 People come to me with one of two problems so the first one is either they know they come and they say I know exactly what I want my website to look like but they haven't given any thought to content What's going to go on the site or? They looked at all their competitor sites that wrote up a list of pages that they'll need and they're like well You know I don't I don't really care what it looks like So that's a problem because you have no strategy and one if you just copy off your competitors It's not going to suit your business because you don't know what their strategy is You don't know why they chose those pages or why they have that and if you Just have a site that looks good It's not going to serve you either because the people who come to your site need more than a pretty site They need the right information and they need to know the right things to do and you need them to have the right things So bear with me also guys had to borrow my daughter's computer It's one of those days, so that's what we just talked about Okay, so having a website strategy will save you time Because of course you don't have to waste time creating content that you don't need because you'll have an outline for exactly what you do need It'll help you to save money Because you're not building out like I had a lady she came she had a HR firm And she had looked at her competitor site and this lady had an e-commerce portion with all of these Kits and documents that you could buy and she said, you know, I want that now of course Her price is going to go up because she wants the e-commerce portion But the problem was she hadn't created any of those guides and she didn't have any plans to for at least a year So the quote that I was giving her was way higher than what she really Needed at the time and she wasn't going to create those so you can save money by knowing exactly which one on your site and Of course your sanity because who wants to? Create all of this extra stuff. Well, you're not ready for it So in that lady's case, she would have to create 20 kids and then sequences to go out with them in the whole thing in three months Okay Any questions so far? Okay, so your website strategy is How people will find you? How you'll move them through your site and how you're going to stay in touch with them and I use two parts of it So I like to talk about the style portion of it what your site looks like and then the strategy portion of it How you're going to use each of your tools to accomplish your goals so Before you start with your website strategy though, you really need to define what your offers are What are the things that you're going to be providing to people? You also need to know who your client is and what they're looking for from you What actions you want your visitors to take once they're on your site? What pages you're going to need and then establish what your goals and metrics are So if you're trying to build your list, you don't want to make one of your goals to have You know certain people on your contact form one of your goals would be a metric to track would be How many people are opting in for your newsletter and then also how you're going to promote your site So we can start with the style portion of it now style is just the design of it what you see when you come to a site and How that site makes you feel when you see it And you have certain tools that you can use to style your site You have your fonts your images and graphics your color your layout and they all provide the feel of the site now with fonts and Typography you want to pay close attention to your sizes your headlines And then also the feel of the fonts because if you're going for a more modern feel using Older fonts that's going to make your site look a little more traditional And then you'll have a mismatch in your branding and also we taught they talked a little bit yesterday about making sure the site is People can read it so if you have long blocks of content using headlines and having subheadings throughout also using your Images and graphics so if you have a chart or something that can be Better explained visually then just to write it up use a graphic and Professional images some people have a problem with stock images. I personally like them I think it's a less expensive way for a small business owner to have professional quality photos on their website and they do make a huge difference with images on your site and Of course your colors your colors set the mood for your site For stocking just absolutely I stock photo Getty images One two three RF dreams time Fotolia and I'll get you started Dollar photo club absolutely And if you're looking for like dollar photo club also death to stock photo is a go when those are free And then they have photographers like Shay Cochran who puts out branding kits and She creates really beautiful images that you can overlay graphics on top of and Different things like that to promote what you're doing Yes dreams time Getty images Getty g e t t y death to stock photo Hmm absolutely We can be specific. What do you do? Okay, she said that she's a business consultant and she asked to speak more on setting goals and metrics for your website So as a business consultant, I would assume that most of your clients need to speak to you before they actually hire you So one metric that you could set on your site is to have a way for people to contact you and So as opposed to seeing, you know, just how much traffic you're getting You would really want to track how many people are actually coming to the site and then how many people are Clicking to contact you and schedule a phone call Okay, we're going to get there setting up your real strategy, but Like say for instance What you want people to do your call to action on your site is for people to contact you You can do it two ways You can pre-qualify people by giving them like an application to fill out beforehand and then that sends to you And then you schedule with them or you can just have them have a calendaring system set up where they just click Schedule with you and go forward And what you would track is actually which one how many forms are filled out How many people actually contact you and how many you get from that? Anybody else? Lost guys. Where are we colors? We'll go on to layout so for your layout there's two really main kinds of layouts And one is just a full-width layout and the other one is a sidebar layout So you'd have your main content and you have a sidebar with secondary things on the side More recently people have been moving to a full layout and doing what's called a