WDD LIVE 041: Local Search & Conversion (My Recent Experience) + Q&A/AMA

0:00:00 Yo, yo, yo, hello everybody. What is up?

We doing good? We doing good? Super chat, we already got super chats rolling in.

Super chats from Ruben. Ruben says, leave Breakdance alone. Ruben, I mean, we haven’t even started yet.

I haven’t even said anything about Breakdance. But I appreciate it. The $2, I can buy myself like, what was that, like a third of a cup of coffee these days with the inflation, you know.

All right. I appreciate it. I appreciate it.

We got Justin in the house. Third Geary base, late night in a row. Who needs sleep?

Correct. And that actually it would be four nights in a row if you come to the Frames live stream that is probably going to be tomorrow. Rob is here.

Michael’s here. 0:00:53 Dhunzi is here.

0:00:54 Good to see you. Azar is here.

0:00:56 Sebastian. 0:00:57

I swear, I probably just murdered half these names. Dimitri is here. SK says hi from Singapore.

Kevin is in here from New York. Welcome Kevin. Wolf from Germany.

Love it, love it, love it. Tudor is here. Breakdance is everything that’s wrong with WordPress.

Oh no. See what you did, Ruben? You’re stirring up.

You’re stirring things up. Let’s see. Attila’s here.

I see some new names, new faces. Tony, good afternoon. Callis Hittings Island here as always.

All right. Where are we at? All right.

Agenda for today. Let’s go over the agenda. We’re going to do website critiques with a little bit of a twist today.

What I would like to do, because this is a real world experience, a couple of weeks ago I was looking for a new cleaning company for our home. And my wife was like, hey, I want it to be a green cleaning company, or like a non-toxic cleaning company. She doesn’t like all the chemicals and such.

So I was like, alright, well, I’ll see what I can do. Try to find, try to find something. And it’s just, you know, and I recommend everybody do this.

I recommend that when you are personally, as a web designer, as a marketer, whatever you call yourself, when you are personally looking for a business, especially a local business, the kinds of people that you actually do work for, be more aware of like your own process of finding that business, right? You know, do some extra thinking about, all right, here are the sites I’m clicking on and you know, why am I making the decision I’m making, right? You’re not, your experience isn’t independent from everybody else in the world.

You kind of look for the same things that they look for. And so take note of that, like what’s working and what’s not working, what’s actually persuading you in the moment and what’s not persuading you in the moment and what’s repelling you in the moment. Because you can take those insights from your own search for companies into the work that you do.

I think this is very valuable. And so on today’s WDD Live, I want to walk through that process that I went through in finding a cleaning company. Manny in the house, let’s see, I believe my brain will take that as a challenge for tonight so let’s go.

Good stuff, good stuff. Alright the second part of this live stream will be some Q&A, AMA. I don’t think I have any other announcements I think we should get right into it.

So all I will say is save your questions. If you ask them now, I’m never going to find them in the chat. You can also put in your own comments while we go through this search process of these local businesses and see what we see.

Put in your own comments, thoughts, opinions, etc. And that’s it. That’s all I’m going to say.

Let’s go ahead and share screen I’m gonna get to Google first all right oh I got a hold on I got a silence notifications and all this jazz it likes to come in and try to interrupt us okay yep focus mode till this evening all right let’s let’s let’s do this so green cleaning company I I did two main searches I did green cleaning company near me and I did non-toxic cleaning company near me. That was really all I could think of off the top of my head. So I went green cleaning company near me and I did non-toxic cleaning company near me.

All right let’s start with the green cleaning company near me First things that we see, we’ve got these sponsored, kind of like from Google Maps up at the top, and then we’ve got some PPC ads going on. And Google, I will say, Google’s done, like, you know, it’s obviously it’s on purpose. Like, they’ve done a really good job of blending in the sponsored results now.

It’s very, for the average user, like, I know, we look at this stuff all the time, I don’t think the average user even knows they’re clicking on an ad a lot of times anymore because of how Google has hidden this in here. And then you also have the, notice that it’s like, it’s a never-ending stream now. There’s no page one, page two, page three kind of thing.

It’s like a never-ending stream and you’re gonna run into like where the page 2 would be you’re gonna run into more ads And not even I don’t think most people even realize it But anyway, let’s let’s go ahead. You know everybody’s gonna click on this this first one or most people I guess let me go back and Let’s hit command while we do this. We’re gonna open this one Commercial cleaning Atlanta comm it’s also take note of like the domain names.

We got squeakygreen right here, Atlanta Green Maids, thegreenqueen, eco-maids, ecofriendlymaidservice. com. Let’s just roll with these and then maybe amysgreencleaning.

This might be enough, okay? All right. Alright, before we actually dive into sites, going back to domain names, CommercialCleaningAtlanta.

com. So right off the bat to me, it’s the number one thing right there, sponsored result, but it’s the result that doesn’t actually, you know, they’re bidding on this, but it’s like, doesn’t really speak to me right off the bat. I’m not looking for a commercial cleaning company.

And so it appears their whole domain is focused on commercial cleaning. So even though it came up first, that’s a waste of money in my opinion, right? Like you got to make your ads a bit more specific here because they’re going to get a lot of clicks and I don’t even know that they do residential cleaning services.

So all the people like me that are clicking on their ad, I mean that’s just lighting money on fire more or less. Squeaky Green, so the word green is in the brand name, it’s in the domain, right? Atlanta Green Maids, alright, so they’re keying in on this with their branding, which if you’re looking for a green cleaning company, this is a good thing to see.

You would want to see this, right? The Green Queen, this one has a little bit more personality to it. If people are drawn to brands with more personality, this would probably stand out to them.

Whereas these are very literal. Well, Atlanta Green Maid, that’s very literal. Squeaky Green, you could say, alright, maybe that’s Squeaky Clean, Squeaky Green, I guess that’s the play that they’re going off of there.

So I guess that has a little bit more creativity in it. Eco, eco made like that’s very literal, you know, and it’s got the eco in it. Now, there’s an interesting twist here too, in that, and I, you know, I was just processing all of this as I as I went through it, because it’s not just about finding this cleaning company, right?

Like it is, I turn it into kind of like a lesson and like how people may think about this kind of stuff. There’s really two audiences here at least. There’s people who want a green cleaning company because they’re like pro-environment and all of that stuff, right?

Then there’s people who are just like, no, it’s not really an environmental thing, it’s more about like a personal health thing. Like I don’t want the chemicals affecting my health. That’s kind of two different camps there that you need to consider talking to.

Like when we get to the copy on the site, knowing what percentage of people are like, care more about the environment and which percent of people care more about themselves, that can influence how you need to structure your copy and your narrative on these websites. Okay, so let’s just dive in. Georgia Facility Services.

This is the commercial green cleaning. This site had no chance, no chance of converting me. It says Commercial Cleaning Atlanta and then the brand is not even a brand.

I mean, everybody that looks at this has an IQ that’s room temperature at least, right? It’s like, that’s like a can vote logo. Like let’s just grab some Georgia clip art and then throw a name next to it that doesn’t even match the domain name and that doesn’t even appear like what.

This has no personality whatsoever, no effort. This is a zero effort brand. This is a zero effort templated website.

It’s clearly like buy a template, fill it out. There’s just no care. Like you don’t care about your business.

Why should I care about your business? That’s kind of the gist that you get from this. And it was just a bad match because they bid on the wrong term or they didn’t bid specific enough.

And so they brought me here and I have no interest in what’s going on. So like I said, this is if you’re a PPC person running ads for a company, this is how you light their money on fire. You bid on the wrong keywords or the and I mean are we, does anybody see anything related to green cleaning here?

And okay right here. Well there’s one slide and here we go with the slider thing. Why am I always hating on sliders?

I just happened to catch a glimpse of it before it went away and was hidden by another slide. So we have this, right? But I mean it’s like man, all these other sites that I’m going to be looking at and this is what real people do in the real world.

They don’t just go to one site and fill out the contact form. I know business owners love to think that that’s how it works. I love some you know how some you know low-level marketers think that’s how it works.

Like oh we can just get traffic to the site. They’ll all sign up. No that’s not how it works.

People look at like four or five different at least four or five different you know options and so it’s not just convincing them to convert you’re trying to convince them while other people are trying to convince them so you’ve got to be good at convincing them otherwise you’re not going to get many people to pull the trigger and this site it just doesn’t do it this is just bad immediately crossed off the list okay so now we’re into squeaky green cleaning company first thing I see I’m I can’t really find the brand. It’s hidden right here. What is, who thought this was a good idea?

Like, oh, yeah, let’s not put it in the header, right? Where it normally goes. Let’s just let it float there in the hero section.

And then when I go to services, I mean, it’s just still there. It’s just gonna float in the hero section right there. It’s just, man, it’s, and how about that font guys come on come on now how about that font?

Where are my UI designers at? How about this? How about this?

Yeah this is just a typical it’s like and this would actually get me into the rant. What’s up Robbie? What’s up?

Justin says such stock photo little wow. Manny, Manny with a great point here that more than 70 people haven’t hit the like button yet. Yes, hit the like, drop some likes while you’re here.

Let’s get the likes going says Don Z. Yes, okay. This is, this is, this is fantastic.

Remember, yeah, yeah, here we go. Yadira is on point, right? Prison time, absolute prison time from a UI perspective.

Okay, guys, let’s, I just, I wasn’t even planning on doing this, but it does bring this thought to mind. Having conversations lately, I’ve been very active on Twitter lately, you guys know I’m very active in Facebook groups, always having these, what I feel are fundamental debates. These are fundamental debates.

The fundamental debate that applies right now is the idea that we should, that it is good to democratize publishing that is the Mission of WordPress is to democratize publishing which I don’t even know what that means Anybody has been able to publish on WordPress since the inception of WordPress Literally you sign up and you hit the publish button. They’ve democratized whatever you want to call that I think it’s a you know an empty marketing slogan, but whatever it means. It’s always you’ve always been able to do it it’s like anybody has always been able to create a wordpress account and publish something on the internet ok so but the idea that anybody should that’s where we get into the philosophical debate the idea for example that a business owner should be able to create their own website like let’s make it easy this is like the thing we have to debate.

Should we make it easier for them to do that, to build their own website? And a lot of people seem to be in the camp of yes, we should make it easy for anybody. That’s really WordPress’ thing.

Like anybody should be able to build a website. Now, if you are building a personal blog, if you have a hobby site, if you’re whatever, hey, do you. Of course, I would love for everybody to be able to build their own website.

But the minute we’re talking about a business and a real person with real aspirations of like, hey, you know, I don’t want to live a corporate life, I want to do the entrepreneur thing. I’m going to take risks. I’m going to go out into the world and I’m going to try to build a company.

And I’m going to try to be successful that way. You know, we all know how hard entrepreneurship is already. Okay.

So now the idea is we’ve got a real person with a real idea, with a real future, with real risks, with real bills to pay, who potentially may have real employees at some point, who also have real lives. And there is kind of a lot on the line. If you wanna really boil it down to, why did I get into entrepreneurship?

