Web Podcast - Episode 20: Kickstart Your New Site

Read the transcription of this podcast:

We have a good one for you guys today that’s really informative. Mainly for if you’re setting up a website that's a little more above the average information website. Let's say, you're setting up a shop, or you're making an online service like a directory or a forum. I want to give you some tips because we have a lot of people set these sites up, and they don't really know where to go, they have the idea. They want to do this web site that allows people to do this, or saves them this amount of money, or whatever. But, they don't know how to execute it once it’s live. So they have the idea and they know what they want it to do. But, they don't know how to market it when it’s live.

I’m just gonna give you guys a few tips today, mostly for if you’re doing a shop, but if you’re doing anything else like if you’re a directory for lawyers for example or of you’re offering an online service where people subscribe to and pay for monthly. These tips might help you in someway if you’re not using them already.

Number one: set up a decent amount of content on your website. Referring to previous episodes I’ve done, people do not put enough content on their website, or they put way too much and no one wants to read it. So when I’m talking content, I’m talking important things, like information about your company or about the idea. What’s the inspiration behind it. Contact details whose the face of the business, whose the team behind it all, other things like what costs are involved, how’s it going to save me time or money, or what value is it going to add to me, the customer?
So put relevant content on the site thats nice and crisp and to the point. Don’t put paragraphs of information. Keep it short and simple as I say. Get the good content on the site.

Tip number two: set up a social media page, set your eyes on Facebook or maybe Instagram or whatever. Some sort of social media, generally I would say Facebook is the way to go because you can put lots of dynamic content on there.
Set up a page, put the logo on there, make a good cover photo that sells the idea and post to it regularly. It can be little posts here and there, in relation to the service you’re offering or the products you’re selling. You might not get people looking at it to start with but its fine, keep doing it, and over time you will build up a good base of people.

Tip number three: make sure your site looks legitimate, you've really got to get a professional to design it, or you've got to be a good designer yourself. Make the sire relevant to the target audience, if its a site that's related to very professional things it needs to be a professional, clean, corporate site. If its a site that's based around hobbies and fun things, you'd theme it in that sort of way, you’d use pictures and text.
Make it look local, make it look friendly and welcoming, don’t go using a template off the internet and only change a few bits of it because everyone will look at it go “looks a bit American” “looks a bit standard”. When I say American it’s because a lot of the templates are obviously built for America, so, if you're like us and you’re in New Zealand or in Australia or the U.K. even, it might not apply to the local area. So make sure you get the site to look legitimate.

Another thing is reviews. People are influenced by feedback from other people. So if i said, “this company is awesome and I bought whatever it was from them and it was amazing and affordable, it arrived on time, the customer service was great”, thats stuff you want to put on your landing page, or the home page of your site. So, telling people from another clients perspective, that your service is great. If you don’t have anyone yet, even just offer someone a free use of the service, or offer them discount to do it and to leave you good feedback and then you can use that to start building up credibility for your site, to make it look legitimate. Thats through using reviews. Reviews are a very good point to put on your site.

Number five is: including a local address and phone number. Really important if you’re an online shop. Really important if you’re anything that deals with payments online or transactions or if you’re taking money from people online they want to know you’re local. They want to have a phone number they can call if the credit card system buggers up or if they want to see where you’re based even. It’s good to have a postal address on there. I know people don’t like being contacted and having a phone number on there, but at the end of the day, you want to grow your website, you want to grow your business, there's sacrifices you have to make and that is generally one of them. Go buy a $20 phone from your local electronic shop. Just go buy a phone, put a SIM in it, at least then you have a number if you don’t want to put your own on there.

Number six: put your website out the old fashioned way, its not sending an email out to someone, it’s not going on Facebook and creating a boosted post. Its making a little leaflet, going round to businesses or your target audience and giving them information face to face. I know it sounds like a waste of time, and its inefficient in the long run, which it is, but going to people face to face, getting that initial base setup will then help plant the seed to grow, referrals and word of mouth and other forms.

