 This is about the size of crowd. I'm comfortable with you and it's very strange to hear myself like I teach I'm from Utah, and so I teach at a little college out there, and so The presentation thing is a little bit of a different vibe. I'm much more used to the whole students and asking questions So let's do that ask the questions and and that kind of vibe And so I'll not I'll just kind of get into it and introduce myself So I am married to three kids my wife is super thrilled that I'm here right now and not at home helping with the three kids If I look tired, I am I So I actually ended up getting an undergraduate degree in Spanish linguistics At a school called Utah Valley University and then went to grad school for computational linguistics And then while I was in grad school decided that I didn't want to do a million more years of school Because it was painful and long at the same time I got offered a job to work at a solar panel company And so I thought all right. Well, let's do that. So I got to go join their team and Just teach myself marketing and they were a great fertile ground to kind of just play with some stuff And since then I worked at route unfortunate victim of some of the tech layoffs recently, but I You know low-key big news got a new job with a FinTech company called Lendio So I'll be working as a growth manager for them over there I teach at Ensign College in Salt Lake City I Like to play some guitar if you've ever seen those one wheels those one-wheeled skateboards. I love those I've only hurt myself a little bit. It's not so bad Anyway, yeah, I'm a normal human being with boring things that I like to do That's my family. They're great. Sorry. My kids are the cutest. Just is what it is They're great. I call that guy in the corner skinny Dan before he found his love for food. It's real bad So, yeah, my kids are great. My family is great and again my wife is thrilled that I'm not at home helping with the kids this weekend So hopefully this is worth it Like I said ask me questions. I'm used to kind of that the student teacher environment If you have questions, I will hopefully ask questions to you guys like I think that's more beneficial I'm not that interesting and so like I think you guys will have interesting things to say And so I want to involve everybody and make it entertaining the other thought I have is You know, I'm ideally here for you guys. I tell my students a lot of like you guys are paying me to be here You know You're paying your tuition and that pays the couple bucks that I make here doing this and it's kind of the same with you Guys, you're paying me to be here So I'm I'm hoping that what I talk about is valuable to you right like I'm I am your servant in this regard So like if this is not helpful, please tell me I don't want to know so I can be better and if it is that's also really good to know But like I'm here for you and so I hope this is beneficial and valuable for you so Let's get into it. Let me make a couple of caveats before I get started There are more ideas than just these four things that will help you believe it or not There are a lot of things you can do that will grow your business and help your business lots of them These are just four that I thought were valuable and let me provide a little context to a couple of years ago When I was starting to get into SEO and WordPress and I'm becoming a little bit of a developer. I Came to a word camp out in Phoenix, Arizona. I just figured, you know, I like WordPress But I wasn't very good at it. I wanted to get some feel for what the community's like and what the platform is like and what I could do I just didn't really know what to expect and so I showed up at this work camp a slightly younger man and Not really sure what to expect and I got a lot out of it And it wasn't necessarily the things that I expected that I'd get out of it but I was very grateful for that and so The reason I'm here today is not because I'm making but loads of money And I think it's going to work but it's because somebody at that camp gave me a good idea And so I'm hoping that I can be that guy who gives one of you guys a good idea here You know what I mean? That's really my goal is that somebody gets some value out of this And that's really how I run my businesses and my marketing is just providing value wherever I can that said Let's get into a little bit So like I said, these are just four strategies. These are not the end all be all strategies Some of them might not work for you, right? Your business might be different But I am making a couple of assumptions about who you are and I'd like you to tell me if I'm right or wrong So that when I'm kind of catering what I'm saying it makes sense to you and it's applicable to you First you have some kind of product market fit is already relatively familiar with the term product market fit Raise your hand if you're not familiar with product market fit. Okay, let me explain Does your market like what you give them? Right if you sell a t-shirt does your market need a t-shirt? Maybe it's a bunch of people who don't have shirts That's a perfect product market fit It's for most of you guys It's probably more like you are selling websites to people who do not have and need websites So there are varying degrees of product market fit. You can get all sorts of in the weeds But basically it's you have something somebody needs something you're working with those people to make that happen Does that make sense? Have a clear on product fit thumbs up if you like that thumbs up. I'm crazy and really crazy Just alright. I like it good You have some kind of monetized product or service and you want to take that to the next level You don't have to but it's certainly easier if you do If it's a blog if you're doing a design thing if you are running a development agency It's a lot easier if you're making a little bit of money on it I think adding some money to the hobby Kind of slaps you in the face with like that. Do I really want to do this? You know and so because crossing that that line from hobby over to business is a big jump And I think getting a little bit of money and a little bit of time dedicated to that is sort of the wake-up call Yeah, I do or do not want to do this my wife has a couple of times She's a Disney junkie and a couple of times. She's been like I think I want to start a Disney blog I'm like great like I know how to make that work like she's a software engineer and so she could build the website I know all the marketing tricks and she'll start write a poster to and she's like I don't know if I want to do this Like I don't think you do yes I think one of the best things you can know is do you actually want to do this or not So hopefully a little bit of money helps you to