Why do I like the idea of building businesses on the internet versus like, I could build brick and mortar businesses, but why do I like the idea of building businesses on the internet? It’s not about money, it’s about freedom. It’s about time freedom it’s about location freedom I don’t want anybody in control of my schedule I don’t want anybody in control of my location in the world if I have a brick-and-mortar business even though I’m in control of the brick-and-mortar business it does tie you to a physical location it does tie you in a lot of ways to a schedule and I just don’t like those things and and to me that that’s ultimate freedom.

We can go anywhere at any time and we can do anything at any time and it’s up to us to manage our schedule and manage our life from that point forward. But that’s freedom that frankly a lot of people in history have never had. You’ve never had that kind of freedom.

We have an opportunity. Now somebody else comes along and they say I want to pursue that. I want that too.

My option is I can live this corporate life that I absolutely hate or I can hopefully build something successful that gives me a tremendous amount of freedom that I actually love and I’m passionate about and that pays my bills and protects my financial future and on and on. That’s not an easy like you know one of those outcomes really sucks for that person and one of those outcomes is really awesome for that person. And you know what’s standing between them and the great option, or them and the really bad option a lot of times?

The execution of the business. Part of which, a big part of which, is the marketing of that business. How are they going to get in front of the right people?

How are they going to convince people to do business with them and to give them a chance and give them a shot and then to Continue repeating the business enough for that business to grow and be successful and be referred to by others this is make or break and so They’re kind of at a crossroads where they say who is going to be in charge of that marketing? Who is going to be in charge of putting our best foot forward and convincing as many people as possible to give us that shot? Are they themselves going to be responsible for that?

Or would they be better off, let me ask it this way, would they be better off managing that themselves? Or would they be better off putting that in the hands of somebody with expertise and experience experience who has a much much much higher percentage chance of getting them to that initial success point where it tips into wow I’ve actually launched a legitimate business here. To me this this goes back to the the old quote of like if you defend yourself in a court of law you have a fool for a client.

If you don’t know anything about marketing and getting in front of the right people and and putting your best foot forward in that regard and convincing people to do business with you. All you know is how to clean stuff and so you want to create a cleaning business. This is the e-myth, go read the e-myth book, right?

Just because you have a good skill at something doesn’t mean you can build a business around it. Ok, that’s the first thing entrepreneurs need to learn and so if we empower more business owners who don’t know how to do copy, who don’t know how to do design, who don’t know how to do development, we empower more of them to think that they do, that actually does them a tremendous disservice. They’re the worst person that could be working on this website and this is what you get when that happens.

This is what you would expect to see if you make it easy, if you democratize publishing for small business owners. This is what you will get more of. Websites that do no, who’d trust this?

I would never, this is not who I would choose. And again, what it also tells me is, when you are, when you really, you know, care about a business, you do have to invest in the business. Like you, you have to put some money into it.

I get it. Like some people got a bootstrap. I bootstrapped all my businesses right thankfully he like I spent the first part of my business journey not just in like what am I skilled at and what can I build a business around it was actually like how does a business get built how does the marketing work that was the first thing I learned so that when I had an idea down the road and multiple ideas down the road I was actually able to execute them myself but most people are not in that boat right most people are like oh I have an idea for a business I’m good at this skill but they don’t know how to market the business they don’t know but again the debate to me is the easier you make it for small business owners to create their own websites the more you will fail those same small business owners because that you can’t just do this.

This does not work. That’s kind of my point. That’s the boat I’m in.

And you guys are, you know, drop your comments in the chat. You know, what side of the fence are you on? Do you think it’s beneficial to democratize publishing for small businesses?

Do you think it serves them for them to slap some shit together that poorly represents whatever brand they’re trying to build that does a very poor job of Communicating their value and their services and their unique selling proposition and I mean that stuff’s non-existent on on these sites. I Don’t think it does them any service whatsoever. I think that they’re better off They have a better shot at success if they put this kind of stuff in the hands of somebody who knows what they are doing.

Us, us, all of us collectively together can do a better job and give them a better shot at success. And I think if we actually went back to uncovering the sob stories, you know what percentage of businesses fail, right? What percentage of people start out with this and then it fails and they have to walk their butt back to the corporate world world sobbing going, oh man my shot at freedom is over.

There it was, I had my chance and it just didn’t work out so now I’m back to the corporate life for the next 40 years, hating my entire life, right? That’s not what I want for people. We’re squandering their one big shot because we democratized publishing, made it easy for them to do their own thing when they didn’t know, I don’t know how to do any of this and I shouldn’t be doing any of this.

Because it’s harming my chance of success. Just like if I walked into a courtroom and said, you know what, I don’t know anything about the law, but I’m going to defend myself. And then I’m fucking in prison for the next 30 years and all I have is myself to thank.

No, not really. You have everybody, everybody around you failed you. Everybody who didn’t say, no, dog, you don’t want to do that.

Please step back you need an actual lawyer to defend you. Everybody knows that in the term in terms of like law but for some reason in marketing and entrepreneurship we want to democratize everything. We want to make it easy for anybody to do their own thing.

Not the best course. Not the best course. Okay Let’s see, I like their dirty South line.

Let’s see, how, I didn’t, I’m sorry, I couldn’t even read it because it’s black on a, on like a messy like background image. We need a little overlay here or something. How the dirty South stays clean.

Okay. Squeaky green cleaning coming out. I mean this was just, there’s nothing to read here.

I mean what’s supposed to go here guys? I don’t know. Eat organic, clean organic.

All right. Testimonials. Okay.

All right. And then we got an Instagram feed. Fantastic.

Okay. Needless to say, I didn’t choose that one. Okay.

Here’s Atlanta green maids. Now, you know, some of this stuff is like some people won’t notice this stuff some real real Prospects won’t know like most real prospects like I think of my wife was you know going through these websites for example Is she gonna notice that this is a blurry logo like this you know? PNG pixelated Not great.

I don’t think she would care. I don’t think she would notice. I don’t think she would care You know she’ll probably cue in on things like, I like the name, you know, whatever.

So, I don’t think we should necessarily nitpick that much, but it’s, you know, the big stuff. We can focus on the big stuff. Your time is precious, why spend it cleaning?

So, this does obviously speak to most people. It’s, I think if you asked somebody to sit down and write copy, who knows anything about copy, this is probably one of the first things that they would write on the page. Like, you know, most copywriters will write lots of different options, because then they want to weigh them in their head and, you know, have a little conversation about them and things like that.

This is like one of the most obvious ones, okay? It would immediately go down on the page, because it hits on the obvious thing of like, most people don’t want to spend three hours cleaning their house. If they had that time to spend elsewhere, they would probably opt for spending that time elsewhere.

So you are hoping that when people arrive, that’s the number one thing that they care about. Now for a green cleaning company, you’ve chosen a niche. I mean, you’ve said, hey, we’re Atlanta green maids.

So to me, it’s curious that we focus on the time thing because we already know if somebody’s looking for a green cleaning company for whatever reason, time is probably not the number one thing on their list. I would imagine that it’s something to do with the green aspect of it, right? So I think this is a failed headline in general for this kind of company, right?

If it was just a generic cleaning company, sure, whatever. But it’s also a failed headline because going with the obvious thing means that you’re gonna say what most people are saying and then you don’t really stand out from anybody when you do that. I do kind of like their little engagement here.

It’s how fast can you get the person engaged with the website? I think it’s a really good question to ask. I mean, it’s the number one question we asked with the automatic CSS website.

How fast can we get the person actually doing something on here, right? Like, I want them to engage, I want them to play, I want them, like, because it keeps them there longer, it keeps them focused on the thing and on the content and on the concept. And so, in this hero right here immediately people are like oh well alright I mean I might as well bucket myself I might as well choose where I fit in here what I will say is this is too granular you know like alright what we’re doing every 500 square feet does that really matter all that much like there’s too many options and I got to study it I’m like alright well hold on apartment or studio home or apartment then I got homes then I got every 500 square feet, then there’s this hourly service down here.

There’s too many options. Too many, too many options. But we can, and then schedule appointment $450 per clean.

Man, okay. We do have some social proof here, which is good. Top rated Atlanta cleaning services with the convenience of booking online.

We can meet some of the cleaners, which is, this is a little unique. I don’t think you’re gonna see this on many cleaning company websites. I do think it adds a little bit of a, even though the photos aren’t great, like I would, a hundred, dude, if you’re gonna do this, my gosh.

To me, it’s like, I don’t know. Like, man, okay, this is awkward. 0:27:34

This is awkward. 0:27:35 Just get a nice, get a photographer with a nice camera.

I mean, you can find someone on Craigslist to do better than this. This is like low resolution cell phone slash like bug shot camera photo. Like, I don’t, I don’t, it’s not great.

But I do award the like, hey, you know, we’re putting some people that aren’t stock photos onto the site always good because it helps connect. Okay so we’re going down you know I was going through this like all right it’s like it’s all it’s all typical I think I went to the about page on a lot of these this one deals gift cards fact yeah this one didn’t really have one they kind of put everything on the homepage and then they just had services pages. What I was looking for was like tell me the ways that you like what does the green mean to you?

What do you guys use? What is your commitment? What is your mission?

That kind of that’s really what I was looking for because that’s what my wife cares about. So I was looking for the things that she cares about. Let’s go back to I want to see if there were specifics on this one.

And so, okay. Okay. The background check, 100% satisfaction, dedicated.

Okay. What separates us from other Atlanta? Okay.

Here’s an interesting little section. What separates us from other Atlanta cleaning services? Added convenience, commitment to safety.

Oh, by the way, the conclusion of this, I’m going to tell you which one I chose, and I’m going to tell you why I chose them. And the conclusion may be something you don’t expect. Okay?

So let’s just keep that in mind while we go through this. Okay, so they went with the protect the environment line, right? Which oddly, you know, you can go with a main line, like we talked about in the heading, right?

What’s the number one thing that the people care about? Well, for me as a copywriter, if I put my copywriting hat on, okay, and I’m not a professional copywriter, like I don’t, that’s not my like one area of focus. I just have a lot of experience with copywriting, but I wouldn’t even call myself like a copywriter.

I just have a lot of experience with it. And I spent a lot of time around a lot of copywriters, and I’ve done a lot of copywriting courses, and I’ve done a lot of copywriting practice. But I still wouldn’t even call myself a copywriter.

But if we were here, obviously the time thing out the window, we’re not going with the time headline. We’re probably going to go with a headline that either speaks to the environmental side of things or the health side of things, knowing that that’s one of those two buckets is what people care about. And we may even be able to, what I would probably go with initially is crafting a headline that speaks to both of those in like one or two sentences.

And then I would make sure throughout the website we’re talking repeatedly about the environmental side and the health side of things. Whereas if you come down here, it’s like, there’s one little blurb about it. Again, what is the number one thing they went with?

