what I mean by that is avoid page builders for now. You know you’ll stumble across a theme, or WordPress system called Divi. This is a page builder. This is an example of a page builder. Things like Thryve themes. These kind of tools make it look really easy for you to build your own website, but actually, it’s quite difficult for a beginner to get to know these tools. They’re kind of a theme within a theme, if that makes sense. So what’s important, I think, for you guys, is to have an open mind when it comes to your website, but make it as easy as possible where you can.

This is why I would probably recommend you find a theme that’s been pre-made for you. It’s okay if some of that theme includes certain page-building elements, but what I would say is there are plenty of templates out there, plenty of themes, that will allow you to build a website quickly without the headache of learning an additional system, as well, like Divi, like Thryve themes. Some page builders are fantastic, but generally, I like to use them after you’ve installed your theme. You know, you’ve found your theme first, and then if you want help building out the pages, then that’s where you can look up page builder. So just be aware of that.

So, the first thing I want you to do is think about your goals. Think about what you want to achieve when you launch your website. Go back to the first episode in this series. Think about your goals. Think about the structure. Think about how that’s going to work within your design. In the last episode, we spoke about structure of the home page, so you want to keep an eye on themes that will allow you to achieve what you want to achieve. We actually provided quite helpful documents in the last episode, where you’re able to download and fill out the different sections on the home page. So, try to find a theme that will allow you to do what you need to do, that will help you achieve your goals.

So what you can do is, when you … To get ideas for themes, you could search via industry. If you are a book editor, for instance, you could type in WordPress themes for book editors. That’s a way to go, although it’s not always necessary, you will get a few features if you do that that you may not already get with a standard theme. So it can be helpful, but don’t restrict yourself to just that options. What you could do is you could type in “best WordPress themes 2018,” or 2019, whenever you decide to do this. You could type in “easy to use WordPress themes.” Yeah, just anything, really. Search quite a lot of themes, get to know a few of them, and make a list of all of the themes that you like the look of, all of the themes that will represent your website, the way you want it to look and feel. And yeah, generally speaking, if you do your research, you’ll cover yourself.

So, don’t buy the first theme that you see. You want to read reviews. You want to make sure that if you do get a list of themes, and you want to shorten that list, a quick way to do that is to actually do reviews on the themes, and actually work out which ones are easy to use. Read what people are saying about them. You can also check the demo of the theme, as well, which is a good thing to do. Quite often, they’ll allow you to browse the back end of the theme as well as the front end of the theme. Again, you’re still going to have to build the website out. You’re still going to have to add your own images, and create the different pages, but a theme will generally mean that you can just worry about the images and the content, and then the theme will take care of the rest.

So you want to make sure it looks good. You want to make sure it looks like a website that you’d be proud of, and you also want to make sure that it’s easy for you to use, as well. So, does it come with documentation? Do they give you instructions on how to set up the theme? Do they offer ongoing support? Some of these theme websites actually have comments that are publicly viewable. You can actually see them without having an account with them. Look at some of the questions that people are asking. Look at some of the replies that the actual developers of the themes are giving back. Doe sit look as though this company are going to be able to support you in your efforts when it comes to creating a website? Again, we’re not buying anything at this stage. You’re just getting a list of themes that you like the look of, and you’ll quickly realize that when you start researching this, the same themes will be popping up, especially if you’re searching for “best templates,” “best themes 2018 or 2019,” or “highly recommended WordPress themes.”

Generally, you can give yourself quite a lot of choice on those ones. And don’t just look for the best-looking ones. You need to make sure that the support comes part and parcel with it. You don’t want to buy something just because it looks good, and then five months down the line, it stops working, because they’re not supporting it on an ongoing basis. So that’s something to be aware of, but like is say, don’t buy anything just yet. We’re just giving you things to think about before you sit down and start handing over your cash. Okay?

So there you have it. Again, it’s more of a technical episode, this one, but it is important. There’s things that you can do with your imagery, with your colours, with your theme, to give yourself quite a lot of power with your website. If you just take care of these three different elements, you can make sure your website looks great. It doesn’t have to look world class. It just has to look good enough so that you are bing represented in the best possible light. Your website will allow you to build more trust with your potential buyers. It will allow you to come across as more note-worthy. If you want to stand out from your industry, these three things are absolutely vital.

So yeah, a few things to be aware of there. So hope you found this episode useful. Let me know how you get on with these exercises. Don’t forget to download the workbook, as well. And let us know how you get on in the free Facebook group. If you didn’t already know, we do have a free Facebook group. It’s at JammyDigital.com/Facebook. We try to do training quite frequently, and there we’ve got website critiques that we do every Wednesday afternoon, which we’ll be picking up again in the new year. And we’d love to help you get better results with your website, too. So feel free to join and say hello.

And that’s for today’s episode. So we’ll see you next time on the Make Your Mark Online podcast.

Martin Huntbach

Web designer & marketer for small businesses. Martin is an experienced search engine and web design specialist, with over a decade of experience working with large corporations to small businesses.

jammydigital.com

The post Ep 24 – Planning Your New Website – Part 3/4 Design Elements appeared first on Content Marketing & SEO Agency | Get More Sales From Your Website.

Every year we hear the same thing from business owners and personal brands:

‘This year, I’m going to sort my website.’

But then clients and customers come first and the sliver of time you do have to work on your website is taken up by procrastination.

What’s my colour scheme? 
What should I write on my homepage? 
How do I do this bloody techie thing! 

If this sounds like you, you are not alone! We see business owners vow each year to sort their websites only to go into the next year with the exact same one.

You know your website is important. You know that you can’t continue with the website you’ve got and that #WebsiteShame is holding your business back.

So 2019 is the time to get it sorted! 

In this four-part series, we’ll be outlining the four key pillars to website success so you can get your website live ASAP in 2019.

In this second episode, we’re talking about the structure for your website. This structure is based on the goals you have for your website, which we talked about in the previous episode.

We’re going to go into detail about how to structure your homepage to get people to the right pages on your website. We’ll also be looking at how to present your services. This is exactly the process we follow with our clients to ensure website success!

In this episode, we’ll cover…

• • Structuring your web pages
  • Prioritising your menu items
  • Mapping out your homepage (click below to download our diagram)
  • The first third of your homepage
  • Things to consider on your homepage

Resources

Make Your Mark Online Membership 

Facebook Group

Page Structure

Homepage Structure

Ep 22 – Planning your new website – Part 1/4 Goals

Big Bold Statement

Testimonials 

Time Stamps: In a rush? Get to the section you need to below!

Welcome to the Make Your Mark Online Podcast, where we help personal brands build and grow a successful business website.

Please welcome your hosts, husband and wife team, Martin and Lyndsay.

Welcome to Episode 23 of the Make Your Mark Online Podcast. This is actually Episode 2 of 4 of this little December mini-series.

As you know, 2018 is drawing to a close, and 2019 is right around the corner. Part of what we’re trying to do with this podcast, and the Facebook group, and also the membership as well, is to help as many people as possible create a highly successful website.

The problem is quite often you’re just not sure where to start, especially if you’re trying to redesign your website, and it feels like there’s a mountain to climb. And this is why, over the next few episodes, for the rest of this month, we’re helping you plan your new website.

We’re gonna be focusing on four key activities that will help you get your website live quicker, so you can get 2019 off to the best possible start. Because, seriously, I want you to make your mark online in 2019, and stop fuffing around and putting off the website stuff, because I know it will be holding you back. And I don’t want it to. So, let’s do this together.

Now, before we get into the show, this podcast is sponsored by the Make Your Mark Online Membership. This is our signature membership community, where we help personal brands build and grow a successful business website. Now, the doors for the membership are currently closed, but you can check out the details in makeyourmarkonline.net And you can actually join the wait list, and we’ll notify you as soon as we open the doors again in January.

So, let’s get into the show!

Now, the last episode was all about web cycles, and why it’s important to think about these before doing anything else. Now I highly recommend that you go back to that episode and listen to it, if you haven’t done already. There are worksheets with each of these four episodes. So make sure you check it out in the show notes as well.

Now, in this episode, we’re talking about structure, the structure of your website. What goes where, and how to do it effectively, so you know what you need to include. Now, why is this so important? Well, this is actually a really vital step that’s hardly ever done when people build their own website. Now, much like an architect creates a plan and a structure for a house, you also need to think about how to structure your website. You know, you need a plan. It’s gonna be a lot easier if you have a plan, and some blueprints to follow, so that you can build a website quicker, and make sure that things are going in the right place.

So this is kind of like a bird’s eye view of your website. And this is a really, really important aspect to it, so that you don’t focus on, you know, the minutiae, the focus on the little details. You actually focus on the big picture, and the broad strokes first, so that you can then focus on the finer details later on. And this will allow you to get off the starting block with your website a lot quicker.

Now there are two pieces to this puzzle. Okay. So when it comes to mapping out your website, you have to think about this on two levels. One level is mapping out all of the pages that you’re going to have, all of the core pages that are based on the goals that you have, and the goals that we went through in the previous episode.

You’re going to need normal pages. You know, you’re gonna need a home page, you’re going to need an about page, a contact page, maybe an FAQ. You know, the standard pages will probably need to be there. But we need to take what we discussed in the previous episodes about the services that you offer, about the goals for the website, and consider how they’re going to play a part in the blueprints for your new website.

So, if you have a number of services that you’d like to promote, ideally, we need a page for each one of these services. So again, at this stage, we’re not really thinking about anything technical, we’re not thinking about styles or colors, or content, necessarily. We’re thinking about where things are going to sit on your website.

Now, in the notes for this episode, we have actually included a quick diagram to allow you to kind of envisage how this might look, if you’re not sure where to start. So, it kind of … Imagine that we have a home page, you know, which is obviously a really key page on your website, and branching off from the home page, you’ll have all of the other core pages. So imagine what you might see on a website. You might see a main menu. You may see the about page, you may see a couple of service pages, you may see the contact page. These are kind of the secondary pages where at least, so the home page is kind of the first power page. And then branching off from the home page, you have all of these other core pages.

So you need to realistically know what you need to have on your website. And also, if you have a number of services as well, how might that work? You know, if you have one key service, and that’s all you do, then you may just have one menu item. But quite often what people do is they have a main topic, and then they have their sub-menu items underneath their main menu item.

So this is kind of the purpose of this first task, really, is to understand, based on the goals that we discussed in the previous episode, based on the most important. You know, we told you to put them into a priority list. What do you want to be doing more often? What do you make the most money from? What do you enjoy doing the most? You know, consider how those goals may be linked to services on the different pages.

So, using the diagram, think about … You don’t have to fill out all the boxes. This is just an example. But if you can think about the home page as the main page. You always need a home page. And we’re gonna be talking about that in a minute. But what does the big picture look like? If somebody was to look at a bird’s eye view of your sitemap, how would it look? You know, if you’re giving things kind of three different tiers, as in tier 1 being the home page, tier 2 being the other main menu items, and then the third tier being the sub-menu items.

So if you have services, you’ll notice on our website we have services, and then we have a website redesign, we have a personal brand website, we have started a new business website, we have maintenance packages, and we also have website critiques as well. So those are kind of our third tier of menu items.

So what we’re doing at this … We’re trying to put down on paper where these pages might sit, based on the priority of the goals. And like I say, you’re always gonna need an about page, you’re always gonna need a contact page. You might not always need to, but in general situations, you would have those pages. You might even have an FAQ page. Depending on your service-based business, and your industry, you might want to portfolio as well. That might not always be relevant, but consider what you might need on your website. You may have a case study section as well with individual case studies. This is your opportunity to plan out the structure of your website without thinking about the finer details.

Now this is the very first thing that you’ll need to do. And this is stage 1 of planning out your website, you know, the structure of it. So, yeah. You’ve got your goals from the last episode, and now we’re gonna actually put in some goals down on paper, and working out where they’re going to go. Is it tier 2? Is it tier 3? On some websites, they have more tiers, but again, this is just a general idea, really, to get you off the starting block. So that’s the first thing you need to do.

The next thing that we need to do when it comes to structure and planning, is to think about the home page. Now, quite often what will happen is lots of the other things that we’ve just been discussing, the services that you’ve got, you know, the contact us, and the about page … Quite often what happens on websites is they actually include sections on the home page that link out to these individual pages, these kind of tier 2 pages. And what we need to do, really, is to kind of use the document in the show notes, or just sketch out a kind of a design of a home page on a paper, so that you can actually plan out what’s going to go where. Because the home page actually acts like a little bit like a reception area. When someone lands on your home page, you want to imagine that people just wanna know where to go next. Quite often the mistake that people make is that they think that all of their information needs to be on their home page, whereas in reality, what matters most is you giving people the direction, pointing people in the journey in the path that they need to take to get to what they need to get to. So you don’t wanna overface people with too much content. You wanna give people an idea of what you offer, and where they need to go next to find out more.

So we’re gonna go through this in detail now. So, if you can imagine a home page from top to bottom, naturally, you’re gonna have a logo at the top, you’re gonna have a menu at the top. And the next section down, generally, is kind of the big impact area. This is what we like to call the hero section. Quite often, with personal brands, we’d have an image of you, you know, something that represents your business, so the people can connect with you better. This is your opportunity to include a nice image or something that people can relate to. You know, you want to stop people in their tracks, and you wanna stop people from clicking on the back button. So you need to consider what might go in this main section.

Now, if you’ve ever used heatmap tools, and heatmap software, there’s a few of them on the market, but you’ll have noticed that when you look at these tools, quite often, a majority of the people have stayed quite actively in that main top area. Not as many people as you think scrolled right down to the bottom of the page, which is why this area is so valuable. It’s so important. And if you don’t plan this well, you may waste that section, you may waste and squander your opportunity to get people to do what you want them to do, and to connect with them as well. So this is why this hero section is so important. And don’t treat the images as an afterthought.

The next thing in this section, you’ll also notice on most websites, they have this big, bold statement. They have a clear defining statement that clearly articulates what they do, and why you should care as a visitor. So you need to consider where that’s going to go. Generally, it’s the first thing people read on your website, and it needs to be quite big and bold, and we did actually cover this in a previous episode as well. All about how to create a big, bold statement, and we give you nine ways to do that as well. And we will link to that in the show notes.

Another really important aspect to this area is, potentially, a supporting statement. So sometimes, big, bold statements by themselves, can come across a little bit vague sometimes. So, quite often you’ll see like a line or two beneath the big, bold statement, below this key, clear, defining message, that actually explains, in a little bit more detail, a little bit more clarity, about what it is that you do. We use this on our website as well. So feel free to check that out.

Next, what you need is a button, a call to action. At least one button that will allow your visitor to be able to click on something when they get to your website before they scroll down, before they kind of lose interest, we need to give them a button to click. This will allow your visitor to start using your website, actually start going through some pages. And that’s why it’s really important that you think about what button that would be. Where are they gonna go? Is it schedule a free call? Is it download a free ebook? Or access some video content? Or maybe it’s just a contact page, or get in touch to find out more. Or maybe it’s a link to the service page. Whatever it is, it’s important that you have it. And it’s important that it’s as enticing as possible.

And again, it comes back down to the previous episode: Goals. What are your goals for the website, and can we find a way to include this within the main call to action?

As we scroll down the page, you may notice that, on some websites, they have media badges. They have, you know, signs of their previous publishing records. You know, where you’ve been published in the past. Is it BBC? Is it The Guardian? Maybe you’ve been … You’ve had a blog post published on a marketing, you know, if you’re in the marketing arena. You may be a popular podcast or something related to your industry that people will recognize. This is something else that you can do. It will allow you to build up a little bit more trust and credibility, so that you keep people around for longer. Especially if they don’t know who you are, and whether or not they can trust you.

So that might be something you wanna consider. Have a think about any places you have had things published, or you’ve appeared on things, and what could go there? Just write it down. Again, don’t worry too much about the details right now. We’re just trying to get an idea of where things are going to go.

And then, further down the page, we like to have something called a promotional area, or promo area, for short. And this should be a few boxes, potentially. Or a few things that people can see that clearly articulate how people can work with you. We try to do this on every single website that we build. We always tell people when we’re doing our free website critiques in our Facebook group, it’s really, really important that you use a section on your home page to tell people what you can do, and how they can benefit from working with you.

This is your website at the end of the day, and it is important that we focus your agenda as well, rather than just, you know, being completely free, and giving with all of our content and not have any structure to it. This is why this is … that is so important. We want to make sure that when we are creating content in the future, and we’re getting lots of visitors to our website, that people can actually see, “Okay, they do have services as well. Maybe I want to commit. Maybe I want to hire them. Maybe I want to work with them on an ongoing basis.” And that’s why this section is so important. And it’s not done enough, as far as I’m concerned.

Further down the page, you may want some home page content. You may want a little bit of text to go along with your home page. Just in case you need to reaffirm why people are still here. Maybe you’re just doing a little bit more of rapport building. Maybe you’ve got an image of yourself further down the page. Whatever it is, you may want some home page content. You generally find in most websites, especially for personal brands and small business owners, there’s a little bit of content there supporting, you know, reinforcing why people are on your website in the first place. You may also want to think about links to blog content that you might have, podcast episodes, any resources that you might have, like downloads and free give-aways, and videos, all that kind of stuff. You do want to entice people to stay on your website for longer. And quite often, content is the way to do that.

You may also want to think about video. You know, if you use a lot of video in your marketing, you might want to section out some space on that page for a video. You know, something that helps your business come across better. Video is phenomenal when it comes to marketing, because there’s so few people still doing it, compared to the number of websites on there. So if you look at your competitors, video often can be the one thing that people wait the longest to do, you know, because people are nervous about it, people are frightened. That’s why it’s so good when I come across websites that do use video on their website. It’s great for engagement. It keeps people on your website for longer, and it’s a lot easier to build about trust when they can see and hear you on camera. So you might want a section on your home page for a video to go there. Think about what that video might be, what it would be like, what would you be saying in that video? Just a general outline as to where it’s gonna go, so that you can start to think about, you know, the finer details later on.

Another thing you might want to be thinking about is building your email list. You know, are you hoping to gain more email subscribers? Maybe it’s something that you’ve not done up until now, and you know on the new website you absolutely want to make it a priority. So you’ve got entice people with a free give-away usually. You don’t just wanna say, “Please join our mailing list.” Or, “Subscribe for news and updates.” It’s not interesting enough. So consider where that would go on your website, and what you might consider as enticing enough for your visitors. That’s something that’s quite important, actually. If you are wanting to build your email list, don’t treat it as an afterthought. Think about it at this point, where it’s gonna go and, “What’s the best thing that I can give away in exchange for an email address?”

You may also be thinking about testimonials. Again, we want to build up more trust. Where are these gonna go? How many should you have? You know, these are questions that you should be asking yourself. Is two or three enough? Generally what you find is if you have too many, people get a little bit blind to them. So you wanna pick two or three, maybe four at the most, of your best. Make sure it doesn’t take up too much space on your website. You know, quite often you see these roller banners with testimonials go across. That will save you a little bit of space. But quite often, you know, a couple of testimonials is enough, as long as they are good enough, and as long as they’re not just kind of, you know, just saying how good you are, you know, actually getting to the content there, and say why people hired you. And actually we do have a testimonial, a podcast episode. I think it was around Episode 19? Episode 18, 19. But again, I’ll link to that in the show notes. But again, two or three is generally good enough for the home page.

And, other things as well. Things like if you’ve got a book. If you’ve got, you know, something that will build your trust and credibility. I know some people who are listening to the podcast have already got books out, or they’re planning or writing books as well. So, where would that go? If you’re selling a book, maybe you’re giving a free chapter away of a book in exchange for the email. You know, you can kind of use these in tangent with one another.

But that kind of structure is the kind of things that you want to think about when it comes to your home page. You notice there’s so much that you might stumble across on a home page, but these are the things that we think would generally go on a website that we would be happy to build. You know, we try to cut out any clutter. We don’t have things like social media feeds coming through. You know, I need my social media feeds. And if we have social media links, generally, they’re quite low down on the page. You know, people have to scroll to get to them. Partly because we don’t want anybody leaving your website at the end of the day. We want people on your website so that they can build up trust with you, they can join your email list, they can hire you for your services, they can pay you cash. You know, that’s what a website is at the end of the day. It’s a sales tool.

So, that’s kind of … covers it really. We’ve got the planning in the first section, which is mapping out all of the different pages on your website, how that might look in terms of a priority list. But we also have how the home page might look as well, and structuring that home page. And kind of sketching it out. Not spending too much time on the details, but actually considering where things are going to go, what order they’re going to go in. Use the downloads in the show notes for extra assistance as well. And, hopefully, you will now have more of a structure.

So, that’s pretty much it for this episode. I don’t wanna overface you with too much to do. We’re gonna be getting into, you know, the nitty-gritty in the next episode, and actually thinking about what we’re going to use to build the website, and how we’re gonna actually build it.

So, I hope you found this episode useful. This is such an important step, and that is often so overlooked, and it’s really important before we talk about tools and tech. So now, hopefully, you’ll spend less time, you know, fiddling around with the tools and the tech, and now you have a plan. You have a blueprint. You kind of have a bible to follow when it comes to your website. And again, this is related down to your products, your services. So we don’t have all the answers. This is just kind of a general, helpful episode about how to plan it. You’re the one who has to work out what your goals were, and what should go on this website. And, hopefully, this episode along with the last one, and the next two episodes, should help you create a website quicker.