know. Yeah, I do want to do this This is something I could actually do I think will be valuable Then my last one is you're doing something WordPress related is anybody here not doing something WordPress related I'm really surprised, but I'd love to know. Yeah, what do you got? Okay, that's cool and probably not super anybody else not like super WordPress related. It's okay. I'm not gonna like this Is not like a gonna kill you yeah Okay, great. Is that oh, sorry. I so he said he's an attorney But kind of a hobby, okay, right and that's just great So and I ask that mostly because the advice that I'm giving is the advice that I'm giving to Dan from a couple of years ago Who was trying to do some WordPress stuff and some SEO and some development But I think some of these principles and tips will work for attorneys and they'll work for health care They'll work for other places, but they might just need to be modified a little bit differently. So Let's get into it Get specific with your target market This like it feels really obvious to say it out loud, but it doesn't happen often enough especially when you are going from Hobby to business. So when I got started doing my own agency freelance SEO development kind of thing I was working with my solar panel company and I really was enjoying the learning right? I was learning a ton of SEO and try a ton about development It was working. I built them an e-commerce store that was making millions of dollars every year It was awesome like I was feeling really good about it and I decided okay I want to scale back full-time work and start doing some contract work and some other side of work because My learning is kind of outpacing what the company here will let me do right? I wanted to continue my learning into to know other industries and niches and and explore and so I Decided to kind of go out on my own and I didn't really know who I was serving or why I was just like Yeah, I'll eat like small medium businesses SMB those kind of guys and I wish Drastically that I had had niched down get specific with my target market right a success story of this is Like I said, I like my little one wheels you guys know a one wheel as if you seen these like give me a thumbs up If you know what a one wheel is otherwise I'm going to describe it like a goofball kind of okay So it is a skateboard. It's an electric skateboard. You like balance on it, but it's got one wheel in the center It's got a computer and it's smart and you ride it. It's awesome It's great and I love it I've been a fan for a couple years and I was like researching googling stuff I was like, you know what tire pressure should my one will be at How do I change the foot pad on the one wheel and I wasn't finding a ton of answers And so I was like, you know, I know how to blog this kind of stuff and I know how to make websites And I know SEO I can get all these pages to rank and make a couple of bucks off it So I did right and that's a really great example of niching down because no one else in the world was creating one wheel blog Content that was providing value to users. So now my blog makes like a hundred bucks a month. Cool. That's great Isn't that fun? That's a great little side hustle for me pays for my other one wheel accessories And I love that but there was nobody else to compete with I was just providing all of the value in this one space so if you're Working on web design or web development find a specific target or audience, right? And there's a couple of reasons for that one. It's a lot easier to target that market So if you're a lawyer if you work in healthcare, maybe you're designing or developing websites for dentists or doctors You can very easily target that market when you're creating your products, right? If you're building websites if you're designing websites, it's really easy to say hey Look, I do websites for dentists, right? And then on top of that the more work you do with dentists or with lawyers or doctors or whoever The more you get experience in solving the problems that dentists or doctors or lawyers face And so when a new dentist comes to you and says hey, I have all these problems like great I have five dentists that I've already worked with or 20 dentists that I've already worked with I bet you have XYZ problem and I know how to solve all of them You're that much better of a pitch to whoever you're doing that for and hey Wow, you are you predicted correctly my problems and you know how to solve them. That's awesome. Great So provides you some value in that you can be specific with the problems you're solving and you Spending time to understand your customer problems goes a long way. It's there's a lot of long-term lifelong value for that So niche down get specific. I've got a couple examples for you We This is not a company I've affiliated with I've used them before other jobs But what do these guys do who is their target market and what do they do just shout it out and I'll repeat it for the mic Any ideas just shout it out. Sorry. What was it? Yeah, it could be could be everybody with a website, right? So they're some type of a digital advertising agency is what they do right unlock your gross potential. Okay, cool Some hints might be like kind of right here. They've got some relatively big names You know, typically that means hey people we've worked with right so like calm is a pretty big name If you can see columns like you guys probably use the call map, right? Racquetons big clovers big voodoo everybody's pretty familiar So like they're kind of trying to say hey like we work with some pretty cool clients kind of the real deal, right? They give us another hints at who their target market is in this form Because this is a question they ask how much does your company spend on paid media monthly for those of you that are small Business owners or even in health care or lawyers. How many of you guys are spending more than $50,000 on your ads? So this is probably not the advertising agency you want to be using right so the ad we when I was working at route This is the advertising agency that we used and we were spending Like five million dollars a year right and that was they knew that market Well, they knew very well how to spend five million dollars a year, right? But if you go for a smaller agency, they're not gonna know how to spend five million dollars a year But they might be really really good at spending a thousand or two thousand dollars a year or a month, right? And so They're telling us Who they want to work for that's that's kind of what they're trying to help us understand here, right? So you should be doing this in your marketing too. There's lots of ways that you can niche down and tell people Hey, here's who I work with right in your web design in your own website