Expand2Web Podcast #17 PDF Edition

Transcription

1 Expand2Web Podcast #17 PDF Edition Common Business Website Mistakes Show notes at: This is the Expand2Web podcast with Don Campbell, session 17: Common Business Website Mistakes - and what to do about them. Welcome to the Expand2Web podcast where it s all about making your business successful online. Now your host: Don Campbell. Welcome to the Expand2Web podcast. In this session, we want to talk about what makes a great website. I want to start that off with some of the things that I see and that my guest here sees as problems that people run into on their websites. I've got a special guest with me this week his name is Aaron Weiche. Aaron is the vice president of Spyder Trap - a digital agency with 40 people on staff based in Minneapolis. Aaron's got a long history in this industry. He's worked with a lot of websites on their online and mobile marketing efforts, and presents at a lot of different conferences. I ran into him recently at a Local University event in New York where he had a really nice presentation about what makes a great website. I wanted to have Aaron on today to talk about this topic because I think he's got some really good insight and I really like his presentation. Welcome Aaron thanks for being on the podcast. Thanks a lot for having me Don. You bet. At the Local University presentation, I was thinking of the one that we were in October in New York, but I noticed we sort to have a kindred spirit on these kind of things basically what makes a good website. We both were talking about some of the things that we see out there and these are just little things I see businesses get tripped up on all of the time that are making huge difference in how effective their website is. That's what I wanted to talk about today with you is just what are some of the mistakes, maybe common mistakes that people make on their website. Then what are some of the best practices that you found that make their websites more effective and convert into customers, things like that.

2 You are kind of right on par with that, there is a certain set of pitfalls for one reason or another that small businesses especially are really susceptible to and it's probably just because any small business you lack either time or money to make some of those things happen. The high level of really were it starts for me is just the whole overall approach in what your website is and what it's supposed to do for you. I break this down in a lot of my presentations. I'm big into analogies especially with small business owners. I break this down to a website owner, a business owner a lot of times they want the Ferrari of a website. They want a cool and a wow factor. They look at it as a pride factor. They Vill it with a lot of marketing jargon and they want lots of trafvic to it. They want it to add to their business. They want the whole world to know and they want to generate as many inquiries as possible. Then if you look at the other side of the coin, the visitor to that website, they're actually perfectly happy with a very reliable mini- van or a caravan. They want something that's helpful and easy and intuitive. They want it to be professional and trustworthy but it's more of a utility. They want it to be practicable and accessible and get the questions answered that they want. That approach level is probably one of the biggest things of changing that mind set and how you look or create or re- design your website. It's as a pretty important one. I'm glad you brought that up because that slide is what's sticking in my head. I was picturing that slide with... it's like a Ferrari or something on the top and the website owner wants all these cool Vlashy animations and stuff. Then the mini- van on the bottom were the visitor... they just want to get the job done. They want to Vind their information. If you don't mind I'd like to paste that slide in the show notes because I always have for the podcast, I have notes people can go back to and if you don't mind I'd love to... that's a good one like that. Absolutely, not at all. I was thinking we should back up a minute, I should have covered this in the intro but you're one of the faculty members at Local University. Could you tell us... some people may not be aware of what that event is and what it's all about, could you kind of describe that? Yes. Local University started four years ago. It's basically a collection of roughly six to ten long standing internet marketing professionals that we do kind of a hands- on workshop for small business owner's to really kind of cut