one-page one-purpose method And so the full page has no distractions on it It's only about one thing and I suggest this for your services pages So for a home page you might have various options of where people can go around the site About page you may have your sidebar But when you get to your services, you don't really want to distract people with opting into your newsletter or You know seeing what you posted on Twitter or anything Besides seeing your service so you could use a full-width page for that with one call to action at the end And that's a metric like if you had a Page about your service then at the end you would just you'd remove all the distractions and at the end have a call to action to fill out your form or schedule a console with you and All of those things together will make up the feel of your site and kind of the styling of it So your fonts your colors your image Images your graphics and professional headshots to guys No selfies no camera phone photos at a guy send me a camera phone selfie for his book cover That's not gonna work It's not gonna work so and Professional head shots will last you a couple of years too So it's definitely worth the investment and if you're gonna do any interviews or speaking or anything like that people will Book you more if you have a professional head shot So just a tip got professional head shots for very cheap by Taking benefit advantage of a daily deal. Thanks. You look for coupons there. That's it He got a daily deal for head shots So let's get into the strategy and this is a good part So for your website strategy you have really You know cup five tools that you can use to strategically create a plan To get more business So you have your website you have your blog you have your email newsletter. You have your social media channels and online events with your Well with your website So those are your strategy tools and what you're going to use to Create your online strategy So the key to your strategy is having a purpose for Everything on your site and being very intentional with what you put on your site. So no cute puppies No cat photos your kids are cute, but your clients don't care and Social media we'll we'll talk a little bit more about having social media things on your site, but for me an avid fan of Minimizing any kind of social media on your website So In everything that you put on there should be intentional and with a purpose if you have a photo there Why is that photo there? If you have yes You can use conference call HD instantella seminar Go-to webinar a client when he's using stealth seminars to do kind of automated on-demand seminars She just runs them every six weeks and Brings in leads with them with the pre-recorded webinar stealth stealth seminar ST eal th and then seminar We do a lot of webinars challenges quizzes different things like that tele summits and a tele summit is Similar to a tele seminar except you have a lot of speakers you may have 12 speakers and in various Experts in their category and they all come together for two or three days or a week to put on a Kind of a presentation like where can't if this was virtual This could be a tele summit So you have all the different speakers speaking on their different topics and people can call in and listen Mm-hmm having used WebEx we usually use go-to webinar is what we usually use Go-to webinar So we talked about being intentional and on purpose with everything that you put on your website and Each of your tools needs to have a purpose as well So we said your website your blog your social media your email newsletter and and Holding online events each one of those needs to have a purpose for being you don't want to just put on a webinar with no Goal in mind of what you want to achieve from that and we'll start with websites And the keys to remember on your website is who's visiting your website and what do you want them to do? So when you first Put your pages together you want to think about everybody who's going to come to your website not just clients are going to come You may have media come to your site. You may have your staff that comes to your site You'll have Maybe potential people who want to book you for speaking or different things like that and you want to pay attention to all of those and create You know the pages that those people will need so if you're going to be promoting yourself as a speaker You'll need headshots and a speaker sheet and to have all those things accessible on your site And make sure people can really understand clearly what you do who you do it for and Why you're the best option for them? want to talk about your blog and a Blog in a website anybody know the difference between blogs and websites everybody know Or nobody knows Yes or no guys come on Okay, you know, okay, so your blog is for Well a lot of people put I think too much emphasis on the SEO of your blog I think if you're promoting your blog in other ways SEO is good to have but Doesn't have to be the main focus I think the content that you put on your blog should be the main focus and if you're providing good relevant content people will share it Which will get you a lot more traffic than waiting on SEO to kick in So you want to blog with your audience in mind, but still keep SEO and social media in mind as well So here's some just really super simple SEO. I'm not a SEO expert But this is just some simple things that you can put in place On your blog So you want to use keyword phrases and not just a keyword So if you sell cars, you don't want to try to rank for cars You're not going to make it but if you use Atlanta Auto Broker That's a keyword phrase that you may be able to rank for Also your permalinks so in WordPress right underneath your title You can change your permalink and you want to change your permalink to your keyword phrase And also include that keyword phrase in that title tag up top You also want to put it in your headings on your page Subheadings as well your alt tags on your images so when you go into your media library and There's that little space there that you don't know what to do with that says alt right there put your keyword phrase and links to your other blog posts within your article and Then of course include that same keyword phrase throughout your article it is but No, no, no, no, don't just type the keyword in over and over and over again Make it relevant like you could use your title again for the image you want to describe the image Yeah, and ideally the image is representative of what you're writing about Yeah, no keyword stuffing guys None at all Okay Any questions on that