in your marketing Whatever you do you can be telling people here is who I am targeting and I'm doing it like pretty explicitly and a little bit More subtly with like the voodoo and the calendar. It's like those are like pretty big names, right? They've probably got big ad budgets So tell your customers when they visit your website who you are and who you want to work with right? Because if a doctor lands on your dentist website could be a fit, but maybe not, you know what I mean, so He's specific Who is this? This is my aunt's company out in Utah. Who do they target? He said brides not quite Moms parents little girls, that's correct. Yeah, so this is a princess party company You hire a princess to come to your daughter's birthday party and it's cool, right? How are you guys able to infer that this is a company for I brides is a good guess for sure? Yeah, and that's a great guess. How are you able to infer parents or kids? You know just kind of shot any answers. What clues were there that gave that away? The image right what's in the image you got a princess pretty clear and then a bunch of little girls, right? So are they targeting a bunch of little boys? Maybe But not quite as explicitly right so this is a good example of like they are pretty clearly targeting Who exactly they think they they want to be targeting? That's not to say that other people can't they also have heroes and like spider-man looking up to your party But the majority of what they do is targeting this kind of person and it's clear I you don't really need to read anything or see the rest of the site. They're telling you straight up This is who we hope you are this is where we think it's the best case scenario, right? So they've got a very specific niche Any questions on Neaching down specific topics that are right every like thumbs up. We're like, okay with that thumbs down thumbs dance Kind of crazy and talk to you fast. I get it Okay Conversion conversion focus website and experimentation. This is my bread and butter. I love this stuff because I'm a dork So I'm gonna dive into this one of the mistakes that I made when I was building my website for my freelance from agency stuff is I Had somebody come and design it I hired somebody who was they were pretty good designer But I didn't really know what I wanted somebody to do when they got to my website Right and let me go back a couple examples right here There are two actions you could take well two actions that are implied that you should be taking on this website What are they anybody got any guesses? Contact us and what we do exactly right right one of them is action one of them is informational That's pretty good right what about right here. Oh, sorry not this one. What's the action? There's only one that they want you to take Check availability that's right And so that's one of the problems that I see consistently across smaller websites and just web developers in general is What do you want this person to do right? This is one of the benefits of having somebody who's a marketer but also developer and also designer if you can find that That's great But work together with all these people here some of you are designers some of you developers some of you guys are marketers This is a good group of people who can work together and help answer these questions But if you've got a website right now, what do you want somebody who gets to your website to do? Do you have a clear action? Does that make sense and then how do you know that that is the right action or not right? Maybe you have a check availability button. How do you know if that's the right action as it turns out? Interestingly enough the most popular page outside of the home page on this site is the pricing page We just that's I can see that in the data analytics. That's interesting So I'm not really sure what to do with that information, but I think that's interesting information nonetheless, right? So I want to give you an example at my last company route They are B to B to see what that means is their business to business, but also to consumers So they have two different products one of them is merchant-facing or business-facing and one of them is consumer-facing The website that I maintained was primarily focused on the merchant or the B to B side But the large majority of users came from the B to C side Unfortunately, we only had one page that was dedicated towards the B to B B to C side The rest of the website was more merchant or business to business focused and so we had contact forms all throughout the site That's great people were filling them out The problem is something like 65% of the people who filled out the contact forms or consumers or B to C clients Not B to B clients not the people that I wanted to be filling out these forms And so we had to try to figure out how do we reduce the amount of people who are filling out forms incorrectly, right? Because that's not providing a good customer experience for them, and it's not helping us generate or leave It's not providing a good experience at all for anybody, right? So we did a bunch of tests one of the tests we ran here was our old form So we ran what's called an AB test We take 50% of the traffic and you send it here and you take 50% of the traffic and you send it somewhere else I guess a little bit familiar with that basically just saying we know that the action that we care about is somebody submitting a Form a form submission is our conversion action And we want to know are more people submitting forms on this form or on this form Can you guess which one got more submissions? Which I'll get a hold of a one if you think it's the first one or two if you think it's a second Let's take a let's take a poll two Got two you got a one we got the one we got a one you got a two I'll tell you it was this by about 30% It was a lot more Part of the reason is because there's a little bit of like a sunken cost fallacy where you hit you enter your email You hit enter and then the form pops up and so you're already like you got me You know I want to finish this form, you know It's because like you don't want to back out and end the whole thing But then on top of that we have an option where you can figure out are you a merchant or a shopper if you click on a Shopper you're directed totally different place. We don't want you to fill this form This is not for you if you're a merchant then we have basically the exact same form a little bit simplified, but not much You know what I mean, and we saw a huge improvement in the overall form submissions on this form And this was a great way for us to experiment Okay, we know that this form for whatever reason we might suppose it might be we didn't do any experimentation to figure out Why this form was better? I have some