3 through all the confusion. There's a lot to digest and understand with marketing your business online especially with search and local search. Our workshop and seminar is really kind of set up to set the ground rules, give you the basics. Our seminar is not designed to... there isn't anything to buy or anything like that. It's all about getting you routed in the best practices and understanding what truly is important, what carries weight, what should you be paying attention to or aware of, and what are industry missed. What are tactics that other companies just specivically use as marketing to sell their product, really bringing as much clarity to what the online space is about for small business owners. We cram this clarity into about a four hour session and discuss things for them. What is the best route for your website? How do the search engines work? What are different things that you can do to rank for local searches? Then we covered a little bit about social media and website analytics as well. I've been to several of those. I think it's just such a great resource for people especially because you tour around to all these different cities so it's local for most of the people there, except for the speakers of course. For all the attendees it's local and it's a half day and it's very reasonably priced right. It's very inexpensive go to this thing and it's not a sales pitch. It's just, these are the kind of things... you've got these experts in the room telling you here's what works for getting your local business online and being effective. Based on both the relationships that we have and just that kind of level set of expectations that we bring in with it, we also... we're sponsored by Google. Bing has been part of our events as well. Really the major players that are out there support what we're doing with sponsorship. A lot of times too we're featuring speakers from Google or Bing that are also talking about different components of their engine as well. That for us is a big credibility piece. Obviously, this industry just as many are full of snake oil sales man, those willing to... whatever they can promise, they feel like they can put a price tag on and sell. We're really not about that we're about helping them understand and then being able to decide for themselves where they want to spend their time and money focusing on to make their online presence better. Right. All the advice is above board stuff; not a tricks. That's why Google and Bing, and those guys are willing to sponsor the event and be there and present that they're basically... they're in agreement with the kind of advice that you guys are giving out. That's huge. Thanks for that I just wanted to make sure that everyone knew. The web site is right?

4 Localu.org will always have our upcoming presentations, where we're at. We're in New Orleans in May, then a couple of days later in Philadelphia. Every couple of months we have a few different locations that come out. Then the localu.org blog also has a lot of relevant information that we post a few articles every month geared towards small businesses and online marketing. Keep an eye on that schedule everybody. If one comes to your area, I'd highly recommend you attending. Awesome, awesome content there, so good. Thanks Aaron. Going back to basically how you set this up, you're saying, okay as a website owner you really want to think about your visitor. Think about what it is that they want. I guess similar thing that I see a lot of is maybe the website many times is written kind of from the business owner's perspective and not from the visitor's perspective. Yes. I have one slide in my presentation that just really tries to set that mindset. It's all about your user Virst. Your website, if it's not reaching an audience or connecting with them or providing value to them, it really doesn't have any means to exist after that. Sometimes it's a very simplistic thing the user just needs a way to contact you. They need easy access to your phone number, an address, or to Vill out of form. It can also get a lot deeper, more complex. They want to know about a very niched piece of expertise you have, a service you provide or a product and it might all come down to one little detail on whether they decide that you are the best product or service for their Vit based on what they consume off your website. In today's day and age, whether they come to your website via seeing a billboard, a search engine, a referral from a neighbor, when they come into that site they're not looking to really visit 10 sites and Vill out 10 different contact or lead forms and see whoever gets back to them. They're going to be selective in looking at roughly probably three or Vive different providers. If they have enough trust and convidence in one after doing some comparison, they're going to put the ball into that person's court. Every now and then you might see him put two out there but today's consumer is all about doing the research up front and then saying, "Alright, now I will disclose to you who I am and what my specivic need is so we can communicate on it." Yes, so from that perspective it's really your website's job to make that good Virst impression, right?

5 Yes, absolutely. It's a combination of a number of things that do it on there. None of them have to be at unbelievable level so I would say if there is one area... if I break down most websites, I kind of break them down into four different areas. As we talk here we can decide which ones we want to dig in to the deepest. The Virst major area of the four is usability. This is just how easy is it for someone to use your website. There's a great book out there on website usability that's called, Don't make me think. That's an exact approach that most people should look at when they look at a website is how do you make your website so that it's intuitive for someone and how they move around it, what they click into, what they get answered. If they have to Vigure out how to use your website or how to get to the answer they need, you're probably going to lose that user and not get them to the next step with you. Second piece is content. Here as we get into this, this is where most small businesses, especially fall short. You can grab a small business owner and they are more than willing to talk to you for four to Vive hours about their business, their specialties, their experience, what they're looking to do next, who their referrals are, and what people say about their service or product. When you actually ask them to translate that into words, graphics, photos, and video, it completely cuts- off. It's very hard for them to put together even a handful of short and succinct paragraphs on what they're offering is in a very straight forward and a matter of fact way. In fact, in my experience, that's where most website projects breakdown is right there at that step. Yes. It kind of gets Vlipped around. The third piece is the design aspect of a website. To me this is the one area that most businesses put way too much emphasis in. They think that it is the design and the aesthetic that is going to win them business or change someone's perception of them or build trust in who they are, when actually it's the content that even though it receives probably the least amount of attention from small businesses, that's what's actually going to connect with that consumer. Being able to Vlip those two around is important. Now, that's not to say design isn't important but a lot of times I tell people, you need your design to be more of a chauffeur. You want it to be on time and professional and presentable and help guide you around but it's not really what it's all about. It's about your destination that ends up being the content piece of it. Then lastly, the fourth pillar in it is the technology side. This one, it can be tough. If you're busy trying to run a business selling pet supplies and pet food, how much of the time do you actually have to pay attention to what type of technology you should be using and how it can sit in those kinds of

