4 – Cheap World Class Websites

Cheap Websites

[00:00:09] Welcome to Screw the Commute. The entrepreneurial podcast dedicated to getting you out of the car and into the money, with your host, lifelong entrepreneur and multimillionaire, Tom Antion.

[00:00:26] Well welcome everybody to Episode 4 of screw the commute podcast. This is one of our special weekly business training sessions where I give you insights guaranteed to help you either start a business or run the one you have more effectively. Right now I'm doing one training session a week and two entrepreneur interviews. But keep in touch with screwthecommute.com if we change that schedule. All right. Make sure you Subscribe when you're over there too and please leave a review. All right our sponsor this week is me again the Tom Antion internet marketing retreat and joint venture program where myself and my staff work with you for a year to either get you started in an Internet business or to use the Internet to take your existing business to the next level. I'm going to tell you more about that later and the details will be at greatinternetmarketingtraining.com and that will also be in the show notes at screwthecommute.com. All right let's get into today's training. I want you to make sure you listen to Episode 1 on keywords because the things you do here with websites rely heavily on keywords so make sure you go back and listen episode 1 and implement them into your website. I've been teaching people to get control of their own website since around 1997 when Microsoft front page came out making it easy for regular people to make HTML websites. That program went through several updates over the years but now the gold standard is WordPress. Now, why should you bother?

[00:02:19] I'm sure you're wondering about this why should you bother with this when there are plenty of Web designers out there. Well let me tell you some of the benefits to your business. One is speed to market.

[00:02:29] See when you are able to add things to your Web site or even create websites in a matter of days or you can add things in a matter of minutes. You have no delays. This is a fast paced society if you want to make money you need to take opportunities when they come and quickly. I mean when you're dealing with a web designer in most cases you've got a couple of weeks just to fix a typo. All right that's just not acceptable in today's fast paced environment. And I'll tell you a story about when on the radio I get called quite frequently because I'm known as the pretty good guest because somebody canceled. So when I get called at the last minute I can put up a Web page in no time at all with their call letters on it and send people from the radio show to a specific page. Now if you get called at the last minute and depended on a web designer you couldn't do that in a million years. So that's just one little benefits fast.

[00:03:34] Next thing is cheap. You're talking about maybe from free to about a hundred dollars for a world class Web site.

[00:03:43] All right. Now this is not pie in the sky. This is the way we do it all the time. I'm going to give you the method a little later.

[00:03:51] And if you want a membership site which has a lot of potential for recurring revenue we're talking maybe maximum 300 dollars where if you went to a regular professional firm for either one of these you're probably talking thirty five hundred fifty five hundred maybe ten grand for a membership site and months until they got it ready for you. So that's just not acceptable and it's ridiculous if you really want to make money in your business. Now another big benefit is you can try ideas that would be too risky if you had to pay full price thousands for Web site. Give you an example. Two examples in fact. Back in 2002 I came out with a eulogy e-book and other words that taught people how to write eulogies. The website cost me fifteen dollars. And that site and that ebook has brought in forty two thousand dollars a year. It did at the time for nine years straight nine years straight 42000 dollars a year. But guess what. I would have never in a million years and I wouldn't have advised you either to even try it. If the Web site was three four or five thousand dollars much too risky. Same thing with my wedding books I'd wedding speech book How to do wedding speech and how to do a wedding toast. Fifteen dollars for each website they brought in seventy two thousand dollars a year for nine years straight. Again I would have never ever tried it. If it was thousands of dollars for a Web site.

[00:05:32] All right. Here's the basic method you've got to get a domain name and there's some things you really need to know about that and can really mess you up if you didn't know and many of you don't know this.

[00:05:44] When you get a domain name you must be and that's what the capital M U S T you must be the registrant.

[00:05:53] These are specific terms with regard to this industry. You must be the registrant and the administrative contact. Those are two terms that are very specific to domain names. You must be the registrant and the administrative contact. It's okay to have your tech person if you have one as the technical contact. That's perfectly acceptable but here's the problem. You turn everything over. You put your head in the sand. Go ahead get the domain name for me. While many web designers and some are unscrupulous and some just don't know any better. Go buy it on your behalf and they end up being the registrant oh my god this is about as bad as it gets. Because if you have a falling out with that person. Very common. If that person disappears off the face of the earth even more common. Or they die or something or whatever. Guess who owns the website. They do not you and it could cost you thousands and thousands of dollars in legal fees and ICANN fees to get it back. So make sure you're the registrant. If you already have a domain name and somebody bought it for you how do you find out what's going on? Well you do what's called a whois Look-Up. So who is like W H O I S. And then I use a service at .SC so it's whois.sc.