guesses you probably have some guesses But we didn't really know why we just know that there's a 30% increase in form submissions on this form So it was very clear this was the right conversion action and Displaying it in this way was the right way to display it And so this all comes back to you what do you what action should people be taking on your website? What is the conversion action? Right? Maybe it's reading a blog post if you're primarily a blog whatever it may be What is your conversion action? Are you directing people to that way? And are you sure that's the right place to send people test that prove that show me that you know that for real Sure, okay website data analytics. This is also my favorite. I love data analytics because I'm a giant dork It's also there's something about like watching people behave on a website that I find really fascinating Like when you click around on a website just when you use your computer Generally, you're not thinking about who can see what you're doing But if you're on a website, there's a log of every action you take and actions pretty loosely defined And let me show you what I mean by that These this is a log of all the most common actions on my one wheel blog Which I think is pretty interesting right just to go through a couple of them Where does my the one wheel of Vesca get its name? That's a type of one wheel It's just an explanatory blog check out first name first name people are filling out forms add the cart Link to that place at the research thing linked to one wheel market linked So like clearly I can see what people are doing on my site. That's pretty cool. All of you can see This is a free tool. It's called heap. You can also do it with Google analytics You can see what people are doing on your site if you don't know what's happening on your site It's very difficult to make decisions about what you should be doing on your site. So let's imagine This is the case with a friend. I was helping recently. They were running some ads To their their website and they were hoping people would convert But they didn't have any data analytics or tracking information on their website So they were spending, you know 500 to a thousand dollars a month on ads and Occasionally it led to form submissions and phone calls. So she came to me was like, hey, I can't figure out like why my ads aren't performing Well, it seems like I'm getting fewer phone calls. I was like, oh, okay Well, what what's happening on your website? She's like, what do you talk about? What do you mean? What are we talking about? What's happening on your website? She's like, oh, I have no idea So we installed data analytics on her site and it happened to be this princess party site found out that the prices Page is the most common we ended up revamping her site a little bit and it's doing a lot better We were able to identify what the actual conversion rate is instead of just taking a guess because you don't $500 in the machine And hope you get a phone call out of it now. We actually have data. We can track this journey We can understand what's happening. So if you don't have some kind of analytics on your site, you should get it Right Google analytics is free. He has a free version both of these are great. I'm not an affiliate I wish I was I love the products They're great, but if you don't have information about your site, you should have it you should get it Any questions on analytics or anything like that so far? That feels like the easiest pitch like have analytics on your site. It's gonna help. It's pretty cool It's worth exploring a little bit too, right? So I've got some calculators You can see who's engaging more with my calculators. You can see which pages are the most viewed Here's the initial landing page and I can see who did other stuff afterwards That kind of teaches me some more information over here about like what are my most viewed pages How many users are visiting these pages? Where are they clicking? What's cool, too, is I can then define these events, right? So they heap the program tracks all these actions and I can say hey That's an action that I want to define as a conversion actions I can give it a name and I can say okay This is my conversion action if this action is occurring show me everything that happens before that conversion action And I can understand kind of like what Chris is saying before I can understand these user journeys and these user flows and say Okay, this is my conversion action people are visiting six pages before they get to my conversion action page Okay, how can I simplify that process six pages is a long time? Maybe if I simplify it to one or two pages provide all that information in one location People will be more likely to take a conversion action just having the accessibility to information allows you to make better decisions So if you want to make good decisions about your business, whatever it may be You need to understand what's happening on the sales tool that is selling while you're asleep. You just got to know Questions comments concerns fears phobias Nobody's afraid of spiders. I don't believe you guys. That's not true Okay And this is my last big note and that is high quality content production plus distribution We've got a lot of talks on this kind of stuff Whether it's podcasting or blogging or video production, whatever it is if you don't have content You're just hurting yourself, right? And there's a lot of reasons for that. Has anybody googled anything today? Has anybody not googled anything today? One person is not two people have not googled. I should that's actually really impressive When you Google things you get a result. Where does that result come from? I mean Google, but where is Google getting these answers from? Generally, it's people like you and me who are writing answers to content or questions, right? Sometimes it's a business. Sometimes it's people who are providing information. Sometimes it's educational But somebody has written down or more and more recently recorded a video or a podcast of somebody answering a question, right? so You can be the search result. You can be the answer when people are googling things and Let me give you a couple of examples. So first of all, I say this to a lot of people and the overarching point Primarily is don't write really crappy content Which feels really obvious, but surprisingly is not I think everybody who's ever started like a web designer web development business has probably written an article about why you need a Web designer or why you need a web developer, but how many of you have ever read somebody else's blog about why you need a web developer web designer? Gasp no one's ever read that article one guys read that article. I like it so That content is providing