Hey everybody, Mike Linville founder of Black Dog Education and developer
of video creator series and welcome back to week number three does your website suck awareness
campaign now in this campaign what we're doing is we're calling attention to six of the largest
website mistake that for small businesses make now if you've been with us you'll remember
in week number one we talked about design blunders we shot this video about 20 minutes
long, where we were talking about things like typography talk about things like color theory
and how that evokes different emotions in people and things like layout. In week number
two, I wan to go ahead and apologize right now we started talking about Web analytics
and site tracking and I get a long-winded when it comes to that topic so we went along
on that one was about 35 minutes or so but the reason why we did is because I want you
to understand web analytics is what it's all about you got to be able to track, remember
your website is just another marketing tool. You wouldn't do some sort of a advertising
campaign if you didn't know how much money you spent on it and what your return on that
was right if you got a positive return you're going to do more of if you're getting a negative
return and you're not getting your money back you want to stop or you're going to go out
of business your website is exactly the same way in and a lot of people don't really put
that much emphasis on the tracking and analytics and they really should so you know if you
haven't seen those videos go and click on the links over here on the right-hand side
and start with the intro video because that's where we're going to talk about why we're
even putting this awareness series together and we're also going to talk about the sweepstakes
we've got that goes side-by-side with it okay so if you haven't signed up in the sweepstakes
click the button over there and mention that you sign-up for it don't be silly it's a free
website we're giving away pretty much anybody can use a free website it's going to be all
search engine optimizing it's going to be awesome okay so let's get to it now here we
are week number three we're talking about content catastrophes so throughout this video
this is going to be shorter than last week I promise but throughout this video we're
going to be talking about content quite a bit, content this, content that this is what
it should be and what shouldn't be so before we really get rolling what I want to do is
I want to make sure we are all clear on exactly what content is and what we're really talking
about. So when I'm talking about content I'm talking about the information that actually
goes on your page right in the first way to talk about design blunders we talked about
layout we talked about color theory and things like that so there we were talking about in
general how things are positioned in relation to each other where you have headers and footers
and sidebars and whatever that is now we're talking about content what were we talking
about are things like text, images, audio, video, interactive forms things like that
so it's not where things are positioned in relation to each other exactly what gets involved
what kind of information is being put on the website okay so what kind of images are you
going to use on your header what kind of emotions are you going to evoke with that. Where are
you going to have interactive forms, where are you just going to use text? So hopefully
that's clear now that we understand what content is all about why don't we try to talk about
what content is for. From a consumer's perspective website content to let a user know about a
business's products and services or areas of expertise so they can make an educated
decision as to whether that business is right for them or not. Whether we can make a connection
for them.\ When we take a look at content from a business
owners perspective though we are more strategic with it, granted we do all those other things
that we let people know, look this is who we are, this is what we do, these are our
products, but when we start looking at crafting content for a website what we really want
to do with our content is to be able to take our users one step closer to an ultimate action
that we want them to take we're trying to drive people closer to doing something right
if it's an e-commerce site maybe we're trying to driver a sale right if it's a, if your
service-based business and you try to generate leads maybe it's we want them to fill out
a form and download a document or something like that, it could be setting an appointment
whatever the case may be this is a big distinction that we've made in which we should probably
do that right here is that when people are searching online there's one main reason why
people search online why they use Google or Bing or Yahoo or whatever it they use. People
search online because they're trying to solve a problem that they currently have right so
for example I have allergies really bad we live here in California lot's of pollen and
stuff like that every Saturday when I go mow the yard you know for three hours afterward
my throat is scratchy I hate it drives me crazy so I do a Google I type in landscape
services and a find they guy that can come out and mow the yard for me, problem solved.
