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Big Website No-No's Part 1

Now we're going to cover the big no, no, it was a lot of the mistakes people make that will really deter the traffic that comes to your site turning into leeds and therefore limit your sales so let's jump and your website is the core of your online business. Everything revolves around your main website where you either get the lead or position the product to sell. So cover this a little bit in section one about there's no really point in being on social if there's no end game there's no gold there's, no place to be sending them. So the website is the corps had to make sure it looks good and you're doing everything you can tio make the most of that traffic that you're working hard to get any social media actions or activity that you d'oh. We're online promotions. It only amplifies your website it's a lot of people, especially when we coach or sell courses on certain social media top, especially my wife, sells a pinterest course we'll get some customers seriously, mails every once in a w...

hile, I'd say you're coarse doesn't work, I want my money back and you go and look at their website. And it's socks and no one's gonna know it's gonna buy stuff from the website where they feel their credit card information is going to be hacked so no matter what you dio on the promotion and you can send all the traffic in the world toe website but if the websites no good you'll have ah clear benefit statement products don't look good they're not positioned well it's just not a good user experience you know we're gonna get sales so you got to make sure your websites good mistake number one is using a complicated platform and why we have to start the platform because a lot of business owners I talked tio say I just haven't updated my website forever or my website I've been trying to get it done but I can't find developer that'll do it so you want to make sure you wantto squash that bug before it appears make sure on a good platform and it's a platform that we can update ourselves at least with the basic content maybe not a whole overall brand redesign but at least adding products if you're in a commerce store changing the basic stuff so you don't have to rely on a huge army of people to make changes happen because that'll only make excuses happen and delay actually accomplishing something so there's two main divisions of websites to groupings that I put them and you got the e commerce which is where you sell a dozen or more products you're actually it's a store basically and you have the non e commerce and this is going to be for blogging businesses or online magazines or people that sell information products training courses you're goingto it's not just even if you sell products that doesn't mean you're only commerce because there you don't really need a shopping cart, it could be an order form that people buy from and you need to provide a lot more in the educational upfront uh process with free content, gina, you know, for you trying to position yourself is an expert so people want to buy from you takes a lot of the positioning front before that practice ever really brought to the forefront as the of the conversation so it's more of a non e commerce because you're not just a store that sells supplements makes sense even though you do sell something so just because just because you sell something doesn't automatically put you n e commerce, I would consider custom greek threads e commerce because it's products all the way around very little positioning of free content or anything like that, which is the boat you're in so it's a difference covered that so e commerce the platform that we use for both custom greek threads and luxury monograms is illusion dot com there's a couple other ones that are pretty good the reason you've illusion not saying is better than the rest it's just I've been using it the longest I used it from when I first started a plus years ago with my first web store and there was no good enough reason for me to change they never let me down or never had a feature that the others others had but for great things about shopify great user experience there, especially for smaller stores if you want to put a lot more feature sets and benefits, I think a great web site that I that uses shopify that I love the design of his dodo case d'oh d'oh case they're san francisco based artists and they make beautiful ipad case is an iphone cases using traditional books leave manufacturing pretty cool what they do a great job position of the product in telling the story and during this whole this whole relationship building journey but they use shopify because they're not very customization heavy it's just a product page and you either want to buy it or you don't there's not a lot of not a lot of options like on custom greek threads there we need a full blown e commerce platform uh and then the last one's big commerce I've heard great things about them in the last couple years really been coming up with some great features I haven't used them personally, but a lot of uh close colleagues that were on very successfully commerce shores used them and these are all basically out of the box platforms that you it creates an administrative back end and you two say add new product with the product name what's the skew number if you want to give him one what's the price point and it just builds out these product pages for you so you have to get all this custom coating it includes the shopping cart and all that technology for the back and you just say what sort of payment methods do you want to accept you want except pizza and mastercard american express and they have connections to get you approved for all those who take him it just is this kind of seamless very easy set up for an e commerce store so it's not so super complicated you have tto how would I ever code this this platform from scratch and that's that doesn't need to be hurdle uh when you want to start any commerce store non e commerce so the main one that I recommend is wordpress all of our non e commerce sites are rana where press and I really don't think there's a reason for the majority of people to be on anything else the world press software is free you obviously still have to pay for hosting you know placed actually have your website be sitting online the domain name but you can win you get hosting, you could just say I want