Convenience, commitment to safety. Like, I don’t feel like I’m gonna get mugged when a random cleaning company comes to my house. I guess that maybe theft is like a concern that a lot of people would have.

It’s not a top concern of mine. So convenience, safety, those are the top two things. Quality is important to me, but the first two things don’t land.

They don’t help convince me of anything, right? Then they went to green cleaning products, but they didn’t talk about the stuff my wife cares about. My wife cares more about the health side of things.

They didn’t speak to that. They spoke to protecting the environment. And then unmatched support, online portal.

I’ve never needed, wanted, or expected an online portal for a cleaning company. And then, okay, can I pay everybody via credit card? I mean, I just feel like in 2023, that’s an obvious thing.

So this is another lost opportunity cost type of section, right? We’re just, you know, we’re just wasting opportunities to try to convince the person. So let’s click out of that for now.

Now we have the green queen, pest and cleaning. Now I’m a little like you know green queen okay first of all I like the logo I love I really really like the logo. This is the first company that we’ve encountered that actually has like personality in their brand which is fantastic but while I’m one part impressed and have a feel-good kind of situation going on here immediately they were like turning me off because I’m like, well, hold on, hold on.

You’re a pest control company and a cleaning company. What is this little marriage of two different industries here? It’s not really what I need.

So then immediately I just had to be like, all right, I got to, I got to look a little bit deeper. What’s exactly going on here? So why clean green?

Let’s just read it. We got a, we got a why us statement right off the bat. Must be important.

Must say something really important. So let’s see. Studies have shown cleaning with traditional cleaners can leave over 38 contaminants in the air.

Green cleaning can reduce that to zero, instantly improving air quality and helping you breathe better. Children in particular are more vulnerable to chemicals such as formaldehyde found in traditional cleaners. So instantly they’ve can we all agree that they’ve done a better job right off the bat of connecting with a visitor who cares about how toxic cleaners impact their health.

And again, this was the thing my wife cared about. So they did an obviously, I think, objective better job. Notice that they started out with like, problem, here’s the problem, let’s all highlight the problem, and then we’re gonna talk about our commitment to solving that problem for you.

That’s what the person cares about, that’s gonna land. That’s gonna work, okay? We come down here, don’t call your service standard anything, okay?

Like, doesn’t that just make this seem like, ah, fucking standard house cleaning. Right off the bat, you’re establishing that we’re a commodity. But you’re not a commodity you’re you’re a green cleaning company you’re a better cleaning company you’re a better option than all the standard you’re better than the standard why are you calling yourself standard all these people need for the most part is a one consulting call one consulting call can it’s dramatically improve things don’t call yourself standard housecleaning if your whole existence is that you’re not standard.

That should be obvious. But let’s read the copy down here. You can have a clean home without toxic chemicals because we have years of experience on our about the green clean team.

That’s a mouthful. Knows the products and methods to use to leave your home sparkling, whether you’re looking for weekly, bi-week. Okay, this is another lost opportunity.

We know the products and methods to use to leave your home sparkling. This needs to be rewritten, but I’ve talked about this before. Products and methods to use.

Very vague, very abstract, no detail. Right now, if I read this, I have to have faith in your products and methods. What I really need is details about your products and methods to really understand what I’m getting and how that’s different, okay?

Now maybe that’s gonna be found somewhere else on the website, I don’t know, but it can be put right here. You can allude to the specifics here without having to go into like paragraphs of detail. They do deep cleanings, okay, whatever, move in, move out cleaning, office cleaning, whatever.

Then we have a testimonial, okay. Notice that we haven’t, there’s nothing on this home page. This is the, oh no, I clicked on home cleaning.

Okay, so services, let’s go back to services. Wait, hold on. Oh, that’s why.

Okay, there we go. Okay, the navigation is not working. Let me refresh.

Come on, what? Oh, you have to click on it. Okay, you can’t just hover on it, odd.

All right so we click on it. Home cleaning, mosquitoes. Wouldn’t think that those two things go together.

Turf and lawn. What do we are we are what you have a lawnmower too? You show up with.

What’s what’s going on here? Turf lawn and turf care. Okay, so I’ve already got a company for that.

I don’t, I don’t necessarily need that. Pest control, termites, wildlife. Well, you a trapper?

No. You a, oh, yep. Oh, we can do it all, my friends.

We can do it all. What does this communicate? Let’s just do a pop quiz in the chat.

Tell me. What do you, what do you feel? You want a cleaning company, does it bother you a little bit that they’re also over here doing mosquito treatment and over here trapping rodents and over here doing this and that?

I mean are you a specialist at green cleaning or are you kind of like a jack of all trades, hey we just do it all? I mean maybe they do dental work while they’re here. I mean I could kick back in the chase lounge and just, you want to take a look?

What else? What else is on the list? So this is, yeah, this is, I just, I kind of immediately was like, no, I can’t do this.

I’m not, I don’t feel comfortable. I don’t, yeah. Dawson says, hey, just throw in some home security while they’re at it, right?

It’s like you clean the fridge, put up a camera. I mean, those two things are very, I mean you’re in a home, is the niche just whatever the home needs? It went downhill.

This quickly went downhill. And every business that tries to be everything is going to go downhill. Think about processes, think about expertise, think about team and hiring, think about like, it’s just impossible.

It’s impossible to do all those things really well like it it’s just no it’s not sorry you got you got crossed off the list that got you crossed off the list okay eco maids too busy to clean we’ve got you covered hey where have we heard that before where before let’s just do a quick oh dear okay man immediate pop-up mmm all right you’re already on my naughty list gotta say a green way to clean life I get let’s look at this one the top choice for eco-friendly cleaning okay we could we could really do it would what’s fantastic I think I actually do this for competitor research so if you know in discovery process for clients I’ll literally pull up 30 sites that I Google and just go hero, hero, hero, hero, hero, hero, hero, all 30 of them. What are the headlines? And I’ll put them all down.

And this is, again, people think that their sites, their businesses, their projects exist in a vacuum. They don’t, okay? When people are comparing sites, I show business owners, I’m like, dude, you don’t wanna go with this headline.

15 out of the 30 sites use the exact same messaging in their headline. They all sound exactly the same. And the number one rule in marketing is don’t sound like everybody else.

Just a little hint, okay? Alright, so eco-friendly cleaning services. Too busy to clean?

We’ve got you covered. We’ve heard that before. Again, it’s a mismatch for what people are looking for when they’re looking for eco so not only is it what everybody’s saying it doesn’t land for the crowd that they’re trying to attract.

Giant phone number we need to do a test like just increasing the font size does it get people to click like make it as big as possible maybe I don’t know let’s we need to run a test. Save for the people people, pets and planet. Hey, okay, so finally, not only if we hit on both things that people might care about in the same little headline, we got the planet, we got people, they even threw in pets.

Hey, alright, bonus points there, bonus points there. Now they’re talking to their crowd, right? Okay, eco-friendly and all natural, alert, allergen and toxin free, color-coded cleaning system that prevents cross-contamination.

” Wow! Do you see what I talked about a minute ago when I said you can give specifics without giving too much specifics, like without paragraphs of information. Most people may not even think of that, that that’s a need.

What this alerts me to is, hey, they actually identified, like, they have a process. Oh my God, did somebody that you guys know, did you, have they done something called process is everything? I think there was a masterclass on that.

Process is everything and then you use your process to sell your services. I think I vaguely remember somebody doing a, like a two hour masterclass on that. Okay, let’s keep moving on.

Cleaning products certified by the Green Seal and EPA Safer Choice. Guys we haven’t heard anybody talk about this stuff yet. Haven’t heard anybody talk, this lands okay, this lands for people.

Trusted team, that’s been talked about. Everybody’s talked about that so far. 64 point cleaning checklist.

Scientific cleaning methods, 64 point checklist. We bring all cleaning equipment and products to you. We clean everything from baseboards to ceiling fans.

Okay. Here’s their little checklist. I can download the checklist if I want to.

Wow. I mean, they just give this for free. It’s like I can.

Yeah. Yeah. Okay.

All right. All right. Different.

It’s different. It’s not what everybody else has said. Layouts clean.

Nothing wrong with the brand. Professionally designed logo. You know, so far, so far, I think, I think they’d be winning out, right?

They’d be winning out. They kind of lost me with these cards. A little cheap on the card design here.

House cleaning services, apartment cleaning services. But, I mean, if we’re looking from like a SEO side of things Look at this. They’ve pulled in my city little geo location and all these go to service area pages I’m not in this is a false geo location.

This is not where I live Okay Standard template, you know, whatever they’re playing the SEO game. Clearly, clearly they’ve put a lot into SEO. But at the same time, their copy is connecting more than other sites have.

Okay. One thing that’s missing I feel like, let’s go to the about us. Okay, locally owned cleaning partner, immediately talks about the founders, okay, corporate America.

I’m looking for a mission. Why did you start a green cleaning company? What does that mean to you?

Because if it means, what it means to you, what it means to me, we’re on the same page. We got a little connection going, right? But I don’t really see, you know, they talk about the non-toxic allergen free certified products, but I’m not getting the vibe of like, why?

You know, who we are? We need a why. Why we’re here kind of thing.

I think that’s very important. When you’re picking a niche that’s for a lot of people means a lot to them, you gotta connect with them. By telling your story, telling your mission, right?

People will eat that stuff up. You’re creating an instant connection. It’s like, wow, you have the same mission that I have in this world.

Man, you know how much that can convince people? You could do a lot of other stuff wrong, but if they feel like you and them are aligned in mission, that goes a long way, my friends. I just don’t see it here.

Little bit of a lost opportunity. Look, she talks about her love for the mix between activities and educational opportunities the area has to offer. I don’t give a fuck.

I’m sorry. What about the mission that we’re on? Can you talk about that a little bit?

This is how people think, though. They don’t actually specifically think this, but it’s the vibes they get. It’s the feelings that they get.

You’re missing opportunities here. All right. Let’s jump out of that.

Let’s go to eco-friendly maid service. I really like the branding on this. And by the way, guys, don’t forget, dropping your comments, dropping your opinions in the chat, it’s all valuable.

I come back and I read through this. I put comments up, right? Different sites and different branches could work, green queen cleaning, green queen pest control, very possible, but if I still know that those other businesses exist and you’re not a big company, you know, it’s like you can’t be doing all that stuff.

I just know that it’s going to be a problem for me. They should separate the two business offerings that are not close enough, 100%. I just think that they should go all in on one.

If I was like you know put your business consultant hat on just tell them this is an area where you got a niche down. You got it you don’t need to be running a pest control business and a cleaning business and a roofing business and of this business you don’t it’s too much it’s too much. Okay.

Please clean my teeth after trapping my rats. Fantastic. Okay.

Andre says that logo looks like some kind of lemon juice company. 0:46:07 You’re right.

0:46:08 It kind of does. It kind of does.

But at least it’s not from like Canva and it’s, you know, it’s, it’s well done. I, you know, I just eco-friendly maid service. It’s a mouthful.

It’s, I don’t know. It’s a lot. A green way to clean life.

