Spring clean your website to increase productivity, boost promotion and explode your profits
As an entrepreneur with increased competition to get the attention of your ideal client you need to become far more proactive in managing and maintaining your website. Joining me today is Tonya R. Taylor (known as Your Savvy Online Business Builder) from SavvyBizBuilder. Tonya shares:
why it’s important to have a website,
why you need to keep it fresh and current,
how to keep visitors coming back, and
the top three mistakes that will keep you from making money with your website,
and much more!
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Show Transcript: Spring clean your website to increase productivity, boost promotion and explode your profits
“Hi this is Annemarie Cross and welcome to the Ambitious Entrepreneur. Join me as I speak to Tonia R Taylor all about importance of having the website, why you should spring clean your website and keep it fresh and current. And how to keep the visitors back and much more, so stick around. “
If you are sole entrepreneur or business owner operating either a service, product or may be both and product based business who doesn’t have a physical sole but realized solely on the internet to connect with prospects then really your website is going to be your sole front. However, with the growth and popularity of the social media, technologies and other technologies, consumers are becoming far savvier in their purchase decisions. In the static website which is really more like an online brochure which is doesn’t get updated very much is probably not be as effective as may have been several years ago.
So If you rely on your website as a way to bring new business but your website hasn’t updated for quite some time or you are struggling to keep visitors back to your website then you want to grab pen and paper and have it handy so you can take down all the tips and strategies that my guest would be sharing today. And Tonya R Taylor known as savvy online business builder joins me on today’s show and Tonya is dedicated to show business people savvy ways to build their online presence so that they can increase their productivity, boost promotions and explode their profits and as a business that is what we all are looking to do. So welcome to the show Tonya.
Tonya: – Thank you! Thank you for having me.
Annemarie: – It is great. This is a really exciting subject and I got my pen and paper handy too to write down all the tips and strategies that you would be sharing. As I mentioned in the beginning of this introduction it is very important for people to realize that their website is far more than a one page or 2 page online brochure is really is far more than that. Did you want to give you an overview of what you really think that the website should be and then we can go into what are some of the tips and strategies people should be doing with their website?
Tonya: – One of the things that I really want to stress and we have talked about what website should be. The website should be your hub; it is the main feature of your business. It is like a heartbeat where everything stems from and then I want people to realize that having a website it’s never done. Some people think that they can put their website and walk away. But is absolutely never done and they need to make that understanding right from the beginning.
Annemarie: – And I absolutely agree with that because if you got a static website and you are not updating it then people can lose interest particularly if they are coming back and visiting your website on different occasions. Can I just ask you because some of the things that people ask me and this may be a question you asked as well, for those people who may be updating your website and they are not too sure about the technologies that they use because I know that there are lot of different platforms, what you generally recommend as far as type of technology people can harness to build their website on?
Tonya: – Well, I definitely recommend what known as content management system and there are number of these systems out there that are low cost to no cost. And my favorite one that I like to recommend is word press. You know word press is the one that is used most often in the industry so that is the type choice for me.
Annemarie: – You know I have to agree and I am so glad that you said word press because something that I heard while ago and this is what I heard from my mentors is that Google loves word press. So if you got a website on word press then all of the strategies and different plugins that you can use and I am sure you will be talking that in a moment can really enhance your SEO, your Search Engine optimization and connection and that is really getting out there. So that is fantastic the word press. So the people who haven’t heard much about word press, do you just want to give a very brief overview of what that platform is because I believe that is a very low cost and if not some hole actually allows you to download word press and that is free. Is that correct?
Tonya: – Absolutely! They are couple of ways that you can use word press. You can it without out being hosted by directly going to wordpress.org or wordpress.com. You can go there and get a blog or the best choice is that if you have a web post then or if you are going to get a web post which you should to make sure that your web posts offers word press and it is like a click of button to have it installed.
Annemarie: – And I certainly think that is wise as well and another reason too and this is why I use and you might have heard similar stories Tonya is that people started to use .com which is hosted on the word press platform as well. But if you are running a business that is hoping to generate an income and I am hoping that all business there have that as an ultimate goal, you may find that your website is shutdown overnight and it happened to just a colleague of mine, she was building a blog on .com which is a free one but she had things that she was selling like e-books like that and they got wind of that and it closed overnight. Thankfully she took backups and she was able to get that on .org to her host. And I think that is so important to start because of all the time that you put in to developing your website, you don’t want to disappear it overnight.