value to somebody but much less frequently, right? So what I want to do is show you some examples of really good content that you should be producing This is from HubSpot. They're like the kings and queens of really really great content because every time I look through their couple of Topics like dang, I want to read that article. That sounds really compelling first one How to create a social media calendar to play your content. Is that not compelling to anybody in here? That's pretty compelling. That's a good article. That's a clever title because it's gonna provide value, right? Let's go to the top how to drive attendees to your next event literally according to uber for business marketing director Well, that's pretty great for a lot of reasons. Where's the word camp organizers? I'm sure they're like, oh, that's a good I should read that article because guys from uber are gonna tell us how to drive event traffic That's awesome, right? point no one to So How to create a sales plan create an outstanding marketing plan with templates templates templates So there's all this value that they're providing in their content, right? I like to think of I'm a little bit obsessed with YouTube content creators And I think there are more similarities between YouTube content creators and written blog content that we think about Does anybody here not familiar with guys like mr. Beast or Mark Rover like really big names on YouTube? Is everybody pretty familiar with those names? More or less, okay. Who can tell me why does mr. Beast make the best content on YouTube? Why is his stuff the most viewed any ideas? He spends a lot of money. Okay, but He's on the most tests. Is that he said yeah, that is very interesting that we should explore. What else? Yeah, he helps people out for sure. There's a philanthropy aspect of it What else any other reasons so putting himself out there, okay? Vulnerable authentic he buries himself alive, right? He buries himself alive and had and talks about that experience Yeah, these are all really great examples and we all keep coming back to watch the next content It's not teaching you anything about business per se, but it's very valuable content in that it's entertaining, right? How many of you guys are consistently going back to any blogs website and reading their content? Probably maybe a few but is anybody here like actively subscribed to a blog from a business and reading it a lot? One one or two people so a couple but like generally Businesses are very guilty of producing what we call like SEO content. That is not this This is very good high-quality content like this is a blog I do subscribe to because it's actually providing value. You know what I mean? Another example This is Neil Patel. He's a bigger name in the SEO space and I just scrolled through a couple of them But he's always got really good like I don't want to call him quite click baby headlines But they're right on the line of like you got me, you know, so got nine content marketing trends to increase your traffic That's pretty good. You know my seven favorite SEO strategies are the same ones I have they're probably the same but I'm gonna click on them either way best VoIP phone services This has nothing to do with anything. It's definitely a sponsored post, but I'm probably still gonna read it You know so point of this being when you are producing content You got to be providing value to people so if you guys are an agency if your development agency if you're a freelancer if you're a designer, whatever it is One of the questions I guess is what kind of content should we produce which I should be right about right and the answer is what? Questions are your customers asking Right is anybody here design freelancer or design agency where all developers good couple designers couple developers What else what else you guys do and what just shout out like a title for me? You guys are all unemployed I know I got lawyer and I got healthcare so You write things. Let me ask if you are a designer. Let's hypothesize with me, right? If you're a web designer and you have an agent let's play this game Let's go to the princess game right the princess party company. This is my aunt's princess party company What questions do you have about my aunt's business because to a degree that should be defining the content She's writing you might wonder how much does it cost and that's why the pricing page is the most huge page You might wonder how does the whole thing work like a princess just shows up and throws the party? I mean, alright, that's that's a blog. She can and should be writing right maybe I've suggested this one to her a couple times how to throw the best Elsa birthday party right because even though she's located in Utah There are people in Florida who want to have an Elsa themed birthday party And she can be providing an answer for that question that builds authority and builds trust with her audience, right? So even if you're not directly monetizing and profiting from that contact You're getting traffic and you're building trust and authority, right? So if you run a designer development agency if you're a freelancer, you might be saying Please don't write why you need a designer for your website. Everybody knows that, you know Like what are the questions people are asking you about your business? Whatever it may be? Why do you write, you know what what is it that you write about? Why do you do this? How does this work, right? Couple examples coming back to my one-wheel thing I'll toot my own horn a little bit because this is one that I've done pretty well Like I said, I was I was first googling stuff about my one-wheel. I was getting into it There's a lot of YouTube videos about it, but there's not a lot of written content about it And so I was like watching videos where people are talking about this one-wheel VESC VESC And I was like, I don't know what that is and I googled, you know What is a one-wheel VESC and I couldn't find what that was and so now if you Google it You'll see one-wheel Utah to my site and I answer that question, right? So the other one I might have is What's the best tire pressure for a one-wheel, right? That's what I was googling because I got my tire. It was at 20 psi which is how it came Seemed pretty heavy. I was like, can you reduce the psi? Can you prove like what's what's the best? So and I couldn't find the answer so I wrote an article about what the best psi is for a one-wheel And these are my highest performing. This is in the last 24 hours But I had had 198 users on that one 53 on the other 39 So like it's not crazy traffic, right? But I'm also very specific I don't anticipate there are a million people searching for one-wheel related content But what I am hoping for is that when people