Okay. Green, does this speak to anybody? A green way to clean life.

This is one of those examples of a headline that’s like, they feel like it’s cute, I guess, but what value does it bring to the person who’s here? And by the way, I mean, what’s going on in the background here? What is this?

What are we even looking at? It’s like what is that? It’s like a that.

I don’t know if that’s a bathroom. Oh, I Don’t know what’s going on here None of these none of the imagery speaks to me. What is this?

What is this? What what what? Who decided that this was the most the best use of space right here?

Eco-friendly maid service is a green cleaning alternative for residential and commercial spaces. Our goal is to offer our clients the best service possible while maintaining our core values. Our goal, let’s just read this.

Our goal is to offer our clients the best service possible. No shit. Isn’t that the number one goal of like every business?

It just, it doesn’t mean anything. It’s just we’ve got to end the epidemic of words that don’t mean anything. Having the peace of mind in a clean and healthy home without the worry of harmful chemicals surrounding your loved ones is priceless.

Okay, now we’re talking a little bit. Now we’re talking a little bit. Fortunately, our local green maid service provides both for a reasonable price and great experience for you and your loved ones.

Okay, why choose us? Here’s your big pitch. Here’s your opportunity.

The mic is in your hands. What are we going to say? Affordable, reasonable prices and always customizable.

I’ll decide that. I’ll decide if you’re affordable or not, okay? Friendly and personable, our staff is invested in your happiness.

You know, I don’t sit around and shoot the shit with my cleaners, okay? So as long as you don’t come in like, you know, I imagine the cleaning company is not going to walk in the door and like, look at this fucking disaster. Like okay, friendly, what you smile when you walk by while you’re cleaning.

That’s all I need. Honestly, this is not the most important thing to talk about. We make it easy.

Our staff is devoted to your comfort and comfort. Why choose us? Dude, you are a green cleaning company.

You’re a green cleaning company. Talk about that. Talk about that.

Why are we talking about these things? These things don’t matter. Talk about the things that matter.

Very high up on the list in marketing. Talk about things that matter. Stop wasting time on stuff that doesn’t matter.

One call, one consulting call can fix so much of this nonsense. Okay. Our locations.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. I don’t know.

Nothing has been said that I or my wife care about. Our service area, mm-hmm, mm-hmm, about us, reviews, our service, our story, okay. Here we go.

Well, you know what speaks to me guys? Dandelions. No, it’s not even dandelions.

I don’t even know what those things are. What are those things? They’re animated though.

That’s cute. Eco-friendly maid service founded in 2008 by Alex when he was 19 years old. He helped care for his.

. . okay now hold on we’ve got a story brewing.

Storytelling is good. He helped care for his elderly aunt who suffered from. .

. it’s aunt by the way. It’s not aunt.

Don’t bring me that. Don’t bring me that. That’s.

. . see that?

What? That’s. .

. that’s a you. That is a you.

Okay, who suffered from COPD? The disease encouraged Alex to do some deep research on the causes of COPD and what makes it worse. Through his study, he found that the chemicals used in most commercial cleaning products were very detrimental to the upper respiratory system, motivated him to replace his aunt’s cleaning company at the time and use more simple and organic ingredients in her home.

Over time, Alex began to experiment in making his own cleaning products. The simple act sparked an interest for him in the environmental sustainability movement that is currently making a huge impact on our culture and views toward Mother Earth. Okay, okay, okay, okay.

So a lot of people I think like if my wife reads this, man, I feel like she’s going to connect with with that story. And now instantly, she’s gonna be like, I kind of save you, right? This kind of stuff can save you because you failed on your homepage, but if they make it to the about page, and that’s the problem, right?

If you fail on your homepage, a lot of people won’t even make it to the about page, but this kind of stuff can save you. He’s done the best job of like, let me connect with what people actually care about. He talked about both, you know, earth and health, right?

In a nice little concise little you know meaningful story. So that’s good. Now we have core values.

Look at this. The health of our. .

. health! Bang!

Okay. Growth. Meh.

Meh. Whatever. Sustainability.

Okay. So for the people that. .

. what did I say the top two things are? Health, sustainability.

There you go. He’s talking about them. He’s hitting on them.

Okay. That lands. All right.

Respect, integrity, client focus. This comes from those fucking corporate workshops that they tell every entrepreneur to go through. This is all corporate mumbo jumbo, valueless, like obvious, great.

You respect people, fantastic. You have integrity, fantastic. Your client focus, great, great.

That’s all nonsense, waste of time, waste of time. The lemons thing is getting to me. Now that somebody pointed out the lemonade thing, the lemons thing is getting to me.

I know that it, you know, lemon, I guess, goes in the cleaners a lot of times, but now I can’t unthink that we’re, possibly they’re gonna make us lemonade when they arrive. Regular service, again, guys, is it a regular service? I’m just gonna ask the question is it a regular service?

That sounds pretty pretty regular, pretty standard, pretty typical, pretty do I want am I buying into regular, standard, typical? These are not things most people want to buy into right? Okay, Brada says this is the best entertainment channel.

Hey I mean I do my best. Um, wheat is, wheat is lacking on the homepage. Ah, you guys got me.

Okay. Blog. Somebody said way out of date.

Yeah, man, you’re right. Hey, shout out to this blogging plugin that they installed here. Instant, instant recognition of this is a blogging plug-in add-on.

This is a, you know, whoever built the site didn’t know how to build a blog grid, so they installed a plug-in that does it for them. Yeah, man, okay. And this is why, by the way, I’ll just tell you an instant fix for this.

Instant fix, if you came for like, hey Kevin, I want practical tips, well, I’ve given a lot of practical tips. There’s a lot of like golden nuggets, guys. Bad websites, bad copy is the norm.

It is not the exception, it’s the rule. It’s everywhere. There’s an epidemic.

So that’s why we do WDD Live. Like we’ve got, we, all of us, our mission with WDD Live is we need to end the epidemic of bad websites. That’s our mission, I think, that we’re on, right?

And it’s not just bad from a technical perspective. Sure, we can open the DOM, these would be a fucking nightmare. These, from a DOM perspective, from an accessibility perspective, we can’t even get there though.

We can’t even make it that far into the analysis. Why? Because the more important things of copy, messaging, offer, these things haven’t even been done right.

These are disasters. And I will tell you right now, accessibility and HTML5 and maintainability of a website and even the UI, throw the UI to the side. None of that matters until you’ve done the big pillars, the core stuff of like, dude, can you even like talk about your business properly?

Can you even start like just get us a headline that actually lands? If we can’t do the major stuff we don’t even need to talk about the specifics beyond that and that’s what I want to point out. There isn’t and why why is this okay I’m writing a whole article about this by the way I think this this needs to be analyzed and broken down but Why are bad websites the norm?

Well, they’re the norm because, one, we’ve democratized publishing. A lot of Wix, Squarespace, WordPress, they’re all saying the same shit. Everybody can build a website.

Come on, everybody, let’s go, build your websites, let’s go. And you know what happens? Everybody comes and they think, well, they gave me permission and they gave me the tools, I guess I should do it.

Why the fuck would I pay this agency over here or this freelancer over here when this tool makes it so easy? I love this democratization. What the tools have done is they’ve made it easy for people to walk their little business to the edge of the cliff and fucking jump right off face first and land at the bottom and be dead.

That’s exactly what we’ve empowered people to do because they don’t know what they’re doing. And we just show example after example. Did I cherry pick?

Did I go to Google and go, oh, I know this one sucks, let me show that one. Oh, I know this one’s not very good, let me show that one. I literally clicked on the first seven results.

0:56:22 I didn’t skip any. 0:56:24

There hasn’t been a good one yet. And we’re getting to my conclusion of how I ended up choosing the company that I chose. But this is the problem.

We have to try to fix this. And by the way, people doing their own websites, bad. But you also have, what is the barrier to entry to be a digital agency?

What is the barrier to entry? Owning a computer. It don’t even have to be a new computer you just own a computer you’re in digital agency right and so you can put up mostly you know a crap website and people will hire you especially if you’re cheap because they’re cheap because they don’t know what they don’t know and they don’t know how to vet you either they don’t know what they’re looking at.

They don’t know any of this stuff. So they end up hiring terrible agencies. And so terrible agencies are creating terrible sites.

Clients that don’t know what they’re doing are creating terrible sites on their own. And thus we have an epidemic of bad websites. That’s what we have.

And I really feel like, you know, this is a, it’s an important thing because like I explained in the beginning, real lives, real businesses are impacted by this. Okay, let’s move on to the next one. Amy’s Green Cleaning.

This is the last one we’re going to look at and then we’re going to talk about why I made the decision I made, how I made the decision I made. And then we’re going to do Q&A and AMA. The top choice for eco-friendly cleaning services in Gainesville, Georgia.

I’m not in Gainesville. So but I know Gainesville is, you know, it’s in driving distance. It’s not, it’s not particularly close.

So kind of right off the bat, I’m like, can they make it out to me? Am I going to be that client where they’re like, I got to drive out there again today and they don’t really want me to be a client? Is that going to end up happening?

Possibility. I don’t know. It’s a concern I have.

Red flag. We have a photo of a real person smiling. It’s a good start, better than a stock photo.

I can actually see maybe the person I’m going to interact with. I don’t know what I just clicked on, but it was a 404. Okay, Amy’s Green Cleaning loves servicing Gainesville, Georgia.

We provide outstanding green cleaning services for the residents and surrounding areas. We offer a multitude of services including recurring maid services, one-time deep cleanings, move in, move out, vacation, office, our cleaning technicians are professionally trained in order to do the job. What have we not talked about yet?

The thing I care about most. We’re not really talking about it. Here’s a whole opportunity.

It’s the first thing I’m going to read, obviously. What is going on here? Why does it keep doing that?

I don’t even think I’m clicking on anything at this point. Okay. So we’ve, we’ve just, again, I haven’t taken advantage of the opportunity.

I just gave you my time on this paragraph right here. You chose to talk about things I don’t particularly care about. Insured and bonded.

Okay. I mean, that’s everybody. We just, everybody on the list is insured and bonded.

Locally owned, well obviously, obviously I’m, my guess wasn’t that you were going to fly in from fucking Canada to do my, to clean my home. I get it, you’re locally owned, we already got that point. Five star rated.

It’s like I’m not, I’m not making fun of them, I’m not attacking them, I’m upset that they’ve failed themselves and somebody’s failed them in their representation. Do you know how many more jobs she could have? Do you know how much more money she could have in her pocket?

This lady better not be broke. Don’t tell me she broke because now I’m feeling even worse because she doesn’t have to be. It’s not hard to start a successful cleaning company and make a lot of money.

Your competition sucks. The whole industry does not know how to market, okay? This would not be difficult to build a successful residential cleaning company.

1:00:37 Especially if you have a niche already. 1:00:38

You got a niche that’s like even the people who care about this niche are even willing to pay you more money. But we’re failing either ourselves or somebody is failing them. And that is upsetting.