[00:07:27] This will be in the show notes. It'll tell you who's the registrant who's the administrative contact who's the actual technical contact and I'll give you all of that right there. It's all public knowledge unless you have made your site private. And in that case you don't even know unless that person tells you then hopefully they're truthful with you.

[00:07:51] So you gotta make sure you get the registrant or you could be in deep doodoo if anything happens at all. You don't own your website. All right. Another thing people don't know frequently is that you can buy your domain name one place and host your site somewhere else. So this is pretty common to us that are in the business but sometimes business owners just don't know that. Now it is a good idea to keep your domain names in one place because if you have them all over the place and then you miss a notice from one of the companies and just kind of forget about it because you've got an outlier domain at some other place, well it might expire and it's gone and you've got to jump through hoops to get it back. If you can or it's just gone so try to keep your domain names in one place if you can. But you should host your site in multiple locations. If you have more than one Web site of course if you have just one site there's no worry there. But when you have multiple websites you hosted an even different parts of the country because if that if you have them all in one place because somebody gives you a bargain and it's all in one for fifteen dollars a month.

[00:09:04] Well guess what. When I'm not going to say if when that hosting service gets hacked and stuff happens you'd disappear off the face of the earth.

[00:09:15] All your stuff goes down poof gone. So it's a good idea when you have multiple sites to host them at different parts even the country because of a big backbone of the Internet on the East Coast goes down and you have some of your sights on the West Coast. Well now you're not totally out of business. You've still got stuff going. So hosting multiple sites and I'm going to tell you more about hosting and mistakes with hosting a little late all right let's talk about WordPress. Wordpress is now the gold standard and I'd like to explain this like WordPress is like the engine to a car. All cars have engines that make it run. Now it's free. So most hosting services will give you and many will install it for you. So this is pretty easy but it's extremely popular. It's really the gold standard for even major major big sites.

[00:10:17] The next thing is is you put a theme on it now a theme is like the paint job on a car. It's what your site looks like.

[00:10:27] So when you hear the term responsive theme that means it must look good on cell phones and tablets. Many of the older sites and older themes don't work on. I mean they actually work. But it's people have to squint their fingers up and down and move all around to try and see your sight that's in fact how you tell if your sight is responsive get your cell phone out. Pull your side up on it and see if you have to use your fingers to expanding and slide around all over the place. And that's not responsive but that's a pretty much must. Google came out several years ago and demanded that if you're even going to get a high ranking for anything they're not going to ban you but they're never going to see the light of day if your site is old like that. Now this is mostly for consumer sites. I do have a couple business sites that it just doesn't matter. Everybody's going to be on a desktop when they're working. But for the most part you want to think responsive and the theme is what things look like.

[00:11:34] Now there's free ones available but even with a world class when you shouldn't pay more than 100 dollars I've seen some at 150 that have specialized functionality but probably most of you listening to this would never need that.

[00:11:48] Now another term couple terms you'll hear with regard to WordPress sites are plugins and widgets. Now what I want you to think about there is there like accessories on a car. So we had WordPress as the engine. The theme is the paint job and plugins and widgets are like accessories like heated seats or heated mirrors or a DVD player.

[00:12:13] So the people in the back can watch a movie. So those are plug ins and widgets and almost all of those are free. There are paid ones that do very special things.

[00:12:25] For instance our membership plugins cost maybe a couple of hundred dollars but they're the ones that allow you to do the membership where people pay you monthly for stuff.

[00:12:36] Now the only other thing you need to make your site look right is custom graphics and there's a site that I've been touting for years called Fiverr that's fiverr.com and it use it started out where it was just thousands of people all around the world telling you what they would. They're willing to do for you for five bucks. All right. I got all kinds of stuff. Book Covers custom logos graphics headers for Web sites all kinds of stuff headers for youtube youtube channel. So now a days a lot of them are more than five bucks they might charge five for the basic and then add ons if you want something extra or it's ten dollars or 15 dollars. But it's still bargain of the century and you could do 10 logos let's say and throw nine of them away and still be cheaper than going to a firm that's going to spend months and charge you five hundred dollars. So it's a great place. So that's what you need. You need WordPress that's installed usually by your host. You need themes. Now the themes we recommend to all our students with it's changed over the years but currently we use thrive themes and thrive architect are what we use instead of the old front page to make your site easily.