6 things. That one there's some easy things and easier ways to look into but that's devinitely an area where you're best of seeking someone like yourself, Don, or others of us in the profession that can help take care of that side so you can focus on the other pieces to what make a good website. Yes, I totally agree. I think that's a trap that I seen a lot of businesses falling to is they get stuck on the design where they've heard about a certain technology and they kind of go after that and forget about some of the other... we all do it, right? I think we all do to some extent. It's an easy thing to do but like you said, I think one of the things... I guess when you were saying that the whole thing about content and design, I love those four pillars, usability, content, design, and technology. One of the things I see a lot of is people are really afraid. One easy thing you can do is put your picture on the website or use real photos of your ofvice and instead of like overdoing the design just make it personal, right? Yes. I really feel that design to me is like how do you create the perfect container and way to access what your true answers or trust factors are within your website. Creating design to me is something that really on the surface, you almost don't even notice but it's accenting and putting forth the content and allowing the accessibility to the content in all the right ways. It doesn't have to be something that jumps out at you or entertains you or gives you that wow factor. Again, that's the Ferrari approach for a website owner and those things where for months they lament about how it needs to look and how it makes them feel when they take a look at it. Then when you turn around and you ask them to evaluate content, they'll spend an hour and kind of throw some rough things together and not really care about it one way or another for how well it aligns with what a possible visitor to their website is going to need. For sure. Let's take each of these pillars. We just talked about design a little bit. I love the concept of design being a chauffeur or like the container for your message instead of overdoing it. Let's talk just a little bit about usability, content, and technology. From usability perspective, you're probably talking about things like, what easy to use navigation so that they can Vind their way around or what are some things that you talk about there? Again, the easy way to think of usability is if you've ever used a website and at some point you either want to scream or throw your mouse or you're saying to yourself, how did I get here or why can't I Vind what I'm looking for. All of those things fall into the usability of a website. The Virst one you point out, navigation options, having the same seamless navigation across all pages, that no matter where you enter in through the website or where you

7 click to, you still are only a click or two away from where you need to go within the site. Sometimes you'll see some sites that are kind of a mess where the home page has one set of navigation and as you drill into a section, you get another set of navigation or you can't easily jump back to a main site. That's one area. You devinitely want to do that if you're leading people down dead- end paths. Even simply thinking of things like how you label navigations so you can pull up millions of websites that have the same navigation options as home, products, services, about us, contact us. Those same Vive, six staples are part of so many sites and what those lack is actually giving the user any amount of easy comprehension on what those sections deal about. If you know you're an insurance agent, products might be specivic types of insurance, so instead of calling that Products you would want that label to be home insurance or auto insurance or personal insurance services, then another tab that maybe says commercial insurance services. You really want to say how can I be more descriptive? Again, the user doesn't have to think, will this content be under this section or will it be under another? Usually by applying just one good keyword descriptor you can really improve the usability of your navigation. That's a good one. A simple test that I always like to tell people to do is to bring someone that they know and sit them down... maybe it's someone that you know and is willing to spend Vive or ten minutes looking at your website. You sit them down and ask them to... just give them a goal like, I want you to Vind out about home insurance and request a quote or you give them a little goal on the site, whatever your goal is, and let them navigate and don't say anything, just watch. That's always an interesting exercise. Even with my blog or my website I do that from time to time and I'm sitting here thinking, "No, don't go there. Go over here." It makes me realize I've got to do some tuning because people think... like the curse of knowledge, right? We know all about our business. We know all about our website. We know exactly where to go but other people don't. We can't make that assumption. That was the exact point I was just going to bring up there. You are so close to the vest with that information. For you as a business owner it's all about organizing it and how do you structure it the right way. For users, that structure is all about, how do I hit my end goal of feeling like this person can help me or I should buy this product or their valuable resource for what I need to do? How do I make that determination and then how do I take the next step with them.