wordpress installed, they do it for free. That software is free and has great started off is a blogging platform, but it can it's just a content management system now, so I recommend for the majority of people out there if you're not e commerce just gotta wear press, but here's, a key pay for a premium theme now theme is basically the dress that the website is wearing, the clothes it's wearing, making it look pretty and there's free themes out there, but just pay its themes. I mean, the average probably round seventy dollars a couple resource is for this is wu themes and theme forest and it's very easy to install these themes. Wordpress makes it very easy in the administration administrated section it's pretty much one click after you download it to install it super simple, but it'll get you a very professional look without the use of a designer or custom programmer before you want to take that step, to do a full branding package and doing something really professional. Once your business is of a certain size, just get a premium theme and don't worry about it looking like we know ah, cheaper website, you want to make sure their professionalism from the very start so premium theme blue themes or theme forest mistake number two too many messages when you go to a website, you ever go to a website and you're just like, confused from the starters? Like where do they want me to click? There's? So many things going on this flashing over here. This this button over here sent for my newsletter read this new article read this block post like me on facebook up here. Some big obtrusive button what do you want me to do? First, whenever you go to a website, we'll get this little bit more. But you want a simple and clear design and you want to benefit headline so people know what you d'oh right off the bat. They are having a scroll or look around. So for simple and clear design, this is the home page for custom greek threats. You come to the site and it's immediately recognizable by the greek apparel. What we do, we have a trust logo up here for the official license products and there's, a clear design of our navigation for the different categories that we have. We have the images representing the item and then shop sweatshirt shop shirts and notice the verb ege. It actually has a verb in the butt and said just sweatshirts are sure to make it. Look like an actual button it's, a shop sweatshirts has an action term involved with that makes a big difference, and we'll talk about a lot of this and types of images to use on day three when you talk about conversion optimization and best practices to maximize, uh, efficiency through a website going from home page all the wayto completed checkout process, which is the ultimate goal, which usually involves fortify steps starting on the home page, then a category page, then a product page filling that out than shopping car. Then check out page that's five steps the who have to make sure our seamless and you don't show up by not providing them with the information they need at the right time. So a lot of testing and, uh, practice comes into that will give you, especially on day three, a lot of really great tactics to use tell a shortcut to get a cheat off of all my expensive lessons so you can see it's a simple and clear design there's not a lot going on your eyes and me, they go to these yellow buttons in these images, which is the action we want you to take any questions so far, benefit focused messaging should be really clear right off the bat what your site is going to do for the visitor, what you're going to provide so this is mellie duncan dot com site my wife's on a coaching and advice site so this is a good example because this is a block page, so has a blind pages kind of only page where there might be conflicting or at least more than one attention grabber because there's the article which is kind of the free content but then because we're providing this free content while we're really really providing it is to try and get you just sign up for form or information so he always that's the only time that there might be more than one just specific reason with e commerce there should never be more than really one action for them to take on that page other than like you saw in custody threads, shoes basically which category want to go to there's? One thing for them to do on this page right now we're here you can read the article the block post you came too, but the reason it's free content is it trying to get that e mail opt in? We'll talk about those messages uh tomorrow when we talk about getting leads in your league magnet and started follow a process being above the fold above the fold is a term you go to a website you want all the key information, your benefit headline and your main the main action you want them to take without having to scroll so the fold is basically anything below the scroll point you don't wanna have to scroll down to get the full messaging or toe know what they have to do next, so I noticed this is on no the average browser this is what you see you could scroll down and it'll give you more benefits or more options to dio but this is very simplistic and this is what you see when the page loads it's very clear and all the relevant information is available here it's not cut off any of the screen cut off here they're you know or or here even these air I mean six categories and you're only seeing three so you're not if you were looking for bags, you have to scroll so you would have to scroll the sea bags so that's why everything is laid out so it's about the full to get all six top categories which is what ninety five percent of people come to our web site for the satisfies their needs. Ninety five percent of people will talk about navigation structures just a little bit design tip removed social media icons unless their main purpose is social proof when you get someone to your website, you don't want to be telling him hey, go check on my facebook page the goal is to be getting him to your website from facebook not to be sending him from your website it's back to facebook just to get a like your main goal, you're already further down the line. You want to be sending them back to the start, back to a social media source, the main job of social media developing the relationship to get them to your website. So then the website can do its job. Don't be sending a for your website back off the social