do search for one-wheel related content Or in your guys's cases agencies or developers or designers or whatever that you are an answer or the answer to the question they have right Yeah Yeah Question is how am I monetized? I've got a couple things. Um, I put a bunch of google ads on my site because that's easy and It's fine It doesn't pay a ton, but it works. I've also got some affiliate programs There are a couple of third-party accessory producers and I've reached out and said hey I've got you know about two thousand three thousand people that are on my blog every month And I love your products like you guys have some kind of affiliate program Or can we create some kind of a deal or if I send you guys traffic that that works out like a great Yeah, we'd love to have your traffic. So an affiliate program I've also got an amazon affiliate setup because people occasionally will click on that Like I wrote an article around Halloween My most popular article was the best Halloween costumes with your one-wheel Right because everybody's got a one-wheel wants to show off how cool it is and so people create all sorts of goofy things Like people would create little mario kart setups and they'd sit in the one-wheel And so like I would link to a mario costume on amazon One of them was like a raft and like a blow-up inflatable raft and so somebody would somebody actually purchased the raft off amazon I thought that was cool They'd sit in the one-wheel with the raft and like pretend to be floating in a raft around heli So there's all sorts of goofy little things if my favorite one was if you've ever seen those alien costumes Where it looks like the alien is like holding you Imagine that but somebody writing like an electric skateboard while the alien is holding you. It's the funniest thing you've ever seen It was marvelous. And so that's Primarily what I do. There's a lot of other ways you can do it and it depends on your space, right? What I've found is the one-wheel space because it's so new and there are so few people who are active online There aren't a ton of affiliate programs, right? And so like my market cap is pretty low Right, there are other ways that I can make money with the site But it's kind of a hobby and I'm not dying to monetize it to that degree But there are a lot of ways you could monetize a blog, right? You could be doing events you could be doing outreach you could be selling a product As you develop an audience you could be selling your own anything, you know if I were going to start A design or a development agency today I'd be writing a lot and that's how I'd monetize my blog is I'd be offering the product or service in my blog Right. So coming back to my aunt's example with her princess parties I'm telling her I'm like, hey, you should be doing some amazon links and affiliate programs because When you're writing how to throw the best elsa party You can be linking to the products you actually buy and give to your princesses that they take to the party Just use an amazon link right because she buys these little two dollar crowns and some necklaces and some cheap dresses And it's all super cute But in florida they're not going to order from her anyway So she might as well make a couple of bucks by somebody reading that article and ordering that product You know what I mean, but every blog has some kind of a cta It's like hey, if you're local then give us a call and we'd love to have a princess come to your party There are a lot of different ways you can monetize depends on your business model and what you offer And what people are willing to pay for Does that answer your question? Okay so We can talk a lot about all this stuff, but any questions in the meantime also, that's my favorite gift of all time David S. Pumpkins, it is the best Yeah One second. I'm gonna bring my mic to you For the route example, you're looking at the second form that's sort of converting better. Yeah Do y'all track like drop-offs in each phase of that form? Yeah, and then y'all are y'all collecting like information to them I'm gonna funnel saying you didn't finish her form Kind of hit them back that way 100 percent You can get insanely granular, right? And to a degree you got to go. Well, what's the analysis paralysis component? When do we have too much data to act on so generally if i'm tracking a form submission? I will track Clearly like their path and I will track the conversion action if I want to know immediately before that I might consider form drop-off rate when I mean by that is I'll track Who has engaged with the first part of that form that email form? And then what percentage of people who engage with that email part of the form actually submit the form and that way I have an idea of okay, so I know 60 percent of the people who start the form are finishing the form Is that good? Is that bad? Can we improve that number? Let's try reducing the form fields Let's try clarifying the form fields. Let's try improving the process And so you can create a whole series of experiments around improving just that one form field And it depends on your traffic and you can there's a whole experimentation game you play That's literally my day job at my new company lendio is the experimentation component of it But yeah, it's a tricky line to walk because when you have access to Insane amounts of information you got to be careful that you're You're clear on what your success and your failure metrics are and what aligns to those So you don't get lost in the weeds and all that data, but that's a great question. Does that answer your question? Okay, okay What else what other questions Cool, then I did a great job or really bad job Yeah Um specifically with ab testing are you aware of some good plugins or solutions to use the wordpress to do that? Yeah, I have used with wordpress you can depending on your level of skill You can do anything optimizes really good adobe's got some good ones. I've just used google optimize because it's free and If you're just starting out, that's the best way to do it because it's free. It doesn't cost much money I will say there are a lot of really goofy troubleshooting things With google optimize, but once you get kind of a system figured out I found that to be super helpful I was able to run not just ab tests But what we call multivariate tests where i'm testing one headline and six paragraphs or three headlines and two paragraphs And seeing which kinds of combinations are leading to the best You know conversion or whatever our success metric is there, but generally a google optimize is great and it's free So I love that one Right. Hey dan. I um I walked in about a half way through the talk um What would you say is your one nine? Biggest take away that I should take from this From