Now, if you didn’t already know, we actually have a free Facebook group that we’d love you to join. If you head to jammydigital.com/facebook every week we try to do training, we try to do website critiques, and we’d love to help you get better results as well. So, feel free to join, and say hello.

So that’s it for today’s episode. We’ll see you next time on the Make Your Mark Online Podcast.

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Transcript

Welcome to the Make Your Mark Online podcast where we help personal brands build and grow a successful business website. Please welcome your hosts, husband and wife team, Martin and Lindsey.

Welcome to episode 22 of the Make Your Mark Online podcast. This episode is actually going to be a bit different from the usual episodes. As you know, 2018 is now drawing to a close and 2019 is right around the corner. And part of what we’re trying to do with this podcast and with the Facebook group and also the membership as well is to help as many people as possible create a highly successful website. The problem is is that quite often, you’re just not sure where to start, especially if you’re trying to redesign your website from scratch, and it feels like a big mountain to climb. And this is why over the next four episodes for the rest of this month, we’re helping you plan your website.

So we’re going to be focusing on four key activities that will help get your website live quicker so that you can get 2019 off to the best possible start. Because seriously, we want you to make your mark in 2019 and stop faffing around and putting off your website stuff which I know from feedback that I’ve got and is happening right now, they just keep putting it off and putting it off, and that’s kind of the reason that we wanted to do this kind of four-part series because we want to make sure that you make your mark online and I know it’s been holding you back. So let’s do this together.

Now, before we get into the show, this podcast is sponsored by the Make Your Mark Online membership. This is our signature membership community where we help personal brands build and grow a successful business website. Now, the doors for the membership are currently closed but you can check out the details on makeyourmarkonline.net and you can join the wait-list and we’ll notify you as soon as the doors open again in January. So let’s get into the show.

Now, in the first of these four episodes, we’re going to be talking about a very, very important aspect to the entire web design process. Now, if you don’t do this, it can have a dramatic impact on how successful your website is and it can feel like you’re just missing a piece of the puzzle and you’re not really sure why your website’s not working and its goals. It’s understanding what your business goals are and how you can use your website to move you towards those goals so that you can make money and achieve everything that you want to do, your website needs to have a goal.

So what’s your goal for the website? Maybe you might have a few goals. For a lot of us small business owners and personal brands, it would be to get customers and to make money. And it’s okay to talk about that. We’re all friends. It’s about making money. That’s why we’ve all got business websites, that’s why we all pay for hosting, we pay for expensive plugins, we pay for really nice themes. It’s because somewhere down the line, we want to make money from it.

Now, that’s not always going to be the goal. You might win a charity and that might be to generate donations or whatever. It might just be to help people. You need to understand your goals, it doesn’t matter what it is. But for most of us, it’s about taking on clients, getting customers, taking on new members and getting booked for speaking, and workshops, all those kind of things. And you need to understand these goals before you can build a successful website.

So when you start to build your website or even if you’re paying for a web designer, you want to think about the techy stuff or you might start thinking about the style, or the colors, or the fonts, or the images, or adding social media feeds, or fancy features. And before you know it, you forgot why you needed a website in the first place. And this is so common. We like to focus on the small details partially because we don’t have a strategy. We focus on the smaller details and we end up procrastinating because we don’t really know what we’re doing, especially when we’re building websites ourselves. We have the best intentions in the world, we want it to look great, but quite often we forget about getting customers, we forget about making money, we forget about the ultimate goal and this is what tends to stop us in our tracks. We focus on the cause, the styles, and all the fancy features and we forget about why we even have a website in the first place. And like I said, this is very, very common.

Now, what really matters with your website is that we need to make sure we get our visitors to do what we want them to. You see, people visit your website for many reasons. It could just be to check on your prices, it could be to read an article, watch a video. It might just be that someone is checking out the competition and you are that competition. So you’re going to get lots of people to your website for many different reasons.

So everybody’s agenda, when they visit your website, is completely different but your agenda is exactly the same. Your website is a tool for you to make money and get customers. So that’s why it’s important to understand the goals so it’s as important to identify the most important goals and how we can take these visitors that may or may not be the right customers and make sure that we are funneling them through and making sure that they are in a position to know what services we offer, how we can actually make money from these people, and it’s your job to understand those goals first so that we can actually reverse engineer the website. And this is by far one of the biggest reasons that websites fail, it’s because they’ve completely missed out the understanding your goals segment. This is so important and that’s what we’re going to get into now.

Now, I’m going to give you a few questions that you can ask yourself and you can actually access a workbook with these questions on. As part of the next four episodes, we’re going to give you a workbook so that you can actually download it, print it off, and actually answer these questions that will help you come up with the plan so that you can launch your website in 2019. So for the worksheet on goals, go to jammydigital.com/22 and you’ll be able to download the PDF file there. And like I said, print it out, fill it out, and yeah, let us know what you come up with for your goals.

So the first thing I want to ask you is what do you have to sell. So what is going to actually make you money? What products and services are you able to provide to allow you to achieve your goals if making money is your number one goal? So what services do you have? Do you offer coaching? Do you offer workshops? Are you a paid speaker? Are you selling books? Are you selling physical items? Whatever it is, I want you to write down all of the services that you offer that make you money.

And this is one of the most important elements for you to do at this stage because it will help you focus your mind when you’re thinking about your website rather than getting the little images to line up and your social media links in there and making sure that you’ve got all of the stuff that you like to procrastinate about and actually focus on the things that are going to make you money. It’s a nice kind of triggering your mine, it’s kind of switching your mindset to think about the money in your bank and your website being a tool rather than getting distracted with the finer details. So that’s the first thing you want to do, write down what services you offer and what things you have to sell.

The next question is what do I need to have on my website to sell these services. So what we’ve really down when we’ve thought about the services and people giving you money at the end of it, we’ve kind of got the end goal there. And what we need to do now is to reverse engineer it. So what you’re going to have to have on your website to allow your visitor to buy from you and to hire you for this particular services.

So a nice little tip is if you up until now, if you’ve been thinking about you and you’ve been thinking about your website, imagine that you are the customer, imagine that you are the one looking to hire a speaker, you’re the one looking to attend a workshop or hire a coach. You’re the one who wants to buy a book. And you’re on this website, what are you going to need to see and to access before you’re in a position to buy.

So this is good because you’ve thought about it from your point of view and how you’re going to make money but you’ve also thought about it from a customers point of view and their goals are completely different from your goals. But if we’re going to convince them to buy from us, then what you’re going to need to have on your website. This is things like a specific page for each of these services.

Now, that sounds really obvious but I can’t tell you how many websites don’t do this. We were reviewing a website recently in our free Facebook group and that’s jammydigital.com/facebook, if you do want a free website critique, feel free. But we were reviewing a website recently that didn’t do this. They had one page for all of their services and they kind of used the services as bullet points. So there’s a couple of reasons that that might happen. They’ve not identified that their visitor might actually want a little bit more information about these services.

You know, if someone’s handing over their hard-earned cash, chances are they’re going to want a service page for each of your services. If I want to hire you as a speaker at my event, changes are I’m going to want to actually ask you some questions, I’m going to want to find out about your feels, and find out about what topics you talk about. And one page to cover all these services is never going to work and that’s why it’s important that you might want to think about having a page for each service so that you can answer those questions.

You know, this is where it gets interesting because you might have completely different audiences as well. So somebody who wants to hire you as a one-to-one coach is completely different from somebody that wants to attend one of your workshops. And that’s why you need an individual page for each individual service and that’s why it’s important to think about your goals first so that when it comes to structuring your website, you start to think about services for each individual product and service that you offer.

The next thing you might want to think about is, well, if somebody’s going to buy from me, the chances are we’re going to have to build up a bit of trust with them. We’re going to have to have maybe a portfolio, maybe some testimonials from people who’ve been in similar situations so that we can actually allow them to imagine what it would be like to work with those. And you’re only going to get to that point when you are thinking about the end goals first and then reverse engineering them. This is why you see so many testimonials that are a little bit vague. “We really enjoyed working with this person, highly recommend. Would use again.” These are the kind of vague testimonials that are not good for anybody. I can’t imagine what it’s going to be like working with you from listening to a testimonial or reading a testimonial that you’re really gray. What I want to know is what kind of situation was that person in to hire you and what kind of situation are they in now once they’re hired you.

A couple of episodes ago we did an episode on testimonials and how to get good testimonials for your website so you might want to check that out and we’ll leave a link to that in the show notes. So another question to ask is what order of importance do you have for the services that you offer? Maybe you prefer to do coaching than you do workshops or visa verse. Maybe you prefer to sell loads of books rather than actually sell an online course. Whatever it is that you offer, you have to put it in some kind of order. This is really important because when it comes to prioritizing your menu items and your sub-menu items and where you place things on certain pages, this is going to be important. So think about the end goal first, think about what you want to make money from, what’s the most financially beneficial product that you want to sell. And then maybe that’s the one that gets the most, the highest in the hierarchy of services that you offer.

Do you offer too many services? Maybe you need to slim them down a little bit so that you can actually put more emphasis on a few key services. Maybe you need to scrap a few of them. We’ve actually got to a position with some of our clients in the past where they’re like, “Well, these are the services that we offer.” And if we hadn’t questioned it would have just built a new website with all of those services.

But we always have a discussion with our one-to-one clients where we actually say, “Well, are all these services still relevant?” Yes, it would be easy for us to just transfer over these five services so that you can sell them all, but do you actually enjoy doing them? Do they make money? Financially, is it worth it? And we’ve to positions before where we’ve had people kind of rethink what services they offer and scrap them all entirely.

So it is an interesting topic but you only get there from thinking about the end goal first which is what’s going to make me money and what am I going to have to do to allow people to give me more of that money or attract the right clients. Because sometimes, working with lots of people just for the sake of money is not the end goal. It’s definitely not for us. We want to work with the people who we really want to help and we don’t want to work with … For example, we don’t want to attract super big companies and corporations where we’re only dealing with a few people from a marketing department, with a company over 100,000 strong. We want to help small business owners and that’s what we really love to do. So that’s why it’s important that we articulate that on our website. So that’s an example of what I’m talking about with audiences.

So how many services do you offer? If you can’t get rid of any, then you have to understand that your website may feel a little bit … you’re going to have to dilute some of the key services. So if you have eight key services and you don’t want to get rid of any of them, then you have to accept that everybody’s going to be able to click on as many pages as you want them to. Whereas if you have two or three services, naturally, they’re going to get more eyeballs. That’s just how it works. So you may have to think about grouping some of these together.

We reviewed a website recently that had kind of eight key services, as an example. And after we reviewed it, we recommended that they kind of group a few of them together. Think about your individual services, could you group some of these together as coaching, could you group some of these together as done for you. Instead of if you’re a writer and you’ve got editing and proofreading and content creation, could you potentially just group them all together as done for you if you have too many services. So that’s something to think about as well. You don’t want to overwhelm your visitor.

Another thing to think about is what are your goals for the future? What is it that you might want to introduce next year, in 2019 that isn’t currently on your website. And it’s important to do this because say, for instance, you’re launching a new online course, let’s just say you’re launching a new services, maybe you want to do some public speaking or you’ve just finished your book and you want to sell a book on your website, you’ve got to write this down as well because you have to imagine what your website might look like with that product or service added. It’s okay cutting down your products and services but just in the back of your minds, you want to know how a future services might impact your website. So again, write any future goals down on here. We’re not talking five years down the line. Your website’s never going to stop changing but it’s a nice idea to write down any future goals you might have, maybe even three to six months or 12 months into the future so that you can start to imagine where that would slot in as and when you’re ready to sell.

So that’s it for the first episode. It’s all about you taking some time out to plan what goals and objectives you have for your new website. And this is just a really important topic. And I think, hopefully, you’ll all find it useful. And like I say, print out the questions as well in the worksheet jammydigital.com/22 and let me know what you’ve come up with. What are your key goals?

In the next few episodes, we’re going to be breaking down the next steps in the process so that you can have a highly successful website. And yeah, I hope you found this useful. Now, if you didn’t already know, we have a free Facebook group and we’d love you to join. If you got to jammydigital.com/facebook, we do weekly training, we do website critiques, and we’d love to help you get better results with your website too. So that’s it for today’s episode. We’ll see you next time on the Make Your Mark Online podcast.

The post Ep 23 – Planning Your New Website – Part 2/4 Website Structure appeared first on Content Marketing & SEO Agency | Get More Sales From Your Website.

Every year we hear the same thing from business owners and personal brands:

‘This year, I’m going to sort my website.’

But then clients and customers come first and the sliver of time you do have to work on your website is taken up by procrastination.

What’s my colour scheme? 
What should I write on my homepage? 
How do I do this bloody techie thing! 

If this sounds like you, you are not alone! We see business owners vow each year to sort their websites only to go into the next year with the exact same one.

You know your website is important. You know that you can’t continue with the website you’ve got and that #WebsiteShame is holding your business back.

So 2019 is the time to get it sorted! 

In the next four episodes of our podcast, we’ll be outlining the four key pillars to website success so you can get your website live ASAP in 2019.

In this first episode, we’re talking GOALS for your website. Yep, before you jump right in with your theme or page builder or start choosing a new colour scheme, you need to understand your website goals first.

This is a process we do with all our clients, and it’s worth the time you put in. Not only will it make things super clear for you from the get-go, but it also builds you the best foundation for your website.

In this episode, we’ll cover…

• • Understanding your website goals
  • Why understanding your website goals is important
  • What can distract you from your website goals
  • The questions you need to ask yourself for website success
  • Reverse engineering your customers’ web journey
  • Honing in on your services

Resources

Make Your Mark Online Membership 

Facebook Group

Worksheet _ Planning your new website

Time Stamps: In a rush? Get to the section you need to below!

Coming soon

Useful Resources and Links

Membership Community 

Free Facebook Community

What To Do Next

Thanks for listening to our episode. If you found this episode useful, please feel free to share it via social media using the links above.

If you want to know about search engine optimisation (SEO), website conversions, content marketing and website copy, then join our FREE Facebook Group.

We would love it if you subscribed to our podcast and left us an honest review. This helps us reach more people and produce more podcast episodes.

If you have any questions about this episode or you want us to cover something new, then contact us on hello@jammydigital.com or leave a comment at the bottom of the page!

• • Join Our Facebook Group
  • Subscribe and review
  • Contact Us

Transcript

Welcome to the Make Your Mark Online podcast where we help personal brands build and grow a successful business website. Please welcome your hosts, husband and wife team, Martin and Lindsey.

Welcome to episode 22 of the Make Your Mark Online podcast. This episode is actually going to be a bit different from the usual episodes. As you know, 2018 is now drawing to a close and 2019 is right around the corner. And part of what we’re trying to do with this podcast and with the Facebook group and also the membership as well is to help as many people as possible create a highly successful website. The problem is is that quite often, you’re just not sure where to start, especially if you’re trying to redesign your website from scratch, and it feels like a big mountain to climb. And this is why over the next four episodes for the rest of this month, we’re helping you plan your website.

So we’re going to be focusing on four key activities that will help get your website live quicker so that you can get 2019 off to the best possible start. Because seriously, we want you to make your mark in 2019 and stop faffing around and putting off your website stuff which I know from feedback that I’ve got and is happening right now, they just keep putting it off and putting it off, and that’s kind of the reason that we wanted to do this kind of four-part series because we want to make sure that you make your mark online and I know it’s been holding you back. So let’s do this together.

Now, before we get into the show, this podcast is sponsored by the Make Your Mark Online membership. This is our signature membership community where we help personal brands build and grow a successful business website. Now, the doors for the membership are currently closed but you can check out the details on makeyourmarkonline.net and you can join the wait-list and we’ll notify you as soon as the doors open again in January. So let’s get into the show.

Now, in the first of these four episodes, we’re going to be talking about a very, very important aspect to the entire web design process. Now, if you don’t do this, it can have a dramatic impact on how successful your website is and it can feel like you’re just missing a piece of the puzzle and you’re not really sure why your website’s not working and its goals. It’s understanding what your business goals are and how you can use your website to move you towards those goals so that you can make money and achieve everything that you want to do, your website needs to have a goal.

So what’s your goal for the website? Maybe you might have a few goals. For a lot of us small business owners and personal brands, it would be to get customers and to make money. And it’s okay to talk about that. We’re all friends. It’s about making money. That’s why we’ve all got business websites, that’s why we all pay for hosting, we pay for expensive plugins, we pay for really nice themes. It’s because somewhere down the line, we want to make money from it.

Now, that’s not always going to be the goal. You might win a charity and that might be to generate donations or whatever. It might just be to help people. You need to understand your goals, it doesn’t matter what it is. But for most of us, it’s about taking on clients, getting customers, taking on new members and getting booked for speaking, and workshops, all those kind of things. And you need to understand these goals before you can build a successful website.

So when you start to build your website or even if you’re paying for a web designer, you want to think about the techy stuff or you might start thinking about the style, or the colors, or the fonts, or the images, or adding social media feeds, or fancy features. And before you know it, you forgot why you needed a website in the first place. And this is so common. We like to focus on the small details partially because we don’t have a strategy. We focus on the smaller details and we end up procrastinating because we don’t really know what we’re doing, especially when we’re building websites ourselves. We have the best intentions in the world, we want it to look great, but quite often we forget about getting customers, we forget about making money, we forget about the ultimate goal and this is what tends to stop us in our tracks. We focus on the cause, the styles, and all the fancy features and we forget about why we even have a website in the first place. And like I said, this is very, very common.

Now, what really matters with your website is that we need to make sure we get our visitors to do what we want them to. You see, people visit your website for many reasons. It could just be to check on your prices, it could be to read an article, watch a video. It might just be that someone is checking out the competition and you are that competition. So you’re going to get lots of people to your website for many different reasons.

So everybody’s agenda, when they visit your website, is completely different but your agenda is exactly the same. Your website is a tool for you to make money and get customers. So that’s why it’s important to understand the goals so it’s as important to identify the most important goals and how we can take these visitors that may or may not be the right customers and make sure that we are funneling them through and making sure that they are in a position to know what services we offer, how we can actually make money from these people, and it’s your job to understand those goals first so that we can actually reverse engineer the website. And this is by far one of the biggest reasons that websites fail, it’s because they’ve completely missed out the understanding your goals segment. This is so important and that’s what we’re going to get into now.

Now, I’m going to give you a few questions that you can ask yourself and you can actually access a workbook with these questions on. As part of the next four episodes, we’re going to give you a workbook so that you can actually download it, print it off, and actually answer these questions that will help you come up with the plan so that you can launch your website in 2019. So for the worksheet on goals, go to jammydigital.com/22 and you’ll be able to download the PDF file there. And like I said, print it out, fill it out, and yeah, let us know what you come up with for your goals.

So the first thing I want to ask you is what do you have to sell. So what is going to actually make you money? What products and services are you able to provide to allow you to achieve your goals if making money is your number one goal? So what services do you have? Do you offer coaching? Do you offer workshops? Are you a paid speaker? Are you selling books? Are you selling physical items? Whatever it is, I want you to write down all of the services that you offer that make you money.

And this is one of the most important elements for you to do at this stage because it will help you focus your mind when you’re thinking about your website rather than getting the little images to line up and your social media links in there and making sure that you’ve got all of the stuff that you like to procrastinate about and actually focus on the things that are going to make you money. It’s a nice kind of triggering your mine, it’s kind of switching your mindset to think about the money in your bank and your website being a tool rather than getting distracted with the finer details. So that’s the first thing you want to do, write down what services you offer and what things you have to sell.

The next question is what do I need to have on my website to sell these services. So what we’ve really down when we’ve thought about the services and people giving you money at the end of it, we’ve kind of got the end goal there. And what we need to do now is to reverse engineer it. So what you’re going to have to have on your website to allow your visitor to buy from you and to hire you for this particular services.

So a nice little tip is if you up until now, if you’ve been thinking about you and you’ve been thinking about your website, imagine that you are the customer, imagine that you are the one looking to hire a speaker, you’re the one looking to attend a workshop or hire a coach. You’re the one who wants to buy a book. And you’re on this website, what are you going to need to see and to access before you’re in a position to buy.

So this is good because you’ve thought about it from your point of view and how you’re going to make money but you’ve also thought about it from a customers point of view and their goals are completely different from your goals. But if we’re going to convince them to buy from us, then what you’re going to need to have on your website. This is things like a specific page for each of these services.

Now, that sounds really obvious but I can’t tell you how many websites don’t do this. We were reviewing a website recently in our free Facebook group and that’s jammydigital.com/facebook, if you do want a free website critique, feel free. But we were reviewing a website recently that didn’t do this. They had one page for all of their services and they kind of used the services as bullet points. So there’s a couple of reasons that that might happen. They’ve not identified that their visitor might actually want a little bit more information about these services.