media, okay, but talk about social proof. I should probably go find this it's, basically, if you're going through a sales process and you see twenty five thousand people like this page, it might be a good thing to put somewhere somewhere along a sales process, because it means this company's legit, a lot of people like them and follow them, so I'm not alone and thinking this product's good that's what social proof kind of meats, like we psychologically wanted part of this crowd, other people have kind of vetted and approved of this company, and the downside of that is if you don't have any fans or followers, you definitely don't be putting out there to people like this company like there's something wrong here? I need to do a little research before I press is binal button, uh, and james will talk about that with, uh, tomorrow, when he talks about which how to choose what social media platform is right for you and focus on that and have goals and how to use that to your advantage and it's not afraid to tell people to ignore the others until you're ready and have a specific strategy don't just want to go open an account and every one of them when you have two followers on each it's not going to do any favors if you do want to be trying increase likes because people go, I want to get more likes my fan page to help with that. Put it on a thank you, paige, after they sign if they've already taken a main action after they signed up for email list the page, they end up on this hey, thanks for signing up could check your e mail owned by away before you go click like right here because you've already got the main action. We do this a lot more receipt paid thanks for completing your order, really excited to get this to you. One give you the best agree threads you can possibly get like our facebook page he kept up to date with below block but it's a secondary action I never want to get in their way of giving me their email address or completing an order for a social media like put that ana thank you, paige well, we have some questions is doing from a couple people regarding those e mail addresses and getting those email address is, actually, karen had asked a question, and brute camp has a similar question, so I'll start with brute camps, he says. How does he contact the non buyers? How do you contact the non buyers? How do you get their email addresses if they didn't buy on dh? Karen has somewhat related question, and I'll let you answer well if they didn't buy the only way we know that if we had their contact information first that's why they want to use pop up forms and have opt in boxes around our website like I talked in the first session, and we will elaborate on in my session tomorrow, turning lookie loos in tow, warm prospects, okay, and so because you have tio you can'tjust, if you don't give them the opportunity to enter in their contact information just by them being on your site, you don't magically get their contact information, so you have to have the contact information first and then you can if they're still in your prospects category. When we talked about a weber and the last the last one if they're not your customer category automatically you know that by now so you can talk to them differently great and since we're on the email subject karen had asked in the last segment she has a list of email of emails but they're mostly people who had given their email in regards to her art and then this is something for her business she doesn't want to lose those followers however she she needs them tio build this new business you have any advice for somebody in that position? Yes so there's there are laws about email on what we can and can't d'oh we obviously could never sell email addresses or rent them out or do things like that there's spam laws and people you always want to keep the messages you send the people consistent with what they asked for when I signed up you always want that messaging to stay similar so it's hard when you have an email list then you go live his other business over here that's kind of similar but they really didn't sign up for that you'll be really careful you don't want to abuse that relationship and that trust you developed with them regardless of what law say uh which I'm not an attorney so I can't I don't know everything you can to can't deal but if you use common sense and marketing you just wanna you know abuse people's contact information and trust that's the best starting point in everything in marketing, but you can always do some sort of bridge e mail promoting that other business, and what I would do is is mail them talking about this other business, the benefit points and send them to another often form before that other business they consigned for that businesses lists, depending on how separate is if it's. If it's a branch of a business and it's closely related enough, sure you can still smell them. Just imagine if your audience would be shocked if they're getting it then don't do it, but if they're like, oh, this totally relates to me, I'm you know, this is in line with what I was expecting when I signed up for it. Then you're all in the clear, but I've had that happen before or especially a dormant, uh email list that you have an e mail a long time you could ask, send out an e mail to them because they might not be interested anymore and say, hey, re sign up, we're going to be more active again and how people that are interested then get, you know, can opt in again and sign up in that way you're not just sending messages to people they're like I send out for this two years ago, and I don't care about you anymore, it's not relevant, and you're just filling up there in box, so just be kind of follow that basic mindset and it'll work perfect. Thank you. Yeah, mistake number three making all pages equal this tux is an intro a little bit about talking about navigation structure. This is an old version of the custom greek through its home page. Now you'll notice there's a lot more choices here on the first page because we want to keep things above the full with to make items a lot smaller. The image is a lot smaller, not as claire called actions knows there's just a bar here instead of ah, a clear yellow button, something looks like you can actually click. It doesn't say, should we don't have the verb it shop sweatshirts? It just says sweatshirts now, but there's a lot more things now. When I was first introduced to