You get 100 people using your service or buying products you’re going to hopefully get 10-20 reviews, and those 10-20 reviews are going to help cold leads. So people that don't know anything about you, buy from your site because you have 20 good referrals. The other way is you have people who you’ve spoken to face to face raving about it, then they say to their friends “use this person”, “use this service for selling your house”, or finding a lawyer, or selling your pets.

Thats where your growing a good base. Not just sitting there and putting boosted Facebook posts out, trust me I’ve tried it and it doesn’t really work to start with. Overtime it does, but it’s not as easy as it sounds.

Another thing to do is source contacts from other places and get in touch with them, if you’re doing a site that sells cars, people can put their car on and sell it (I’ve done several of those, a few of them were quite successful), if you’re setting up a site like that, go to the car dealers. Walk into the car dealers and say, look, put all your cars on my website for free, we will put them on for free (I know it sounds silly and you’re not going to make any money from it initially, but put them on for free. Get 100 cars on there. Then get people to your site. Then there’s something on there and they can all start search through and they’ll say “I’ll chuck my car on there” and they’ll pay that listing fee. You can’t go out there with no cars on your website. Or no business in your business directory, then asking people for a $300 a year or a $20 listing fee when there's sites like eBay and TradeMe that have thousands of people every minute visiting them. Looking through they are just miles ahead of you. You have to do it the old fashioned way.

Get a list of contacts, get them off google, go to car dealer sites, get their details, write them into a spreadsheet. You could do a mail out to them, but it’s better to do a call or walk. You don’t want to be a pushy salespeople or anything like that, it’s totally against my morals, but go there, introduce yourself. This is my idea, I’ll chuck all the stuff on there for free or I’ll give you a 50% off coupon for these products, just to get some initial feedback, get people using it. Say to them “hey look, I want some ideas, do you like our site, do you not like it, give me a list of things you don’t like”. Then improve it, improve your shopping site, improve your check out process.

Just recently we’ve been getting people in off the street to sit down and use our shopping software that we’ve made. And we are improving it based on their feedback. Some of them love it, the, some of them don’t like it at all. Its interesting, because everyone is different, so you really have to find the median.

Get people the old fashioned way. It sounds like you’re wasting time going to see someone, it’s only one person and you’ve got this big idea of having millions of people, but, thats how alot sites start. Go on YouTube and listen to one of the co-founders of Airbnb, he did this sort of thing. He went to people that were using Airbnb originally, flew across the country, flew to New York and sat with them for an hour, wrote down the stuff and then made the process easier. He came all the way on a plane. So if you have to drive 20 minutes down the road, then you shouldn’t be complaining.
That’s how I look at it when I do it with our software.
That’s very important.

Don’t just sit there: a lot of people set up a website and they think it’s a magical thing and that it’s all just going to work out because it’s now online. It doesn’t work like that. You need to go and do something, you need a plan in place. Plans change every five minutes, but just jot down what your ideas are and even talk to people who are experts in the field, like me, or other marketing people, or other web design people. Say to them “do you think this will be a good idea?” and they'll say “That’s a good idea, try it.” or they may say “Nah, don’t worry about it, try this”. But, get feedback. Don’t just sit there, start trying to push your site. Start trying to push your products and online shop.

There's millions of ways to do it and people think the only way to do it is to advertise. It’s not advertising. You don’t have to advertise. If you have customers already, if you have a customer database, or if you’re selling on another website and you’ve already had sales through that, get their details, send them a postcard. Write them a letter, a hand typed letter, put it in an envelope, put a stamp on it the old fashioned way. Send it to them, they will open it, because people don’t get mail much nowadays. We all get emails, we don’t open a lot of emails. So post them a letter, say this is the idea, and get them onboard.

So I hope that helps guys, thats eight tips for you on episode 20 of the RAZOR Web Design Podcast.

Hope you found that helpful, feel free to get in touch with me and like and subscribe.

Cheers.