You know, if someone’s handing over their hard-earned cash, chances are they’re going to want a service page for each of your services. If I want to hire you as a speaker at my event, changes are I’m going to want to actually ask you some questions, I’m going to want to find out about your feels, and find out about what topics you talk about. And one page to cover all these services is never going to work and that’s why it’s important that you might want to think about having a page for each service so that you can answer those questions.

You know, this is where it gets interesting because you might have completely different audiences as well. So somebody who wants to hire you as a one-to-one coach is completely different from somebody that wants to attend one of your workshops. And that’s why you need an individual page for each individual service and that’s why it’s important to think about your goals first so that when it comes to structuring your website, you start to think about services for each individual product and service that you offer.

The next thing you might want to think about is, well, if somebody’s going to buy from me, the chances are we’re going to have to build up a bit of trust with them. We’re going to have to have maybe a portfolio, maybe some testimonials from people who’ve been in similar situations so that we can actually allow them to imagine what it would be like to work with those. And you’re only going to get to that point when you are thinking about the end goals first and then reverse engineering them. This is why you see so many testimonials that are a little bit vague. “We really enjoyed working with this person, highly recommend. Would use again.” These are the kind of vague testimonials that are not good for anybody. I can’t imagine what it’s going to be like working with you from listening to a testimonial or reading a testimonial that you’re really gray. What I want to know is what kind of situation was that person in to hire you and what kind of situation are they in now once they’re hired you.

A couple of episodes ago we did an episode on testimonials and how to get good testimonials for your website so you might want to check that out and we’ll leave a link to that in the show notes. So another question to ask is what order of importance do you have for the services that you offer? Maybe you prefer to do coaching than you do workshops or visa verse. Maybe you prefer to sell loads of books rather than actually sell an online course. Whatever it is that you offer, you have to put it in some kind of order. This is really important because when it comes to prioritizing your menu items and your sub-menu items and where you place things on certain pages, this is going to be important. So think about the end goal first, think about what you want to make money from, what’s the most financially beneficial product that you want to sell. And then maybe that’s the one that gets the most, the highest in the hierarchy of services that you offer.

Do you offer too many services? Maybe you need to slim them down a little bit so that you can actually put more emphasis on a few key services. Maybe you need to scrap a few of them. We’ve actually got to a position with some of our clients in the past where they’re like, “Well, these are the services that we offer.” And if we hadn’t questioned it would have just built a new website with all of those services.

But we always have a discussion with our one-to-one clients where we actually say, “Well, are all these services still relevant?” Yes, it would be easy for us to just transfer over these five services so that you can sell them all, but do you actually enjoy doing them? Do they make money? Financially, is it worth it? And we’ve to positions before where we’ve had people kind of rethink what services they offer and scrap them all entirely.

So it is an interesting topic but you only get there from thinking about the end goal first which is what’s going to make me money and what am I going to have to do to allow people to give me more of that money or attract the right clients. Because sometimes, working with lots of people just for the sake of money is not the end goal. It’s definitely not for us. We want to work with the people who we really want to help and we don’t want to work with … For example, we don’t want to attract super big companies and corporations where we’re only dealing with a few people from a marketing department, with a company over 100,000 strong. We want to help small business owners and that’s what we really love to do. So that’s why it’s important that we articulate that on our website. So that’s an example of what I’m talking about with audiences.

So how many services do you offer? If you can’t get rid of any, then you have to understand that your website may feel a little bit … you’re going to have to dilute some of the key services. So if you have eight key services and you don’t want to get rid of any of them, then you have to accept that everybody’s going to be able to click on as many pages as you want them to. Whereas if you have two or three services, naturally, they’re going to get more eyeballs. That’s just how it works. So you may have to think about grouping some of these together.

We reviewed a website recently that had kind of eight key services, as an example. And after we reviewed it, we recommended that they kind of group a few of them together. Think about your individual services, could you group some of these together as coaching, could you group some of these together as done for you. Instead of if you’re a writer and you’ve got editing and proofreading and content creation, could you potentially just group them all together as done for you if you have too many services. So that’s something to think about as well. You don’t want to overwhelm your visitor.

Another thing to think about is what are your goals for the future? What is it that you might want to introduce next year, in 2019 that isn’t currently on your website. And it’s important to do this because say, for instance, you’re launching a new online course, let’s just say you’re launching a new services, maybe you want to do some public speaking or you’ve just finished your book and you want to sell a book on your website, you’ve got to write this down as well because you have to imagine what your website might look like with that product or service added. It’s okay cutting down your products and services but just in the back of your minds, you want to know how a future services might impact your website. So again, write any future goals down on here. We’re not talking five years down the line. Your website’s never going to stop changing but it’s a nice idea to write down any future goals you might have, maybe even three to six months or 12 months into the future so that you can start to imagine where that would slot in as and when you’re ready to sell.

So that’s it for the first episode. It’s all about you taking some time out to plan what goals and objectives you have for your new website. And this is just a really important topic. And I think, hopefully, you’ll all find it useful. And like I say, print out the questions as well in the worksheet jammydigital.com/22 and let me know what you’ve come up with. What are your key goals?

In the next few episodes, we’re going to be breaking down the next steps in the process so that you can have a highly successful website. And yeah, I hope you found this useful. Now, if you didn’t already know, we have a free Facebook group and we’d love you to join. If you got to jammydigital.com/facebook, we do weekly training, we do website critiques, and we’d love to help you get better results with your website too. So that’s it for today’s episode. We’ll see you next time on the Make Your Mark Online podcast.

Martin Huntbach

Web designer & marketer for small businesses. Martin is an experienced search engine and web design specialist, with over a decade of experience working with large corporations to small businesses.

jammydigital.com

The post Ep 22 – Planning your new website – Part 1/4 Goals appeared first on Content Marketing & SEO Agency | Get More Sales From Your Website.

Over the past 10 years, we’ve tried hundreds (probably thousands) of tools that help us and our clients improve their websites and processes.

Some tools are fantastic, helping us save time and money. Others, are terrible, taking ages to wrap your head around or costing too much for your business.

So in this podcast episode, we’ll be running through our favourite tools that we use all the time to improve your website and business.

In this episode, we’ll cover…

• • The best tools to create images and graphics for your website
  • The best video hosting software
  • The best email marketing tools
  • Our favourite page builders
  • The best tools for taking bookings over your website
  • The best tools for taking payments over your website

Resources

Make Your Mark Online Membership 

Facebook Group

Time Stamps: In a rush? Get to the section you need to below!

1.52 – Why are we talking about ego?
2.42 – Why personal brands fall into the ‘ego’ trap
4.02- Your about page is not about you
6.57 – Be careful of the word ‘newsletter’
10.21 – Using silly names for normal stuff
13.36 – Caring more about aesthetics than anything else
16.57 – Thinking too much about your competitors
20.04 – Using your blog as a promotional tool

Useful Resources and Links

Membership Community 

Free Facebook Community

What To Do Next

Thanks for listening to our episode. If you found this episode useful, please feel free to share it via social media using the links above.

If you want to know about search engine optimisation (SEO), website conversions, content marketing and website copy, then join our FREE Facebook Group.

We would love it if you subscribed to our podcast and left us an honest review. This helps us reach more people and produce more podcast episodes.

If you have any questions about this episode or you want us to cover something new, then contact us on hello@jammydigital.com or leave a comment at the bottom of the page!

• • Join Our Facebook Group
  • Subscribe and review
  • Contact Us

Martin Huntbach

Web designer & marketer for small businesses. Martin is an experienced search engine and web design specialist, with over a decade of experience working with large corporations to small businesses.

jammydigital.com

The post Ep 21 – The best tools to improve your website appeared first on Content Marketing & SEO Agency | Get More Sales From Your Website.

We’re all human. And sometimes being human means our egos can get the better of us.

Generally, it’s okay when this happens. We can keep ourselves in check and try to be better people.

BUT, what happens when our egos creep into our business and, more specifically, our websites?

In this podcast episode, we’ll be going through our top ego-driven, website faux-pas that will drive your end-user insane!

In this episode, we’ll cover…

• • Your about page is not about you!
  • Why you should steer clear of the word ‘newsletter’
  • Using silly names for normal stuff
  • Looking pretty is way more important than user-experience, right?
  • When your website is for your competitors
  • Using a blog as a promotional tool

Resources

Make Your Mark Online Membership 

Facebook Group

Time Stamps: In a rush? Get to the section you need to below!

1.52 – Why are we talking about ego?
2.42 – Why personal brands fall into the ‘ego’ trap
4.02- Your about page is not about you
6.57 – Be careful of the word ‘newsletter’
10.21 – Using silly names for normal stuff
13.36 – Caring more about aesthetics than anything else
16.57 – Thinking too much about your competitors
20.04 – Using your blog as a promotional tool

Useful Resources and Links

Membership Community 

Free Facebook Community

What To Do Next

Thanks for listening to our episode. If you found this episode useful, please feel free to share it via social media using the links above.

If you want to know about search engine optimisation (SEO), website conversions, content marketing and website copy, then join our FREE Facebook Group.

We would love it if you subscribed to our podcast and left us an honest review. This helps us reach more people and produce more podcast episodes.

If you have any questions about this episode or you want us to cover something new, then contact us on hello@jammydigital.com or leave a comment at the bottom of the page!

• • Join Our Facebook Group
  • Subscribe and review
  • Contact Us

Episode Transcript Below

Welcome to episode 20 of the Make Your Mark Online podcast. Today, we’re going to be talking about how your ego can stop you from having a successful website. But before we get into the show, this podcast is sponsored by the Make Your Mark Online membership. This is our signature membership community, where we help personal brands build and grow a successful business website. The doors for the membership are currently closed, but you can check out the details at the MakeYourMarkOnline.net website, and you can join the wait list, and we’ll notify you as soon as we open the doors again in January.

Now, just before we get into the show, we just wanted to let you know that this is actually the end of season one of the podcast, as Lyndsay is now going off on mat leave.

I am, yes. And you’re going to be all by yourself, aren’t you?

I am, yeah. It’s going to be lonely.

It’s going to be lonely for you.

Yeah. But we felt that this would be a nice place to break up the episodes so that I can take it from here as a solo show for a few months until you come back next year.

Yes. And I’m hoping the listeners don’t double while you’re doing your solo show.

That would be really embarrassing, wouldn’t it?

It would, really.

We just can’t get enough of this manc accent.

Yeah. Get rid of her.

But we are actually continuing straight on with season two on the podcast, so there won’t be any gaps. So it’ll just be the next episode next week as normal, but it will just be yours truly instead of the both of us.

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

So yeah, let’s get into the show.

So Lyndsay, this episode is all about ego.

It is.

It’s an interesting topic.

Yeah, it is interesting because I think we can all have a bit of ego from time to time, and we all are human, and sometimes ego creeps in. But sometimes, it creeps into our websites, and this can actually make them less successful, and it can kind of harm your conversions and things like that. So yeah, that’s why it’s quite a good topic to talk about I think.

Yeah. I think you’re right. And I think it’s when we forget about the end user mor than anything else.

Yeah.

And you see it a lot on websites these days, and we focus on ourselves and our business rather than our potential customers.

Yeah, definitely. That’s pretty much the nail on the head of when ego creeps into our websites, and as Martin always says, your website is not about you.

No, absolutely.

So I have to say, this is actually something that impacts a lot of personal brands. When you’re a personal brand, it’s tempting to make everything about yourself. You’re selling you, which I get, so it’s quite difficult not to. But we can easily fall into the trap of kind of making everything about ourselves and our brand and kind of forgetting about that end user. So it’s quite a difficult one for personal brands, I think.

Yeah, it’s definitely a difficult balance, I think, isn’t it?

Definitely.

And it’s not just personal brands, as well. Big businesses also fall fowl of this, as well. It tends to be there’s a certain arrogance of being a big business or a larger business. Big business websites also tend to make quite a lot of mistakes with their website, too.

Yeah, definitely. It’s not just the little guys that, like you said, fall fowl of it. It is big businesses as well, so we see countless examples of this when we are just browsing the web all the time, and it kind of irritates us, doesn’t it? So yeah, it’s not just the little guys. Definitely not.

Okay. So from all of our research and all of the websites we’ve reviewed over the years, big businesses and small businesses, have we got a list of things that we can do to make sure that we kind of leave our ego at the door?

Yeah, I think the first thing that we constantly talk about is about your “about” page, and a lot of businesses make their “about” page just about themselves, and I get why because you think “about us”, “about me” is just going to be about you, and you see this sort of start of the page that says, “I graduated in 1984 with this thing, and I did this, and I’ve done that, and I am brilliant.” And it can kind of put your end users off, really. They’re not going to be interested in that information. Yes, they want to know you’re qualified and things like that, but that “about” page is just either going to be really boring for them or it’s just going to turn them off and make them think you’re a bit of a big head.

Yeah, but I don’t think it’s your fault a lot of the time, as our listener. I don’t think it’s your fault because people say, “About me. This is about us. This is our “about” page.” And this is the one page where you think that you can actually talk a little bit about yourself and not your customer’s problems, but that’s not true, actually.

No.

You don’t have a lot of wiggle room on this one. But yeah, the “about” page actually is one of the busiest pages on your website. It’s one of the pages that draws in a lot of traffic. So yes, it’s okay to be about you a little bit, but more than anything you have to remember that if somebody’s clicking on your “about” page, they still want to do business with you, and by having a big block of text saying all about you, it does put an extra barrier into play, in the waves, doesn’t it?

Yeah, definitely, definitely. And I think, yeah, you’re right, maybe sometimes it doesn’t come from a place of ego, it’s just a case of, “I’m unsure of what to put on this page, and I’m just going to talk about myself for the next paragraphs.” But yeah, I think that it just comes across as very self-centered when we just talk about ourselves on our “about” page. I’m not saying don’t talk about yourself at all, but you need to put the onus really on the end user, and more make it about how you can help them. We actually have an episode, a podcast episode about how to write an “about” page, and I’ll put that in the show notes because that explains it quite clearly in there. But that’s a big, epic one, really, that we talk about quite a lot, where your ego can creep in, and you can end up just being quite self-focused.

Yeah.

Particularly on that page. And as Martin said, it’s quite an important page on your website. It’s usually well trafficked, so you want to make sure you’re taking advantage of it and actually getting people to do something, and connecting with people, and getting them to actually convert into a customer or lead on that page, not just talking about yourself.

Yeah. It is important because every page on your website is a sales page.

Exactly.

Okay. So what’s next, and what else are we doing out there that may cause our ego to get in the way of getting customers and leads?

Yeah, another thing people do that really bugs us. This is just a big, giant episode of things that bug us. Is that people offer a newsletter-

Oh, that old [inaudible 00:07:08]

Yeah. People offer a newsletter. Sometimes it comes as a pop-up, which is like a double whammy of joy.

It’s like a double [crosstalk 00:07:16] around your face.

And I get why people do this, I do. A lot of people offer just a newsletter in exchange for someone’s email address, and sometimes you just say, “Sign up to my newsletter.” Sometimes we say, “Sign up to my newsletter and get my latest news.” Or thoughts, or whatever it is. But you have to think, how much do people really care about your latest news? Do people care that we got a new office plan this week? Probably not. I don’t know. And I think, yeah, I think newsletter just isn’t good enough really to get someone’s email address. You have to be respectful of someone’s personal information. If you’re requesting that information, you kind of have to give something in exchange for that. You can’t just say, “Sign up to my newsletter.” Because at the end of the day, people probably don’t care. It’s your ego coming into that, I think.

Yeah, and we’re not saying that you can’t tell people about your business and what you’ve been up to, but the idea of a newsletter and you saying the word newsletter makes it feel like it’s just going to be a bulletin about you and about what you’ve been up to.

Yeah.

So we’re not talking about, you don’t have to not tell people what you’ve been up to. It’s great to learn more about you and about how you run your business and let everybody get to know who you are, but try to avoid using the word newsletter because I just think it’s becoming … there’s a negative effect that it’s having out there, so you’ve got to be careful. When I see the word newsletter, I think I’m going to sign up, and I’m going to learn about what you think about things and what are your thoughts and feelings, and it’s very internal rather than thinking about your customers. So just something to be aware of I think [inaudible 00:09:09].

Yeah, definitely. And actually, some businesses offer really, really good stuff. They offer really good stuff in emails every week, but they just call it a newsletter, and I think if they called it something else, I think they would find that conversions on that call to action a lot better, definitely. But yeah, just newsletter, like Martin said just sounds like it’s going to be just about you and your company and what’s going on in your life, which is fine to talk about, but you don’t want to be talking about it all the time. So to get people’s email address, yes, I think you either need to give something away for free, something meaty in exchange for their email address or just reword what the actual newsletter is.

Yeah. Unless you’re famous like Ann Handley and Chris Kroeger and these people that just from saying newsletter, it’s like, “Oh, I’d actually like to know what they’ve been up to. I’d actually like to know if Chris has got a new video game playing on.” But again, we’re not all at that same level.

No.

So you have to think about your customers more than you think about yourself.

Yes, definitely, definitely.

Okay, so what else are we doing? What else are we doing that’s infuriating you today?

This is great. This is a great eight and a half month pregnant episode. Just rip into things. Another one would be using silly names on websites for normal stuff.

Oh God, yes.

It really, really irritates me. If I see the words “My Journey” instead of “About” on a homepage menu, I’ll go insane. Yeah, I think people have this idea of wanting to be kind of quirky and different, so they give things different names. I’ve seen “blog” called “growth zone”, I’ve seen all sorts of different things.

Yeah, or “our stories” as the blog. And I’m like, what?

“Our stories”, yes. That was a strange one.

That’s the most egotistical thing I think I’ve ever seen on a website. Crazy.

Yeah, I think it is. It is very much like that. And it’s a mistake that a lot of people do make because they want to be different, but if you think about it from the end user’s point of view, and I think this is the point that we keep making, it’s that they know immediately what “about” is, they know immediately what “blog” is, and they can easily get to those pages, and they don’t have to think about it. Whereas, if it says “my journey” or “my stories”, that doesn’t make any sense really to anyone.

Yeah. Imagine if you were to walk into a shop and they changed the aisles. Rather than “dairy”, they said “cow stuff”. That’s the worst example I’ve ever used in anything.

That’s terrible.

Okay, so “vegetables” is “plant stuff”, and you’ve just got to kind of figure it out for yourself.

I actually would like to shop there.

I know. That’s our next business. Settled that. But you see what we’re saying. It’s about not letting your visitors think, like, why are you making them jump through hoops to access information that they already know, like, and trust, you know what I mean?

Yeah, exactly, exactly.

We wouldn’t change the name “website”. We could just introduce a new way to say website, but it’s like, what’s the point? People know what it is.

And I think this is the thing of, like, big businesses do this a lot we find as well. They kind of use this weird terminology, and there’s absolutely no reason for doing so.

You’re still laughing at “cow stuff”?

I’m still laughing at “cow stuff”, you’ve made me giggle too much. So I think, yes, I think stick to the normal names for things, make it easier for your end users, and try not to be different and unique in that sense. It doesn’t mean in your actual copy you can’t be yourself and reflect your brand, but I think when you’re naming pages and things like that, try to stick to the normal stuff, really, rather than using “cow stuff”.

Yeah. Don’t forget about SCO as well, because if you have a service page where you offer, and we’ve said this before about, let’s just say that you’re a solicitor, and you offer will writing or whatever, and you decide to call it something completely different, then people searching online won’t be able to find it because they know the terminology that they’re used to.

Exactly.

So it’s kind of a negative impact in terms of traffic as well.

Yeah, definitely. So I think further on with this is a lot of businesses care more about how their website looks than user experience.

This happens a lot.

It does happen a lot. We see this with luxury brands all the time. So they use … if you go onto many luxury brand websites, they use really small text-

They do do that. Why?

It’s really difficult to read. They do.

Why is that just a luxury brands thing? It seems to be, doesn’t it?

I don’t know, they just … I don’t know whether the customers just have really good eyesight.

Yeah.

I don’t know.

30/30 vision.

It’s not aimed at us. We wear glasses. We’re not good enough for these luxury brands. I’m really not sure. I mean, I went on a luxury brand website today to try and look at this, and also their product descriptions are terrible. There was one who was advertising a suit for 3000 pounds, and the product description had six words.

I’ll buy two, please.

And I get, you don’t want words to reflect badly on your organization, to look ugly on the page, but people might want to know a little bit more when they’re spending 3000 pounds on a suit.

Might do.

I don’t know. Maybe.

Or maybe you want to live life on the dangerous side, you’re just like, “Yeah, it’s 3000 pound, and I don’t really understand what this is about, I can’t really see it because the text is too small, but yeah, let’s do it.”

Yeah, let’s do it. I think a lot of things like art, luxury brands, those-

Even photography-

Photography, yes.

It’s generally more-

Image based.

Imaged based, and branding. And what you’re saying really is that branding sometimes and design can get in the way of user experience when really we should be using users to come up with design. How a website’s built and constructed and looks should be based around your target audience, otherwise, it’s just about you, and that’s where the ego comes in.