8 Yes, that's a good way to look at it. What about like the call to action? How do you think about that? Every site or maybe every page on a site should have some sort of a goal and a call to action. That's in everything I see people miss quite a bit. Yes, absolutely. The analogy I love to use here is if you're a gas station owner, do you want six entrances into your gas station off of the freeway or just one? That really helps getting people thought about that. It's about the destination so if it is for your website, if you set goals of, I either want someone to be able to Vill out a contact form or a lead form, I want them to give me their address. I want them to download this case study or a specivic project that's similar, I've completed in the past. To do that you need to put clear call to action that those people are consuming your content and understanding how you can help them provide. You need to place these next steps of hear something that you can do to learn deeper and then that also allows us to learn more about who you are or what kind of help or getting your address so we can mark it or continue the conversation further. With those you look at where the different locations I can put them, how can I blend them into my content. Just about every page you have there should be a clear next step, a clear call to action that, okay if you read this page, as the owner you don't want them just to read that page and then go away and fade off. You probably want them to take some type of logical next step to further the conversation or the interaction with you. Having those called out clearly and in different specivic spots is only going to be helpful in leading them to the goal that you'd like to have achieved. For and ofvline business that might mean a phone call or it might mean a visit to their place of business or it could mean an appointment request or something like that from in terms of call to action. Yes and we're blending a little bit into the content discussion here but any good website starts by saying not just... so small businesses do a good job of saying here's what we need to have on this site but very few sit down and say, what do we want to have happen as a result of this site? They don't really plan goals for the users, what's a successful visit to the website. If they make a list of those seven or eight things, we want them to Vill out a lead form. We want them to at least consume three or four pages of content or spend eight minutes on the website. We want them to give us their address. We want them to call us using our phone number. If you lay those out, then that s really the foundation that you should be building your strategy around with your website is, "What do we need on the site to make these goals happen" not "we need a website that has all these things on it."

9 Right. Let's do that, let's talk about content, one of the other pillars then. What kind of things can people do to build content on their site? It has been a thread to this conversation, you ve said. It seems to be the area that s the most important but people spend the least amount of effort on in many cases, right? Yes. One area for a lot of people, I tell them to start with it. It s just such an easy exercise. Either if you re one- person business, make this list yourself. If you have someone who answers your phones, get them as part of this process, or if you have a sales person or sales team but sit down and formulate, what are the top 10 questions that were asked over the phone, over e- mail, and in real life, when people are looking at buying our product or services, or interacting with us? Once you make that list, your website should be answering all 10 of those questions that you re asked most frequently and I can t tell you the numbers of times when I actually have a client sit down and make this list. They have about two or three actually covered on their website that would be considered a sufvicient answer for that question. That s a really easy thing that somebody can sit down with their one- person business or they have 5 or 10, but get a group together, put those out on the ones that they get asked in frequency and importance the most, and then, how do we built content around that and that answers those questions. Yeah, that s a great one. I think, the other thing I like about answering those questions is you pointed and as I ve noticed you is that it builds trust and credibility, right? There s a favorite video that s about it. It s about 10 or 15- minute long video I like to tell people to watch. It s called Marketing by Sharing by Jason Fried from 37 Signals. In this video, he talks about how they ve done their marketing by not buying ads but by just sharing good content with people and we tend to trust people that we learn from, right? It seems like a good opportunity for business owner to answer those questions you talked about and build some trust and credibility with potential customers. Yeah. If you re able to shape yourself as an expert on what you re providing by the depth of what you share and how transparent you can be with that and built trust in that, that s only going to help with how you shape your company and you re offering with what s there. Finding ways to put as much of it out there as possible is extremely important. Again, if you think back to an ofvline practice, if somebody called you on the phone and asked you a question, you wouldn t give a very short answer and say, I m not going to tell you anymore unless you come in here and talk to me. Why should your website content stop short or be in an abbreviated version or not allow someone who has a deeper or longer question to get their answers from that,