Because I do think, I’ve been the entrepreneur who is broke, like struggling, like trying to learn, trying to come up and like struggling to pay, I’ve been in that position. I don’t want anybody to be in that position. It sucks to be in that position.

And it’s not easy, it’s not hard. Once you know what you need to know, it’s not hard to get out of that. It’s not hard to get out of that but you squander it with you know efforts like this five-star rated okay yeah I can I can find that myself great start great service it’s fantastic take our word for it it’s fantastic all right I I didn’t none of this none of this really connected I mean it’s all typical look stock stock family stock what is what is she does anybody picture themselves like, what, what, why was this, why were these chosen?

I don’t know. That’s not a house in Gainesville. You are not going to find that in Gainesville, Georgia.

Okay, let’s talk about why I chose, who I chose and why I chose. Let’s go back here. It’s upsetting, seriously it’s upsetting that all these businesses are like, I know they are, most of them are struggling, I know most of them are struggling and we know that just business statistics like 70% of them are gonna fail.

I got, what is it like 90, isn’t it like over 90% fail in the first five years, something like that. I don’t know. The statistics are out of control, but I can see why.

I can see why. Dog, it is a game of, it’s a competition game. Barriers to entry to start a cleaning company.

Zero barrier to entry. Okay? That means everybody that wants to is going to start one.

And all you need is a fucking mop and some cleaning stuff and you’re off to the races, right? So you’ve got a lot of competition. Everybody’s going to have a website because of fucking Wix and Squarespace and WordPress, democratize publishing, everybody builds your own website.

The person, especially in a niche like green cleaning, you come in, you’ve got a great website that says all the right stuff, you know what people care about, you’ve got a great little funnel going, dude, you are going to rake it. Every one of these people immediately gone. It’s like, it’s like a black belt rolling with white belts, right?

It’s just tapping them out all day long, right? It’s so easy. But we have an epidemic, right?

We have an epidemic that’s inflicted everybody. And what we need to like you know create a higher standard for things. Here we go.

I chose I chose, where did they go? Oh they’re up here. I chose, now I didn’t choose them like I’m all in, I’m all in dog.

I love this company. They’re the one, they’re the one. I didn’t choose them for that reason.

Okay, what I did is it was Atlanta Green Maids and it was Eco Maids, I think those were the two, and I did Atlanta Green Maids reviews and I did Eco Maids reviews, okay, and there’s Atlanta Green Maids and then what I did is this. I clicked here and I clicked here and I started reading. Alright now I noted some one stars.

Okay. Alright. And I’ll ended up making my mind up okay it’s hard to ignore it’s hard to ignore 983 reviews with a 4.

9 star rating hard to ignore that I was reading one of these I don’t remember exactly where it was I don’t I it was a while I was reading lots and lots and lots of reviews because the conclusion I came to none of None of the websites that I looked at connected. None of them made me want to hire them. None of them, zero.

I was not convinced by a single website. And you see why, we just went over why. So I had to take an alternative path.

Because guys, I still need a green cleaning company. Right, I still need one. It’s not like I’m gonna be like, well, I don’t need that anymore.

I still need one. So what I had to do is I had to go to another method of vetting. I wanted one of the websites to stand out and do the job but none of them did so I had to go to another method, a backup method.

Plan B. Plan B was read the Google reviews and I guarantee you a lot of people will do this okay. So I started reading.

It was one review, one bad review that was on EcoMades and I again I don’t remember which one it was but when I read it I was like oh fuck that sounds like I want to make sure that doesn’t happen and it seemed to be related to like a systematic kind of potential issue and I just mmm it I can’t even remember the specifics of like what the feeling I got was all I remember was I just I think I got to cross them off the list that was the vibe that I got like I just think I have to cross them off the list and that left me with this company and I called right to see I didn’t schedule to their website like remember their website was not that good but I called them up and the lady that answered the phone was nice as shit like like really, really good phone customer service slash sales. She was like, you know, she was like, what’s your name? And I was like, Kevin, she’s like, Mr.

Kevin. And like, she’s just charming the shit out of me, dude. Like for real.

And so it made me like comfortable booking with them. Now they’re expensive, okay. They’re probably the more expensive option.

And you know, they did a good job cleaning the first time around. I don’t know if I’m gonna end up keeping them, but that’s how I made the decision. The website, none of the websites did their jobs.

So I had to go to plan B, and then thankfully they were saved by this tremendous amount of reviews, and they were saved by whoever answered the phone, honestly. They were saved by, I still wasn’t convinced when I called them. And I will tell you right now, if I like, if I’m like, alright, I’m gonna call this company.

If they suck on the like, if I just get a bad vibe of like, man, you guys don’t care. Like you just don’t like that happens a lot these days, by the way, go watch Keith Lee videos, go go watch Keith Lee videos on TikTok. I’m gonna tell you right now, there’s a lot of businesses in Atlanta that don’t give a fuck right about anything.

They don’t give anything, customers, their business cleanliness, anything. They just don’t care. People don’t know, they don’t know how to run businesses at all, period.

There’s like an epidemic of bad business in general, okay? So they were saved. They were saved by their review profile and whoever answered that phone.

Whoever answered that phone needs a gold star and a raise. Okay, she saved the day. I was like, this is who I’m signing up with.

I would have gotten off the phone if they gave me the Keith Lee, you know, don’t care about anybody vibe. I would have gotten off the phone. I would not have scheduled.

She saved the day. Okay. So kudos to her, whoever she is that answered the phone.

All right. Let’s see. Let’s go to chat.

We got to go to chat and then we’re going to go to Q&A. What are we doing on time here? All right.

We’re good. I’ll have about 20-30 minutes for Q&A AMA. Let’s go back to camera for a minute.

Did I hit pause? Are we still streaming? I accidentally hit two buttons at once.

Can you still hear me? 1:08:59 Can you still see me?

1:09:01 Okay. 1:09:02

Michael says, two hour story, skip web design, sell Google reviews. So it’s actually not the conclusion because people, if the website does its job they will and you have the reviews on the website and the Google rating on the website they will not go to Google and read and spend time reading they will just convert they will just convert if the website does its job they will just convert okay you obviously want the Google reviews are important the Google my business profile is absolutely important but the website when done properly will convert lots and lots and lots of people. You want to win on the Google review side of things, 100%, you want clients to win on that side of things.

But any website that actually did its job, I would have signed, I never would have gone here and worried about that. I would have just signed up on the website. 1:09:56

Okay, everybody says still streaming, still streaming, 1:09:58 yes, still streaming, good.

Okay, David says the damn images behind the text always the same yes they were friendly on the phone but earlier you said that you didn’t care that their website said that they were friendly because the I want to know they care well first of all the person that’s doing the sales and running the business a lot of time I guess in this kind of business they would that would be the person that shows up. This company, the person answering the phone and talking on the phone and all that is not the person that shows up. And the thing is, when the maids showed up, I talked to them for eight seconds, about eight seconds.

And then, oh, eight seconds when they arrived and eight seconds before they left, okay? So those people, I didn’t really necessarily need to be friendly. I mean, yes, it’s nice that they have a smile on their face and stuff like that.

But when I’m doing the actual business transaction with the business itself, yeah, I do care if they’re friendly and if they actually care about their business and care about customers and stuff like that. Customer service is important. But the other thing too is you expect people to be friendly.

When they’re running a business and they show up at your house, it’s an obvious expectation. So you don’t get bonus points by like stating the obvious. You don’t like, and I’m just saying it’s a wasted opportunity, we can put something more important there.

And by the way, if you say all the right things and then you call in your friendly, they just immediately get that vibe. It’s like, oh that box is checked. You just, it’s not something you have to say on the website.

Really you would trust a good website and not even look at reviews? Yeah, 100%. No, I mean, I look at the reviews on the website.

I expect them that they have the reviews on the website. But yeah, I’m not going to go scrutinize their Google review profile. Because here’s the other thing that I know.

They come out, they do a bad job. I just don’t hire them again. Now I’ll search for somebody else.

Like, they’re not going to come burn my house down, you know, or anything like that so it’s what do I have to lose I’m not buying you know a $3,000 computer or camera like if I’m buying a you know a $3,000 piece of technology I’m gonna go read a bunch of reviews I’m like it’s gonna the barrier to hiring a cleaning company is also low so you know if you say the right things and you can present some social proof people will sign on the dotted line they don’t have a lot to lose, right? It’s like, oh, I lost 200 bucks. Okay, all right, whatever.

Have you done any research into website optimization for Google SGE AI searching? Not yet, not really. Let’s see.

Yeah, as Andre said, anyone can say that they are friendly. Not only will anyone say it they you know it’s like they don’t even have to be accurate in claiming that it’s like there’s a lot of unfriendly businesses that claim they’re friendly so you can’t even believe it when you read it that’s so that’s another reason why it’s just a waste of time and a waste of space it’s only something that people can actually experience then they’ll believe it I need a pointer how would you approach an. .

. 1:13:15 Hold on.

1:13:16 Remove from broadcast keeps hovering over here. 1:13:18

Okay. 1:13:19 How would you approach an academic NGO that needs a membership feature, CRM, conference event management, and a learning management system?

What plugins to use? Man. Well, the CRM is 100% separate.

I do not, I’m not on board with like combining the CRM with WordPress, that kind of thing. The fluent CRM thing, I’m not really super on board with that. Event management and a learning management system.

That right there, the question I would have, the learning management system side of things is, do they actually need some of the learning management features or do they just need like a kind of a course concept? If they don’t need like progress tracking, grading, if they don’t need a lot of those like higher level learning management system features, then a membership plugin is going to be able to do the job. So yeah, there’s just a lot more I would have to know, a lot more that I would have to know.

But I’m very bullish on the Shure brand right now. Like ShureCart, Shure Members, Shure Triggers, all of that. That would probably be the direction I would start trending in.

With Shure Members taking care of the access side of things. A lot of the learning management stuff can just be built with custom fields and ACF kind of stuff. Just depends on like how deep into LMS they need to go.

And that takes care of the membership. The event management system, we’re gonna need a long discussion about, I mean, what level of event management do we need? Do we need recurring events?

What kind of recurring event functionality do we need? Do people need to be able to sign up for events or just notified of events? Do they need to do this while they’re inside their account or can they just look at events on the front end?

Man, you’ve got to get every detail of requirements. A site like that can go south on you real fast. The chance that you’re going to underbid that project because you’re not asking questions to a certain level of detail is very high.

So I would say first things first, you get on calls with them and you, first of all, that’s a project where you sell discovery first and nothing else. You just sell discovery. Here’s what we need to do, Mr.

Client. We got to come in and we got to look at what’s going to be required to do all this stuff. We might even prototype some stuff for you.

Make sure that we’re on the right track, because the thing that we don’t want to do is build this wrong and light a bunch of your money on fire and then have to go backwards or even light a bunch of our money and time on fire and then have to go backwards and then have to redo a bunch of stuff. We’ve got to get all of this structured and planned out from the beginning and we can’t do that for free. So they pay for discovery.

