 I was taking medicine. My brain was foggy. I knew only one thing and that was that I need to hire Kerry Dills but Kerry had made it apparent to everyone she would never work for the man and by the man it was like anybody but herself and I was like I got to do this so I sent her an email and I don't remember what I wrote and I remember all the different emails I went back and forth but for four days I was in a delirium while I was recruiting Kerry to come join me a crowd favorite neither of us are there right at this moment but we were there working together last year and all I remember was as I'm writing this I kept thinking I have no idea if this is gonna work but if it works it will be my greatest achievement in life and it works and then I realized I had a new greatest achievement and that was to get her to come speak at WordCamp San Diego and we have that now so please welcome Kerry Dills thank you Chris all right so how many of you guys use your website to sell services how about products how many of you want to use your website to sell products or services okay actually you're in the right room then so so here's the deal writing writing is a great way to actually generate that business to come through your website and I'm gonna share some tips with you on how you can do that but before we get into that let's talk a little bit about the why why why writing why not Google ads or anything else for that matter why not well I don't know what the other why not was but anyways so when you're when you're writing you're actually doing three things you're building three things and the first is your name recognition the more you're writing the more Google is indexing what you write the more you're sharing these things on social media the more people are seeing your name I do a lot of work in the Genesis framework and few years ago that was a relatively small community it was kind of a town everybody knew everybody and there was this guy named Shrita never heard of him but one day somebody shared one of his blog posts on social media went read it great immediately forgot his name a couple weeks later I was in a studio press forum answering a question and and there I see that Shrita's beaten to it and already got the answer in there and I'm like okay and it didn't take long before I just started seeing his name everywhere and at this point if you do any work with Genesis you'll probably be hard pressed to not know who this guy is and the deal is he pumps out tons of tutorials tons of content and he's actually for him it's turned into a paid membership model where he charges people a monthly fee to come in and get his content so that's the first thing it builds your your name recognition the second thing it builds is your authority huh there's a guy named Tom McFarlane here you might have heard of him um Tom blogs politically about some technical stuff and then also just sort of some thought pieces of what's going on in WordPress and if you go read an article of Tom's you don't walk away thinking I'm not sure if he knows what he's talking about there's such authority in there in a way that he's delivering the information that his writing has been able to establish a great authority and actually asked Tom if he thought that that writing had had any impact on his business and his answer basically was he didn't have to do gold calls the business is coming to him which is awesome so we got name recognition authority and then the last thing is trust people want to do business with people that they trust and we got Michelle show she's well where can Minneapolis organizer and designer and she's got this great piece of content on her site called the good clients guide and it's a series of five six articles that's basically helping educate potential clients on what it's like to work with her what it's like to work on a web development project here's some common words that you might run into in a WordPress world basically she's helping educate them before they've ever spent a dime with her she's provided some value with this content and that trust that's exactly what it what it so let's see let's say you've got all this name recognition authority trust people are banging down your door wanting to do business with you okay the leads the leads are flying in here's the deal not all leads are leads that you want to do business with I'm glad y'all enjoyed that one I had a fun time searching for that one not every customer is going to be your perfect customer you know when you're when you're poor and somebody says I'd like to give you some money to do this thing it's really hard to be picky right but there will come a point where being picky actually helps you tremendously and when I say be picky I mean you have to define who your ideal lead is who is it that you want coming to your website so answer the questions who's your ideal customer who is it that you want to attract what kind of person or business do you want to work with some questions that you might ask yourself if you've never thought who anything about your ideal lead think about do you enjoy working with nonprofits or do you enjoy working with small-owner operator businesses do you enjoy working with government contracts do you enjoy working in education kind of narrowed down what your niche is that you excuse me but you enjoy working with this is something I really struggled with because I didn't when I started writing I didn't have I wasn't thinking about ideal leads I wasn't even thinking about lead generation I just started writing I was writing tutorials that basically helped me submit my knowledge so I'd learn how to do something and then I write a tutorial and what that did was bring in traffic of other people wanting to know how to make some theme at it or what not so I thought I'd found myself bringing leads to my site but these leads were DIY people they were there are people that were ever gonna hire me to do any coding for them otherwise they wouldn't be on my site looking at my tutorials and so I inadvertently do not the right crowd to my website and now I've been able to turn that around a little bit and and figure out how I can serve that that particular audience but for me that process was it took a lot of soul searching to figure out who my ideal was if you're totally lost on that I highly recommend break yourself solid by Michael Port it's some great exercises that you can go through to kind of figure that out so once you once you define who that ideal lead is then of course you want to start writing towards that audience sorry that was the awkward part where you don't want to acknowledge the awkward part but you can't quite get over those just I just made a really weird pause this is why I like email instead of calls nobody sees when you totally do that so going back to that the name recognition the authority the trust I had all these DIY folks coming through my website who were not necessarily the people I was trying to attract but I actually got a client once and he said I have no idea what any of your posts mean but I saw so many people liking it sharing it that I knew you must know what you're talking about so we have different audiences but basically no know who you serve and then target them Rebecca Gill over web savvy marketing does a fantastic job of this don't think I have a laser on here but down at the bottom she's she's got that's what you would call your