the concept of a friend of mine named derek help earn, who also taught a creative life session about selling online very great course, tommy what the three by three rule is with navigation structures never got more than three choice is tall and three choices wide you want you don't want, he calls it people getting decision constipation and not knowing where to go what's the right navigation for me you ever been to those websites and there's just it looks like this ah and you go down one rabbit hole and you're like the product I was looking for us and they're gonna back out again and try another one that's a really annoying user experience just to try and find something you know you want your basically waiting to give them your money if they just get out of your way just help me find what I want an easy way so we simplify this with what you can see was our new home page where he really cut down the options ish options so how we determine what the main categories should be is used the key twenty world we looked at again referencing the tool google analytics which we'll talk about a little bit more in the future of this course but we could see what were the main categories people were going teo and I can narrow down to six instead of having I think it was twelve on that last page cutting in half so I could give a lot more screen real estate above that fold line make it a lot clear called actions and the majority of my traffic that's what they want when we talk about split testing will understand how actually ran that test and you know the clear winner what our audience basically virtually voted on even though they're voting through their actions without even knowing there are voting on something we'll talk about that on day three in the conversion optimization session so pre navigation structure changed twelve choices small not a clear called action over bage and the image in the image title you can see across this now bar to how complicated that navigation bar look we have all these options repeated again super small like not your eyes not going to go to something right away on this it's just there's a lot to process before you get to making a decision it's not a clear just that's what I want that's what I want worse is that now is the now bar put a search bar up there so people can actually just search directly for what they want and then use drop downs to break down in apparel and then they'll be there would be all in these in his drop down for custom apparel all twelve these options would be listed but the majority people need to use that they can use these top six categories. Our most popular ones were over eighty percent of our track was going just by looking at those two could just imagine and half second you have when a new visitor lands on your site to know is this website for them is what they were looking for and candice business help me get what I want. They're goingto come to that decision a lot faster. Less confusion makes sense. Any questions? So far? We got all right. All right, we want a clear benefit headline so people could make the decision quickly. If this is the right place for them in under two seconds, this is one my friends websites he sells surfboards online is website his degree, thirty three surfboards, dot com and, uh, great great company uh, young family out of san diego. But I love I think this is a great example of a benefit headline, especially in a crowded market like buying surfboards, especially the added difficulty of buying a surfboard online so they have a challenge. But I love this headline super clear, not really style it all, so they're not trying teo taken stel their their logo that's totally fine that's not relevant what they want, they khun use their branding there but I love just a simple font hand shaped surfboards, pretty descriptive. Forty years of shaping experience and unmatched thirty day right it guarantee benefit write in that top headline, it talks about his guarantee, which is going to important whatever you buy something online, whether it's your first or your fiftieth, we'll get the right board under your feet every time after reading that it's very clear what this sight's gonna provide and you can make the decision is right for you or not. So that way, the visitor can make that decision right away. Minimal separate calls to action. We talked about this with the simplistic design from a steak number one you want to maximum on the home page, especially if you're any commerce store. Where? Choose your navigation like your category you want to go to or opt in? Those should be your basic choices, so you could get the lead, or people who can keep going down customizing a product. Every other page should be one other than the home page. So here is our normal home page when you have this banner right now, that first first example, I showed you had this banner removed. For some reason, I can't remember why, but this is what our home page looks like. Right now, we have this deal banner so you can see the main called action. It introduces a second called action, but the main one is choosing where you want to go. Which category. But then there's the called action to senate for discount your first order, and you click expand and it expands, and you can enter in your information there, so that has arguably too kind of mork called actions because we do so same coloring to try and get your attention up there and this did using conversion organization this did test overall for better results for us on the home page but we only do that on the home page and then further pages down the sales process we keep it just for what they want to be doing on that action choosing which I am in the category they want to customize the customizing it and go to the shopping cart in the cheka we don't try and keep interrupting them the home page is basically here your options now choose where you're going to go but once they make a decision let them go down that route devon duncan dot com home page clear benefit headline achieve success in your online marketing single called action very obvious testimonial very nice from james the melanie duncan dot com when you goto mellie duncan dot com this is what is referred to as a splash page so this is something when you're very when your business really depends on getting contact information so and is mohr valuable than anything else so million ducking dotcom does not sell any products