Tonya: -And absolutely the one that people don’t realize when they use the free version is that you lose all control. You cannot install the same plugins is that on the .com version. So the best thing is to install it on something that you can totally control.
Annemarie: – And that does not suddenly disappear overnight. So let’s talk about the elements that you know make for savvy site. What are the some of the things that you suggest?
Tonya: – Well, you definitely want to have a fresh content. You know when we talk about your website as we mentioned earlier having fresh content keeps what Google happy and keep coming to your website. It keeps your visitor happy, fresh content can be rewarded from the backlinks from other sites and it may even bring media attention, speaking opportunities and it really get you known as an expert in the industry. So you just want to make sure that you keep your content on your website fresh.
Annemarie: – And you mentioned a term there and those of you who are not sure what the word backlinks are. What is backlink Tonya?
Tonya: – A backlink is like money on the internet or like a referral. What Google likes to see the more people who link back to your website from their website it makes Google think well everybody is linking to this particular website then it must be important, it must be good source of information and Google rewards that? And that is what backlink is and more of those you get the higher ranked your site is. People always say let’s put a website, why it is not showing up in a Google search and that is one of the reason why it is not showing up in Google search.
Annemarie: – And you mentioned fresh content and for people who want to backlink to your website, I would imagine that they keep it interesting on topic. So how often do you recommend that someone should be updating their website?
Tonya: – At a minimum, they should update that once in a week. And if you are really savvy and really good you can updated it daily. You know some websites are updated hourly and you know running your business, I would say at a minimum you should at least update your website with a new content once a week and content can be anything from an articles to majestic videos.
Annemarie: – And that is a great point because some of the people that I have spoken to and you have exactly the same comments from your clients Tonya, I do not know what to write, in fact I stare at the blank screen and nothing is coming to me. How, what will I do? So what you mentioned is a couple of key things you can have audio and video as well. And is that something that you recommend to your clients that they find difficult to find a content, talk it, speak it, record it and upload it and record yourself a video.
Tonya: – Absolutely it is so funnier that I update my blog every week and I write an article every week and this week topic was all about how to write an article without actually writing an article using your voice. So I know looking at that blank piece of paper or that blank screen can be very intimidating but sometimes speaking the words they can move a lot freely and free to talk as much as you can add it later. So I would definitely recommend use it as a tool around creating content by an audio.
Annemarie: – And one thing that I think creating different forms of communication like creating an audio then video, if you have written an article you can repurpose that content, so you might have a hundred pages not hundred pages say 500 words article take snippets of that and create a 2 or 3 minute video or speaker or recorded so that you can repurpose so that you not have to reinvent that wheel. Is that something that you also do?
Tonya: – Absolutely! You can take snippets of that and you all know how popular social media is you can take snippets of that information and post it on your social media site as well and the key is to repurpose a 500 word article can be repurpose may be 5 or 6 or even 10 times if you are really-2 good.
Annemarie: – It will really help you to build your brand as an expert because you are giving the same consistent message or delivering the content around the same type of topic but just a different format and as you said Google will love you because you are updating it and known as an expert in that field. So those are great tips. Now you mentioned and you talked about something about further about this spring cleaning your website. I know spring cleaning your home, now we bring to the aspect of website. What do you mean by spring cleaning your website?
Tonya: -Well it is a same thing and I think spring is that time when everything is fresh, everything is new and we want that spring cleaning to get rid of the old stuff and just freshen things up. So we should take a look at our website as the same way. We should do things to update in our website to make things fresh again. May be spring is one time a year where you switch some things out to really spruce up your website.
Annemarie: – And would that involved things that perhaps might be topic that you don’t really deal with your business anymore, get rid of those and integrates new topic. You also talking about refreshing the banners, may be logo that sort of thing or the other areas that we can freshen up.
Tonya: – There definitely other areas. One of the things that I like the people to do and I definitely recommend to my clients is that you want to make sure that you want to update your professional photo. We change especially women our hair, color, we get that look for spring and you want to freshen that up. So updating your professional photo on your website is a perfect way to clean your website. One of the things that is important that if you have an event that say in December and it is now April, you want to make sure that you want to get rid of that content that you get out of your website because you want that information to be fresh, to be if the first thing that they see they may not really care about your website, if you have that information on their 3 months ago.
