Episode 437: How to improve your website in just five minutes
In this episode, Fiona shares essential advice on how to evaluate and improve your website in just five minutes. She also provides insights into the buyer cycle. Tune in!
You'll Learn How To:
Importance of identifying three key goals for your website
Overview of the Buyer Cycle
Common website pitfalls and how to avoid them
Recommendations for website platforms like Squarespace
User experience tips
Get in touch with My Daily Business
Connect and get in touch with My Daily Business:
Welcome to episode 437 of the My Daily Business Podcast. Today you're reading a quick tip episode and if you have a website and want to improve it, today's quick tip will help you. Before we get stuck into that, I want to let you know that if you are in Melbourne on Thursday, the 5th of September, I would love for you to come and help me celebrate the launch of my second book, but also my first book because I never got to do a launch party for it because we had lockdown the year it came out and then we had lockdown the year after it came out. Because we were going to do a 12-month later party and that couldn't happen either. I am doing a make-it-up book launch for Passion Purpose Profit, and a book launch for my new book Business to Brand.
If you're in Melbourne on Thursday, the 5th of September, I would love for you to be part of that. You can find all the information and register and please make sure you register because we just want to make sure we have enough food and everything else. You can do that at mydailybusiness.com/booklaunch and I look forward to seeing you there. If you are not able to come to that physically, we are going to have a Zoom launch party later in the year. Look out for that. All the details will also be at mydailybusiness.com/booklaunch. The other thing I wanted to mention is to of course acknowledge where I'm coming from and acknowledge the traditional owners and custodians of these beautiful lands, which I'm looking at right now. They're grey and miserable and overcast, but still absolutely beautiful. I pay my acknowledgement to the traditional owners, the Wurrung and Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation and pay my respects to their elders past and present and acknowledge that sovereignty has never been ceded. Let's get into today's quick tip episode.
I have been in the online space for probably 2005. 19 years. Maybe it was a little earlier than that, but I was working on websites for fashion brands that were trying to go from brick-and-mortar to e-commerce and e-commerce was so exciting and new and different at the time. And when I think of those websites now, it probably looks so clunky and old. But I've been in this space for a long time. I've worked on countless websites, I've worked on websites. Web companies are spending well into six figures, multiple six figures on the website. I've also worked with people who are just doing it DIY in the evenings whilst they're working a full-time job. I'm raising my hand because I've also built websites like that for people.
I've also done my own websites. Mydailybusinesscoach.com, fionakillackey.com and My Daily Business. I've built those websites with the last one, the current one. I did have some great help from a wonderful guy called Andrew Levine. He is in Los Angeles, he's a Squarespace expert. I think he runs a website agency. I found him through Upwork. Amazing. I've recommended him to lots of people and now I'm recommending him over to you as well. But the point is, I have worked on so many websites and I wanted to give you some tips today on what you can do if you are looking at your website, thinking it needs a bit of a refresh, but doing this analysis, I guess within five minutes or less. Let's go, and I'm going to try and say all of this within five minutes or less as well.
The first thing you want to do with your website is to think about the three main actions you want somebody to take or the impressions you want them to have from your website. If nothing else happened, just three things, what would those three things be? This is the first thing, and I think sometimes people are not clear on this. if you're trying to then get a web developer or an agency or a freelancer or you're trying to do it yourself, it's hard. You can go down a whole pathway into a utopia of all the different possible things you could do on a website and you get off track with what you're trying to achieve. For example, on our website, the three things that we want to do is, make a sale, which is why we have a bunch of things available.
Two, and these aren't necessarily in that order, but yes we are a business, we're trying to make money. We have a bunch of things available on our website, including my new book, my old book, all the things, courses, coaching programs, all of it. It's all through the website. That's the first one. Sales. The second one is driving signups to our email. We have various freebies we have on our blog articles, which are also the podcast show notes. More recently we did have blog articles originally as well. Some of those will have downloadables, and some of them will direct you to a freebie to get you to download. We also have a subscription box at the top. We also have subscription offerings throughout a lot of our pages reminding you to sign up for the Sunday email. that's growing our audience.
Growing the audience can also be done in other ways as well. The subscription is just one part of that. First is sales, second is growing our community, growing our audience. And the third is, I would say showing authority. I do a lot of speaking gigs, I do a lot of master classes and go in and do all sorts of deliveries for different people's memberships and things like that. I work with some government groups on presenting corporate groups with a bunch of different things. If you are interested in ever having me speak, you can go to our speaking page on our website and see that. But I would say those are the three things. If you look at our website, every single thing points you to one of those three. You're either being pointed or guided to buy something.
You're either going to be pointed to a freebie or some way of signing up to get our emails or you are being shown things like a logo, farm testimonials, all the different places we've worked, all the different things I've spoken at. you are, you're showing that I guess the books as well like so, and the podcast and the fact that it's almost done, a million downloads, like all of that is building authority. Those three things, there's nothing else on that page that's not leading you to one of those three things. In your business, try to identify what are the three things that we're trying to achieve on this website or that we are trying to put forth. We want somebody who's visited this website to go, I get that impression from this website. I understand what they're trying to do here.
That's the first thing and that is, what I'm up to three minutes. It's pretty quick for you. I mean it's not necessarily always quick for you to get to those three things, but for you to sit down and concentrate and go, if just three things were achieved by this website, nothing else, just these three, would I be feeling like the website works? For us, if we get sales, good. If we grow our community through mainly email at this stage, good. And if it's building brand authority and people look at it and go, okay. In that evaluation part of the buyer cycle. You've got awareness, research, evaluation, purchase, post-purchase, and advocacy in the evaluation. If the website's doing its work, people can go through that cycle and they're not dropping off at the point of research.