Yeah, exactly. If you want a good example of this, Apple, their website is quite a good example of a website that is both beautiful, but also thinks about their users as well. They do it quite, quite well, and it is possible. You have to get that balance right, I totally understand that. It’s not good to have an ugly, user friendly website, but I think you have to think about your end user. If you have something so beautiful, websites aren’t a piece of art, they’re not there to be looked at. They’re there to actually do something, so don’t try and get so hung up on how it looks to much so that the end users are the ones that suffer really.

Yeah, no, that’s a great point, and I think it’s a fairly common thing. Especially when you’re building the website as well. This happens a lot because you’re thinking a lot about how you want to be perceived and what people will think, what your friends and family will think when they see your website, and you want it to look amazing. But while you’re thinking like that, you’re not thinking about your customers or the people that are going to give you money. And in some cases, you’re thinking about your competitors, which is very strange.

Yeah, definitely. And that actually leads us on to the next point actually, which is businesses that think about their competitors too much.

True, yeah. It does impact-

It does.

The way we think about our websites.

Yeah, and a lot of businesses do this. We know from working with businesses and talking to businesses that they are, a lot of them are quite bothered around, “Such a body’s got this thing, and such a body does this thing, and we’ve got to be better, we’ve got to do this, and we’ve got to do that.” And there’s a lot of focus on what your competitors do, particularly in our industry, so web design.

Definitely.

Web designers are terrible because we use sort of jargony language and try and look like we know exactly what we’re talking about and use really technical terms and try and show off in front of each other.

Exactly. Like PHP and having all these little weird languages on your website to try and appeal to your customers in the hopes that they’re going to be baffled and they’re going to buy from you because you know more than them is such an outdated way of looking at a website, and that’s what a lot of web designers do. We talk a lot about people in other industries. We talk about accountants and the way that they use their language, and sometimes they come across stuffy, and we talk about … we don’t want to leave web designers out of it because they do a lot of really bad stuff as well. So when we use examples sometimes, we might tend to focus on certain industries, but we’re not the best, the web design industry is one of the worst for this.

And I think sometimes it can be a bit like, “Well, we know what we’re doing, so you probably don’t understand any of this.”

So you shut up and sit in a corner and just give us your money.

Give me money, yeah, and I will do what I can do. Whereas I think there’s arrogance about it, but pretty much anyone who wants to apply themselves, could be a website, it could be an accountant, it could be any of these things, you can learn it, and there’s no need to be arrogant about it really, so we try to explain things in as simple language as possible, and I think that’s something you should do on your website. I don’t know, someone famous, I think it was Einstein, he said something like, “If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t know it well enough.” Or something like that, which is true. You’ve got to explain it in terms of how your end user is going to understand it.

But it’s just such a difficult one because even now, even though we’ve tried to dedicate a hundred percent of our efforts in creating content for our customers, you still get in the back of your mind an idea for a blog post that is, this is going to make us look great with our competitors, and it’s difficult to get out of that role, but it is important, and when you do get the thought, “I’ve got a great idea for a podcast episode or a blog post.” Just ask yourself, did you come up with the idea because it will make you feel better, and it will make you look good with your peers and your competitors, or are you creating that piece of content because it’s going to help educate your customers or help make them into a potential customer like a lead or a sale?

Yeah, exactly, and that’s a really good point. And I think the final thing is when businesses just use their blog as a promotional tool. That really, really grates on me.

Yeah, much like the newsletter, isn’t it?

Yeah, it is. It’s so irritating. There’s a web design company that’s relatively [inaudible 00:20:09] to us, and their blog is just, “This is the awards won this week. This is who we’ve hired this week. This is the new client we took on this week.”

Office makeover.

Yeah, “Office makeover this week.” And it is just, why would anyone be interested in that? I just don’t understand it at all. I mean, they’re sort of aiming at bigger corporations, but I still think, you’re still speaking to someone, and it doesn’t mean that you can just show off about yourself. It’s unbelievable ego really that comes into that. A blog should be there to educate your end user, provide helpful content, and it doesn’t mean that you can’t try to get leads from that, we’re not saying that, definitely the opposite, but it definitely shouldn’t be there just to shout about yourselves because it’s just boring.

Yeah, exactly. And we don’t want you to not think about your experiences and your stories because we recently started introducing a little bit more about the internal running of our business as well, but we always do it from a customer point of view. So for instance, the last podcast that we released this week was how much money we had made from doing free website critiques. Now, on the face of it, that looks like a very egotistical blog post.

It did feel that way when I was writing it.

And we were a little bit concerned about publishing it, which is why it took us two or three weeks to hit the publish button. But an actual fact we were thinking about, how can this help our customers create better content? How can this help our visitors think about marketing in different way and how it works, and what can they learn from our experiences? And if we’d have blogged about every recent award that we’d won or our latest bean bag in our office, then how does that help anyone? So I’m not saying you can’t do it, you can’t talk about your experiences in your business, but think about the customer’s spin.

Yeah, definitely.

And I just want to add one more to this, actually because we’ve not mentioned it, but it’s about your logo.

Oh, the logo.

I can’t believe we missed it.

I need it nine foot, Martin.

Yeah. Actually, can you make people scroll down so that they have to get to the actual content because I want my logo so big.

Right. Logo is amazing.

Yeah. Make my logo bigger. No, this is just something that we get asked a lot, and we do joke about it quite a lot, but so many businesses still have a big logo. Someone recently hired us to redesign just their homepage because they had a current website, they were getting lots of visitors, but it wasn’t converting, so they had hired us to just design a homepage and then give it to their development team so that they can build it, and the only thing that they changed was the logo. Everything else was pixel by pixel perfect, exactly as we’d designed it so that we can increase conversions, but you know that she’s … this customer had obviously just said, “Actually, can you just make my logo bigger?” And it changed the entire design, really. It just pushed everything else down, and everything else was not in the right proportion. And I get that she was proud of her logo, but it does get in the way, and it’s important to remember that when someone’s on your website, they don’t really care about the name of your business or your brand. They just want you to help them buy from them. They just want your support as well.

Yeah. Definitely, absolutely, I agree. So I think in conclusion, what we’re trying to say is just think about who your customers are and what they actually need from your website and from you, and try to be a bit humble on your website. Try and think, okay, so what does my end user actually want from me? Do they want a huge logo and a blog that just talks about the awards I won? Or do they want something more? And just really just about helping people and not at all hyping yourself up, really. I think that’s what your website should be about, definitely.

Yeah. Fantastic. Well, I hope you found this episode useful. I know that we can all find ways to improve our websites and leave ego at the door. If you didn’t already know, we have a free Facebook group. We’d love you to join. If you go to JammyDigital.com/Facebook, we do regular training, we do free website critiques, and we’d love to help you improve your website as well. So that’s it for today’s episode and season one of the Make Your Mark Online podcast.

I’m going to miss everyone.

I know. I know, but I will see you next week for the start of season two of the Make Your Mark Online podcast. I’ll see you then.

Martin Huntbach

Web designer & marketer for small businesses. Martin is an experienced search engine and web design specialist, with over a decade of experience working with large corporations to small businesses.

jammydigital.com

The post Ep 20 – How your ego can damage your website appeared first on Content Marketing & SEO Agency | Get More Sales From Your Website.

Designing a website yourself can be a lonely and overwhelming process. You’ve got to figure out hosting, domain names, themes, plugins, content management systems as well as write new copy, figure out the design and get new images.

It’s no wonder when we speak to people, they tell us they’ve been working on their websites for months or even years.

We get it. Even as web designers we still question ourselves and take time making decisions.

In this episode, we’re going to tell you how to best avoid website overwhelm and make sure you get a good website up and working as quickly as possible.

In this episode, we’ll cover…

• • How choosing a good theme can make or break your website
  • Keeping it simple so your head doesn’t explode!
  • How to cheaply seek the help of a ‘techie’ for those annoying bits
  • The research you need to do before jumping into DIY websites that will save you so much time and money
  • Where to get answers to your questions
  • Where to find support from others

Resources

Make Your Mark Online Membership 

Facebook Group

Time Stamps: In a rush? Get to the section you need to below!

4.49 – What kind of images do you need on your website?
7.10 – Showing your personality through photographs
8.53- Think about your surroundings
5.15 – What kind of testimonial should you be looking for?
10.32 – Creating your own stock photographs
11.15 – Think about your location
12.03 – Think about your outfits

Useful Resources and Links

Membership Community 

Free Facebook Community

World Class Communication

What To Do Next

Thanks for listening to our episode. If you found this episode useful, please feel free to share it via social media using the links above.

If you want to know about search engine optimisation (SEO), website conversions, content marketing and website copy, then join our FREE Facebook Group.

We would love it if you subscribed to our podcast and left us an honest review. This helps us reach more people and produce more podcast episodes.

If you have any questions about this episode or you want us to cover something new, then contact us on hello@jammydigital.com or leave a comment at the bottom of the page!

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Episode Transcript Below

Welcome to episode 19 of the Make Your Mark Online Podcast. Today we’re going to be talking about how to avoid overwhelm when building your website. But before we get into the show, this podcast is sponsored by the Make Your Mark Online Membership. This is our signature membership community where we help personal brands build and grow a successful business website. The doors for membership are now closed, but you can check out the details at MakeYourMarkOnline.net. You can join the wait list and we’ll notify you as soon as we open the doors again in January. Let’s get on with the show. So Martin, overwhelm. Why are we talking about overwhelm?

Well, I think it’s inevitable when you are doing most things in your business. When it’s something new, when it’s something slightly more technical than you’re used to, it’s very easy to see why so many people get overwhelmed by it. We get overwhelmed by it. We do this stuff all the time, but when we take on new clients, new websites, different features, it’s okay to feel overwhelm sometimes because it’s just natural. If we feel overwhelmed, then anybody else building their own website should see it as a normal kind of day-to-day thing that happens, but people let it stop them in their tracks and it can feel really frustrating.

I think we speak to a lot of people who say actually building a website, they think it’s quite say to begin with. You know, you see things like Wix and Divi and it kind of looks really easy on the videos. Then when you actually come down to it, it can be a real struggle. People have a real battle with it, don’t they? Yeah, it’s very, very easy to get overwhelmed with it all, isn’t it?

Yeah. It’s so frustrating sometimes. You’re trying to get a plugin to work. You’re trying to get something to your theme to set up. Even with WordPress, you install your theme and you want it to just look amazing as it does on the demo, but it doesn’t. You have to actually do something to make it work, to make it look good. At every stage throughout building your website, there’s a chance you might feel out of your depth and feel overwhelmed, but that’s the same, like I said, for techies as well. If it’s new, if it’s new in general, then it’ll take you a while to get used to it.

It does require a little bit more patience especially because like you say, when you see these videos online and it’s like, “Oh, I’m a celebrity and I can build a Wix website in 10 seconds,” like shut up. You don’t do anything yourself.

Martin loves those adverts.

I have dartboards of all of the actors that Wix hire. It’s even more infuriating because my football club, Manchester City, are sponsored by Wix, which is just like a knife in the back. It’s not nice.

Do you think the players themselves set up their website?

Oh yeah. Every one of them.

Definitely.

Sergio Aguero clicking around, building his own website. I’m sure he does that.

Definitely.

It’s infuriating because everybody else says it’s so easy. You see all these amazing websites. Your friend might not be a great web designer, but they may have a great website. Maybe they’ve chosen a theme and you’re like, “Well, it was so easy for them,” but it’s not. It’s not easy. Someone once said something like “don’t judge your backstage by somebody’s front stage.” What they do in public might not always seem that easy. I think sometimes we’re all victims of that. We all sometimes think, “Well, they’re doing great things and their website looks amazing. How have they done it? They don’t know that much more than me,” but it’s because everybody struggles. They just don’t talk about it a lot.

Yeah, definitely. Do you have a few tips then that will help people avoid this overwhelm where possible?

Yes. We’ve given a few tips, one of which is to choose a good theme with great support. If you’re building your own website, chances are you’re going to use a template or a theme of some sort. It’s really important that you find one that’s got great reviews. It’s got good feedback. There is a support desk, and there’s people there to help you if you struggle. That’s quickly the worst thing in the world is when you get a theme and you just paid for it and you’ve spent hours trying to decide what theme you get. Then you buy it and you install it and you just don’t know what you’re doing. That can be really frustrating and it can quickly make you feel overwhelmed.

A lot of things as well. They come with like documents before you buy them, don’t they? These manuals of how to use it and things like that. It’s always good to look for those as well.

Sometimes we get excited when we see something, we just want to buy it before doing all the research and that’s where that comes in handy. Especially if you’re buying from a legitimate company, check on the documentation. See if there’s a demo. See if you can actually test out the theme before you actually buy it. Log in to kind of a demo portal and play around with it a little bit. I’m the worst for this. I’ll see something that kind of remotely does what I need it to and then I’ll just buy it before doing the research. But look …

You are the worst at this.

I am.

I can concur with that.

Lyndsay, I bought the wrong thing. Can you get a refund? I don’t think so. There’s got like a lot of like plugins and stuff that we’ve never used before that we’ve paid for. Ridiculous.

I’m one of those people that read the instructions for about six hours. We’re kind of both of extremes. We kind of meet in the middle though and that works.

Yeah, exactly. But if you do find a template that has great support, that can solve so many problems. Just by sending off a message at 8 o’clock at night, by morning you might actually have an answer to that question while you can get on with some other stuff in the meantime.

Definitely. Also look at where the template is from. I made this mistake once with actually a plugin. The guy was in New Zealand and then we kept having to wait 14 hours. It was just a nightmare. It was great, but yeah, that was a nightmare because 14 hours in our business is like forever. Well, it is for me. I’m very impatient, so yeah. Do actually look at where it’s from to see how quickly you’ll get an answer back.

There’s plenty of reviews online as well. Just do your research when it comes to your theme because it’s so important that you don’t want to make a bad buying decision when it comes to your theme.

Okay. What else is there? There’s obviously to look at the theme and support. What other things can we do to avoid overwhelm?

One thing is a little bit of a mindset shift actually. It’s in regards to how complicated or simple it is. We always recommend that you try to keep your website as simple as possible. I don’t mean basic black and white with no styling whatsoever. I’m just talking about when there’s an opportunity to keep things more simple and get things done quicker, that is nine times out of 10 the best option. We can always make it a little bit better. Your website’s never going to stop improving. It’s just you need to finish your website, get it out, and then make improvements once it’s live.

We’ve seen people actually just dwell over the tiniest insignificant kind of little hover effects and these fancy little features that somebody else has got on their website and you want on yours. Don’t do it. It is literally the biggest time suck and it can be the death of your project completely because people just spends two years building a website. Every time you speak to them, “How’s the website coming along,” “Yes, it’s coming. It’s still coming,” but they’ve not have anything to show for it. In the meantime, they’ve not got a website. They’ve not got leads coming through and that’s a problem. Your website needs to be up and live and out there as quickly as physically possible.

By keeping it simple and having that simple mindset when it comes to you designing your website, as long as you’ve got that key core information that people need, things that we’ve spoken about before in previous episodes like the big bold statement, like having your call to action buttons quite high up and quite prominent and your service is visible, as long as you do the basics, then the design to a certain extent doesn’t matter that much on the first round of getting your website up. Then you can make improvements as you go.

Yeah, definitely. I think that’s the point, isn’t it? It’s about making improvements as you go, but trying to just keep it simple and get something up straight away out there. Advertise is what you do in the right way and getting the basics right from the beginning. Definitely.

Exactly. This leads us on actually to the next point, which is when you really do need help, when you really do need a feature installed in your website, something that you can’t do, then seek the help of a techie. Now not just any techie. Techie, not Trekkie. We’re Star Wars fans and we’ll have none of that here.

Trekkies might be able to help.

We’ll have none of that here. Anyway, if you are struggling and you’re trying to do something, I mean … We had Rachel, one of our members, ask in the forum actually, “I can change words and images on my website, but I’m not sure about moving buttons and actually the design elements. What can I do?” We actually suggest that you have a look on Upwork or a freelancing website, maybe even Fiverr, to see if there’s anyone who specializes in that theme. I think it was Divi.

Yeah, I think for her it was quite easy because it was Divi and there were plenty of really good Divi sort of developers out there on perhaps Upwork. Yeah, she doesn’t need to spend a lot just to …

You’re talking $10, $20 the most to solve a problem-

Yeah. Yeah. Potentially.

… that you really, really need to solve. You shouldn’t have to do that a lot because not everything that you do needs to be that complicated, but there are a few things where you might need help. For Rachel, that was exactly what she needed.

It’s that time versus money issue, isn’t it? I mean you could spend all the time in the world trying to figure it out. But if it’s just going to take $20, $30 to solve that problem in five minutes for someone else to do it, then that’s going to be better for your business and you can start focusing on other things, more important things in your business that will move you forward definitely.

It absolutely will stop you in your tracks and it will make you feel overwhelmed if you’re trying to do this complicated thing. When you search for it on Google and you get this really complicated blog post where it’s telling you to go into your FTP and change this code and add this snippet of code and then something happens and your website goes down, like all that is really scary even for me.

Even for us, yeah.

You’ve got to be careful with your websites. We’re all susceptible to having your website go down or deleting something that you shouldn’t. It is sometimes necessary. Just stick to the basics and then hire someone if you really, really need some extra support.

Definitely. Okay. So what else can we be doing then?

Well, you spoke about this a little bit. It’s about doing your research. This doesn’t just to do with the theme. This is things like plugins. This is things like content management systems. If you want to use WordPress, you want to use Shopify, if you want to use something else, then do your research. It’s also the same for things like your email marketing system. Even tools like Canva, for instance. Do your research before you actually start downloading and actually creating new accounts and just signing up to stuff without actually doing your research. Because you can sign up to something and it’s like, “Oh, it’s a free trial. I might as well do it,” but then you get …

An hours gone by and you’re trying to set up an email marketing tool and you’ve not even got your big bold statement done on your website. You’re thinking so far ahead before you actually decide what’s important, what can I do to keep my website simple. I’ve got my theme. I’m trying to keep it simple. Then you go down a rabbit hole and we got the plugins and themes and content management systems and you’ve wasted all that time. It’s best to know what you want to do first and then do your research before you start delving into the tools.

Yeah, definitely. I think a good thing to remember is what is insanely popular. This is why we use WordPress for all our websites is because if we got hit by a bus, our clients would be able to google any problem and no doubt someone on the internet will be the answer to that problem because WordPress is so popular. Same with Shopify or with Canva or that email marketing software like MailChimp or ConvertKit, those kind of things. If they are well-know, if people trust them, if they’ve got good reviews and you’ve done that research beforehand, the likelihood is you’re going to be able to find quick solutions to your problems. If you use something a little bit out there that hasn’t been heard of before, maybe …

Even if it’s cheaper.

Even if it’s cheaper.

This is the point, don’t always go with the cheapest option-

Exactly. Exactly.

… just to save money when another tool might actually be built a lot better. It might be quicker to get something done. You might be able to go live sooner rather than you try and do everything for free and then spend a year trying to hook it all up because there’s no support. This is the same with free plugins, free templates, even cheap, really, really cheap freelancers. You’re not going to get everything you need to. You just need to do your research and don’t be afraid to put your hand in your pocket if it’s a ton here and there.

Yeah, definitely.

Another thing as well is, and this again is more of a mindset thing, when you are thinking about yourself and you’re thinking about your website and it’s easy to see how you can become overwhelmed, just try and remember that this is not for you. This website is not yours. It’s for your customers. This is something that we’ve been talking about a lot recently. It’s the fact that when you think about your customers as the audience and you only think about them and you think about what questions are they going to ask, what questions are they looking for online, then it’s easy to see how you can create a quick and easy website and get it live sooner rather than later.

But when you’re thinking about yourself and all the fancy features, then it does get a little bit more complicated and more time consuming. That’s when you can go down these rabbit holes. Try and remember that. Actually stick it on your wall in front of your computer and think that my website might belong to me, but it’s not mine. It’s for my customers. That is so important that people understand that.

I think people get very wrapped up in what their competition is doing. Oh, they’ve got a fancy hover feature. I want one of those. Really it’s about them and they’re not thinking about their customers. I can honestly say hand in heart that I hardly spend anytime thinking about who our competition is or going on their websites at all. It just doesn’t take a penny of our mindset, does it, because we know that that’s not going to be productive. We have to focus on what our clients or potential clients will be asking when they’re on our website, what do they actually need. Don’t start looking at your competition and thinking about, “Okay. Well, I need a Whizzy thing because they’ve got this Whizzy thing,” and that kind of thing.

This is why people make so many mistakes when it comes to websites because they end up copying people, “Oh, they’ve got a slider image. I want a slider image. They’ve got like a Twitter feed in the bottom of their homepage. I want a Twitter feed.” We go down a road that we shouldn’t be going down anyway. Never mind, “I just want this fancy feature,” that’s when we do start actually looking at competitors and trying to get what they’ve got. Yeah, it’s a great point actually.

Absolutely.

Okay. The next thing is actually really important. This is how we grew our business a few years ago. This was kind of the biggest shift that we made and it was to find a community, a supportive community, that can help move your business forward. Not just your website, not just a “I’m going to join a WordPress group,” actually join a community that’s going to help move your business forward, get your website live quicker. Maybe join an accountability group and actually have people around you that are going to move you in the right direction. There’s nothing worst than feeling alone when it comes to running a business. It’s even worse if you’re trying to do the techie stuff yourself.