Annemarie: – Yeah! That is so true, just one point on the photo exactly that it is a professional photo and I am surprised to see business owners with their photo, with their dog or whatever it may be. Because this is perhaps the first time that a prospect comes into contact with you, you want to make sure that everything that is on your website is fresh and up to date and continues to build the relationship to professional angle. They don’t want to see unprofessional photo because you really can damage your brand, can’t you if it is not professional.
Tonya: – Absolutely! And people take that for granted, you know you want to make sure that is not the kind of the picture that you want to see on the Facebook, Facebook we know is more relaxed and you can go to any place like a target and can get a nice professional photo if you can afford to go into a big studio but at least it gives you the proper lighting, proper background, you put on nice outfit and everything will look great and you can tell them that is for your website. So that is atomized for your website as well.
Annemarie: – Yeah! That is great and one another thing that something that you probably recommend to is to continue to check any links on your website to make sure that they are working. Because you know Tonya we can change things, move things, you do not want to have any broken links there. Do you?
Tonya: – No, you do not, again that is something that is overlooked a lot on your website. From time to time you definitely want to have somebody or may be outsourced this to have somebody to go through or click through all of those websites to make sure that they are going to place that they are supposed to go to and that they still work like we mentioned and they are still relevant to that article or blog posts or whatever you have on your website.
Annemarie: – Very important. Now what are some of the tips and strategies that you can recommend to keep visitors coming back to your website. Because I know that is so important, you have to have that traffic gets good for search optimization, Google loves that. What are some of things that you recommend?
Tonya: – I would definitely recommend just one basic thing have a nice offer on your website something to get that initial engagement going. So when people come to your website have some value that they want to come to your website for. So that is the first thing that you need to do attract them. And again you know ongoing tips, ongoing information, not just you don’t want to put anything out there and say hey buy my stuff, my stuff, you want to say give them something that lets people know that you are the authority that you are the expert in your industry and you are the go to guy or go to girl, so they want to come back to your website. And those things can include a checklist; in my website you see how to spring clean your website, a complete checklist. It gives you 7 things that you can check off to go to figure out what to do with your website, so I get people contact on my website to make the people come back from week to week to see what is new what is fresh and what I am talking about.
Annemarie: – And I think that is so important. You don’t want to become someone who is only promoting their products and services because I think that is one of the top things that people stop following you and stop going back to your website. But something else that you mentioned and I wanted to stress that because I see this time and time again that business owners are not doing and they don’t have that offer of value to give to their prospects. And of course what you are doing is that you are compiling a list of email addresses and possibly even physical addresses when someone comes and say hey I want to request that free report or whatever it may be. Because you can then continue to keeping in touch with that person whether it would be through newsletter or something like that. You know so many people don’t have that strategy, so all of the hard work that they do to get people to their website is lost. Because someone will say that is really good and of that they go again. Is that something that you find also with the clients that you recommend but just not doing?
Tonya: – Absolutely! There are couples of things that I wanted to let them know, first of all you only have 5 or 7 seconds to catch somebody’s attention initially before they leave. So having that offer is to get somebody’s attention. Then the other thing is about 95%, probably 95-97% of people that come to your website, the first time won’t buy anything. So if you spend all of that time and energy getting that traffic, you do not want to lose them, so the best thing is to do is when you drive somebody to your website, drive them to some type of free offer based on thing that you want to sell, based on the product or that service or you drive them to free offer and you can get them on your list. At least you know that they are interested and then you can follow up with some other form of communication being responders, additional articles to go back to your website.
Annemarie: – So true, that figure is amazing, 95-97% won’t buy first off so in other words, if you got a first time visitor they are highly unlikely to purchase or invest in your products or services. So that is a great way to keep your email address to continue to communicate with them and down the track when they are ready to invest, hopefully your name would be at the top of the list because of the relationship building that you are doing. So I mean that is the one area that I often see happening that people don’t have a way to capture those email addresses which is valuable in this day and age. What are some other things that you typically say that people are not doing or maybe they are doing and you say that really is a mistake and it is stopping them to generate a type of income that may businesses are generally on the interest and their website.
Tonya: – One of the things that they are not doing is that they are not making their website social media friendly. We live in a age, just a few years ago, we didn’t have social media. Twitter is just turning 5 years old this year and Facebook is little younger than that since it is being opened up but make your website social media friendly and what I mean by that is that make sure that there are 2 ways that you do that. One if you are on social media, make sure you have links to your social media sites then also in your content, on your blog, on your pages make sure that you have a like button for Facebook, so people can like your articles, people can tweak your articles and so people can share your articles on LinkedIn, all these ways that once you get traffic on your website and these people are spreading your information by the orders form of the communication out there and that is word of mouth. So you want to make sure that your website is social media friendly and that is one of the things that I recommend to my clients all the time.