a permalink is the the URL that shows up in your website So when you go to www.yourname.com and you have that slash and then like your page name that's your that's the permalink Yes I mean, it's it's fairly important. You can go ahead and utilize it because it's there but I Mean it's not gonna give you a ton of points, but You can you can use it? I did a talk yesterday. Well, I didn't do it. I attended a talk yesterday for the Yoast plug-in Which I highly recommend I use it a lot and it does help a lot with With your search engine optimization and it'll actually give you a preview of what? That post will look like when it shows up on Google, which I think is really cool So when you put in your tags and everything it'll give you a score For kind of how much SEO juice you have and it'll show you exactly what it'll look like on Google Yoast Y O A S T Okay, now email is one of my very very favorite things Because email is a way for you to reach out to your audience without Making them have to remember you and come back. So with social media I'll just say Facebook because I'm sure everybody knows Facebook on Facebook people have to Come to your page. They have to remember that you're there. Sometimes they'll get your post. Sometimes they won't With email You're kind of reaching out to them. You're going into their inbox where they are every single day And it's a really great way to keep in touch and share promotions also So with email One key thing that you really want to do in your strategy is to offer a free gift and exchange for an email address and this is not new but We talked a little bit about it yesterday too in the panel. They talked about Not just putting please sign up for my newsletter But actually having a compelling reason for someone to sign up. Is anybody currently collecting email addresses on their website? Good. Good. Good. Who has a free gift that they offer? What do you offer? nice a White paper he offers a white paper in exchange for the email address Okay, anybody have anything unique like a quiz or a challenge that they're doing Anybody doing a what are you offering? Okay, so she said that they have a Challenge on their website and then they ask people to Instagram it with a hashtag and they select a winner and that winner Gets a printed calendar. That's a strategy. She's using social media. She's using her website. She's using email To get the word out about her business So nice There's lots of places that you can ask for your email address Some of them are often overlooked. The header is a really good place to put for an email opt-in Your sidebar The footer of your website One of the highest converting places that I find is at the end of a blog post and you can use something like Natalie Luciae's pop-up ally It's not just for pop-ups You can use it for all the opt-ins on your website and often do we'll put it in the header put in the sidebar Put it at the end of blog posts We'll create a standalone page that just like for example, he has the white paper So the landing page would just talk about the benefits of the white paper and ask for the email. There's no navigation nothing else on your about page, so This is the one time you can use your pictures cute pictures of your kids to guys. So on your about page People are coming there to learn more about you. That's a missed opportunity to get an opt-in because There is really No other call to ask you you can put other than you know Hey, check out my services and if they've done that they probably Coming from the air tier about page and then pop-ups and pop-ups Seem annoying, but they increase conversions a lot a lot. I've seen as much as a lady had She had 300 people on her list when she started and she did the pop-up ally on her site And she was up to 700 in two months Just by changing not her free gift. She didn't change anything else except add the pop-up any questions on email Yes Yeah It is her her Opt-in is mobile responsive. It'll resize and you can click out of it Yeah, hers is actually that's one good thing about her, you know, she's an online marketer So she created it with that in mind any more questions on email Okay, so social media anybody love social media, I don't really care for it, but Social media is a great tool for your strategy like she's using Instagram Instagram is Driving a lot a lot of traffic And if you have something beautiful like fashion or hair or even stationery Instagram is a great great tool to use and Pinterest also for those visual things I like to think of social media as a one-way tool so you you want to get people from Your social media channels back to your website, but you don't want to get people from your website back to social media So take it all off take off your Twitter feed take off your Instagram snapchat roll Unless you know you're just trying to build your numbers over there But if you're trying to get business on your site then minimize the social media maybe put it low in your footer or At the end of your sidebar, but don't make it prominent don't make it the focus You don't want people to click off of your site and go to Facebook Because once they're there the goal is to get sucked into the cycle and they're off somewhere else And never to return Right and that's why the reason I chose it though is because it does go both ways so Social media is one way but at the same time it does go both ways because you want To get the traffic from social media back to your site, but you don't want to send it back over there So it's meant to confuse you Okay, now we're going to talk about online events now if one of your goals is to really build your list I would highly consider doing an online event and online events are webinars Tele seminars podcasts Even holding a challenge doing interviews doing the tele-summit Things like that anything that I haven't seen like tweet chats and people have them in a specific time in a specific date And you have to show up for it and The key to the online events is you get the name and email address to people Has anyone is anyone in here doing webinars to people? Okay, I got a couple people in here Okay, so online events are really really good for building your list mm-hmm She said is our webinars for every business I actually had a lady who's a physical therapist and she ran a webinar For other physical therapists and she didn't do it free She actually charged forty seven dollars for it and she sold out filled up our lines and she had a hundred lines So she made a nice amount of money for Doing that in this physical therapy, you know But I think you can you can find a way to work