You could ask a question in a forum that you’re a part of, this could be a paid community, it could be a free community, that you could spend eight hours trying to solve. Well, somebody else has already solved that problem. Find some communities that you can be a part of, whether it’s paid communities or free communities. We’ve got people in our community that ask questions all the time because they know that we’ll probably know the answer or somebody else in the community will have. They don’t have to spend all that time, an entire Sunday given up because they can’t get this plugin to work.

It makes you feel so much better, doesn’t it, when you got other people in the same boat and you’ve got experts to ask that are willing to help. It makes such a huge difference in your business. We’re part of … I don’t know how many communities we’ve got.

Like too many. Like five or six maybe.

Be our friends. Yeah, five or six communities. Honestly it makes a massive difference in our business because yeah, like you said, you can just ask that question and someone will know the answer.

We get great content ideas from this as well. On the flip side, we were talking a minute ago about having your website work for your customers and not just for you, it’s great when you’re in a community and somebody asks a question that you know the answer to and you’re like, “Actually I’ve answered this so many times myself to my own clients. I’m actually going to write a blog post about it.” A lot of the content ideas that we get are questions that we see other people ask as part of forums and communities as well.

People don’t just go in their normal Facebook page or Twitter and just say, “I’m struggling to get this plugin to work or why is my website not showing up in Google,” but they do ask those questions in sort of niche industry specific communities.

Definitely. Okay. What’s the final thing then what we can be doing to avoid overwhelm?

This is really important. This is to get a good host. A good reliable company to host your website. Not just somebody that can do it for the cheapest, but somebody who actually offers great support. We get people contacting us all the time saying, “Oh, we’ve been with this company for a few years now, but the website keeps going down and the support is really bad. Can you point us in the right direction? Can you help us? Can we move the website to you guys,” even though we don’t host websites. We don’t have a server in our back bedroom. We actually use companies to host as well. It’s just that because we’ve seen the good, bad and the ugly, people come to us and ask the question.

We do have a few companies we recommend, but more than anything, it’s about finding someone that’s going to be beneficial to you. If you have thousands and thousands of visitors coming to your website, then do some research about who the best person is to use. If you’re just starting a brand new website for instance, then we might have somebody else to recommend as a host. It’s all about finding someone that has a great support desk, somebody that can be there, someone who’s got live chat. They can pick up the phone and cal them if your website goes down. That should always be your first point of call and that would help you overcome that overwhelm if you are struggling because something has gone wrong.

Yeah, because you can guarantee you’re going to get overwhelmed very quickly if your website has gone down. We’ve seen it when people have launched major things. They’ve got thousands of visitors to their website. This one always annoys me as well. I think it annoys me because I think you pointed it out to me. When companies say, “Oh, we were so popular our website went down,” I’m like, “Mate, that’s not a good thing.”

Yeah. What is that about?

Like, “I’m really pleased I’ve lost all these sales. Woo hoo.”

I know. That’s like a badge of honor, ain’t it?

Yeah. We always find really strange. We just kind of shake our heads like get a good host then. You’re clearly not investing in a good host. That shows you up really. It’s not a good thing if your website goes down during a major launch. Yeah, I think it’s just something that you have to look at, invest, in do your research. But yeah, like Martin said, think about things like live … Live chat with hosts is just wonderful. If you can just speak to them and someone is there a minute later just replying to you and helping you, either they’ll solve the problem or just show you how to solve it, that’s just so incredibly powerful because it can save you so much time and so much stress as well.

I mean you’ve got to understand that when you’re building your own website, you’re the one who has to think about the domain name and where that is. You’ve got a domain name with one company. You’ve got your host with another. You might have your emails with somebody else. That’s why it’s great having a great reliable host because you can actually just contact them and actually say, “This is the situation. What do I need to do?” If you’re submitting a support ticket and they don’t get back to you for 48 hours and you want it to launch on Friday night, then it’s going to be tricky. That’s why it’s so important. We do have a company to recommend.

If you go to jammydigital.com/hosting, feel free to contact us and we’ll send you a tutorial video as well on that. It’s just a case of what’s best for you I think more than anything. But yeah, you do need a good host. Part of the reason a lot of websites get hacked as well is because of hosts. Again that’s another reason you might get overwhelmed. Okay, my website’s been hacked. What do I do now? Where do I start?

Why is my website in Russian?

I don’t remember selling these products. What’s this?

What are these dodgy things?

Getting a good host will prevent a lot of the ability for somebody to hack, but you can also install a software. You can get pretty cheap software from a good host that will scan your website for any malware and malicious kind of viruses and stuff like that. You don’t want to be overwhelmed by it, which is why you need to get a good host.

Yeah, definitely. Definitely.

That’s pretty much it. There’s a few things there that should help you avoid overwhelm. I’m sure there’s plenty of other things as well, but for you, it’s about growing your business. You are the business owner or you’re the marketing inside a business. It’s about you thinking about promoting your products and services, reaching your audience, and making sure that they’re becoming inquiries rather than just visitors. That’s what you should be thinking about. Not the technical stuff. Not your hosting and your domain name stuff. Yes, you might have to do it, but seek help when you need to and do your research.

I think the point is as well is that we’re not actually saying that you have to invest a lot to avoid overwhelm. If you are new to business and you think, “Well, I can’t do that because I’m just on my own. I’m just starting out. I haven’t got much money,” like Martin said, you can hire people off Upwork for quite cheap. Just go for a reliable host that’s well-known. You’ve got that chat support. These things don’t cost a lot of money-

No.

… but they are worth it because it will save you so, so much time and then you can go ahead and build your business. I hope you found this episode useful. Everyone has struggled with this in the past. Hopefully now you can use a few of tips to help you overcome it. If you didn’t already know, we do have a free Facebook group. We’d love you to join. Head over to jammydigital.com/facebook. We do training, free website critiques, and we’d love to help you get better results from your websites. Feel free to join and say hello. That’s it for today’s episode. We’ll see you next time on the Mark Your Mark Online Podcast.

The post Ep 19 – How to avoid overwhelm when building your website appeared first on Content Marketing & SEO Agency | Get More Sales From Your Website.

Building your own website is much cheaper than hiring a web designer.  However, sometimes there are hidden or unexpected costs to building your own website.

In this episode, we walk you through how much you’re likely to spend if you DIY your own website and where the best places are to invest your money.

In this episode, we’ll cover…

• • When you should build your site yourself rather than hire an agency
  • The danger of ‘free’ domains
  • The difference between expensive and cheap hosting
  • Should you get a free WordPress theme?
  • The difference in prices and where you should invest your money
  • The additional cost of plugins

Time Stamps: In a rush? Get to the section you need to below!

1.05 – When should you build your own website?
4.50 – Domain names and costs
8.18 – How much would you expect to pay for hosting
10.09 – How much does a WordPress theme cost
14.39- How much do plugins cost?
17.01 – What do page builders cost?
20.09 – Being wary of annual charges
Useful Resources and Links

Site Ground Website Hosting

Membership Community 

Episode One Podcast: Should You DIY Your Website?

Free Facebook Community

What To Do Next

Thanks for listening to our episode. If you found this episode useful, please feel free to share it via social media using the links above.

If you want to know about search engine optimisation (SEO), website conversions, content marketing and website copy, then join our FREE Facebook Group.

We would love it if you subscribed to our podcast and left us an honest review. This helps us reach more people and produce more podcast episodes.

If you have any questions about this episode or you want us to cover something new, then contact us on hello@jammydigital.com or leave a comment at the bottom of the page!

• • Join Our Facebook Group
  • Subscribe and review
  • Contact Us

Episode Transcript Below

Welcome to the Make your mark online podcast where we help personal brands build and grow a successful business website. Please welcome your host husband and wife team Martin and Lindsey.

Welcome to episode 15 of the Make your mark online podcast. Today we’re going to be talking about how much it costs to build your own WordPress website. But before we get into the show, the podcast is sponsored by the Make your mark online membership. This is our signature membership community where we help personal brands build and grow a successful business website. The doors to the membership are now closed but you can check out the details at Makeyourmarkonline.net and you can join the wait list and we’ll notify you as soon as possible when the doors open again.

Okay so let’s get on with the show. So today we’re talking about the cost involved if you choose to build your own website using WordPress, but I suppose my first question would be why would you want to build your own website?

Yeah it sounds strange coming from a web design agency [inaudible 00:01:03] build your own website-

Just a little bit.

But we have spoken about this quite a lot in the past and we are strongly in favor of you building your own website. If you’re limited on funds. You can’t really afford to hire an agency to build your website, then you’re left with no option than to build your own website. And not only that as well is if you are just starting out, sometimes your business can shift quite a lot within the first six to 12 months and if the first thing you do is go and pay a web designer, then your business shifts or changes. Then you may have to essentially pay a web designer again, a year down the line just because your business has shifted. So it’s a nice exercise actually to start by watching a few youtube videos, learning a bit about it and then actually taken some action yourself.

Definitely. We actually talked about this in episode one of our podcast where we say, when is the right point to actually hire a web designer and it’s a lot further along than people think, what we advise anyway. So I think you should check that episode actually as well if you haven’t listened to it yet. Okay so let’s get into it. How much can we expect to pay to build our own websites?

Well this is where it gets interesting because there’s not one set price, it doesn’t kind of bundle itself in and say you know, you just pay 50 pounds and you can have a new website. There are lots of different factors that go into it. So for example, a domain name that’s like your website.com, that will cost a certain amount depending on where you get it from. You then have hosting, which is where you actually rent space on the internet so that you can actually have a website. There’s things like content management systems like WordPress, some of them are premium content management systems. You have to be careful, but some of those do come with a cost.

Your WordPress theme, so the style and the design of your website, you’ll need to buy a theme potentially. And some of those come with a cost and a price tag not something else, plugins. So these act as like little add ons to your website so that you can achieve better features. These sometimes are chargeable, so some of them are free, some of them are not. And we’ll be getting into this in the show. There’s also the possibility of page builders, which is kind of an assistant for you to build website pages easily. So you can use drag and drop features and some of those come with a price tag as well.

Okay. So that sounds like a lot, when you actually lay it out there and I think a lot of people probably go into sort of building their own website, seeing perhaps something on Wix where it says, you can have your website for 14.99 or whatever it is and actually become a little bit more surprised about how the costs adopts. So is it really expensive? How expensive are we talking?

Well it can be. You can actually get started for free. This is the thing, for you to actually launch a website and get started. There are a few free options. There’s also a few options if you’ve got a little bit of a budget and then obviously you can spend as much as you physically want with the website. So the point of this episode is to make you feel, it’s okay if you don’t have a big budget right now, there are a few options available, but the more that you can spend here and there, the better it’s going to be for you and the more potential customers that you can reach. Because there are a few features that you might prefer to invest in now, and actually see a return on that investment sooner rather than spending far too much time on free stuff. And then it takes far longer to actually see results.

And in that time you’re not gaining anything from clients, you’re not moving your business forward and anything like that. So yeah, it’s kind of weighing up that time and money thing, isn’t it really? Okay. So let’s firstly start with the domain. You mentioned domain, so how much do they normally cost?

So the first option you have when it comes to a domain name is you can actually get a free domain name providing that you don’t mind using the company name within your domain name. So mywebsite.WordPress.com or mywebsite.wix.com, that’s the kind of thing that you might have seen online and it’s because that website owner has not paid for that domain name.

Right.

So you can actually buy a domain name. They are only cheat. They’re only 10 pounds a year, and some of them are more expensive, if you have a domain that’s already been paid for before by somebody else, if it’s a really popular one, they could potentially sell it back to you. And that’s where it can get really expensive. We’ve seen big companies in the past acquire domains just for the sake of owning it. Some people have paid over 100000 pounds or millions potentially to buy domain names that they really, really want. So that’s not what we’re talking about. If you can find a domain that’s not been registered then you can generally register it for around 10 or $20 or pounds a year.

Okay. And would you say that would be somewhere where you would invest? You would say to yourself, “Okay, yeah, I can get it for free, but I’m going to look a little bit more professional if I do actually invest in something that is 10, 20 pound per year?”

I think so. I mean for the price of it, I think you’d be silly not to. I mean if you take on one customer, just one customer over the year, then you’ve probably paid for your domain multiple times over. So I think for us I can’t imagine a scenario where somebody thinks it’s actually going to be better for me to register a domain name for 10 pounds a year. I might as well-

Yeah. I think it’s an automatic signal isn’t when someone has .WordPress.com that they’ve not invested in that business or it kind of confuses people. It looks quite odd. So yeah, I totally agree. I think it’s worth spending that little bit of money and getting an actual proper domain.

And not only that as well is that when you actually have one of these company names inside your domain name, you don’t actually own that domain name. So when you’re working on your website, you’re building up quite an authority blog maybe, and you’re getting lots of back links and people sharing it at the end of the day, you can’t do anything with that credit. Google credit in that domain name, and that’s not your domain name that’s owned by.WordPress.com. So that’s another reason if you’re going to spend time and money and effort into it, then buy the bloody domain name.

Buy the bloody domain name, that’s the one key takeaway from today’s episode. So what about hosting then? I mean, there’s so many variants with hosting. So what’s the best route for people to go down with that? How expensive is it?

Well, again, much like the domain name, you can get started for free potentially depending on what tool did you use. But again, WordPress.com, you know the managed WordPress, that potentially does come with free hosting. But again, it’s a case of what features you have available, how much time it’s going to take, hosting isn’t the expensive part of building a website. I mean you could pay 20, $30 a year for hosting or you could pay closer to 100 depending on what level of support and service you need. And that’s what it comes down to generally, you tend to find that the cheaper options don’t come with as much support or guidance and you may potentially have issues with site speed and stuff like that.

Okay. So, I mean we always recommend a company called Site Ground only for hosting-

Absolutely. Yeah. Because they are more affordable than most, but also they have really, really good support. So you can expect to pay closer to the 100 mark for a year of hosting with Site Ground, 70, 80 pounds will probably get you a years hosting, and that support is phenomenal. I mean you can use live chat and they are usually there within 30 seconds and yeah, it’s great. If you want to check them out just go to jammydigital.com/hosting, check them out. Have a chat with him, live chat, ask them if they can help and they’re more than happy to help you on a presale basis as well before you actually give them any money. They’ll answer a few questions for you and potentially move your site over if it’s hosted elsewhere. So it is a great tool.

Yeah. Definitely. And I think it’s again weighing up that time versus money isn’t it and how much time you want to take to look into hosting and sort of set it up? There’s many different variances how long it’ll take.

Yeah, absolutely. And there is the third option which is you can have kind of really premium hosting. So there are some companies that people might prefer to pay 25 pound a month plus. These are more expensive naturally, but they do come with an extra layer of support as well. Companies like WP engine, Fly wheel, these are the kind of more pricey options that you might opt for and that come with an extra layer of support and guidance and not something potentially you might want. If you don’t want to do anything yourself, it all depends because Site Ground will help you and point you in the right direction. But if you actually want someone to do it for you and you just want to send the support ticket off, then you might want to actually spend a little bit more.

Okay, that’s really interesting. So yeah, and again, there’s variants, so like the domain and the sort of free, middle and expensive option there. So what about the theme? You mentioned themes before and how expensive are they? What are we talking?

Well, themes are something that you could potentially use a free version of. So there are lots and lots and lots of themes within WordPress that will allow you to install it, have a play around with it, and actually have your website up without actually buying a theme at all. There’s a big plugin and theme library for you to be able to use on WordPress itself. And you can have a good look through those themes. Maybe do a Google search and say the best WordPress themes of 2018 and actually have a good look through. The only problem with those themes is you don’t get any support whatsoever. I mean, there is kind of an open forum in WordPress that you can ask questions about, but because you’re not paying anything, you can’t really expect them to get back to you that quickly.

No.

So that’s the only problem with free WordPress themes. Plus this is another area that I think you should invest in, especially because you can actually get a theme for really, really cheap, 20 or $30 up to 50, $60. You can really get some amazing templates or themes. And those actually come with support. So it is important that you do invest in that because you need to know how to change the things on your website, you need to know that you’re going to get the latest updates to that theme if they release any updates. That’s another good thing about it. And for the sake of even 50, 60 pounds, absolutely. I recommend buying a template. If you starting out though, it’s not the end of the world if you have to use a free one.

So with the, you said it was either 60 pound maximum for a decent theme. Is that per year sometimes? Or is that just an outright cost?

Well, some of them, it’s an outright cost, however, some of them, and this is where you got to be careful, some of them will allow you to use the theme forever, but you’ll only get updates for a year unless you pay each year.

Right.

So there’s that to weigh up as well.

So you’ve got to look out for that really and seeing how much it will be annually going forward?

Yeah, definitely. But like I say, it’s relatively cheap and it will have a massive impact on your user experience when they visit your website, if you actually have a good looking website and it’s a very quick way to actually achieve a great website just by paying 50 quid for a new theme. And in some instances as well. And we’ve noticed this in the past, is this is potentially what your web designer might do anyway. We’ve spoken to lots of people in the past where they’ve spent 500 to 1000 pounds on a website and the web designers said to them, it’s actually gone to be a theme at this price. So I’m gonna look around for you. I’m going to get a nice high quality theme and this is what I’ll be building on your website, which isn’t a problem-

No not at all

I don’t have to tell you about it. It’s when they don’t tell you that they’ve used the theme and they’ve charge you that much. But it’s more than anything if you can do this yourself and cut out the middle man, you might save yourself a few hundred pounds.

Yeah, definitely or potentially a lot more really, and particularly if a website designer is charging you 1000 pounds or whatever-

yeah, absolutely.

Yeah, that’s not to say there’s not work involved with it though. There is-

No yeah, absolutely.

There is work actually involved in changing a theme and making it your own, but we always advise, it’s kind of worth doing because you get that experience of WordPress and all that learning that you do is so valuable for the future because you’re able to update your website constantly for the future. You don’t have to rely on a web designer every single time you want to make a text changed on your website or change something on your website. It’s very, very powerful that you do learn that stuff.

Exactly. And there is a third option. Obviously you can spend as much as you want on a theme. Some themes will set you back over 100 pounds. So $120 I think, there’s plenty of things out there that will cost 150, maybe 200. And these usually they’re direct from the maker. And you’ve got a kind of ongoing support with them. Some of them even charge you a monthly fee to have access to the theme, if they offer quite a considerable support as well. So it might be kind of 30 pounds a month and you’ve got access to all our themes and you can email us whenever you like. So there’s that option as well if you’d like to change things around quite a lot.

Okay. So you also mentioned plugins as well. How much do they cost?

Well, you’ve got a lot of plugins available for free and you should always start with the free plugins, so this is one where we’re like, use the free ones if they’re available. But you can potentially spend a lot time looking for plugins. So let’s just say for instance you want an events plugin, you want to actually list events on your website and you need a way of displaying them easily so people can view the different events. You can find lots and lots of plugins that will allow you to do this for free. However, you may find that if it’s important enough, you actually do need some ongoing support. So usually what you can do is you can try the plugin for free, see if you like it and then you’ll notice that in the back end of WordPress you might be able to upgrade it for 30 pounds or $30, and actually get a premium our pro version of that a plugin.

So that might be something you want to do if it’s important enough, but for the most part you can install your SEO plugins for free with Yoast, you can install a 301 redirect plugins, you can install free social media sharing plugins. But you can always upgrade if you feel as though it’s important enough. But we use lots of free plugins on our websites and our clients’ websites and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. As long as you do your due diligence and you check out the reviews, you make sure they are compliant and they’re actually built well.

Yeah, definitely. And it’s good also to look at the last time it was updated, wasn’t it?

Yes.

We always look for plugins that were updated very recently because that means the developer is making sure that they’re free of any books and things like that and they’re compatible with the latest version of WordPress. So it’s always good to check out how recently they’ve been updated. If it says last updated 2012, then definitely avoid that one. Yeah. So that’s a really good point. I think there’s a theme actually building really where you can see sort of if you’re going for free, you’re not going to get any support with it. If you’re going for this sort of middle one, you get a little bit of support, but you do it yourself and if you go for the more expensive one, generally someone will either for you or you’ll get a lot of assistance. So yeah, I can see that theme running through. So finally you mentioned page builders, what about page builders? How expensive are they? How are they different?

Yeah, so you might want to use a page builder if you need a little bit more control over the design of each of the pages on your website. So page builders are things like Divi, Visual composer, you’ve got Elemental, you’ve got Thrive themes, you’ve got Beaver builder. These are all page builders that you can actually go out and install on your website that will allow you to use drag and drop features. We generally don’t recommend people use a page builder unless you absolutely need to, partly because you know they can potentially slow your website down. You’re adding this extra big bulky thing to your website, and if you don’t really need it, then we recommend don’t using it. However, if you are struggling with the normal WordPress editor and you need something with a little bit more control. Then by all means, you can install a few page builders.

Some of them you can start for free, Elemental, which is absolutely fantastic if we’re being honest, it’s one of the better ones. They actually offer a free version that you can install on your website and have a play around with it. That way you can drag things around and drop them and you’ve not paid anything for it. You can always uninstall it if you don’t like it, and obviously there’s a premium version of that that you can use. So that’s one option.