10 because if you don t answer it, they re going to try to probably jump to another source that is able to answer that. Yeah, for sure. Right. It s just good opportunity and then, the more content you have out there, then the more time Google comes back and crawls your site so there s a lot of good reasons to have that. I have a question for you. One of the things that I see a lot is the business owner will say, Yes, I will write the content, but they re very busy trying to run their business. They have all the right intentions but, I even don t blog as much as I should, right? I think it s a hard thing to do. Do you have any experience with having businesses hire copywriters or get help in writing some of this content? Yeah. If you think back to earlier in the podcast where I said, if you corner a small business owner, they will talk for hours about their business. That s a great way to get this information out of them. The other thing that a copywriter, by having someone else take that out of you, is they are also going to ask questions as somebody not so close and tied into it. Right. If you re asking yourself questions as that business owner, you re thinking about the things that drive your business, not necessarily the things that drive your customer. That can be a very, very benevicial process to pull that out and then have a copywriter to be able to frame it up. If you get lucky enough and especially, if you have copywriter that understands search- engine optimization and how to place terms the right way when they create that content, you re going to have a very valuable piece of content created for you. Some of the other things I understand, too, well, that s great is content are multiple types of things in today s online environment. Yes, it can be texted in the words that you type in, put together, and that s the basis. You still need a pillar of that type of content. It s still very important with search engines, the amount of written HTML content on your site but photos, graphics, videos, reviews, customer testimonials, these are all different types of content that the search engines view as content themselves. Your user views it as content and helpful, and they all play different roles in helping tell your story that might provide more visual trust or more emotional- type trust, and different things that can play upon there so, you really should be thinking to, How do I diversify my content? If I can provide the same answer three different way in a written format in a series of three photos and a graphic, or I make a 60- second quick video with my iphone, now I m really delivering to all different types of senses on how someone might consume it, and I m really giving a complete story the way the user wants to receive it.

11 Yeah. That s a great point is to think about content in that where there s many different ways to produce it and like you said, many people, some people, they want to see a video, other people don t. They d rather see the images or read the article so you re getting a chance to read. Just like, I was thinking of it like, you know how when you get to know somebody, it s either a friend of someone in business and you quickly realize, this person doesn t really respond to phone calls but by e- mail them, they ll respond, right? Yeah, or even today, if I text them they will quickly respond. Yeah, right. I feel like everybody has their preferred mode of communication and I think our customers are the same way. Some people like videos, some people don t. They want audio or they want something else. That s an interesting way to think of it is content isn t just text. Again, we re talking about, as we discussed before, it s about the user. If you offered a few different ways, the user will decide, I d rather hit play on a video and be able to understand what this is about, or I d rather read through and Vine- tooth comb all of the details that s here, or I d rather just see a visual summary or a photograph of this and to me, that connects the dots and provides it. When we re talking about contact methods, one person wants your phone number, one wants to Vill out the contact form, one wants to do it via e- mail, but again, provide those opportunities. Let them decide what works well for you. All you re after is that they understand it and they re able to put the ball into your court. From there, your real world thinks can take over for how you do business. Right. That s great. I m sure we can talk about content for a while. There s a lot there. Yes - that could be a whole other podcast, right? Right. What about the technology, this other pillar, what kind of recommendations do you have for people there? Yeah. In today s day and age, two things that I really try to get people to think about, one, one of the most important things to me in the content management system is a content management system that a user can understand and it s easy for them to update themselves. When we look at this, even though one content management solution or technology platform might have a lot of bells and whistles or features or whatever else, if it isn t easy for that business owner to go on swap out a photo or the system does not automatically resize the photo for them to put into a photo gallery or different things like that, it s not going to matter how fantastic of tool it is or