You do all of that legwork in discovery, you build out a couple of prototype situations, okay, and this is where Figma comes in really, really, really handy. Just wireframing stuff out, simple, simple prototype stuff, to make sure everybody’s on the same page, and then when they green light all of that, now you know how to actually scope the project. Now you know what’s actually going to be necessary.

And by the way, I’d be installing like sure members and I’d be installing a Event system plug-in I just be set up set up. Let’s set up one event Let’s see if it does the things they needed to do let’s set up one little course kind of concept and see if just Structurally if it’s going to do what they need to do and let’s show them that and let’s get them to agree Yeah, that does what we needed to do. Okay good.

Now. We’re all comfortable. We’re on the same page Here’s what’s going to cost to build out the whole thing.

That’s how you take on a project like that. So and by the way I will say if you propose that because it’s an NGO right? Did they do my next question would did they do an RFP?

Is that how you came across this? Are you responding to an RFP or did this company or this organization actually contact you? Because that matters.

If they did an RFP, they’re gonna get a shitload of proposals. And they’re gonna get full proposals for this thing. And I will tell you right now, if you come in and you’re like, you get on a call with them, which a lot of people responding to RFPs don’t even do, you get on a call with them and you just tell them flat out, look, you’re gonna get a lot of proposals.

I’ll tell you right now, there is no way any of those people know exactly what you need or exactly how much it’s going to cost. What I would like to do is I would like to do a discovery phase where I prototype some of these things for you and I map everything out and we get on the same page and we make sure that everything is going to be done the way that you want it to be done and that’s all I want to do right now and then I will give you a proposal for the rest of it once we do that. But what I can do is I can guarantee that that proposal is going to be accurate.

It’s not going to be based on theories and, you know, fairy tales and your RFP. It’s going to be based on reality and it’s going to be accurate and we’re going to be able to do the work at that point. And we’re going to be confident.

And if for some reason we feel like we can’t take on this project, we’ll let you know. And all the work that we’ve done in discovery, we’ll hand over to you and you can give this to the next agency. And you, that’s a, first of all, it’s an easier decision for them to make because the cost, the upfront cost is significantly lower.

And number two, most companies will be like, that seems like that’s what needs to be done. You’re right, how can all these people be giving proposals? They haven’t even talked to us on the phone yet.

Right, it’s like, man, so you can actually beat out a ton of competitors and again what does this go back to? Take a different approach than what everybody else is taking. Just come in and say hey logically it would make more sense to do it this way and it’s going to cost you less up front and we’re going to be sure to cross our t’s and dot our i’s so when we do a proposal we’re actually going to know that it has the right things in it at the right price.

They’re going to be like yeah I mean who can argue with that? Nobody can really argue with that. So you get green lights a lot faster.

As flip back says, yes, RFP equals request for a proposal. Yeah, I did the discovery process, but they are still confused about what they actually need. 1:19:56

Got it. 1:19:57 Thank you for a feedback.

Well, if you’ve done the discovery process, and this is the thing, I mean I wasn’t in it, I wasn’t involved in the conversations or the discovery process, but if they’re still confused after discovery, then I would suggest that maybe discovery, you know, needs to be done, something wasn’t done in discovery. Questions are still left unanswered. So we need answers to those questions, bottom line.

But there could be another reason why they’re confused and we need to take a different route if there is another reason why they’re confused. So I just need to know more about the project and what’s going on. What is the best way to integrate positive Google My Business comments on the website?

I put the text, date, name, source, Google Maps, ideas. Yeah I think I’m a fan of just pulling the best reviews manually and putting them in a custom post type and then querying them onto the site. I use bi-directional relationships.

So if we have multi-service company, we have reviews bi-directionally related to service one, bi-directionally related to service two, then we can have a whole reviews page if we want to that queries all of them. And we just put our best foot forward by showing handpicking the best reviews. And then we link back to our Google My Business profile for anybody who wants to go there and check it out and yada yada yada that’s what we do for clients right so and that that works really really really well I’m also a huge fan of if you can get video reviews that’s even better yeah so that’s all I do I know people try to auto pull them from and they use plugins and you know not a huge fan of that but do you I really don’t think there’s not necessarily a you know super wrong way to go about that.

Like not having them it would be wrong, but if you want to use a plug-in to pull them in that’s up to you. When using ACSS text balancing for headings how can you override the effect for a single instance? We answered that question on yesterday’s ACSS live stream but I’ll just quickly answer it again right here because it’s an easy question to answer.

We can get rid of these. All right let’s go in here. I remembered.

Don’t freak out. Don’t freak out. Don’t freak out.

I remembered. I remembered. Okay we’re gonna go with a heading website ipsum.

Grab this nice long heading right here. Let’s make it an H1. Okay, let’s go back.

Let’s actually look at this on the front end and we’ll go to the admin, automatic CSS, spacing. Now typography right here. Okay, so here’s automatically balanced headings.

I’m gonna open, duplicate this. We have two versions of our heading right here. I’m going to go ahead and activate automatically balanced headings.

I’m going to save. I’m going to refresh one of the options. There’s the old unbalanced heading.

There’s the new balanced heading. This uses TextWrap Balance, which is very heavy handed as I mentioned yesterday. TextWrap Pretty is coming.

It’s not supported yet. But TextWrap Pretty will just deal with orphans. It won’t actually balance the lines of text, which is what TextWrap Balance does.

We’re gonna switch from TextWrap Balance to TextWrap Pretty, because what happens is people will say, well, that balanced it too much. I just wanted to get rid of the orphans. I didn’t want to balance it that much.

So if you want to have this text, this balancing on, it’s automatic balancing right but you have an instance like here let me refresh the builder where it’s balancing too much it’s too heavy-handed so you want to unbalance it keyword you want to unbalance it right so you go in and you type unbalance and it unbalances just that one and then you say well Kevin I still have an orphan I don’t want the orphan. Okay, so you come in to where the orphan is and you put an ampersand, non-breaking space. And it’s gonna conjoin those two words together and then you’re not gonna have an orphan.

Another thing you can do is you can create your own, and maybe I’m gonna create a class for this. I don’t know how often it would be used. Your website copy, what did that say?

Once your website copy is ready. I think it said something like that. So you can put a span around them and then if your span had a class like no orphan or something, I don’t know, we’d have to find a good name for that class.

You can use white space no wrap on that and then it’s gonna force those two words to be joined together and you’re gonna eliminate the orphan that way. There’s no programmatic way to just eliminate orphans. So you either have to use TexRat Balance or you have to use these two methods right here that I just showed you until TexRat Pretty is available and supported.

And then we’ll be able to just programmatically get rid of orphans. Okay, let’s see. How much are you charging for discovery?

So it varies on a case by case basis. If it’s traditional discovery, which in the inner circle, I literally just, let’s pull that up. I’ve got a bunch of discovery related videos in the inner circle.

So most of it’s under SEO discovery, and then let’s see agency training. There’s a discovery section. I just did a discovery deliverables overview where I show real discovery deliverables for a sample client.

This was more a textbook traditional kind of discovery deliverables process. The offer messaging masterclass is part of deliverables. That’s how we identify what our copy and messaging is going to be.

This is a whole master class with a workbook. Like this is a game changer right here for doing business. And you can sell this.

You can sell this one thing. This one thing right here you can sell for minimum $1,000. Every single project over and over and over again.

Money in your pocket. Money in your bank. Just follow this training.

Do it with every client. Money in the bank, okay? Not only money in the bank directly but money in the bank because you’re going to end up building a site that the copy and messaging is on point and not nonsense like we saw in all of our examples today.

SEO discovery down here is important and so I just go through all of that I might be doing more follow-up videos on specific aspects of these deliverables that we put in but there’s like textbook discovery that could be usually in the neighborhood of $1,250 to $3,500. Then there’s involved discovery, where we’re actually prototyping stuff, like with the NGO type client, we know the budget’s probably gonna be somewhere, you know, 50,000 to $100,000, somewhere in that range. Now we’re doing discovery that could be 10 grand, right?

So it really depends on the project and the client, but that’s kind of, this is the, gives you the start. Really good stuff in there for you. Let’s see, any tips for getting Google reviews for a business that’s difficult to get reviews for?

Getting reviews for therapy is quite difficult, and a few of our locations have less than five reviews. Great question, fantastic question, and this is what I say, sometimes, either the people aren’t gonna look at the reviews, or it’s very hard to get the reviews like in this case It’s a privacy situation, right? same thing with like Health a lot of times like weight loss a lot of people don’t want to be in photos, you know Especially their befores they don’t they don’t necessarily want to share those.

There’s just some some industries It’s harder to get reviews in so you have to be better with your copy You have to be better with your offer. You have to be better with your guarantee. You have to be better in a lot of other areas.

So I wouldn’t say, it’s not necessarily like bang your head against the wall and try to do the impossible, which is getting people to give a public review that you fixed their, you know, their bipolar situation. A lot of people, yeah, they just don’t want people to know that they’re bipolar. So they’re just not going to give the reviews.

So don’t bang your head against the wall trying to get the impossible. Do better in other areas. The copy’s gotta be on Pointmore.

Your, the content you put out into the world, like as a therapist, if that therapist, much better time spent for that therapist to be on YouTube, right? Or to be on TikTok. Or to be like, putting themselves out there, building a personal brand and using that to draw.

Because then people don’t need reviews. Dog, I’ve listened to you for the last three months. I just love you and what you say and everything you teach, I want to buy into that.

You don’t need reviews at that point. So you got to do better in other areas if the reviews are hard to come by. If you sign on a client that has bad review profile, man, you got to do way better in other areas.

That’s hard. It’s hard to beat, right? Because a lot of people do check reviews.

So Yeah, you you got to do a really good in other areas and then you have to dig into why they have bad reviews Get those fundamental business problems solved for them and then start to help, you know with reputation management That becomes like a reputation management game at that point, but that all goes into marketing and and trust me Here’s here’s the thing and this is why I say people who are in web design, you are not just in web design. When you are hired to build, all get on the same page, a website is the central marketing hub for a business on the internet. That’s what it is.

That’s the purpose that it serves. It’s supposed to pull new people in, that’s organic. It’s supposed to convince people that arrive, that’s conversion.

It’s supposed to do a lot of things. There are things in the business that exist outside of that website though, as we know, the person who answers the phone, the people who respond to the emails. Like there’s a whole part of the funnel that exists outside of the website.

The job that is actually done, when the cleaning crew arrives, are they actually good at cleaning the house? Everything. You get hired, you as the consultant need to look at everything.

Best believe you hire me to do your website if you’re a cleaning company, one of those cleaning companies, and I go read reviews and people are like they’re missing stuff, they don’t clean well, they don’t. First thing we’re talking about because what I also know is I can do my job 100% and I can even get you more clients but I actually don’t want to get you more clients who are going to have a bad experience. That’s not the role that I want to play.