You can also choose to pay a little bit upfront for one of these page builders. So Thrive themes, you can start for around $67, I think it is at the minute or Divi, which is around $ 89 I believe, but some of them are more complicated than others. Some of them might take you more time. It’s up to you what you need out of it. But feel free to tell us what you need in the Facebook group as well. That’s what it’s there for. If you are saying you’re looking for a page builder and this is why, then we can generally recommend which page builder’s going to be better for you. And it can be a bit frustrating if you just paid out for something that everybody’s recommending, but it’s not relevant to you. So feel free to use our Facebook group for that.

Yeah, I’ll drop the links into the show notes on our website. But yeah, it’s an interesting one with page builders because I think they look so easy. Don’t they? And particularly when you’ve watched the videos and you see kind of how easy it is to drag and drop. I think in reality, and I found this myself because I used Divi this year for something. And I did find it a little bit frustrating I think, the amount of time actually took to actually sort of get used to it was quite a long time really. And that’s someone who’s quite experienced with more web design. So yeah, I think it’s just something to be quite cautious of. And if you can try it out for free first like with Elemental, then that’s a good option. So you can see if it works well for you.

Yeah. But they are kind of all a similar price really, you can expect to pay less than $100 for a plugin at least to get started to allow you to use drag and drop features. So yeah, you can start for free, but you can expect to pay up to $100 if you need that.

And is that, [inaudible 00:20:04]so much you charged yearly for that?

Yeah.

Yeah. It’s something to be wary of isn’t it?

Mm-hmm (affirmative)

Because I think sometimes you think, oh, it’s $100, and then next year it comes out of your account and you thinking what was that? So yeah, do check out if it is actually yearly, I think a lot of them are an annual charge. So make sure you keep an eye on that when you’re actually looking at buying them.

Yeah. So to sum everything up really, I think it’s a case of how much time versus money you’d like to invest. So if you know what you need to get a domain name or you might already have one, but you just need to get hosting and maybe you’ve got $50 to spend on a theme, then great, you can start quite cheap. It’s not going to cost you more than 100 to $150 a year at least to get started with hosting because that’s an annual fee. But if you wanted to go, I want lots of plugins and I want all of these fancy features and I’m going to use a page builder as well. Then costs might set you back around four or $500 depending on what you want to invest. It all depends on you and how much time versus money. We absolutely don’t recommend that you stay on any free plans for long.

If you’ve got a free domain, if you’ve got free hosting, use it to get to know the systems, use it to get to know plugins and how those all work and then as soon as possible, get a proper hosting account. Get a proper domain and get a relatively nice looking template, it’s relatively cheap. And that’s usually where most people stay because there’s so many free plugins available. People don’t like paying for plugins when they need to, but for some features on your website, especially if it’s a pinnacle part of your website and your business, like you might run an events business or you might say, “You know, I’m actually going to spend $50 on this plugin for events.”

It might work out instead of using something like Event Brite which takes a percentage.

Exactly.

In the long run, that might be more financially viable. Definitely.

Exactly. So there’s longer term financial benefits as well for spending money now and then reaping the benefits later.

Yeah, definitely. Okay. Well that was a really interesting episode I think. And hopefully we’ve given you some ideas of how much it will cost, which is brilliant. So if you didn’t already know, we do actually have a free Facebook group. We’d love you to join. Just head over to Jammydigital.com/Facebook. You can ask us any questions in there. Any questions you’ve had from this podcast episode, just fire away in there. Every Wednesday we review websites for free and this is usually a paid service where we offer, but at the minute we are doing a number of these for free little mini website critiques in our Facebook group. So that’s it for today’s episode. We’ll see you next time on the Make your mark online podcast.

Martin & Lyndsay

The post Ep 15 – How much does it cost to build your own WordPress website? appeared first on Content Marketing & SEO Agency | Get More Sales From Your Website.

Trying to appeal to more than one target audience on your website is tricky.

It’s difficult to make sure our message connects with each audience we’re targeting. For example, a recruitment agency must appeal to businesses to work with, but they must also attract good candidates too. How would they go about appealing to both audiences on the one website?

There are methods of achieving this and it’s something we carefully consider when we build websites.

In this episode, we walk-through the ways you can do this successfully.

In this episode, we’ll cover…

• • Examples of business who appeal to more than one audience
  • Should you set up a new website for your separate audiences?
  • When you should set up your own website and when you shouldn’t
  • How to signpost your particular audience to the right place on your website
  • Using CTAs and your big, bold statement to appeal to more than one audience
  • Do you need different layouts and page designs for different audiences?

Time Stamps: In a rush? Get to the section you need to below!

1.18 – Who would need to consider more than one audience on their website?
2.39 – Is it worth setting up a new website for each target audience?
5.52 – How to signpost people to the right page on your website
6.45 – Using your CTAs to direct your end users
7.52 – How to write a big, bold statement for multiple audiences
9.50 – Getting your promo area to direct people to the right place
10.39 – Having unique pages per service
11.00 – What to write on the services pages to appeal to your audiences
13.42 – Thinking about your users’ journey
14.12 – Do you need different page designs for different audiences?

Useful Resources and Links

Membership Community 

What To Do Next

Thanks for listening to our episode. If you found this episode useful, please feel free to share it via social media using the links above.

If you want to know about search engine optimisation (SEO), website conversions, content marketing and website copy, then join our FREE Facebook Group.

We would love it if you subscribed to our podcast and left us an honest review. This helps us reach more people and produce more podcast episodes.

If you have any questions about this episode or you want us to cover something new, then contact us on hello@jammydigital.com or leave a comment at the bottom of the page!

• • Join Our Facebook Group
  • Subscribe and review
  • Contact Us

Episode Transcript Below

Welcome to the Make Your Mark Online Podcast, where we help personal brands building grow a successful business website.

Please welcome your hosts, husband and wife team, Martin and Lyndsay.

Welcome to Episode 14 of the Make Your Mark Online Podcast. Today, we’re gonna be talking about how you can use your website to appeal to numerous audiences.

But before we get into that, this podcast is sponsored by the Make Your Mark Online Membership. This is our signature membership community, where we help personal brands build and grow a successful business website. This actually launched on Monday, the 1st of October, and we’ll be closing the doors on the 14th of October, 10:00 p.m. in UK time. So, if you wanna get in at the lowest possible price ever, then visit makeyourmarkonline.net We won’t be opening the doors until January, and then we’re gonna be charging $39 a month. So, save yourself $10 a month if you sign up before the 14th.

So, let’s get into the show!

So, today we’re talking about our websites, and what we can do with them if we have a number of different audiences, different target audiences. So, Lyndsay.

Yes.

Why would somebody want to do this, or need to do it?

Well, actually, it’s more common than you think. And we’ve come across it so many times with our clients, and people that we talk to on a regular basis. A lot of business owners have to think about completely different audiences for their products.

So, recently, we had one lady ask about this in our Facebook group. She’s a fitness trainer and dance teacher who came up with a kind of like a new exercise routine. And her website needed to appeal to two audiences.

So, the first one was actually just getting customers through the doors to her fitness studio. But the second one was other fitness trainers looking for a new routine that she could franchise to.

Got it.

So, they had completely different goals. There was the customers who were looking to get fitter and healthier in like a fun way, and then there was the fitness trainers, who were looking for a new routine they could use to get more customers.

So, that’s completely different. And their needs were completely different. And there’s loads of examples of this. Kind of like if you think about recruitment agencies. You know, they’ve gotta appeal to the candidates, where they get people’s CVs and information. But they’ve also gotta appeal to businesses. You know the people that actually pay them and, you know, the people that they want to work with, and provide candidates for.

So, there’s a lot of examples of this. And this is something that comes up time and time again, and a question we get asked quite a lot.

Yeah. So, we see this when we’re building websites as well. Lots of our clients have different segments of their audience that they need to appeal to. And one of the questions that we get asked quite a lot is whether or not it’s worth setting up an additional website for the audience.

Is that the right thing to do?

It’s an interesting one. It’s always really tricky when people ask should they open another website. I’ve know business owners with five or six websites. And the difficulty is, is that websites take a lot of work. Or should I say, they should take a lot of work because, you know, you need to be updating your website constantly. You need to be adding content. You need to be driving traffic to that content. And that takes an awful lot of work. I mean, we know just having one website, that it takes a lot of work. Having more than one is difficult. It is tricky. So, you have to think very carefully about whether it’s worth setting up a brand new website for your separate service with a separate audience.

Yeah, exactly. And we’ve actually just been through this with our new membership. So, our agency, obviously, as you guys know is Jammy Digital. This is where we build websites, and we help people redesign or start a brand new business, and they need a website.

So, when we launched the membership, we had to think long and hard whether or not we wanted to include the membership on the main website, or whether or not we’d set it up elsewhere. And again, it’s not an easy decision, but in the end we decided, you know, it needs its own home. It needs its own membership site. It needs its own face, and its own branding.

So, although it’s very closely linked, it is separate.

Yeah, definitely. And that’s a really good point, actually, Martin. It needed its own brand. So, I think that’s always a clear indicator as to whether you need another website. Because if something needs its own brand, it needs its own close, it needs its own logo, it needs lots of pages of content, you know, that kind of thing, then that’s a good indicator that yes, it probably will work on another website.

If it just needs a page, and it can kind of fit into your brand already, then you might just wanna look at having it housed on your website itself. Because like we said, there’s a lot of work. You have two websites, that’s automatically double the work there.

Yeah. And that’s twice as much marketing, that’s twice as much Facebook posts, that’s twice as much LinkedIn-

Exactly.

… that’s another Twitter account, potentially.

Yeah, exactly.

So, I mean, we’ve very much kept it close to home. You know, we are using the same social media platforms. It’s just that we have Make Your Mark Online as a product, which is why it kind of works, because we can still kind of group it in, and talk about it on our main social media platforms.

We got away with it, didn’t we?

Yeah, exactly. But that’s what you can do if you create additional product within your business. But if you’re creating a separate business website altogether, then that’s where it might not be necessary. That’s what you’re saying.

Yeah, definitely. Definitely.

Okay. So, let’s say we want to use our existing website. We know we can do that. We just want to appeal to more than one audience. How can we actually go about it? What kind of tangible stuff can our listeners take away and action today?

Yeah, it’s a good question, actually, because a lot of people get this wrong, but it’s so, so simple to actually do. And it all starts with a homepage. I mean, we talk a lot about the homepage. We could talk for hours and hours about it. But we need to use this page to signpost people to the right places on your website.

If you think of yourself and your website like you’re kind of directing road traffic. So, imagine you’re just … stood in the middle of the road with your little whistle, and-

Yeah, don’t do that. It’s dangerous.

No, don’t do that, please. But imagine you are and, you know, you’re directing cars left and right, and straight on. That’s exactly what you need to do with your website. You need to sort of stand there and say, “Okay, you need to go over there. You need to go over there. And you need to go this way.” And people always get that wrong on their homepage, but that’s the biggest thing that you can do. If you’re appealing to more than one audience, then you need to quickly get them to the areas that they need to be on their website.

So, for example, we’ll often have two call-to-action buttons in the big, bold statement area. And, basically, the first third of the homepage, where you see it kind of straightaway. So, if I’m using a recruitment agency as an example, then you might have two buttons. One might say, “Looking for an exciting, new career.” The other might say, “Looking for the perfect candidate.” And automatically then, the audience knows, “Okay, I need to click on that button to get to the right place.”

It’s very, very, very simple, but a lot of people forget to do it.

Yeah. It does sound simple, but that’s because it is. I mean, we’re not talking rocket science here. We’re just talking about giving people the information that they need, and making it easy for them. And a minute ago, we were talking about redesigning an entire new website for a new business. But actually, just by labeling these buttons, and giving people that clear direction, that’s generally enough. That’s what you’re saying.

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.

Perfect. It’s interesting, actually, that you mention the big, bold statement, because we talk about this a lot. But actually coming up with a big, bold statement is a little more tricky when you have two audiences, isn’t it?

Yeah, definitely. It is. So, just so our audience knows, a big, bold statement is essentially the sort of summary of your business, and what it is that you do. So as soon as someone lands on your website, they should be immediately hit by a sentence that kind of summarizes what it is that you do, so your audience knows they’re in the right place.

And, yes, if you are appealing to more than one audience, then this can be a little bit more tricky, ’cause you kind of have to be a little bit more vague with your big, bold statement, I think.

Yeah. So, it might take you a little bit longer than it normally would if you have a number of different audiences. But it is actually quite interesting because we did an episode just on the big, bold statement, and we’ll link to that in the show notes. And we came up with nine different ways to create a big, bold statement. And some of these, you can’t actually use if you have a number of audiences.

So, for example, if you do blog-writing services for start-ups. If that’s your products and service that you offer, and you have an additional audience, maybe you are trying to appeal to agencies, maybe you offer white label, then you can’t just say, “Blog-writing services for start-ups.” It’s important that you actually think about both of your audience.

And so, for instance, you might come up with something like, “Creating better content for the world,” or whatever. That’s a really bad example, but-

Yeah, but it’s about making it a little bit more … having that bit more broader appeal, isn’t it?

Yeah. So that you can reach the two audiences, I suppose. The more specific you go, the more direct you can go, which is great. But if you do have two audiences, then that’s when you have to kind of step back a little bit, and think about your communication, in general, what it is that you do.

Yeah. But then, if you have two buttons underneath that, so you have, you know, “Writing for start-ups,” or “White label service,” then it kind of clarifies then what it is that you do, and then gets people to the right place. So, you can start with a more broader, I think, big, bold statement. That’s absolutely fine.

And the promo area too. The promo area is essentially the area where you kind of house your services. So, normally, this is under the big, bold statement, and you have your sort of three or four key main services, and people can click on them and go to the right sort of page. So, that’s where you will, again, start to direct people where they need to go.

You don’t just do it once on your homepage. You kind of need to keep reminding people, “Okay, you’re here, and you need to go over here,” you know. It needs to be a constant reminder on your homepage. Get your audience to the right part of your website. We always say this: “Your homepage is just to get people to the next page of your website. That’s all you need to do.”

So, constantly remind them on your homepage to get to the next page of your website.

So, you mentioned all the pages, actually getting your visitor to another page on your website.

Yeah.

Are you saying that we should have a unique services page for each service?

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And I think this is another thing that people get wrong. Because people just have, sometimes, just one page that kind of appeals to both audiences, which is-

Yeah, we see that a lot, don’t we? And especially on website critiques-

Yeah!

They kind of group their services and their audiences together, and-

Yes. Yeah. We’re constantly telling them, “Keep it separate.” Because there’s no point. You know, if you’re a recruitment agency, and you’ve got a candidate who’s looking for information about what jobs you’ve got, there’s no point in them learning about what you can do for companies. There’s absolutely no point in them even looking at that content. So, why are they on that page? You need completely separate pages. And you need to think about, on these separate pages, the kind of needs and problems that the people are having, that your audiences are having, and write that content specifically for them.

So, for example, on the page for people looking for a new career on a recruitment agency website, you need to say, “Okay, so you might be feeling underappreciated at work. You might be looking for something new. This is how we can help you.” Everything should be geared towards that person, and there should be no content that isn’t specifically for them on that page.

Yeah. This is where we come back to each of your web pages is kind of its own tool. It’s kind of its own salesperson, really, to get people to fill out the contact form or, in your example, submit your CV. Like you are the recruitment agency that I go in to find me a job that I am appreciated in. You’re talking about using your copy to convert these people to become leads.

Yeah. It’s not just your content as well, it’s actually everything on the page that you need to think about. So, if you were having testimonials on that page, don’t just have any random testimonials on there. So, if we take recruitment agency for an example, and you’ve got a candidate thinking, “Should I work with this recruitment agency? Will they find me a good career?” There’s no point in having a testimonial on there for some, you know, CEO of a big business. You’ve gotta have a testimonial on there from someone who was a candidate, who has found your service really helpful. And you’ve gotta think about all these things. If you’ve got links to your blog content on there, make sure it’s relevant for the actual person that’s on the page. So, you have to think about all these things, and really appreciate that every page on your website should be geared towards that particular audience segment. And this is even more important if you’re appealing to lots and lots of different audiences.

Yeah, ’cause each of these audiences has their concerns, their problems, that they faced in the past. And they have a … yeah, essentially, a problem that they need you to solve. And if you just start speaking to them in general terms about the fact that, “You know, we do recruitment, and we are great people.”

“We’ve done recruitment for 25 years,” and all that kind of stuff. No. Make it really specific. Exactly. Don’t make it general. The most of it can go on your individual pages on your website, the better. Definitely.

Yeah. It’s about thinking about your visitor and their journey. What journey are they going to go on? When I say journey, I don’t mean philosophical. I mean, actually, what pages are they gonna click on, what images are they gonna click on, what length, where they’re gonna go. And map out all of the different sort of points of that journey, until they get in touch, and then how you use their recruitment agency.

Exactly. Exactly, yes. Yeah.

So, this seems like quite a lot of work. That’s the only problem. That’s the only thing-

That is the only problem.

… our listeners might be concerned with. So, if they’re creating lots of page designs, and lots of different things for each audience, do they have to create a completely unique design? Are they gonna have to kind of contact the web designer, or create a new page completely?

No. Definitely not. And, you know, if you’ve got sort of different audiences, there’s no reason why you should have a completely different design. I mean, in an ideal world, it might be nice, it might work, but your time is precious. So, you can keep the same design. You have some content, you have some images, you have testimonial, you have links to your blog post. That’s absolutely fine, you know, to keep that on every page. Just make sure the content is different. Make sure the content and the call-to-actions speak to your individual audiences.

Yeah. So, think about your images, and what your audience are gonna connect to. It’s gonna be different things. It absolutely is.

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. You just have to switch them out really. You have to switch out the content. You have to switch out the images. You probably have to switch out testimonials, and the blog content. But you don’t have to kind of make each page a different design.

No, it can follow the same layout, and structure.

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Which is gonna save you a little bit of time. And know that it’s time-consuming this way, and know that it’s easier to talk in general terms, and have one page that tries to suit everyone. But it’s just not gonna convey as well. So, it’s worth putting the time and effort into actually thinking about your different audiences, exactly what they need, exactly what problems they’re facing, and writing specific pages for them.

Okay. Well, that all sounds quite achievable. I think it’s … We’ve given a few tips away there for somebody who does want to introduce additional audience, or is concerned that they might need to pay out for a new website. Clearly, you don’t. I mean, in most scenarios, we would very rarely recommend that someone has an additional website. It’s quite easy when you think about things the way that we’ve explained, to actually imagine how it might look if you do have completely different audiences. And, yeah, I think our listeners will find that valuable.

Yeah, definitely. I think it can seem very complicated, and kind of scary, but it’s not really. And if you think about like you said, your customer’s journey, that person’s journey, you know, starting at the home page, okay, how are they going to then try and get in touch with you? How are you gonna get them to do that? And what pages will they click on? What process will they take?

If you think about it from that point of view, you can easily kind of plot it out, generally, and get them to the right place.

So, hopefully, you found that episode useful. Let us know if you have any questions at all. Join the Facebook group as well. If you go to jammydigital.com/facebook And ask us any follow-up questions about it. We don’t ask this enough actually. Get involved in the community. Share a link to your website, and let us critique it. At the minute, we are doing free website critiques in our Facebook group every Wednesday afternoon at 4:00 p.m. And we’ll happily take a look at it, and point you in the right direction, and tell you how to improve it.

Don’t forget, there are only a few days left until we close the doors for three months for the Make Your Mark Online Membership. This is our signature membership program, where we teach personal brands how to build and grow a successful business website. We teach you all about WordPress. We teach you all about SEO. We teach you how to define your personal brand, and really build a website that you could be proud of as well.

So, check that out at makeyourmarkonline.net

And we’ll see you in the next episode!

Martin & Lyndsay

The post Ep 14 – How to appeal to more than one audience on your website appeared first on Content Marketing & SEO Agency | Get More Sales From Your Website.

We recently launched a membership community aimed at helping personal brands build and grow a website.

Since our launch, we’ve had so many questions from people about the membership, and it made sense to answer these in our latest podcast.

In this episode, we go through what’s included in the membership, who it’s for and why we started it.

In this episode, we’ll cover…

• • Why we decided to launch the membership
  • What courses are included inside the membership?
  • Who is the membership for?
  • Who is the membership no for?
  • How much does it cost?
  • Do we have original content?

Time Stamps: In a rush? Get to the section you need to below!

3.42 – Why did we set up the membership?
9.08 –  What courses are included in the membership?
11.29 – Who is the membership for?
14.32 – Who is the membership not for?
17.51- How much does it cost?
18.36 – Can you join if you don’t use WordPress?
21.42 – How much support do you get?

Useful Resources and Links

Membership Community 

The Membership Guys

What To Do Next

Thanks for listening to our episode. If you found this episode useful, please feel free to share it via social media using the links above.

If you want to know about search engine optimisation (SEO), website conversions, content marketing and website copy, then join our FREE Facebook Group.