the talk. That's a great question I'd say it's provide value Everywhere you speak to your customers and my second like underscore bullet point in parentheses is know what your customers want Um because you providing value is fully dependent on understanding your pain points of your customers and providing a good solution for them, right? Having worked as a marketer and as a product manager a product manager's day job is basically just to talk to customers and understand What's working and what's not And if you guys are doing your own thing you are all product managers and you better understand What it is that people want if you run your development agency, what do your customers want? Yeah a website, but There's a lot of websites out there, you know, yeah Oh, yeah, and what would you say is your biggest success story in doing that? That's a good question I just have so many successes. I have to think there, you know Um, okay. So here's kind of a goofy one. Um, my one wheel site Uh, I'll show you really quick Utah cool So I started this like I said just because I like my one wheel stuff And if I figure I figure if I make a hundred bucks, that's cool Like it'll buy another little foot pad or something for me. So what I did When I was working at the solar panel company We were selling really cheap solar panels to to di wires do it yourself first And I wrote an article about like the best black friday deals for solar panels And I just figured, you know, like we're selling direct to consumer Most solar panel companies are not doing anything like that And so I like maybe there's a chance this works as it turns out We were the only people or few we were the only people or one of the very few Who were selling direct to consumer that article ranked number one for a long time And drove a crazy amount of black friday traffic And so what I decided to do around uh black friday Is I know that the company future motion who makes one wheel Only does a sale on black friday And I know that third party accessory makers there are four or five big ones in the space also offer similar deals And so I basically just wrote an article that says Um the best black friday and cyber monday deals for one wheel And this got something like 12 000 page views in 15 days And again, like you could see like some of my ads and some of my stuff, but like I'm not like this isn't anything special I'm basically just compiling data So like it's it's my biggest success because it's kind of a gimmick that it worked You know, like I've had other successes that have generated revenue But this is like it's kind of my biggest success because it's so actually funny to me that this generated 12 000 page views and like 200 bucks In 15 days like that's comical, you know, but it was awesome at the same time, you know So that's one of my bigger ones I'm pretty proud of that that I made a gimmicky little article that it provides value at the end of the day If you wanted to buy a one wheel and wanted to know about these deals This is absolutely the page you wanted to find right like the deals that people have had in the past and accessories Some third party like this is providing a really good value But it worked it ranked number one and it drove a ton of traffic It was super fun. So it was like I I call it a win because it was gimmicky and it worked Now I can't see because the white background is like crazy bright here we go Well, I'm way too short for this podium Questions comments concerns fears phobias Nobody raised their hand for phobias. You guys are a bunch of liars. You got snakes out here. There are snakes Nobody's afraid of snakes. It's crazy Okay, well Yeah, she's got a question one second Thanks kind of going back to the data Since that's where your excitement is I could tell I'm looking at the site Um, we're looking at the data should inform what your site does for your customers But google analytics is super overwhelming So can you give an example about when you're looking at that data? What should you be looking at and then what changes should you be making to the website? That's a great question and it's hard to answer because it depends but I would say that the primary Theme around answering that is what do your customers care about? Right Let's use this princess party example because I think that's a really it's very tangible Her customers care about they probably got to her site because they heard about or they were at a party Where some princess came to a party and what the the girls were in love It was awesome and so they have googled or they got a referral and they ended up on this website and so We know that if you land on princess parties by natalie.com my answer website you are Interested in either information about what the heck that is and why that exists or two You are likely intent driven in that you want to take some kind of an action and book a party or have somebody come to your party, right? If you're a web development agency your designer or freelancer or whatever What is the thing that your customer wants out of you? Right, so like you tell what do you do? Um, so me in particular is content writing So putting the content on the website not the developer right and that's you know, you might go Well, what does my audience care about? Right, and then how do you craft your website to making sure that they are getting value and having a positive experience, right? I think at the end of the day most positive customer experiences Across everything come down to trust, right? That's one of the reasons I start with the fun slides about my cute family because I want you to know that I'm a human being Who's kind of a goofball and I have three kids and I'm very tired because like it's about establishing trust Because then you see me as not like just the guy who's speaking at work camp But the guy who's going to go home and be very tired again Yeah, and so build that trust with your audience in the form of your content or in the form of your website by helping them understand And just you want to show your customer at every step of the journey that you have thought about the journey that they're on Whether it's digital or in person or whatever you have thought through this and you're trying to make it as Positive a customer experience as you possibly can Does that answer your question? Yeah, a little bit it goes back to knowing what your customers want I guess you will look at the data to and let me come back to that. That's right. Let me follow up with that because Once you identify what it is your customer wants It's a princess party. It's information about a one wheel. It's to read your content Then you identify what are your success metrics? What action should somebody take based on? Yeah, I'm getting to your site and that