And ultimately, I want to help your company grow and do better, and I treat every client like it’s my own company. It’s like, dog, we’ve got to clean these things up. Because what I also know is that they will blame you no matter what.

Let’s say you do your job and you get them leads. We’ve all had this experience. Most of us who have done any time in this industry, you get people leads and their phone person sucks.

And you know what? They, the phone person, their fucking cousin, you know, and it’s like, they’re not going to be like, yeah, you’re right, our phone person sucks. You know, they’re gonna be like, no, you’re getting me bad leads.

And you go back, no, I’ve, I’ve heard him on the phone. I’m listening to the emails that come back, like the phone person sucks. No, no, no, don’t talk about my cousin like that, right?

We don’t think you’re getting us good leads. And then they fire you. And so you have to look at all of these different areas and help them and you have to make sure the whole funnel is a well-oiled machine.

Even though you were brought on just to do the website thing you really do need to be a consultant across the entire funnel. And find ways to communicate with the client to where that you know these light bulbs go off in their head that all this stuff is connected together all this stuff is connected together any weak link that’s money out the door right we’ve got to fix all the leaks I know you hired me for this but we got to fix all the leaks so that’s the way I approach projects and most clients that’s how you get them to be like thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you. Like that you can you can bring dramatic improvement to their entire company.

They thought they were just hiring a web designer but what they got was somebody who actually improved their entire business dramatically and like set them on a new path in a lot of ways. Any one of those businesses we just looked at my gosh we could set them on an entirely new path. Just with some consulting calls and some tweaks.

That’s the power that we have in our fingertips and in our mouths. And that’s why I advocate for like, hey, let’s know our shit. Let’s play to a higher standard.

And let’s help more people. That’s the ability that we have. We’re not just pushing pixels around the internet.

There are real people, real businesses with real lives attached to the work that we do. And that’s why I get upset when some people are like, ah standards don’t matter, this doesn’t matter, do whatever you want, use whatever builder you want, anybody can build a website, democratize the internet, da da da da da. Like no, because we’re not actually helping people.

We’re actually doing them a disservice. Your shitty builder with your shitty standards and your shitty practices and your shitty copy and your shitty images are building a shitty business for that person to go live a shitty life because none of it worked. That’s at the end of the day it actually has a really bad impact on real human beings around the planet if we want to if we want to get to the bottom line.

So that’s why I don’t accept it. That’s why I say no no our industry is important and we deserve to have standards and we deserve to have everybody on the same page playing to higher standards. We don’t all have to a hundred percent agree on what the standard like the intricacies okay for example maintainability of a website talk about it all the time.

I feel that classes give you the ultimate and maintainability if somebody comes along and invents a new system For maintaining for maintaining a website if you can just answer the questions of like oh This is how I globally control things so that this is fully maintainable, but it’s not the way I do it Fucking fine more power to you right, but what we can’t do is say maintainability is not important Accessibility is not important clean code is not important that it you can’t just make shit up, okay. Clearly it is, but you’re saying it’s not. I can’t get on the same page with that.

That’s what pisses me off. Because again, this does come back to real people. This is why we have an epidemic of bad websites.

Bad copy, bad images, bad conversion, bad revenue, failing businesses, miserable lives. There are real people impacted by this stuff. Okay, Nicholas says, oh we are live, always live my friends.

I gotta get Nicholas on the channel at some point. Nicholas has a channel, you guys should go. Nicholas, very talented guy, like I love his work, you know, I love his eye for design.

He’s in the inner circle. I believe he’s an ACSS user, but just, you know, he’s got his own channel. I know he’s, he just had a baby, I think.

So, you know, congratulations to Nicholas. So he’s been, you know, torn between the two worlds. I know how that goes for sure been there done that but definitely you know Nicholas right here I’ll put his thing back up on the screen he has a channel go subscribe good guy does good work all right um let’s see you see a lot of sites that animate the whole website with scroll animations what is your general opinion on animations with JS libraries.

Do you think this is good or bad for conversions? I think that animation needs to be very subtle. I think that most animation that we see online is a detriment to user experience, is an annoyance to visitors, is not accessible.

It’s a lot of problems, a lot of problems. And here’s what’s hilarious, hilarious. You know, we talk about everything on WDD Live and I’m like, I wish we could get to the DOM on a lot of these sites.

See, if I get to the DOM, I started out, you know, looking at the DOM a lot, right? But what it’s become is a trend of, can I even get to the DOM? Because if I run into like 800 red flags before I even get to the, I don’t even care about the DOM anymore.

You didn’t do all the other things correctly. And what’s hilarious to me is that like, and this is what you see kind of across the industry in a lot of ways, shiny object syndrome with, hey, I saw this site was animated and that looks super cool to me. So let’s make sure we do the animation thing.

And you know what they haven’t done? The general UI, the copy, the messaging, the marketing, all the important stuff, not done, but we checked that fucking animations box didn’t we? It’s useless.

Show me a website where you can literally pull up data and be like before animations, after animations. Look at that conversion rate difference my friends. Look at all that money we’re making from those cute animations.

Never seen it, never seen it. Here’s a public call, give me the data, show me the two identical sites, show me the split traffic, send 10,000 visitors to each one, I want to see the difference in conversion. And if you can’t show me an improvement in conversion from animation, why in the world would I sell that to my client, why in the world, because it’s just extra, it’s just what, so I can feel good, like oh we made a fancy site, someone give me an award Someone pat me on the back It’s got to help the client because you know what the client does have to pay for it, and that’s just not cheap Animation is not cheap if you do it, right So yeah, it’s why would I ask them to spend that money if I can’t show them an ROI for it?

I’ve never seen data that shows that and until I do I really don’t care about animation. 1:38:50 Let’s see.

1:38:53 Are we still considered designers if we pass the design aspect of the project off to a designer while we focus on the development aspects? I’ve heard you use these terms interchangeably.

I wish we had better terms. I use web designer because that’s the terms that our clients use. Our clients look for web designers.

On a smaller scale level, they look for web developers. But for the most part, people consider this whole industry to be the web design industry. I have to use their language, that’s the language I use.

But I make a distinction between a web designer and a web developer. Those are two clearly different areas of expertise. For sure, there’s a difference There’s a difference between UI and UX a lot of people still don’t understand that okay But clients don’t know this clients don’t know what UI and UX is clients don’t know about development They just everybody’s a web designer to them And so in a way it helps to just use the words that they’re familiar with and then once they’re in the door We educate them on the differences.

Your interview with Josh Hall convinced me to go from Divi to Bricks and Frames. What do you suggest for someone new to set prices for web design and digital marketing services? Really good question.

I mean the point here is not to sell the inner circle, but these answers are all given, like literally handed to you on a silver platter in the inner circle. The whole price list, everything is given to you. The proposal outline, the SOW outline, literally everything, you just piece it up.

And then what we do in the inner circle is make sure you know your shit so you actually do good work. So that’s kind of the whole gist, right? Fulfilling our mission of let’s stop making bad websites for clients.

Let’s end the epidemic, let’s socially distance ourselves. Two more weeks to flatten the curve guys. Okay so, it’s hard to answer.

It’s what kind of clients are you going to go after? Are you going to niche down? How good is your work?

How much experience do you really have? That is going to kind of determine. I will say you need to set a minimum.

I will say that almost everybody’s entry level minimum is way too low. But I need more details on your situation specifically to really give you an answer. But literally like a 30 minute phone call, I would ask you a bunch of questions and then I would say this needs to be your minimum, this needs to be the range you’re shooting for on the next five projects that you do.

And then we’ll talk from there once that’s happened. So but it says I just need more background info. We created a website for a customer now we realize that we could have done a better job for the client.

It may be as simple as replacing buttons, yeah. If it’s a situation of, here’s an example. If I get the client to pay for copy, and we put copy on a website, and then we watch the analytics, and we watch the behavior of visitors, and it starts to become clear to us, we’re pretty sure it’s not a design problem.

We’re pretty sure it’s not a UX problem. We’re pretty sure this offer is banging. Maybe they’re using this offer somewhere else and it’s working really well.

And it’s starting to boil down to like, man, that copy is just not landing for them. Then yeah, I’m rewriting the copy for free or having the copy rewritten for them. If they provided the copy and it comes down to the copy is not landing into what we’ve already had the conversation many times on this on this channel don’t let clients write their own copy okay that should be pretty clear by now but some you know want to be hard-headed and insist and whatever but it comes down to like now this is the copy problem now we’re not I mean we’re not writing copy for them for free yeah it’s there is a fine line in there somewhere but if you feel like you know you’ve done them a disservice and it needs to be fixed, then just fix it.

Just, yes, just grit your teeth and fix it. 1:43:19 I’m targeting local service businesses in my area.

1:43:22 I built a website for a church, $500, and I’m currently working on my own and I’m building a coaching site for my sister. Okay, oh, this was the follow-up.

$500 is way too cheap. 100%. So local businesses built a website for a church.

I’m currently working on my own and I’m building a coaching site for my sister. 1:43:45 If, here’s the thing,

1:43:47 would I charge a client $500 to do a website? No.

What I would do is I would do the site for them for free. Now, I would not look for somebody who wants a free website but I would, especially if it’s like maybe my local church, I’m like, hey, let me, and here’s what I would do. I would tell them, I’d be like, look, you’ve got to be honest with people.

You got to say, look, this is what I want to do, and I think that I’m actually getting good at it. I’ve been practicing, and I need a real project, right? And so what I’m going to do is I’m going to build a replacement website for you.

Let’s say we’re talking to the church. I’m gonna build a replacement website for you. And I’m gonna do this 100% for free.

And then I would like your feedback on it. And if you decide that this is better than what you already have, I’m happy to launch this for you absolutely free. And I just wanna put it in my portfolio.

And I just need the experience, right? I’m not even charging them $500. I’m just doing it.

It’s charity, like let’s gift it to them right And assuming that they and I would also tell them by the way, I would say look, you know, I’m not charging you I don’t want you to just take this because it’s free I want you to give me honest feedback and and if you’re willing I want you to go through the process with me as if You’re a real client. Like I’ll bring you into this thing called base camp my project management software We’ll do everything in there Just like you’re a real client paying money And I want you to give me feedback on the whole process. And I want you to give me feedback on the end result of the website.

And if you like it, I’ll launch it for you for free. Now, what I can’t do is I can’t host it for you for free. So if you love it, and you want me to continue managing it for you, it’s gonna be $99 a month.

Pay me the website management fee, and we’ll go forward in that fashion. Now, if you wanna host it yourself and manage it yourself, I guess that’s up to you. But if you want me to do it then $99 a month is would cover that.

And now you have your first client on a recurring fee on a monthly management fee you have something to add to your portfolio you got real-world project expertise okay or experience will say it’s not expertise yet but it’s experience and then you move on to the next person. Now the first person you decide to charge you got to charge them a fair price like like $500 is not fair. It’s overly fair to them, it’s not fair to you.

That’s you’re still doing charity. You’re going to do charity work, just make it charity. Okay, if you’re going to charge them, then charge them.

