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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.

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

Ep 25 – Planning Your New Website Part 4 of 4- Website Content

Martin Huntbach — Sun, 06 Jan 2019 17:50:33 +0000

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

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.

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.

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.

Ep 24 – Planning Your New Website – Part 3/4 Design Elements

Martin Huntbach — Mon, 24 Dec 2018 12:10:42 +0000

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

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.

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.

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.

Ep 23 – Planning Your New Website – Part 2/4 Website Structure

Tue, 18 Dec 2018 12:40:06 +0000

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

Ep 22 – Planning your new website – Part 1/4 Goals

Page Structure

Homepage Structure

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.

Ep 22 – Planning your new website – Part 1/4 Goals

Martin Huntbach — Tue, 11 Dec 2018 13:58:34 +0000

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

Worksheet _ Planning your new website

Time Stamps: In a rush? Get to the section you need to below!

Coming soon

Useful Resources and Links

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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.

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.