Another example let's say we've got an elderly couple that has a couple of pets a couple
of dogs right and maybe their mobility isn't quite what it used to be but they love their
dogs they still want to be able to take their dogs out and get them the exercise they need
so we know what they do, go over to Bing and they type in pet sitter or dog walker and
to try to find somebody to help solve that problem they have right but say for example
you've got a website that is not really doing what you want. It's ugly it's not converting
it's not doing this so you go to Google and type in Black Dog, right? No I'm teasing a
little bit there but what I want you to do there is I really want you to be able to get
that idea how could you understand that because that's really important. Great content on
the Web isn't about you sitting in front of the camera or you sitting and writing down
on a piece of paper saying this is who I am, this is what I do, this this is how great
I am people don't really care about that kind of stuff right really great content is about
telling customers about how you can solve their problems right if you can get that kind
of customer alignment you're going to be good to go so what does that mean that means that
before we start doing any kind of content creation or were taking a look are doing some
sort of an audit on the content on our existing website what we need to do is we need to step
into the shoes of our customer a little bit and kind of see what are the problems that
they are having. How does my service my product my expertise how do I help them solve those
problems now that's going to be important because you want to be able to hit that any
time you do a marketing message whether you're coming up with copy for your home page whether
you're coming up with copy for a pay per click ad or a banner or whatever the case may be
that's really important number one people are going to be searching online because they're
trying to solve a problem, number two we know that 100% of the people to visit your website
that land on your page are going to take some sort of an action and then number three good
content is how we can actually get those users to take the action that we want as opposed
to the action that they want right that's going to be the important part so if this
all sounds familiar probably should, because you probably should've dusted this stuff anytime
you put together any kind of a marketing message right so you know anytime you put together
a marketing message what you want to do is wanna start with the end user in mind if you
have a message that talk specifically to somebody's problem they're going to be like yeah I know
or yeah me too and that's really what you want people to be doing, you want people to
say that in their head or out loud or whatever the case is because when you can get them
to make that kind of a shift you've got them, they understand that on the same wavelength
and I think that your problem or your solution can resolve their problem okay so really what
we want to get to is that we want to get to the point of whether it's on paper or whether
it's on video camera we can actually look and say look I understand your problem now
I have a solution for your problems I helped these people these are all my testimonials
I helped these people with that exact same problem and more importantly I can help you.
If you can do that you can do that with confidence you can do that with clarity your conversions
are going to skyrocket. Okay so we are going to talk about the four primary elements of
content which are text images video and interactive elements. Number one is your text now the
common problem or problems that I see small businesses address or run into when they're
talking about text is really have too much text it's either improperly formatted or what
I like to call limp text okay so as a general rule it is good to think about Web surfers
as skimmers because they do, they're going to skim your page, people are going to visit
your website, there have been all kinds of like eye-study reports and things of that
nature to show that when people come to a page they don't read big blocks of text they
skim right so you know when we're writing for the web what we want to do is we want
to make sure that our text is very clear very concise and very easy to read okay so I guess
the one caveat to that is the deeper that people get into the site you know the more
time they got invested the closer they are to making the decisions of the more time they're
willing to give us, but we're talking homepage we're talking top level page you got like
5 to 7 seconds to get them the information they need and get them on their way or they're
going to bail. So my three tips for text are going to be number one make sure that you
use meaningful headlines okay a couple of reasons for that first is that that's a really
good way for you to be able to break up larger elements of text right come up with some headline
and break that up a little bit the second thing is we know the people are going to skim
through your pages so that's a really good way for you to put your features and benefits
of whatever your product or service are out there and make them easy for people to go
ahead and get to. And the second top tips I have for text is to make sure that you use
lists use them as much as you can okay if you got large paragraphs of text on your website
with lots of commas and features and benefits, turn that into a list. It doesn't matter what
kind of a list it could be a bulleted list it could be a roman numeral list, it could
be a numerical listing doesn't really matter but lists are a lot easier for the for people
to read also a lot easier for search engines to go ahead and grab ahold of too. So take
that for what it's worth and then the third thing is we want to make sure that every step
in our process every element on our page is taking our customers or our visitors one step
closer to the action that we want them to take. Everything homepage should take them
to a product page product page to a checkout page and so on and so forth the second primary
key we are going to talk about here are images. }