very what action should somebody take when they get to your site and read Your content. What do you want them to do? Fill out the form the contact form to learn more about services And so there's a lot of ways you can go about that you can say, okay Well, let's look at the form submissions. Let's look at form starts and let's go back track even further Let's say how many articles are people reading before they submit a form are they reading one or two or three? They're multiple You know, which articles are the first articles they're engaging with and maybe it's over a long period of time And you go generally we're seeing this article and then people click into the next article And then they bounce or they go somewhere else and they come back to this article and this Articles where people convert and you can start to establish kind of a content funnel Like we know that this is ideally a flow that can work and see it all just depends on your goals, right? And so I would say identify What is your user journey or ideal user journey and then how do you improve that? Gotcha. Does that help answer a little better? Yeah, sorry. Yes. Yes, it did. Thank you What else I don't know if this fits exactly in what you do, but when you were showing the princess site I'm assuming that it's all the princess you mentioned Elsa. I'm assuming that's all the princesses Everybody's familiar with what are the issues revolving are involving copyright and things like that. Oh, yeah, it's a ton. It's a ton It's not my business. I don't deal with it. If disney is technically as far as I understand There's no problem until disney says. Hey, this is a problem Because the way that they list their princesses is like, oh, let's do princess parties right now at we.com they list them all as like ice queen and like Ice princess and like all these knockoff names, but like the picture is clearly them So like if disney decided at any point that they were going to sue them then it would be successful But as I understand that it's not a problem up until the moment disney just has decided that Generally, I don't imagine my aunt who's making like two or three thousand dollars a month is such a concern for disney That they're going to do something about it but I kind of crack up a little bit Enchanted house princess flower princess, but Rapunzel is not an intellectual property that disney owns so they can use that actual name Cinderella is the same but new Cinderella. I mean like that feels pretty explicit. Where's our lawyer in the room? You know this feels So and you could probably get better advice this but as far as I understand It's like it's not a problem until the moment. It's a problem and then it's really a problem Oh star princess. Yeah Yeah Arabian princess. I have a student from South Korea and This used to be asian princess and he thought that was the funniest thing on planet earth because like india is in asia So she the indian princess and I was like, you know, that's a good that's a good point So now she's the chinese princess was just a little bit more Accurate snowman. Yeah, that's I mean come on like We're definitely not inflicting on any copy right there. That's fine Um, I always like it's kind of funny because she always has this like disclaimer. We're not affiliated to disney I'm like, this is not going to stop anybody from suing you like you having this does not help you in any way Um, so anyway Yes Yeah, he asked if I think it's an issue of scale if if she got bigger would disney come after It's a yes caveat It depends right because like if you write a story and somebody is using your characters You also might go that's free advertising, you know, and maybe the princess comes to your party and you go Dang, we got to go to disneyland, right? And so like to a degree disney might just be kind of like It's free advertising, you know So yeah, lawyer An issue might also be whether degrades their value of the copyright 100 if you showed you showed one of those characters in a Compromising position or if this was a this was an escort service then you you basically would have a firestorm Yeah, and that's why I think it comes back to you. It's not a problem until the moment that it is You know what I mean right now? It's probably fine The moment is a problem. It's not great. So whatever that's the risk you run, you know So anyway I always thought that was kind of funny too. Like there's all these little things that They do that. I'm like cowgirl really like that's how's that not So anyway, so we have time for one more question. Hey great Um, I had a question on the data analytics. Yeah, is there any tools That would allow you to see where your user is coming from on your website like Heap will do that and um google analytics will do that. We'll look at my heap data because it's pretty fun Um Should be yeah, this is my site. So I've had 50 people today. Cool. That's great Um Down here, I think I have a country and then I can go a specific as region and city Right, that's super nice. It's super interesting because one I'm learning a lot about the one wheel demographic But if you run any kind of business that is global or not, it'd be really interesting to know Like I mean, I'm based out of utah and I the blog is literally called one wheel utah And that is not even top five of the most visited cities, right? It's super interesting. So yeah, um What's where these data and a lot of platforms work, especially heap is Everything in your code has some type of a name or a class or identifier of some sort, right? and so Heap just logs All that stuff so like I can come over here to live data feed. I don't know if anybody's on my site right now Somebody on the computer go to my site and click around it will log whatever events it sees happening So like if you visit the site if you click on a button, I will see that happen. It's pretty cool a little creepy Good information for when you're browsing online people can see stuff But it's really useful for me to be able to collect information and be able to make decisions Somebody's on my site you in the blog awesome. Thanks. Good audience That's what I'm talking about. You guys are the best Look at all this traffic. I'm getting google's gonna rank me so good Um, anyway, so it's really interesting. I and right some of these events are defined right page viewed home is defined Some of these are not defined and so I might go Oh, these are worth defining these are events that I'd like to track because I'd like to see where they fit in my funnel Yeah, keep is free. I freaking love it Cannot recommend it enough. I wish I was an affiliate so I could make some money on it But I'm not it's just cool. Anyway, thanks everybody for your questions and everything and we'll get out of your hair Thanks