directly from this page it's basically a blawg on work trying to get people to get contact information tio educate them moron on making a better online business but the first page and you go to it is just the benefit with opting in if there's no nothing to scroll down to on this there's no options there's no blood below this but then they can use the navigation structure appear to go two blocks so it's very lee generation focused and then people can navigate to the block using the top navigation structure but it's called a splash page when it's all there is it's a squeeze page when there's no navigation they really can't this is all that exists on the web page but it's a splash page when there's opt in choices within our far involved any questions so far how we doing online well we've got some questions going it coming so we'd liketo pop those only one or two okay great um do you have any advice or tips to optimize your sight for mobile devices phones besides having responsive themes and this question came from snappy gourmet snappy gourmet ok I was going to say responsive responsive website design respond let me define what responsive means real fast response is basically just means the website is intelligent to know what device with screen size you are viewing the website from so if you go on a computer it looks normal and then if you went viewed on ipad it would automatically rearrange this stuff to fit the ipad screens so you don't have to pension zoom to get everything to fit in and then if you're on an iphone it changed even more probably totally get ready this image and just have this listed vertically so you scroll down there's an often form so it changes the elements inverse responsive to the different screen sizes so it's a uh it's a pretty advanced design tactic and there are wordpress themes when you're choosing your premium theme that I talked about little earlier when choosing your platform uh they do make themes that are responsive, so I definitely if you're going to pay for a premium theme, make sure it is responsive and all that coating will be built in from the start uh so can answer that question. I mean, the advice is more than ever. In addition to responsive design, make sure it's a clear benefit headline because when you have even a smaller screen space, you don't want to waste their time with a lot of irrelevant information what's his website about you know when you're on a smaller screen you have less and less real estate you wanna make sure that first touch point the first line there reading benefit? Why should I keep reading is not just cem storytelling tax do you know about melanie don't really care don't really care house is gonna benefit me you want it right off the bat learn howto work smarter so that you and then can spend less time working and more time making money the benefit points right away that'd be my advice on top of a responsive theme so that when the screen size is shrunk benefit right away great okay uh fewer decisions are better you don't want them to have to make a lot gets stuck at any point you want you're you want to make your website when I good friends once described it as putting on a nice fitting dress you were just slips right into the shoe horn you know it's just you know after like wiggle they like get your foot and it just slips right in and its just seamless and easy you don't want this is an old customary fred's category view there is lots of choices to make on this page you go to the serious like this is like a puzzle what do you want me to do here? You know there's you have to make a selection of these two radio boxes about what kind of customization you want. This is when we tested the first customization choice putting it on the category page instead of the product page itself it didn't work but there's there's a lot going on here is a lot of choices so you have what ten choices right here and this is just a screenshot there's at least two to three times this length so on this page of your scrolling this's our sweatshirts category and then we broke it down into pullovers zip ups uh there was like two more categories that would have gone all the way down to here. So it's a lot it's a lot of scrolling area to find what you want. So just like our home page we dumb this down and categorized it and even though it's adding an extra step it's a way simpler so we turned all those choices out of an extra step and broke it into subcategories even though we're still in the sweatshirt category. Now what type of sweatshirt pullovers, zip ups, crew necks or ladies cut okay, so a lot simpler navigation and because some traffic will come directly to here we have a headline on all of this category page because some traffic will never even come directly here. Home page uh this is known as a landing page if if I was running advertisements on ghoul let's say for the term greek sweatshirts there's no reason for me to send them to my home page already know theywant sweatshirts I'm going to send them to my sweatshirt category so that's why I need to think of okay for that traffic that skips my home page and mrs my benefit headlines and all that hard work I put in to explain really quickly in under two seconds what were about I gotta have ah clear instruction and benefit headline here and then the second step instead of all those choices remember listed this is now a two step process, so you choose to a type of sweatshirt you want pull over or zip up or ladies cut, and now this is the second stage we can make this a lot simpler make it a lot more benefit headline bent benefit driven with the different features that each sweatshirt type has so they know you know they're all black. What what do you want? We got american apparel, which is a stylish cut, just in case you don't know the brand or what that brand would with the benefits of buying that brand are or have a lightweight because the thickness of the sweatshirt is a big question we get, you know, depending if they're in the hot south or the cold north east. They want a different weight sweatshirt, so you got the heavy weight and you got the super heavyweight. They can make those decisions and there's mohr definition of what each of those sweatshirt features has. So can you guys see where that navigation structure really add simplicity to the process? Even though it adds an extra step? The user experience for the navigation is a lot cleaner and streamlined.