We would love it if you subscribed to our podcast and left us an honest review. This helps us reach more people and produce more podcast episodes.

If you have any questions about this episode or you want us to cover something new, then contact us on hello@jammydigital.com or leave a comment at the bottom of the page!

• • Join Our Facebook Group
  • Subscribe and review
  • Contact Us

Episode Transcript Below

Welcome to the Make Your Mark Online podcast where we help personal brands build and grow a successful business website. Please welcome your hosts, husband and wife team, Martin and Lindsay.

Hello and welcome to episode 13 of the Make Your Mark Online podcast. Today, we’re going to be talking all about our new membership community.

Yeah we are.

Yeah we are. Because we have loads of questions from people and we really want to delve into what it’s all about.

But before I begin the podcast, the podcast is sponsored by the Make Your Mark Online membership. This is our signature membership community where we help personal brands build and grow a successful business website.

This has launched. It launched on the first of October 2018 and we’d love for you to check it out. You can check it out at MakeYourMarkOnline.net. The doors will only be open for two weeks so we will close them on the 14th of October. And it will be available at its lowest ever price so don’t miss out.

Okay. Let’s get on with the show.

So, it’s very exciting, isn’t it? Because we’re actually recording this podcast the day after launch. So we’re looking a bit bleary eyed, aren’t we?

Yeah. We’re absolutely shattered. Yay.

Yay.

No, it was such a fantastic day. Obviously, with any launch there’s a mad rush to get it right …

Absolutely.

… get it done on time. Then we had obviously to send out the email to everybody and let everybody know, which is always nice. And it’s great that we’ve had such a great response.

So, yeah, we’re recording this the day of actually releasing it.

Yeah.

So well that’s providing my podcast editor doesn’t leave us because we’re sending him so last minute.

We love you, James.

Yeah we do.

Hopefully that will help.

So, yeah, it’s just been a world wind, hasn’t it?

Yeah, definitely.

But really exciting stuff.

It’s been an amazing 24 hours actually, yeah.

Yeah.

It’s nice to say that. You can always say that actually afterwards though, can’t you?

Of course you can.

When you’re in the middle of it you’re like, “When are we going to get there?”

Yeah, don’t talk to me at all.

Yeah.

Why did you do this thing? Yeah.

We go through these experiences a lot. And it kind of helps us understand what our clients go through, doesn’t it?

Of course, yeah.

Because we all go through this when we’re launching something new. All this excitement but all the hard work and everything that goes into it beforehand. It all kind of makes it a very crazy, crazy time for people. So yes, we can fully appreciate any websites that go live.

Yeah. And it’s really interesting actually because we always say this to clients when we’re building websites. That it doesn’t matter what kind of website it is, there’s always going to be something that doesn’t happen as you expect. And that definitely happened …

Absolutely.

… with our membership site …

Yep.

… and a few different things obviously out of your control. Like convert kits, sending out emails later than we expected. But it all happened as it should have done in the end and we’re really happy. Got a fair amount of signups and obviously we’ll see lots of people trickle through.

Yeah. Any web designer that tells you that everything goes perfectly is either a superhero or a liar.

Yeah.

I’m going to guess the latter.

Yeah.

Yeah. There’s always [niggly 00:03:19] bits. But it’s having someone there, isn’t it, to be like, “Okay, this is what we need to do.”

Of course.

And yes. So we were kind of up until … well, you were up later than me … but I like my sleep.

Yep.

Martin was up quite late sorting out issues. But yeah, everything’s all okay today.

Yeah.

So we’re looking good, touch wood. So I just wanted to ask a few questions that we’ve actually been asked ourselves …

Yeah.

… about the membership. Firstly, why did we decide to do this?

Yeah, it seems crazy.

Why did we decide?

Seems crazy after the past 24 hours. I have no idea why we decided to do this. No, I think there are a few reasons we really wanted to do this. One of the main reasons is: We have lots of people wanting to work with us but they might not be in a position right now to pay a few thousand pound for a web designer, for instance.

Yeah.

And this gives us an opportunity to help people if they don’t have a big budget. But they still have our knowledge and experience, and we’re able to help these people move their business forward by helping them create an amazing website. So that’s one of the reasons.

Plus even if they did spend 500 or 1,000 pounds with a web designer who designed a website that you might think is going to move your business forward, quite often we find at that kind of price point it’s difficult to find someone …

Yeah. It doesn’t really work.

Yeah, it’s difficult to find someone who has an awful lot of experience. And this is our way of teaching you what to do with your website so that if you ever did hire a web designer, then you know what your website needs to include, you know what your home page needs to include, you know when you’re writing the content for your website how you need to write it. And you obviously can keep an eye on your SEO elements and stuff like that.

But having the knowledge is underrated. People just think, “I’m just going to give this money to the web designer and my computer’s just going to start kind of throwing money out of it.”

Yay.

“And it’s all going to work magically.” But that doesn’t happen. Your website is just a tool and you need help to make it a successful tool.

Yeah definitely. And the website critiques as well have really sort of kind of helped us really in sort of forming this membership as well, haven’t they?

Yeah, they really have. We got so many questions that we never would have thought of answering. Like how to do a website backup, for instance. And what’s the best way to do this? And what’s the best way to do that?

Sometimes because we deal with sort of high end website problems like FTP and DNS and all the technical stuff. Sometimes we get away from, you know, the basics. What are people struggling with day-to-day and how can we help them. And we wouldn’t have known that without doing the website critiques and offering sometimes two hours of our time each Wednesday to actually answer people’s questions and critique the website and point them in the right direction.

Yeah, definitely. And I think from a personal point of view because we’ve been asked by people … not particularly people that are interested in joining the membership but perhaps more kind of colleagues or different kind of people … you know, “Why are you doing this because you charge obviously 5,000 pound plus sometimes for a website, and people are happy to pay for that? Why bother sign up a membership?”

Yeah.

And that’s true. To be honest, designing and building websites for clients is not something we’re ever going to stop because we absolutely love it. But the reason we wanted to set this up is just because we really love teaching.

Yeah.

And we say every week … and we genuinely mean it … Wednesday afternoons are our favorite time …

Yeah.

… because we just love helping people who want to improve their websites. And getting feedback from people saying, “You know what? I made those tweaks on my website and I got a new client from it.” Or, “I got some more sales from it.” And that’s what excites us so much.

It’s amazing. So good.

So, it does. It feels so good to actually teach that to people. And we wanted to start a membership for a long time. I think I remember you mentioning it, I don’t know, three or four years ago.

Yeah.

But at that time I don’t think we felt like we had the knowledge or experience to kind of give to people.

This the thing, yeah. This is the thing that we found mostly is: There are lots of people who offer kind of memberships out there. And it was after speaking to Mike Morrison a few years ago from The Membership Guys, Member Site Academy.

Who we love, by the way …

Who we love, yeah.

Because we’re a part of their membership …

Man crush.

… and it’s amazing. It’s truly amazing.

Yeah, he’s a great guy and Callie obviously lovely as well. And they’ve just go such a wealth of knowledge.

But actually speaking to Mike a few years ago when we first met at a conference, I actually realized that it probably wasn’t the right time for us to launch a membership. There’s so many people out there who actually just teach without actually doing first. And that’s what we really wanted to master. We wanted to master the doing of building amazing websites or the doing of ranking clients highly on Google. And so many people actually don’t … They miss that step off. They don’t do the thing that they say you can do.

And that’s why we really wanted to master that first, which is why we stopped doing the membership and we kind of put it to the back of our mind for a few years. We learned how to build amazing websites. We got feedback, we got results for our clients. And then we felt that it’s the right time to launch a membership.

Yeah, definitely. I think that’s, yeah, a really, really good point.

So, we’re just going to go through a few questions now. Particularly ones that we’ve been asked because we’ve asked so many questions over the past 24 hours …

Yeah.

… which is great. Please keep them coming. We sell Drift on our actual sales page, MakeYourMarkOnline.net. People have been getting in touch on their. But also on Facebook and email. So we’ve got some really sort of common questions that have been [crosstalk 00:09:05]

Yeah, definitely.

So we really want to make sure that we answer those.

So firstly, what courses are inside the membership?

Okay. So this is going to be a bit of a quick fire one. So we have an introductory video, which is really, really important that you watch that one. And actually a lot of our content stems from this very idea of how we brand websites. How you can build a website based on five core principles. I’m not going to go into too much but that’s the first video we want you to watch.

We have a how to brand yourself course, which teaches you how to position yourself in a certain way so that you can get a certain type of customer.

We have a how to build a website from start to finish course, which is going to teach you how to install a template, and how to hook everything up, and how to install menus, and make your life a lot easier.

We have an on page SEO course where we teach you how to create title tags and meta descriptions.

So lots of things included in this course. So it’s not going to stop. We’ve got lots of ideas. Even things further down the line which is, you know, how to integrate your email marketing system within your website. Because it’s a common problem we have.

How to create landing pages. That’s going to be further down the line as well. So there’s an endless amount of content that we could create.

Yeah. That’s the thing with web design. It’s not just, you know, the actual website. It’s everything else that’s part of it as well. So we also have a course on your website copy, which is obviously a huge part of the website. And we also have a course on how to use WordPress, which is going to be incredibly important for a lot …

Especially for beginners, yeah.

Yeah, especially for beginners it’s going to be really important for them.

But, yeah, like you said there’s so much actually connected with a website. And we’ve found that dealing with our clients as well we don’t just design the website. We hook up emails, we start talking about content marketing, and we start looking at their website copy. And everything else. And they’re brand. There’s so much that actually goes into it. Far more than you actually think.

And yeah, this is what we wanted to put into our course, essentially everything that makes a perfect website. But obviously that’s a lot of content there. So we’re going to be constantly updating our membership with all this fresh content which will make your website better.

Absolutely.

Okay so, the next question that is a common one as well is: Who is the membership for?

So the membership is for anybody who really understands that their website is important. Yes it’s a tool. Yes it’s there to make you money. But it’s absolutely vital. And some people don’t actually think that it’s as important as it is. And they think, “You know, I’ll just throw up a quick website and it’ll be fine.” But the website is absolutely vital in your marketing efforts.

So another common question we’ve been having is: Who is the actual membership for?

Well, there’s a few types of people really who would benefit from being inside the membership. Number one, if you understand the importance of a website then this is going to be right for you. I mean not everybody treats a website as sort of a marketing tool that you really should invest your time and your effort into.

So it’s especially going to be beneficial to the people who really get that. Who really understand that the website is a big part of your business.

Yeah. I mean we always say kind of a website is kind of the heart of your business, isn’t it? It’s everything. And kind of social media and content marketing and SEO that kind of gets blood to the heart but your website is everything to do with your business and you have full control over it. It is 100% yours.

So, yeah, we always kind of hammer home the importance of a website. But you’ve got to understand that if you want to be part of the membership.

Absolutely. And it’ll absolutely be beneficial to anybody who doesn’t have a big budget. I mean, like Lindsay said, we charge thousands for a website and you might only have a small budget. It might be brand new business for instance, and you might not have a lot of money to spend. So when we price it at $29 per month or $290 per year, we did that deliberately. We didn’t want price to be a problem. So that’s another reason why we did it.

Also, if you already have a website that you like and you’re happy with it, you might just want to change a few things and you have some support along the way but you need traffic. Part of the reason we launched the membership is because having a website by itself doing nothing on the internet isn’t going to help anyone. And we understand the importance of driving traffic and highly qualified traffic to our website. And that’s a major benefit of being inside the membership.

Yeah, definitely. And also conversions as well because, you know, like you said, it’s great having a beautiful website even if you get traffic to it a lot of people actually still are going to rely on converting that traffic.

So yeah, it’s about trying to help people also grow their website. And, you know, as a buy effect kind of grow their business at the same time. So, yeah, it’s also suitable for those people as well.

Yeah. And this leads us nicely to content as well because content … just website content in general, you know, for your about page, for your service page, but also for your blog it’s absolutely vital that you create ongoing content for your website visitors. And if you are looking for help with that then the membership’s going to be great for you.

Definitely. So another question we’ve actually got which is an interesting one is: Who is the membership not for?

Okay. This is an interesting one. So I think it’s going to be a lot of work. I think that’s the crux of it all really.

Yeah.

If you feel as though you’re just going to install a quick theme and everything’s going to work magically then it’s probably not going to work for you, the membership. It is going to take time and effort. But we did make the course bite sized enough. I mean, most videos are between five or 10 minutes. Some of them are up to 25, 30 minutes but we only give you the information that you actually need. But if you’re not prepared to take some time out of your week to learn bits of information and grow your business and you think it’s all just a one click button software then you’re not really going to find the membership that beneficial.

So another thing that we wanted to mention is: We didn’t create this membership to be kind of a technical help desk. So this is the important thing. Is that with websites there’s always going to be technical things that you’re struggling with and we absolutely encourage you asking questions like that in the community.

But more often then not, you do get support from your plugin developers and from your WordPress themes. So we wanted to create a membership that is focused on, you know, how to grow your business, how to attract the right clients, how to drive more traffic.

We didn’t want to be: Why is this plugin not quite working with this thing very well?

Yeah.

So, I mean you do have a lot of support out there for that kind of thing. Lot’s of help and advisors available. There’s an abundance of it. But what there isn’t an abundance of two web designers teaching you what actually works with a website and how to drive more highly qualified traffic and get more qualified customers.

Yeah. That’s a really good point actually. And I was speaking to a lady on Drift actually yesterday on the actual sales page. And she said she’s got a website that she doesn’t want to change, it’s not perfect by any stretch of the imagination she said. But she doesn’t want to change it. She doesn’t want to spend too much time sort of learning this stuff. But she does need help with technicalities. And I did say, “You know, we’re not the guys for you.”

No.

“What would be better is for you to just get someone to make those tweaks as and when you want them too.” And, yeah, I think people can post in our community and we will help them with techy stuff but we’re not going to go in and solve those problems …

No.

… and that’s not what the membership is primarily for. So if that’s what you’re primarily after, then it’s not for you.

Yeah, it’s about bigger picture. And it’s about us putting our experience inside a membership community. We know from building lots and lots of websites over the years that the things that make the biggest difference aren’t the little technical things …

Yeah.

… the little technical problems that you have. And those can be quickly fixed. You can get someone off Fiverr or Upwork or pay WP Fix It if you’re having some problems. But what moves the needle the most is your positioning, is your traffic, is actually making your website look good enough to attract the right customers. And those are the ideal sorts of courses that we feel will help you move your business forward quicker.

Yeah, definitely. Okay. So moving on. How much does the membership cost? And I think you’ve mentioned that actually previously. But let’s go through it just one more time.

Yeah, so the actual cost of the membership is actually $39 per month, $390 a year. But for these two weeks we’re actually doing a $29 and $290 per year on the annual plan. If you go with that then obviously you save money, but you also get a 30 minute coaching call as well which can be redeemed after the first 30 days.

That could be six months time. It could be, “I’ve done everything that you said in the membership. And now we just want to grow our traffic. Or we just want to find, you know, some blog post ideas. Or what can we do?” Then that’s fine. You’ve got that in the bag and you can redeem it later on down the line.

Yep, definitely. So next one. If you don’t have a WordPress website should you join? And we’ve had this question quite a few times. It’s been a really popular one where people have thought about joining but they don’t actually have a website on WordPress.

Yeah, and this is interesting actually because I would probably say that most of the courses, most of the videos that we’ve produced they do talk about the bigger picture. We talk about color schemes, and we talk about your big bold statement. All of that kind of stuff can be applied to any website. And the success of your website isn’t limited to WordPress. It’s just that we only build WordPress websites so a lot of the information that we’ve gathered over the years is related to WordPress.

But if you need to create title tags and meta descriptions and ALT hacks for your website then you can do that on any content management system. It’s not exclusive to WordPress. It’s just that a lot of people understand that WordPress is probably the best platform and it’s the most reliable platform and there’s loads of helpful information out there on the internet. And this I why we wanted to build our membership around WordPress.

So, yeah, I mean you were saying last night, what, probably 60/40, weren’t we? Or 70/30?

Yeah, 60/40. I’d say 60% of the content is more geared towards WordPress, 40% not so much. It’s kind of for everyone. It also depends what you want. I mean, if you want accountability. So we’re going to be running challenges of every sort of, you know, six week mini bite sized challenges. We’ll be doing that.

If you want someone to talk to on Q & A calls. If you want a forum. If you want those kind of things along with the 40% of content that isn’t about sort of WordPress particularly, then it might be for you.

It’s entirely your decision. We can’t kind of give you a direct answer on that one unfortunately. But, yeah, I think there is still a lot for people …

Yeah.

… who don’t have WordPress websites certainly.

Absolutely.

So just a question that we had actually yesterday as well. Do we have original content on the membership?

Yeah, it was quite interesting getting this question actually. I didn’t expect it. We actually have our own unique content. So we’ve come up with our own ideas, we’ve come up with our own formulas for things like creating title tags and creating meta descriptions. But also the five core principles that every website should follow. And this is all our original content.

Obviously how to install a WordPress theme and how to create title tags in general is something that you can find anywhere. It’s just that we have our own spin on it. And not everybody is going to agree with what we say. We don’t agree with what everybody else teaches in the marketing space. But it’s about you finding a community and some experts who can help you move your business forward. And it’s sometimes nice to have a balanced discussion about it. “Well, these people say that you shouldn’t have your pricing on your website. And you say that we should.” And that’s really interesting because we can obviously use our experience and our past clients as examples. And that’s what’s great about us building websites first and then relaying that information to you guys.

Okay. So the final question: How much support will you get inside the membership? And this is a really important one, isn’t it?

Yeah, we wanted to put a big emphasis on support. So we have a community that you could be a part of where you can ask any questions at all. We have a general chat channel as well so if you just want to talk, if you want to have a bit of a bitch and a moan about your day, or what’s happened, then feel free to do that. But we have our weekly calls as well. Everyone’s there. At 9:30 we have a Q & A call.

And we can change this. Again, we’re at the early stages here. If it fits in better in the afternoon and the general consensus is we want it to be a certain time, then we’ll work around you. You are the founding members and we want to build a membership around you.

We also have the accountability that you mentioned, Lindsay, about the six week mini challenges. This is going to be something that we’re taking part in as well. So we’re going to do a video challenge. So if you want to get better at video then we’re going to create a challenge in the community where it’s, “Okay, we’re going to post a video every day for six weeks so we can get better on video.” And you can do it in the safety of our community. You don’t have to take part but that’s the kind of challenge that we’re going to do.

We’re going to do blogging challenges.

We will be hard on you though.

We’re not going to be hard on you.

No, we’re not going to be mean.

We were terrible at video when we first started. And the only way that we learned how to get remotely good … which I still don’t think we’re there yet but … is by doing it all the time. And doing it in the safety of a community …

Yeah, definitely.

… is very helpful.

I think what I mean is that we will hold you to account.

Yeah.

And that’s what people want. I mean, that’s what I want all the time. Because sometimes I need that accountable to really kick me on the ass and actually get things done. So we will be holding people to account and saying, “Hey, where’s your video today?” Or, “Where’s your blog post this week?” Or whatever it might be. So yeah, we will be doing that.

But it’s amazing about that accountability. When you’re actually paying for something like a membership … whether it’s monthly, annually … you’re in there and you’re committed to it. That means that you want to get the most out of it. So yes, you’re going to get a great looking website, yes, you’re going to get rankings. But you need to consistently move forward and having that accountability is absolutely priceless. It is the only way that we would have produced as much content this year and last year and this podcast is by actually having some accountability in our own mastermind groups.

So it’s absolutely vital and it is completely priceless.

So, yeah, that’s pretty much all the questions we’ve had over the past 24 hours. Please keep them coming. Throw them at us. They really do help us with creating content just like this, which is really, really helpful for a wider audience. To find out more about our membership.

We are on hand answering your questions and welcoming our founding members which is very exciting.

Yeah.

If you are interested in learning more or perhaps signing up, just go to MakeYourMarkOnline.net and you can sign up there via PayPal or Stripe.

So that was episode 13 of our Make Your Mark Online podcast. We hope you enjoyed listening. We look forward to seeing you next time.

Martin & Lyndsay

The post Ep 13 – Why we launched a membership and what’s inside appeared first on Content Marketing & SEO Agency | Get More Sales From Your Website.

We get it.

Why We Spend Money on Membership Groups and Pittance on Advertising

We’re personally part of six membership groups. These groups do the following:

• Deliver excellent content that allows us to grow our business
• Give us technical help and advice that saves us heaps of time in the long run
• Connects us with other business owners which increases our leads and sales
• Connects us with like-minded people so we can gain support and new ideas

We’ve personally seen the value of joining membership sites. We spend very little (less than £200 per year) on actual advertising solely because we’re part of these groups.

To us, they are a ‘marketing’ cost. A way for us to learn, grow and connect with many people.

The Make Your Mark Online Membership

For those of you who don’t know. The Make Your Mark Online membership is aimed at personal brands, who want to build and grow a successful website.

We’ll have courses on…

• SEO
• How to build a WordPress website from scratch
• Website copy
• How to brand yourself
• WordPress training
• How to convert more visitors into customers

Concerns You Might Have Joining the Make Your Mark Online Membership

That’s not to say we don’t have concerns before joining a new membership.