in an online event for any business And if it and if it's not because of the webinar can be a Presentation of your services. It can be a way to introduce people more in depth to what you offer Any more questions on the online events? Okay, so all of this might look like you have your website with all your content on it and That's your real selling tool. It gives people clear understanding what your services are You have clear calls to action on your site and you're using your blog to drive traffic. So You're blogging with your audience in mind You're using some SEO in there also and you're sharing all that content via social media Which is bringing people back to your website where they can buy your services and hire you or learn from you and Once they're there also you're getting their email address so that you can reach out to them again and Tell them hey, I got this new article. Hey, we're doing this special. We're doing this promotion Or are you just sharing content and just letting People know that you're an expert and you know, you love what you do You're passionate about it and letting people feel that energy from you and Then with social media, of course your people are sharing your blog content Switch expand your reach and then again draws traffic back to your site and Online events where you're building your list you're sharing your expertise and you can also online events are great selling tools Like I said, it's a presentation. So you can use them to sell also And then that's me guys so any questions on building your online strategy, so Honestly, I do visually see it in my mind while they're talking to me I can kind of tell them the pages they need before they know but just because I've been doing it for a long time But I do I get out a piece of paper and I list sorry. I keep doing that guys I'm right and left brain so I Could make a list I'll list out all the pages and then I'll draw a chart and see how everything links together So we may have the about page And on the about page will have an opt-in and we'll also have at the bottom Maybe three services listed that they can go to and then I'll draw how they all link together And that helps me in building out the site afterwards also and helps the client I can give them a checklist of the pages will need and all the copy Yes, I don't start the site until I get the content. I Just don't I don't start until I get the content and if they're ready to start and they really are they want to get into the Design part of it and see what everything looks like they'll get the content to you So I just tell them, you know, here's the list of the things will need and when they get it set the date I Do two things in that I have a Workbook that I give the clients called life beyond your home page And it's kind of a template with examples of all the pages that a website would need So for an about page at three examples and a little template they can follow to write their own Right and I do content creation support too. So if they already have a site, I'll help them go through the site and Clean up what they need and I work with Angela Solomon. She's at Angela Solomon calm She's a great writer and That's what she does. She writes website copy If the client really needs some help, I'll send them to her. No, I think it was in Texas Everybody I work with is virtual Another thing I love. Yes Sure or ads your business is that why you have your blog to sell ads? Are you selling services via your blog? Okay, I would say stay away from ads unless you're making unless you have a lot a ton of traffic And you're making money from having those ads Otherwise, I would say put an ad for your services in that spot Or an ad for your own products in that spot. Oh, you can check out Google AdWords They have a lot of good tools for starting with your advertising. Yes Right here. I prefer to use either blog comments or email newsletters for engagement with audience for social media I'm sorry. Oh I'm sorry. She said that um, she was confused about the social media part. She thinks well, she She she wants to talk more about the one way that I mentioned with social media because she increases engagement on social media to have You know when you're talking with your fans over on social media And so I'm not saying don't talk to your people on social media. Absolutely do. I'm just saying don't Let your website be the way that they find you via social media So if if you've gotten them to your website, you want to keep them on your website Get them on your email newsletter get them on your blog and then once you have them on your blog Have them share something and then they'll check you out on your social media Or when you send that email newsletter the first welcome sequence invite them to join you on your Facebook community So I'm not saying don't send people to social media at all Just keep them on your website. You want them on it. You want them on your email more than you want them on your social media to manage lists Mailchimp is great. Those guys are out there I work with a lot of online businesses. So they use infusion soft which in infusion soft Which is a good one. There's also office autopilot and they have a Kind of a beginner package called send pepper, which is pretty good There's a Weber, but if you had to choose between Mailchimp and a Weber, I like Mailchimp personally I think it's more user-friendly But those are those will get you started Yes, absolutely. So I One I think is this she said what are what are my thoughts on setting quantifiable goals for your website strategy? So I think it's essential and once you really know what your own metrics and your goals are Then you can use all the tools to plan accordingly So a lot of my clients want to build their email list. That's their main metric They don't focus on selling on their site. They just want to get them on the list and then they can you know Nurture over time. So for one metric could be to just honestly say, you know These are the things that I'm going to do to get 700 more people on my list in two months Yeah Anybody else? Awesome. Oh No, sir, I've been hand-coding websites since I was in high school. Yeah No, I build everything on WordPress. I know how to hand code But I do I use WordPress for everything because I think the client should have the power Update their site Usually I'll create a custom template for a client or I'll use something like on the Genesis framework and Customize the template to be what I needed That's if a client has a request for a specific thing But usually I'll do a custom template in WordPress. Thank you