So at that point, I would say, you know, even if it’s, let’s say it’s a five page brochure website, $2,500 minimum, like, charge them, charge them. And you want to do it to to vet them a little bit like you don’t want cheap clients Like I’ve had this I’ve done this rant many times on the channel before Anybody who would agree to pay $500 for a website is immediately suspect as a client like that that is a red flag in itself That’s why I say I would never charge it. I would never charge $500 because anybody that says yes is a red flag So yeah, I would just give it to them for free or charge them an actual legit fee.

That’s the camp I’m in. I wouldn’t do the middle ground thing. 1:46:54

I got converted by the same Josh Hall episode, 1:46:57 been deep diving gears content and learning better.

Dev practice has been a great ride. Glad to hear that. Yeah.

So I would do a couple, once you’re comfortable, like, okay, I’ve done a few websites now I can manage a real project. I can provide value for a client. I can give them a better site than what they currently have.

Immediately go to a legit fee. 1:47:20 Which I think in our industry,

1:47:22 my minimum is around 6,000, 6,500 right now. That’s for a one-page website.

And then up from there. And so I think the idea of doing anything for less than $1,000 is like, no, that’s a no-fly zone like none of us should be doing that and if you’re in that range dog just do shit for free stop charging these little tiny amounts you know like put your think about think about any other occupation do you know there’s there’s this can we just revisit the real world for a moment like 98% of people coming out of high school, I don’t know what the actual percentage is, but I feel like that’s probably close to accurate, I don’t know, goes to some sort of next level education, whether it be a trade school or college, university, whatever, or an internship or an apprentice thing, or they teach themselves, whatever. But the bottom line is, they’re spending lots of time learning because nobody’s born with all these marketable skills, right?

So they’re either spending a shitload of time learning or they’re paying a shitload of money to go somewhere and get a piece of paper that says that they’re economically viable. That’s a degree. I feel like degrees are worthless, light them on fire, whatever.

I’ve said many times, one of my best quotes, if I ever get to a point in life where I need a degree, I’ll hire someone that has one. That’s my favorite quote. So let’s continue moving forward with this.

You have the opportunity to just do a little bit of free work, get a little bit of projects in your portfolio. What is the difference between that and going to university for four years and spending $120,000 like these insane children are doing, right? That’s insane to me coming out with the same marketable skills that everybody else has.

And they’re five years behind the market, by the way, once they graduate, they’re five years behind the market. So that’s just insane to me. If you want to be a doctor or a lawyer and it’s an absolute must, then I understand it.

Anything else, nah, dog, no. My daughter’s not getting a social services degree. Fuck that, no.

You’re not going for that. So just think about all the money and time people are wasting going the traditional path, and then there’s people balking when I say you should do your first three websites for free. Oh, we should do free work, like how else you gonna learn?

How else you gonna learn? At least you’re not paying the person to do the sites, like that’s what people do when they go to college, like hey dog here’s some money teach me some things that I can’t really use in the real world. So I think it’s a better path, you know three free websites and then just start charging legit money after that.

Easy, easy, easy. I found it difficult to find good web designers, someone who can prioritize UX, maintain the HTML structure of frames, keep one eye towards CRO, any tips, your sites look good. So, you, first it’s you, Bryn, right, what’s your wheelhouse?

If your wheelhouse is CRO and I’m a marketer, got a marketer hat on, then you keep your eye on CRO, you keep your eye on copy, you keep your eye on that stuff that actually converts. And then you need a good designer who just does good design. My designers, I actually don’t care if my designer knows anything about UX.

It’s nice if they do. I need people who are good at art. I need people who are good at just understanding balance and layout and things like that.

Because I typically, for all of our clients, determine the user experience and the flow. I do the wireframing. So that’s my process.

My process is I do the discovery, I do the wireframing. Then I take the wireframes and I plop them on a designer’s desk and I go, here’s their brand, make them look pretty. And they do the design job.

And then it comes back and that goes to a developer. And the developer is, I make sure the developer obviously is like, as good as we can get an ongoing education on semantic HTML and accessibility and all the stuff that I talk about. But really once I do the discovery and the UX, it’s out of my hands, it’s out of my hands at that point.

So I would say look at your, and that’s because my wheelhouse is user experience and copy and marketing. Like my wheelhouse is like, I know everybody knows me for dev because I’ve worked my ass off to like study, because I actually really, really enjoy that aspect of it. And I like building my own sites, right?

But like my wheelhouse is marketing. I just am really good at dev because I’ve spent so much time studying it and doing it and practicing it and teaching it. But yeah, I hand off the dev for almost all of our client projects.

I don’t do the dev. So it’s knowing your wheelhouse and then putting yourself in the right seat on the bus and then getting a designer and putting them in the right seat on the bus and then getting a, then if you need like a PPC person, get a PPC person, put them on the right seat on the bus. Get people who are specialists in their areas, put them on the right seat on the bus.

Don’t, it’s very hard to find unicorns. You know, the idea that you’re going to hire a designer who’s just like an expert at UX copy and SEO and and everything else. Unicorns are very few and far between and they tend to be very expensive.

They tend to be running their own businesses. So they’re hard to they’re hard to find. Just find people that they have their own wheelhouse and you put them in the right seat on the bus.

I I failed at school in a big way but found web work after many jobs and learned from books. Yes books, yeah books, the internet. I mean I can’t tell you how many books I’ve read.

When I was in my early phase, my early stages of entrepreneurship, we were talking like 17, 16, somewhere around that age. I was already starting businesses, thinking about businesses, figuring out how to market those businesses. I was reading three books a month, three books on sales, customer service, entrepreneurship, business, marketing, advertising, everything I could get my hands on.

Just reading, reading. That was my college, that was my university. I went to a college, I walked in, and I sat in one class, and I was like, this is fucking high school all over again.

And then I was like, I started looking around and I’m like, man, what’s going on here? I didn’t see any like value for me, for what I wanted to do in the real world. And so I walked right back out.

Now I went for like a year and a half, okay? I didn’t walk right back out. I went for like a year and a half, but I was like, man, fuck this.

Like I’m not doing this thing. And what I found in that experience is, you know, the year and a half I spent there was like a year and a half of time I should have been in the market, doing work, interacting and learning in the real world. That’s that was wasted time.

I should I want that year and a half back. Actually, I might actually email them I need that I need that year and a half back. Okay.

That’s kind of the gist, and it’s the gist for so many people. If you are not going for a specialty that requires a degree, your ass does not belong in a university. I’ll tell you that right now.

Especially at the prices they charge them. They are raking people over the cult. I would dare say it’s a scam at this point.

And shame on all the teachers, I’m sorry teachers, but shame on all the teachers that are just you know steering mobs of children into a hundred starting off your life with $80,000 in debt and I feel for you I’m not if you if you that happened to you hey kids are easy to influence I’m sorry that happened to you okay it’s not a knock on you it’s a knock on the people who led you into that situation which damn now I’m probably insulting your parents and everybody else around you but I just this is I gotta tell it like it is like I man adults need to stop hurting mobs of children into $80,000 in debt my children are going to start life with likely you know hundreds of thousands of dollars in investment accounts right because they actually work in my business and they actually are learning the stuff alongside me and there’s already IRA situations going on and so my goal, because I’m using the system as much as we possibly can, you know, there’s a way for your kids to start out with like a Roth IRA where non-tax money goes into a Roth IRA and then grows tax-free for them when they get to a certain age they can even use it as a down payment on their first home. This is possible from the age of like eight, from the age of eight, okay. This is all set up in the US, right.

A lot of people don’t know about this stuff but I want my kids to start out adulthood with marketable skills, entrepreneurship, knowing how to sell stuff, knowing how to market stuff, knowing how to build stuff, and then a bunch of money. That’s what I don’t want them to start out in debt, learning skills that are five years behind the market. What kind of plan is this?

This is not a plan I want to buy into. So I think we can lead kids better too, especially kids that are interested in being entrepreneurs. misled by going straight to university.

All right, let’s see. Good, good, good. All right, chat looks good.

I got to jump out in just a minute here. Can you give us a list of your highest book recommendations? I just did that in the inner circle the other day.

I don’t know what thread it is. Somebody asked me the exact same question, and I didn’t really spend a ton of time doing it, but off the top of my head, I rattled a bunch of examples. 1:57:44

That is a thread in there. 1:57:45 Where’s a good place to find others to hire?

I mean, there is a job board in the inner circle. And the thing is, I’ve hired my whole team out of the inner circle, that’s why I say that. Because it’s a bonus to have people, like you’re hiring people that are literally in the process of studying best practices and making themselves better.

So the chance of getting someone good, you have a higher percentage chance. It’s not foolproof, obviously. And I advocate, I tell people all the time, be honest about your skills.

Be honest about your skills. People can still get value out of an entry-level developer or an entry-level designer, but be honest about your skills. But there are some really good people in there as well.

This will be the last question, then I got to go. How do you convince a client who you worked with that you priced yourself lower to pay you more for the follow phase or jobs, version 2 going from a $3,000 site to a $10,000 site. I would just be honest with them like here’s we underpriced it, here’s how we underpriced it, here’s why we underpriced it, take all the blame and say I cannot afford to do this work at the same rates I will go out of business and I won’t do you any good when I’m out of business.

So here’s the new rates if you can’t afford these for whatever reason or you want to find somebody cheaper I a thousand percent understand and again I apologize my fault for for under bidding this in the first place but this is the reality of my situation and you just literally just tell them that and they’re free to walk and if they walk they walk but a lot of people if they like you and you do good work they’ll be like I understand. Now what they might come back with is that maybe I don’t want to go to 10,000 but would you do it for 8,000? Then you’re going to be in a situation where you have to like are you are you going to agree to that and if you’re comfortable with that and maybe you want to take it as a knock just be like all right well I deserve that right I deserve losing that extra two grand because of the mistake I made initially but I like you as a client and I’m willing to do that.

So you take the hit and you say yes, or you don’t take the hit and you don’t say yes, it’s completely up to you. But that’s how I would approach it. I think just being honest with clients is the best way to do it.

2:00:14 All right, I gotta run. I was gonna give you guys a heads up

2:00:17 on a live stream that we’re doing. 2:00:19

We have the Frames live stream tomorrow. We’ve got a guest, a special guest live stream. I probably shouldn’t announce who it is yet because it’s not 100% confirmed, but it will be a really, really, really fantastic discussion.

Really, it’s a creator of a really great tool. I’m trying not to give away too many details, but it is another software developer. But once I get it 100% in the books, I’ll announce it.

It might be tonight. I still haven’t heard back. We’re on completely opposite time zones.

It was initially for tonight, but it hasn’t been confirmed yet. There was some sickness stuff going on. There was some family stuff going on.

As soon as it’s confirmed, I’ll put it out there. So be on the lookout. All right, guys.

I love you. Thank you for your support. Thank you for being here.

And I’ll be back again very soon. 2:01:14 here and I’ll be back again very soon.

here and I’ll be back again very soon. Cheers.