If you’re thinking of joining the Make Your Mark Online membership, we’ll address any concerns you have below. Ultimately, the decision is yours, but we want to give you as much information as possible before you make this commitment.

1. It’s another monthly fee and you’re not sure if it’s worth it

If you’re worried about yet another monthly fee, we get it. We’re constantly examining our finances, culling those monthly costs that aren’t growing our business.

Is our membership worth the money?

Firstly, we made the introductory price for our membership:
$29 per month or 
$290 per year 
(+VAT depending on where you live)

We wanted to make the initial price for our founding members super affordable.

Through joining this membership, we also want you to cut down the time you spend battling with your website.

We’ll teach you how to significantly increase traffic to your website and transform your readers into paying customers  – earning you more money in the long-run.

This membership is all about you gaining more traffic and relevant leads. Everything is dedicated to growing your business.

2. It will take time to go through the training videos

Time. It’s what we’re all short of, right? You don’t feel like you have time to go through a bunch of training videos, you just want to get on with doing the things you need to do in your business.

Is our membership worth the time?

Time is the thing we value more than anything in the world, and it’s something we were conscious of when it came to creating our membership community.

We have over 50 videos as part of our membership community, and we’ve made sure these are in bite-sized chunks. Many videos are under ten minutes and the more in-depth ones go up to thirty. We try to avoid fluff and make these easy to watch over breakfast or lunch!

You might want to spend your time actually doing what needs to be done for clients and customers, but that is not what grows your business. Our membership will help you grow your business and secure leads for the future.

3. You already have a website you love and you’re not sure if this membership will be valuable

Wooop. You already have a website you love. Good stuff. So you might be thinking, why on earth would I need to join your membership community? We get it, but there are still HUGE benefits to joining a membership community like ours.

Is our membership worth it if you’re already happy with your website?

We wanted this membership community to be super valuable for people who aren’t happy with their website (and need to build a new one) AND people who are happy with their site.

Firstly, there are always improvements to be made on any website (including ours!), and going through our videos will allow you to make tweaks to your current website that will improve conversions.

Secondly, we want to help you grow your traffic and attract your ideal clients through your site. We do this through modules like:

• Your brand – how to build trust and position yourself as an expert
• Website copy – exactly what to include on your home, about and services pages
• SEO – gain a lot more targeted traffic to your website
• Future modules such as blogging, using the right plugins and email marketing

4. You are already getting a lot of traffic so you’re not sure how helpful the membership will be

Getting a lot of traffic to your website is a great achievement! A lot of people think success ends at getting a boat-load of website traffic, but really, that’s just the beginning.

Is our membership worth it if you’re already getting loads of traffic?

It’s great you’re getting a lot of traffic to your website, but is that traffic converting and are you getting your ideal clients through your website?

Our membership will help you transform your readers into customers and, more importantly, attract the right clients through your website.

As we said, getting lots of traffic is a great start but it won’t grow your business in the long run.

5. You’re worried you’ll struggle with the techie stuff

You might have struggled with your website before and tackling something new can seem daunting!

Can you join our membership if you aren’t a ‘techie’?

Of course! Our membership is aimed at non-techies.

Anything to do with websites can seem technical at first and we knew this when we started planning the membership. This is why we tried to make it as simple and easy as we could. We give lots of examples and we avoid anything overly technical.

We use WordPress to build websites and this is an extremely simple tool to use.

We don’t just leave you to figure out yourself. We teach you everything from how to buy your domain name, to installing themes and plugins.

We have a members only forum where you ask questions and get feedback from other members and ourselves, so there’s always someone there to support you!

6. You’re not sure how much support you’ll get

We’ve joined membership communities before where the support available has been limited. You might be able to get ideas or help from other members, but this just isn’t reliable.

Will our membership offer you the support you need?

Every week, we’ll offer a Q&A/group coaching session to our members. This will be your opportunity to ask those niggly questions and gain feedback.

Part of paying for a membership community is gaining personalised feedback on your work. We get that. Which is why we wanted to incorporate it into a regular weekly spot.

7. You’d rather spend money buying templates and plugins

We get it. You would rather spend your money on templates and plugins and everything associated with a website rather than our membership. That’ll save you money in the long run, right?

Why should you choose our membership instead of just getting your own themes and plugins?

Firstly, we’ve done this for years. We know what the cheapest and most reliable hosting is. We know the best themes for you to use (ones that don’t take forever to figure out) and we know the most affordable and reliable plugins. Just having this information alone will save you time and money.

The best thing is? We also show you how to use them! We know people who have spent months trying to figure all this stuff out, our way is a shortcut to getting your website working properly, looking good and pulling leads in.

8. You need accountability, not more training

You’re sick of training. You do loads already by reading books, listening to podcasts and taking part in other membership groups. Why on earth should you take in any more?

Does our membership offer anything more than ‘training’?

Yup. Along with our weekly Q&A calls and coaching sessions with experts, we’ll also be running our 6-week accountability challenges. Examples of our 6-week challenges include our SEO challenge and video challenge.

We’ll give you feedback during these challenges so you continuously improve and develop, and we’ll make sure you’re held accountable if you don’t submit something that week!

Fancy joining us?

If you do fancy joining our membership, then join our waitlist. Doors open on the 1st October for two weeks, where the membership will be set at it’s lowest ever price of $29 per month (+VAT depending on where you live) or $290 per year (+VAT depending on where you live).

Any concerns we haven’t answered?

Those are the most common concerns we’ve received about our membership, so now it’s over to you. Are there any questions we haven’t answered? Just comment below or feel free to email us at martinandlyndsay@jammydigital.com

Martin & Lyndsay

The post Concerns you might have about joining our membership appeared first on Content Marketing & SEO Agency | Get More Sales From Your Website.

Should You Build Your Own Website or Hire an Agency?

This is THE question we get asked the most!

In this episode, we’ll be covering…

• What’s riskier? Building it yourself or going to a web design agency?
• Whether you should invest in website design if you have a smaller budget of say £500-£1000
• When you should hold off on investing in website design
• Why you should spend your money elsewhere to grow your business
• How much it costs to build a DIY website and what platforms you should use
• Should you use a website template or avoid them?
• When you should invest thousands with a web design agency

Time Stamps: In a rush? Get to the section you need to below!

1.28 – If you’re brand new to business should you build your own website or hire an agency?
4.04 – If you’ve been established sometime in business, but don’t have a big budget is that the time to hire someone locally or go to a freelancer?
5.58 – What should you spend your money on if not website design?
6.34 – How much should you invest in a DIY website?
9.08 – Should you ever use a website template/theme?
11.35 – What point should you be at in your business to invest in a web design agency?
14.55 – Summary of the episode

Useful Resources and Links

Why New Businesses Shouldn’t Invest Thousands In A New Website

Free Facebook Group: Website Tips for Non-Techies

What To Do Next

Thanks for listening to our episode. If you found this episode useful, please feel free to share it via social media using the links above.

If you want to know about search engine optimisation (SEO), conversion rate optimisation (CRO), content marketing and website copy, then join our FREE Facebook Group.

We would love it if you subscribed to our podcast and left us an honest review. This helps us reach more people and produce more podcast episodes.

If you have any questions about this episode or you want us to cover something new, then contact us on hello@jammydigital.com or leave a comment at the bottom of the page!

• • Join Our Facebook Group
  • Subscribe and review
  • Contact Us

Episode Transcript Below

Lyndsay: Hey guys. Welcome to Episode One of the Make Your Mark Online podcast. So, in today’s episode we are gonna be talking about whether you should DIY your website, or get an agency, or a freelance web designer to do it for you. I think it’s a question that every personal brand, and probably every business owner has asked themselves at some point isn’t it?

Martin: Yes, it’s a really common problem. I think it’s something that can really hold people back when it comes to getting a website live: should I do it myself using this online free software? Or should I pay for a professional agency? And that’s kind of why we wanted to do this as our very first episode, is because it’s such an important element, and one that we don’t want to hold you back as well.

Lyndsay: Yes, definitely. And it is an odd one for us isn’t it? ‘Cause we are … Last time I checked, we are web designers. So, you might be thinking, surely you should just recommend everyone go to a website agency, one called ideally Jammy Digital.

Martin: But it’s not always the case is it? I mean, we speak to lots and lots of business owners, and sometimes we say do it yourself, and sometimes we say hire a web designer agency, and that’s really why we wanted to do this as our first episode.

Should New Businesses Hire a Web Design Agency?

Lyndsay: Okay. Well, let’s get into this then. Let’s say I’m a business coach, and I’ve just started my own business, what would you recommend that I do from there? Would you recommend I DIY or go to an agency?

Martin: Well, obviously it depends entirely on your circumstances. But, if it’s a brand new business, then chances are you’re probably not at the stage where you need to hire a full agency just yet. Mainly because if you are a brand new business owner, understandably, financially you might be wanting to be careful. You might want to watch what you’re spending your money on. And if you’re brand new, and you go to a big agency, and they charge three, four, five, ten, fifteen thousand pound. Then, that’s an awful lot of financial commitment for you to go in straight away, and that could be a problem within itself. Now I’m not saying you don’t have that money to spend. I’m just saying I don’t think it’s probably the right thing to do if you are just starting out.

Martin: Now that’s one reason. Another reason why it potentially is a bad idea is because with brand new businesses, it’s when … It’s so often the time when businesses are developing and changing. And you change your mind quite a lot at that stage. Well, we’ve watched loads businesses, and we’ve changed our mind all the time at the start of the process.

Lyndsay: Yes.

Martin: Not so much anymore that we’re established, but definitely at the start of it you get new ideas. You wake up one morning, and you disagree with what you said yesterday, and so much changes. That the last thing you want to do is pay thousands of pound out to a web design agency, and then a week later completely change your business direction because you’ve decided it’s not what you want to be doing. And you have a tendency at the start of the process to sort of change your mind more frequent than when you do later on.

The Risks of Hiring a Web Design Agency if You’re a New Business

Martin: So, with a brand new business, like a business coach, take your time. You’re not in any rush. Or you might feel like you are, to start generating some money, and that’s exactly why you should be careful on what you spend your money on.

Lyndsay: Yes. Definitely, I agree. And I think when we … I mean, for example when we started Jammy Digital, we offered everything didn’t we?

Martin: Yes

Lyndsay: We were social media management. We offered search engine optimization-

Martin: Graphic design.

Lyndsay: Graphic design. Logo design. We’d of done anything. We’d of took your bins out for you.

Martin: Yes. We’d have sent you an invoice, and we’d have done it!

Lyndsay: An optional service. But yes, exactly. So, I think that you do find that the longer you are in business, the more you sort of tailor exactly what it is that you offer. So, If you’re spending thousands upfront, you might need to change that in six months. Or that money is just gonna be wasted.

Martin: Of course.

Should a More Established Business Invest in a Local Web Designer?

Lyndsay: Yep. That’s a really good point. Okay, so let’s say for example I’m sort of 12 months, 18 months, or two years, whatever it is down the line with my business. I’m doing quite well. Maybe I’ve got sort of 500 Quid, or 1,000 pound to invest in a website. Is that really the point? Where I should I sort of invest, and maybe go for sort of a freelancer locally or something like that? What do you think?

Martin: Well, again the tendency really is to spend money when we have money. So, if you’ve got a little bit of money coming in, and you can afford 500 pound to spend on a website. Should that be what you spend that money on? I don’t think that it is. I mean, again we’re not trying to put you off from hiring a web designer agency at all. But, 500 pound or even 1,000 pound isn’t going to go very far if you’ve already had some success in your business. So, if you’ve already sort of done it yourself, and you managed to work out how to do it with some free software. Or you’ve paid a little bit to do it yourself. Paying 500 pound isn’t necessarily going to elevate what you have to get it to a substantially better level than what you’ve probably got already.

Martin: Yes, you might be able to get a more professional design, but 500 pound actually isn’t a lot of money. Especially when we build websites, or bigger agencies build websites, they tend to spend quite a lot of time on the research phase of your website. So, who is your target audience? They try to incorporate a little bit more about your branding. All of that takes time and money. And, you’re just not going to get it if you’re spending out 500 pound or 1,000 pound even on a local web designer. They don’t generally have enough wiggle room to be able to justify spending all that time on the discovery process. What they’ll do is you’ll give them your 500 pound or maybe they’ll split it into two payments or whatever; and there’s just not an awful lot that, that money that you’re spending, is just going to cover that time.

Lyndsay: yes, definitely. yes, I totally agree and I think it is something that we recommend to people that the actually do hold off and keep sort of developing their own DIY website really. I mean, there’s plenty things, if you’ve got 500 pound or 1,000 pound to spare to spend. Perhaps, spend that instead on actually marketing your business in a different way. Or, actually improving your DIY website. So, that could be … you could invest in a professional photo shoot. Because, new images for your website can make a huge impact. So, yes there’s definitely sort of new things that you can do, and new areas you can invest in.

Tips for When You’re Building Your Own Website

Lyndsay: So if someone wants to DIY their own website, what would you recommend they do? How much should they invest? Should they sort of go the Wicks route? Or you know, and just invest a little bit? Because, we know that people that have built their own websites have had to invest even up to 500 pound themselves. And, they’re actually doing it themselves. So, what should they do there?

Martin: Well, we have a couple of sort of rules to follow if you are wanting to build your own website. Now, there’s so many new tools out there. I mean, every time you go on YouTube, I’m getting advertised to buy Wicks. It’s understandable why so many business owners just jump on whatever, the first thing that they find. So, we always recommend to keep the costs as low as possible. Now, I’m not saying for free. So, you can start for free, you can get a Wicks domain if you really wanted to, and try it out and play around with it. Or, you can pay between 10 and 20 pounds a month to actually get something decent like Shopify, if you want to sell shop items on your website. That’s what a lot of people do. But, we actually recommend that if you are going to do it yourself, try to stick with WordPress.

Because, that’s the most recognized platform of it’s kind. It is the most widely used and widely recommended platform, and for good reason. I mean, we actually use WordPress exclusively within our business. So, we don’t build websites for people unless they agree to use WordPress because we trust in it so much.

Martin: What that means is with WordPress, it doesn’t necessarily mean you have to have a website built. Because it’s so popular, there are lots of sort of frameworks to use. Like templates that you can buy for sort of less than 50 pound. And, you can spend quite a lot on templates and there’s lots of plugins that you can have. But, anyone with 100 pound to spend on a template and some hosting for the year, you’re pretty much covered. I mean, you can do a lot with that 100 pound.

Lyndsay: So, another good point is that obviously with WordPress being so huge and you know, having such a big following; is that because so many people use it, there’s so much support out there. And more importantly, if you’re a DIYer, there’s loads of free support out there, isn’t there? All you have to do is go on YouTube and generally you can find the answer to any issue that you might have.

Martin: yes, how to configure this contact form to-

Lyndsay: yes, how to move this image over there? Or whatever it is that you need to do. You know, there’s plenty of support out there with WordPress. So, that’s another reason why it’s good for DIYers to go to. It’s interesting you said about a theme. Obviously investing in a theme. Is there any sort of advice you’d give to people, what they should do when they’ve got the theme. Where do they go from there? Do they change a lot of it? What would you recommend?

Should You Use a WordPress Theme/Template?

Martin: Well, it’s worth pointing out that some people get a little bit nervous about using templates. They feel like it’s cheating and it’s really not. I mean, these WordPress themes have been developed because most of the time, they’re really good. They look good, they’re professional, they work well with search engines. Not all of them, but a lot of them if you keep an eye on the reviews, can be really really powerful little templates.

Martin: The important thing that we want you to understand is that, rather than the development of the coding or the aesthetics of your website. The best thing that you can do to have an effective website if you are building it yourself. Is to stick with the framework of the theme. So, find a template that works with … And we say template, we say theme, we mean the same things really. But, WordPress generally uses templates and themes sort of along the same page. So, don’t get too caught up in the technicalities. But, if you can keep the template as close to what they provide as possible, then that’s what you want to do.

Martin: So, keep your messaging clear. That’s a really important element. Make sure your content is nice and easy to understand. Make sure you get your point across. Don’t worry too much about how to change everything, and how to reconfigure it so that this is on this side. If you just install a WordPress theme, you can have your website up in 10 minutes. Follow a quick YouTube video if you really want to and you’ll be in a good position to have a nice, clean, and simple website. And, one that doesn’t take that much time. Don’t start looking under the bonnet and messing around with all the code. It’s just not necessary. Get your messaging across and stick with the framework of the theme. And you’ll be on to a real winner.

Lyndsay: yes, I mean I think that’s a really good point. And, we do see people who have tried to take a template and then spend a year trying to change it. And, it’s just … it’s just silly. Get a website up and start making money. Then you can start focusing on perfecting it as you go. Okay so we’ve really sold the benefits there of building your own website. We’ve totally put off anyone to ever come to us. But, at what point what someone have to be at to maybe think, “Okay, I’m ready to invest now in a web design agency. I’m ready to invest thousands.” When would that be?

When Should You Decide to Hire a Web Design Agency?

Martin: I think this really has to do with where you are in your business. So, if you are generating customers, you’re getting lots of traffic to your website, and you’ve … up to this point you’ve only built your own website. If you want to hire an agency, you have to think about it from a financial perspective firstly. So, when you hire an agency, you’re going to be handing over a certain amount of cash for that website. You need to be sure that you can generate that money back. We all need to make sure that we’re keeping an eye on the financials. And, if you can see that a 5,000 pound website is going to make it’s money back in six months, then it might be a good idea to hire one. If you’re selling a book at 10 pound and you’re only planning on selling 100 or 200. Then, you’ve got to be careful about paying thousands for a new website.

Martin: So, you’ve got to be careful. It does depend on your scenario. Another reason you might need to hire a web design agency is if you have a serious lack of time. So, many of the clients who hire us, they haven’t got the time to be building their own website. They might understand about what needs to go on a website. What’s going to make if effective, what’s going to drive traffic. But, they might not have the time, nor the expertise to actually create that new website. At that point, they might need to hire a web designer.

Martin: So, it’s that time and money scenario, really. If you’re a successful business, and you’re generating lots and lots of money. Then, why would you build your own website. You just wouldn’t. You’d rather just hire an expert and have it done for you.

Lyndsay: yes, or why would you continue with … if you’ve got a DIY website, you know and you’re becoming successful. If you’re spending your evenings trying to google why a plug in isn’t working, or get things working on your website. That’s just not a good use of your time. When you’re speaking here, there, and everywhere. Or you’re promoting your book. Or whatever it is that you’re doing. You want to be doing that. Not kind of messing around with a website like you did at the beginning of your business, which is fine.

Lyndsay: I think another things is that when you hire an agency. They should be able to identify sort of where you can increase profits. Where you can increase traffic, increase conversions. They should be asking you those questions and being able to figure that out for you. So, that’s to the point of your business where you think, “I Can take it to the next level.”

Martin: yes, it’s about investing in the knowledge and expertise of the web designer as well. I mean, we pride ourselves in the fact that we love learning more about online marketing. So, when somebody asks us a question, we’re able to advise them about how to grow their email list, for instance. And, you don’t generally get that knowledge just hitting you in the face when you’re trying to build your own website. That’s another reason why you might want to hire an agency. Because, you really know that that knowledge and that experience is valuable. And, you’re happy to part with your cash for an agency that specializes in that kind of help.

Summary

Lyndsay: Absolutely. So, I think that was a really good sort of synopsis there of when you should invest in a website and when you shouldn’t. So, just to summarize. I mean, I think if you’re sort of starting out in business, we would definitely recommend that you do a website yourself. Build it yourself. Certainly, if you are two, three years into your business, and you’ve got a little bit to invest, say 500 to 1,000 pound, and you’re thinking, “Maybe I should go to a freelancer.” Again, we would recommend you actually continue to develop your own DIY website and perhaps invest in something that will bring some money in. It might be a photo shoot, it might be a Facebook ad, whatever that might be. I think the point where you should invest a lot of money into a website, and go with a web design agency is as Martin said, when you’re becoming quite successful. You’ve got that audience there and you can see a return on investment.

Martin: Yes, definitely.

Lyndsay: Brilliant, okay. So, I hope you enjoyed today’s episode. If you would like our advice on anything web design related, we do have a free Facebook group. And, you can join the free Facebook group by visiting JammyDigital.com/Facebook. Now, I’m not sure how long it will last but as we’re recording this, we’re currently doing free website critiques. Where we tell you exactly how to improve your website. So, please join our Facebook group for that as well.

Martin: Yes, people are really enjoying that aren’t they?

Lyndsay: They are, and we’re really enjoying it aren’t we. We actually look forward to it.

Martin: Exactly, every Wednesday-

Lyndsay: Every Wednesday it’s like, “Yay! It’s critique time.”

Martin: Yes.

Lyndsay: So, yes and please, please do join it. Another thing that we would love, love, love you to do is to subscribe to us on I tunes. And, leave us an honest review. It really helps us to reach more people and deliver lots more content if you do. So, yes that would be really great. See you next time on the Make Your Mark Online Podcast.

Martin & Lyndsay

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