Annemarie:- Before you go on to the next one, just want to talk about this because it is so very important means social media is just taking off. People are sharing things and aren’t going to be wonderful that one of the things they are sharing to their hundreds of friends and their hundreds of friends is your website, your article. Now what you talk about Tonya is like button or tweak button, those are all things that if you got a word press website that you can add as a plug in. Aren’t they?
Tonya: – Yes, they make it so easy if you are making word press platform to add those, their plugins that have Facebook, LinkedIn, all in one plugins, so you do not have to install things individually. I mean using word press is like a miracle too and it is amazing that it is free.
Annemarie: – So that would be something that is absolutely must to put on and may be use that plugin that has all those different platforms as a way to communicate and one of the things that I have done and this what you will recommend to, really I got it top high, don’t burry all of those ways to connect with social media down at the bottom of the page because if someone is looking at your website via mobile technologies, you want to make sure that the first thing that comes up is that hey this is how you can connect with me.
Tonya: – Absolutely, I would recommend you to put at both places. Put it at top and at the bottom because if they come to your site and they immediately forward to your friends as there it is immediately read down to the page when they get to the end of course you know people are busy and get distracted at least that buttons right on the bottom also so that they can click on that and forward the information after that they have read the articles.
Annemarie: – Have them at the bottom places. What about another area that you think this is generally something that you think that they are doing or not doing which is really causing them to not to generate the type of income that they really could be on the Internet.
Tonya: – One of the things that we talk about our website and people always overlook. You want to make sure to verify how your website looks on different browsers and we take this for granted. I mean I use Firefox but I use Google analytics tool to see what people are coming to me and most of the people that come to my website are using Internet explorer. So it is very important for you to take the time to look at how your website looks at the most popular browser that people are using to come to your website. Again invest all that time money and energy in getting traffic back to your website and if they get there and things does not look the way that they should and the site is hard to navigate you know I tell my clients make sure you check that. I like to give everybody a tip the place that they can go and to check and make sure looks like it and they may not be even aware of the website that you can take a look. It is called browsershots.org and basically when you get to that website has every platform that you can think of, you can check the ones that is relevant to your website and what it will do it simply pull back what your site looks like on those browsers. This is huge so quick way to take a look and see what your site looks like. But most of the time by using this word press and you are using the word press theme that is optimized for all those browsers, it won’t be an issue still good to look.
Annemarie: – And so with the themes that you are talking about with those people who do not know that. Do you want to explain what theme is and an optimized theme?
Tonya: – Yes, okay what I talked about with word press is content management system and what it does is that it separates the content from the design which is huge especially for those people who are not programmers necessarily. So you can go out places like themeforest.com and get these professionally developed themes for your website where in the past you need to hire professionals and you just install it by clicking on button and themes if you pick the right one they will tell you if you want to optimize the windows platform, for mac or for safari or Google chrome and it tells you that on the theme. So that will help you especially if you know what platforms that people are coming to your site.
Annemarie: – So in other words if you get this optimized themes you don’t need to know any programming, you don’t need to get on board, not need to follow on all of those done for you. All you need to worry about is to continue delivering and creating fresh content. You mentioned something about that is Google Analytics and this is something that I know is such an important tool for those people who don’t really know what Google Analytics or they are not integrating that can you just give just a little bit explanation on what is it and how they can get that? Because I believe that is also a free tool.
Tonya: – That is yet another tool. Google has what I call Google Gold; they have so many free tools for small business owners they are just not aware what is out there. And what Google Analytics does, again if you are using word press it makes super easy to integrates this. They give you some numbers and in some cases codes but most of the time numbers that you plug those numbers into your word press Google Analytics plugin and it will track, measure, monitor things on your site like for instance it will tell you what browsers people are using when they come to your site. It tells you what countries they are coming from, how long they spend on your site on a particular page they come and to on your site and how they find you, they come from what they call organic search on Google or if they were referred from another site or say social media platform. All this information is huge for marketing because if you know people are coming from site where you posted some ads and you posted an aricle are getting 50 percent of your traffic from you keeps on doing that to make sure that you get more traffic from there.