12 how search- engine friendly it is and anything else. There s nothing that they can do to truly control it. Ease of use is one that I really look at. When you look at cost as well, there s obviously a lot more for a user nowadays to choose from and that s where WordPress comes in. It s so heavily favored is because it s a free open- source platform. You either take it and use some low- level templates. You can work with someone that custom- design some templates around it but the cost you get started with WordPress is very low, very easy. It s just like riding a bike that once you get down, here s the process and through the update content or add in specivic different types of content, build yourself a little cheat sheet and you ll really off and running with it. The thing that a lot of small business owners need to think about today, two, is how accessible is your website on various devices. The web is being consumed so much more on smartphone and tablet every single day. It s pretty narrow- minded if you re only designing your marketing to be viewed on a desktop. Here again, where WordPress again for a small business has some really a number of templates that you can start with that maybe, for $50 or $100 to buy that template. It really is built mobile- friend that the term in our world is a responsive- based web design and what that means is the code and design is already built to reconvigure based on the type of device a user is reaching it from. The small business owner, you just manage one website, one piece of content, but when the user accesses it, it s going to reformat the site to work best on that small screen that might be on their iphone or android, and also free it up and presented as a regular desktop site when you pull it up on your MacBook or your PC. Yeah. That s a great perspective sweep through it. When I got started in this industry, I moved out to the Bay Area from Michigan, and to join the start of company named Interwoven, and this is back in the.com boom time, and they made a software that helped big companies manage all their websites. This software costs hundreds of thousands of dollars. The average sales presenting was $250,000 because it had all these custom code in it and all the consultants would come in. The big companies like Ford and Federal Express would buy this. Then, just a few years ago, four years ago when I went to start Expand2Web, I surveyed the market and looked what was out there. That s amazing. WordPress is like, gosh, it s 80% of what these guys, these big companies are paying huge dollars for 10 years ago. It s amazing how much of it is there. As a small business owner, you can take a platform like that and you ve got a really sophisticated little Content Management System that you can use to

13 publish your website, and it solves that problem you mentioned before where you can update it yourself. It really is pretty amazing how valuable that tool is to somebody and what s available today for a very low cost. Yeah. Technology is devinitely accelerated and to me, we re just at the starting point of this, right? If you look at Facebook, for me, Facebook s success entirely has rooted around making it easy for people to publish photos online. Yes. I really consider Facebook to be America s homepage, right? It allowed anyone to understand how to publish content to the web, not necessarily so much through a.com property but you re building out your own provile which is just the same as a website on the internet. When I look at things like that, it gets back to my point with ease of use, that if you Vind a tool that s easy for you to use and does the right things for you, that s the most important thing that s out there. Facebook has little- to- no search engine value for a company but you have people to connect with there and it s very easy for you to tell your story in micro- formats of quick updates on what you re doing with your business and post photos on what s going on with your business where, well, that might be 10 on the level of simplicity, publishing out of your own website might be a two for you. Right. Yeah. That s a good way to look at it. It s interesting. Facebook has made it easy, obviously, like you just mentioned, you don t want that to be your web presence because it s not necessarily going to help you from a search perspective. It s a good analogy to say, well, they made it easy for people to publish photos and little tiny updates and they took down that barrier which I Vind most business owners are stuck with. They either don t know how to update their website or the person who built it has moved and they don t even have access to it and it just sits there. Yes. Those are very unfortunate situations but again, with the photos, I look at, you can grab your digital camera and take an 8- megapixel photo. When you plug it into Facebook, it s going to compress it for you down to a specivic size that s shareable and will quickly load over the internet, or you can take it with your phone. You can instantly publish it to your page, though. Those are some of the things that I usually start to work with people on understanding like the same way you d want to utilize is [inaudible 00:34:31] make publishing to the web easy, let s make sure we have a tool for you that makes it easy for you to change your website and create new content, since content is so important to your site. Right, right. This is great. All four of these pillars, usability, content, design, technology, all good things for people. That s a good framework, I think, for