They're going through to evaluation and deciding they're the right person for me. And then to the path to purchase. What are the three things that you need to achieve with this website? And then the second part is using the buyer cycle, which I love to use for everything. But the buyer cycle, as I just said, is made up of five or six stages. You've got awareness. Then if people are aware of you, they'll do research. Research is where tend to come to your website and your social media. This is where things like SEO media podcast interviews, and all sorts of things can come in handy. Once they get into a stage of research, they will go through to a point of evaluation, figuring out if you're the right fit for them. If you're the right product fit, where is your product made, and how much does it cost?
When can it get delivered? If you're a service base, who else have you worked with? What do your testimonials look like? What is your sales page? What are your rates, when do you work with people? How do I work with you? All of that. If they go through all of the evaluations, they are like good to go. They're just like, how do you take my money? The path to purchase has to be pretty simple as well. And then if you do a good job and you stay in touch with people and you treat them like humans, chances are you'll have post-purchase, which then becomes advocacy if done well and then they become advocates for your brand and they're helping people become aware of you. And then those people are going through the whole cycle again. Let's look at your website and think about each stage of the buyer cycle, if somebody has just become aware of you if they come to your website, are they getting a pretty good overview of what your brand's about?
If you're a service base, if it's you that you're selling who you are, is there a photo of you? Do they know a bit more about you? Is there some humanity happening there? If you're a product base, do they know a bit about the brand? How it was formed, and who it was formed by? What's that ethos are our values? That's awareness. Then if they're researching you, can they find the information that they'd need to find? For example, if you're a product-based business, is there information about where your stuff is made? Is that important to you? I would say it's important to a lot of people these days and should be important to more and more people. Where is it made? is it ethical? All sorts of things that can go in there. How long it take to come to you?
If it's made overseas and you are not from that country, why did you choose that country? Do you have a special relationship with it? Did you go on a holiday and find amazing people and you've connected? Do you have some family tie to it? What is it? Putting that information in there. That is where people can research. If they see enough of what they like, then their research has done well and they're literally at a point of evaluation. Again, you're looking at the evaluation stage and thinking, if they had to evaluate whether to spend money with us or somebody else, is our website helping them do that? Is it easy to evaluate now once they've got through evaluation, the next stage is purchase? Is it easy to purchase from us? I think this is where service-based businesses, and I am holding my hand up because I'm a service-based business, tend to not do the greatest job.
I work with a lot of people in interior design, architecture, landscape design, photography, and graphic design websites. And a lot of the time it's quite hard to get in touch with you or to find a direct way to get in touch with you. There's no direct email, there's just a contact form. Sometimes the contact form, you hit submit, but nothing happens. You're like, did that go through? Did it go through? Is anyone going to get this inquiry? It doesn't give you any sense of certainty that you're going to get a response. that path to purchase isn't always the greatest. And again, also with e-commerce stores still, I don't know how this is happening in 2024, I'm closing my eyes right now because I'm like how? But a lot of people still don't have an ad-to-cart button anywhere.
That's obvious. I've still found myself on websites going, I don't understand where I buy this. The path to purchase has to be simple. Then you've got post-purchase, which becomes advocacy you've done well. The post-purchase isn't always going to be something that you can see on a website, but on a website pretty much all the other parts should be there. The post-purchase might be some cool message that comes up after you've bought, I remember once years ago buying a subscription to a tech tool, like a software as a service tool. And after I purchased it, I got this fun video straight away on the website. And this was like 10 years ago a video that came up and it was like the whole crowd of these people in an office running towards the screen being like, thank you.
It was just fun to watch. And they're like, yes, you are helping us build our business. And I just loved it. And you see that meme all the time that says like when you buy from a small business owner, they do a happy dance show that shows that in the path to purchase or the post-purchase when someone hits submit, what happens next? Because that can help in terms of that whole experience. All of these things can be done pretty quickly if you get a buyer cycle diagram and you can find one in either of my books, you can also find one, we'll put a graphic on the show notes for this episode, which you'll be able to find at mydailybusiness.com/podcast/437. If you look at that graphic of the buyer cycle and you go through it with your website and you're like, if I was in awareness, am I learning anything?
Research? Am I learning anything, evaluation? Am I making it easy for this person to evaluate, and purchase? Can I go through those and can I tick them off that we are achieving those on our website, on our homepage, on our category pages, and on our product detail pages? Where are we not helping people with these different stages? And the other thing is the three things. What are the three things we want our website to achieve? And are we doing a good job of that or are we confusing people? If you're interested, there is a good book that came out years and years ago. It's like the UX Bible UX user experience. That is called, Don't Make Me Think Just the title of that book is enough. I mean the book is great as well, you should go check it out.
But don't make me think this is the whole thing with websites. If you make people think you will lose them. That is it for today's quick tip episode. I hope it has been helpful for you and that you think about the three things that you know are important for your website to achieve and also go through the buyer cycle. If you want to check out all of this in text format, as I said, it'll be available on our website at mydailybusiness.com/podcast/437. We'll also link to Andrew Levine there. If you need some help with Squarespace, I regularly recommend Squarespace to people. If you are looking at updating your website, you might decide to update to Squarespace not sponsored. They should sponsor this. If you're reading any from Squarespace, very interested. Thanks for reading and see you later. Bye.