user persona so ideal lead you could call that your user persona and she's got website design and development SEO and stock WordPress themes so as soon as somebody lands on her homepage they can self-select what exactly it is that they need so notice one thing is just kind of interesting to me it says website design and development not WordPress design and development doesn't say Genesis development and I think that's now if your ideal lead is to subcontract for an agency then being specific about your technology could be great but for the average person that is a business owner and wants to get their business online they don't necessarily care what tools you're using to get there they just want the end result same thing with themes they're all Genesis themes but she doesn't mention it there so something to keep in mind all right another tip be yourself when you write really time I'm independent it's just me no employees and it's tempting to want to be on my about page we provide excellent services we pride ourselves in high quality below when in fact I'm just an eye so don't be afraid to say you're an eye if you're not a wee and inject some personality into your content a couple of examples that I really like from the WordPress world this is Curtis he throws a Curtis McKell he throws a custom Lego photo on every single blog post that he writes and they're always relevant to the topic of the problem like how did you even did you find that Lego so that's a great example of how he's injecting a little something that he enjoys into his writing style another one this is Lindsay Rio from a pretty darn cute design I'm just gonna say take a stab if you've never met Lindsay do you think she's a girly girl does this look like somebody that likes bows and peek things yes and I'm she's she's a sweetheart but her website speaks so much to her personality lastly here we've got one from MailChimp how many of you use MailChimp wow everybody I don't know about you but I feel rock solid when I just queue up an email I mean I'm getting the high fives if you've ever read some of their knowledge based articles they've got just a little monkey that they use turns a personality there excuse me one moment while I take a sip talk amongst yourselves I didn't hear anyone talking amongst themselves okay so be yourself the next thing is qualify your leads Jason kind of touched on this earlier there wouldn't it be great if we could all have these wonderfully qualified leads that we're filling out our contact form it's rarely the case but we know that you don't want to do business with just anybody and everybody just because they land on your site or like your content doesn't necessarily mean that they're a good fit for you so you can serve your potential clients by helping them qualify themselves three ways that you can do this that are pretty straightforward the first is you can help your clients qualify themselves based on your offerings so if I land on Eric Davis's site which I'm not a designer but even that that's why anyways I'm not showcasing his design here but when you land on his site right off the bat you can see it's obvious that he does e-commerce and if you dig a little bit deeper you can see it specifically Shopify now unlike Rebecca Gill who wasn't focusing on the technology here's a very specific focus on technology so it's not to say that one's right or the other it goes back to who is your ideal lead who is it that you're trying to attract so if I need I've heard Eric I've seen his content online and I'm thinking I want to hire that guy and I go to his website and I wanted to build me a membership site and I get to his site and I see e-commerce he's probably not going to be the right guy to help me do a membership site so about I move on you've saved yourself time by not having someone contact you through your contact form only to have to reply and say oh yeah I don't do membership sites so being clear about what it is that you do and what it is that you provide helps clients know whether or not repotential clients know whether you're not you're a good fit before they ever press the sin button to get in touch the next thing you can do to help qualify leads is is based on their budget so crowd favorite actually does a great job of this I don't know if you can even see it but they have to me they have a line there that says what's your budget for the project and I don't produce 25k that's the very lowest number so if I'm rolling into the crowd favorite website and I've got $500 in my pocket I know right away this is not the agency for me I've tried that I've done tons of I can't even call it as formal as AB testing but I've done a lot of experimentation with my contact form and putting the budget question on there it does a couple things one it kind of frames and how much it costs to do business with you right up front and secondly people who don't have those kind of budgets you've they've immediately rolled rolled out you as a potential service provider and it's a good thing because even though we like people to pay us money we don't want to take just anybody's money the last thing you can do to help your clients qualify themselves is based on your availability Billy Erickson does a fantastic job of this he's done this for years but if you go to his contact page he's always got when when his next availability is to take on projects which if I come to Bill's site and I need this site yesterday and he's not taking projects until July then I know Billy Erickson it's not going to be the service provider for me so you can do your your potential clients a favor by letting them know that up front so you're writing tons of amazing content the leads are flowing in like manna from heaven I don't know that manna really flows in but anyways the leads are coming the leads are coming and what what next what do you want them to do so your website the goal is to convert them and what a conversion is what different for everyone maybe it's just to fill out a contact form maybe it's to sign up for your newsletter maybe it's to click the buy now button but whatever it is that you want your clients to do make it easy for them to work with you by making it obvious what they should do what they should do so you can lead your leads several ways one is with a clear call to action so this is another example from the web savvy site but she's got a little text there about let's create something together and then a blue button that's just say hello and I want to I want to push that button another example rainmaker they use their call to action up in the actually as part of their navigation Andrea Whitmer over at nuts and bolts this is on her home page she's got the big I'm ready and then even our beloved wordpress.com if you go to their homepage it's a massive big invitation to create a website they don't your call to actions and always have to be in the form of these kind of buttons I use in my post actually do invite people to download a PDF and exchange for their email address so it can be right in the middle of your in your content so the bottom line is you want to make it easy for folks to do business with you and when you do that your customers we are like one of the fields of flowers to do business together so with that on a anticlimactic note I will say thank you for Camp San Diego talk about yourselves I finished early so you now have the gift of five minutes