Annemarie: – You know you should put your time, attention and energy on something that you got one click through and spending hours on this and it only worked once. Absolutely! And for those people who are listening thinking all of that technical stuff really you can get someone may be as you wish yourself to help get that set up because you only need to do it once. You don’t need to become an expert on that. Of course once it is set up then you don’t have to change it. It is just a matter to update with blog posts and content. I guess people who are thinking oh I need to learn on this really don’t need to do that.
Tonya: – No and I would say don’t let that overwhelmed that on how. It is more important to understand that you have to do it and like you said you work with someone they can really give you step by step what to do and it is just a matter of setting that up one time may be reading through some instructions, it is not just like that. I do not want to seem it like Oh this technology stuff is so different people I off by it is just things that you need to be aware to get the maximum benefit out there on your website and make sure that you are going to make money from it.
Annemarie: – And I think with Google Analytics monitor what you are doing is so important because you wanted to concentrate as you said on the 500 hundred links on the articles that you posted on the website, go and posted another article on that and it is very difficult to change and enhance that something even better if you are not tracking that and monitoring. So I think Google Analytics is a plug in that everyone should have incorporated to their website. Now I know that you have another mistake that people are not doing, do you want to share that as well?
Tonya: – Absolutely! Again talked about lot of big mistakes, another thing that we touched on little bit is this whole technology piece. Just want to make sure that when you have the proper technology integrated into your site additional to Google Analytics it can really-2 help you with bit more productive on your site and some of the things that can help you is that make sure that you use something that is called auto responders. When somebody sign up on your website, you need to make sure that you are following up, continuing to communicate with them on regular basis. So that is something that is missed by the people. Once again if it is up and you out with your website, write a couple of these pre-written letters to them, you only need to do it once. You just need to make sure that you have a clear process and don’t miss that step, miss out on that opportunity.
Annemarie: – And I think that is so very important, I mean I have got orders to and people can sign up for free seven steps on how to build your brand and paid what you worth. And auto responders when you set up once and when people continuing to access that material, you don’t even their to send that out, your auto responders does that for you. Some people never have heard of auto responders and thinking what is this? So let’s just share a little bit information about auto responder. I know that there are couples that you can use. What are auto responders that you typically recommend?
Tonya: – I definitely recommend in terms of service when you sign in for your newsletter service to make sure you it has integrated with auto responders and if you use a service like mail chip that is free service, they have auto responders included in the tool. And just to let the people know to get them understanding of how the auto responders work, let me give you a quick little story, out of my contacts and all of contacts online and when my one year was up for those contacts, I automatically got an email from company that I ordered from and said hey you are about to run out of contacts. I am like how in the world do they know that. I need to check my contacts. So instantly I ordered. So this is something that I ordered from a place that I place my order and it is giving them additional business quickly. They need not to work quickly any extra, any harder to get me to buy because I was already a customer. So they can spend their time focusing on new customers as supposed to trying to focus on giving that man power to existing customers in sale.
Annemarie: – Absolutely! I love that. That is really about retaining your customers and I think marketing guru said that it costs more, you need to invest more to get a new client then it does to maintain your existing client. Tonya, it has been absolutely pleasure with speaking with you today and I think for those people who are listening and taking notes, they will probably feel 2 or 3 pages and some of them might be thinking that oh no my to do list just triple in size I tell you this sort of thing, you talk a lot of things today particularly the set up stuff is just done once. You can get up someone to do it for you but more importantly really delivering and updating fresh quality content that will allow us to really shine and become known as an expert so when the people are ready to invest to our names that one of that, your names that ones that go to be able to higher. So for those of people who are listening thinking great I want to know little bit more information about Tonya. How can they get in contact with you?
Tonya: – Well, I would invite them to go to my website. Lot of things that we talked about today, I have put it together what I call my savvy online business builder starter kit and it is something that is no cost and all they have to do is to go to savvy.builder.com and just plug in their first name and email and they can download their free kit. And they would get tips, tools and strategies a lot of things that we talked about really help them get going with enhancing their online presence.
Annemarie: – Fantastic! What an absolutely generous offer and I think it is so very important and one of the things that I said to people to stop overwhelm just followed the online rule, get a tip from Tonya, get that working and then implement the next one. So if you stuck in overwhelmed you end up doing nothing often. So that I am sure is a fantastic resource so that again is savvybizbuilder.com. Again we were talking to Tonya R Taylor known as your savvy online business builder to some great tips. None of us will have excuse not to have boring static website we should all have go out and spring clean your websites today. Thanks once again Tonya for joining us on the show today.
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