14 someone to look at that, their web presence in that perspective. What other tips you know there is? Are there any other tips you can think of that if I m maybe a small business owner and I m just thinking Gosh, there s a lot of information here, where do I start? I know I need some help with my website. I need to make it, convert it better, or I know I don t have the content on there. Where should somebody start? Yeah. This leads in to a number of different things that I ve said but my biggest takeaway that I tell people is Vigure out what are the most important questions that people have when they come to your website. If you can do that, that s really going to help you. A couple of different examples, one of them, a client I have that builds decks, and to them, really, it s important about a user wants to understand what type of materials they should use and then, they want to see the creativity or the level of quality that deck builder is using. For this particular client, we can just have one page that says, We build decks. We build these types, these materials, and everything else. That would be a very high level. That just signivies that they re deck builder. The approach we took is that we broke down and said, Okay, here s cedar wood decks and here s why you d want to use cedar wood. It s a natural element. It has that natural look and feel. It s a lower cost. Here are the things you re going to have to do to maintain it and keep it up to yourself. It hits upon all these other things. Now, here are 20 photos of cedar wood decks that we ve done in the last couple of years. Now, here, we also have a page on composite decks. These are maintenance free. The cost more but you don t have to power- wash and stain them every other year. Here are some of the design things we can do and here are 20 or 30 different photos of those decks. That s one example there by that service and product. Getting a little bit more detailed, being a little more niche, and providing the right trust factors. On the other side, I look at something like a realtor and what they would want to do to market themselves, and it s really getting an understanding at the end. It s not so much the homes you sell and the inventory but it s really about you. You re forming a personal relationship with that real estate agent. For that realtor, I would tell them, Vigure out how well you can describe who you are, what interests are, how you work, how you communicate. That s the type of content you need on your website because people are going to pick you based on how well they feel like they will gel with you and they can trust you in making the most important purchase of their life, at least pride the most substantial Vinancially that they re going to make. If you re going to bleed it down and really understand, here are the answers that are most important to the comparisons or the unknowns that a prospect

15 or potential customers going to have with me, and you can make sure you identify those and speak to them in detail. That s going to make for a very strong web presence and bring you the best amount of leads. Yeah. That s great. Those are great examples. I think, if it was me, my takeaway would be, I m trying to summarize what you just said. If I was a business owner, probably the number one thing you would do is just ask yourself those questions or have someone help you come up with those 10 questions that you know all your customers are asking. These are questions that you probably are answering every day, anyway, right? Yes. Then, make a commitment to get that content on your website, whether that s through yourself or someone on in your staff or a copywriter. Would that be a fair as Virst step for everybody to take? I would think. Yeah. I ve had just an extremely valuable step that I would say, majority of the time is just skipped over. It is really amazing but almost all people really skipped right to design right away. They ve looked at it as purely a visual play and they don t get in to what really is the meat and the potatoes of how successful your website will be online with content. Yeah, exactly. The other thing I like about that recommendation is that if you don t have assistant today where you can update your website, then, it s going to drive some change there, too. You re going to have to be on that website where you can actually publish that. Get that done. Get the content out there and then you can update the design overtime later, right? Yes. This is great, Aaron. Thank you so much for this framework, of looking at it. I think, this is an area that just so many people could benevit from, not only just the business owner but anyone with a website. This just means to think about these kinds of things. If someone wanted to get a hold of you, how would be the best way to reach you for, like questions or projects or things like that? Yeah. The best way, let s use this fabulous thing called the internet. Go ahead and type in spydertrap in Google. It s S P Y D E R trap, or go to spydertrap.com and from there, you can see the list of services we provide. You ll see our portfolio of work. You can read blog posts and information and takeaways and just click on our contact form and we d love to hear from someone and any interest they have in some of these areas.

16 Yeah. I was out there earlier looking at the blog. You guys have a lot of great articles out there. What I ll do, I always do this every podcast is if you go to expand2web.com/session17. Sorry, a little tongue twister there. Session17, then I ll have notes from this show and going to include that slide, if you don t mind. They re in about the website expectation slide of that one with a Ferrari and a minivan. I ll be out there and I ll put your links out there to your website and Twitter and things like that, and some notes from the session, and that ll do it. That way, people can get to it anytime. Thanks again, Aaron, so much, for being on here. I m probably going to be at the local university in New Orleans so I ll probably see you there in May. I think, that s in May right? Yeah, next month. Great to catch up with you, Don, and see if we can bring more people this simple but pretty impactful message. Yeah, good deal. Well, thanks, Aaron. Take care and we re looking forward to see you next month. You bet. Thanks. Bye. All right, well, until next week. p.s. If you need a website for your business, check out our SmallBiz WordPress Theme - it is a responsive theme that makes it easy to build a website for your business, complete with website, blog, Facebook and Mobile all in one package. Click Here to subscribe to the Expand2Web Small Business Podcast on itunes!