[00:13:59] I mean a mere mortal can operate these with a tiny bit of tutoring. They'll be in the show notes will be my affiliate link there. It's not expensive at all for this. So the next thing you need to do if you're going to be doing e-commerce and selling things and using email marketing and all that is good shopping cart system. I emphasize the word system because it's more than just taking one order taking the sale it's taking the sale and sending and autoresponder a series of people as the follow up to selling more stuff over time automatically that do ecourses automatically to affiliate marketing which means other people promote your stuff and you pay them only if they sell something that's your affiliates in other words up selling and cross-selling and coupons and all of these things are in a good shopping cart system. The only one we support

[00:14:58] And of course I get a commission on it absolutely is kickstartcart.com and why and I've been running in my entire business for now 16 years with this. And the reason is a mere mortal can operate it. I mean I've had people come to me with these big some of these big marketing companies that sell these shopping carts. And one lady got sucked in to buying it and she was spending four thousand dollars a month for a part time person part time just to operate it because it was too hard. So this will do 90 percent of what that cart will do and you won't spend anything on having somebody operate. So it's a massive bargain that's why we like it and we recommend it to our students that's kickstartcart.com and will be in the show notes. Another good thing about it is it'll do multiple websites so I probably got 70 different websites going through one account. Now it can only dump into one commercial checking account. You can only have one logo so I just keep my logo generic, Antion and Associates, but I sell all kinds of tennis stuff public speaking stuff internet marketing stuff mentoring all these things and it's all through one cart. I'll probably do a future episode all about shopping cart stuff. All right let's get into common mistakes. And I've seen these mistakes even coming from expensive Web design firms and I've got to tell you

[00:16:33] This really infuriates me when people charge you thousands of dollars. They don't know what they're doing they're probably out of work graphic artists and they just know you don't know any better so they charge you a fortune. You have to wait forever and you don't really know what to do with it.

[00:16:50] And it's not functional the way it should be. So I'm going to give you some things that check if you have an existing web site you go check these things to see if your site is making these mistakes. If you're starting new don't make these mistakes and don't allow some web designer to make them and you won't really need a web designer if you do the WordPress thing with a theme and all that. All right. So here we go. First thing is poor usability. In other words people just slop stuff on there and there's no rhyme or reason or logic to lead people through the site. And I know when I was first started there's a book out I just love the title it says don't make me think was the title of the book. It might still be out there and it's probably still valid even though all the fancy stuff we can do now. It's still people are busy they're in a hurry. You want them to easily be able to click on stuff and get what they want. Next thing is form over function and I call that too cool for school so you can make websites have all these fancy elements that aren't standard that aren't what people are used to seeing. And so they have difficulty using again it's back to usability. But it's because you're trying to be too cool. You're trying to make it all the fanciest stuff. And I've got to tell you I won or I beat three other million dollar websites. Forbes, no it was Inc. Magazine had a contest and my site was at the time would cost about six hundred fifty dollars.

[00:18:28] Nowadays it would be a hundred but it beat out three other million dollar sites in Inc Magazine's Best of the web because the panelist CEOs said what was easy to get around and they could find what they wanted fast that's all they care about unless you're doing a gaming thing where people were there because of that you want that to be easy to get around.

[00:18:52] Say you don't want them to have to wonder how the heck do I get around this site. If you want to make money in most cases the people with the money are a little older and not as tech savvy so keep it simple.

[00:19:07] It can be professional can be gorgeous. But if they can't use that you're not going to make any money. All right here's a nuts and bolts thing line width and if you can't hear that in your speakers w i d t h. How wide your lines of text are. I mean some sites it's almost like a tennis match your head has to go back and forth all the way and it's disconcerting it's hard to read and if it's hard to read people will leave some study came out of Canada years ago. I don't know the name of it but it said that people make a decision to stay at your Web site in one twentieth of a sec. And it just has that impression that it's too hard. People just go to the next one. There's actually formulas for how wide a line should be depending on the size of the font. So find those rules. Make sure you don't break them and don't have these wide wide lines that are too hard to read. Along with that your font size should be commensurate with the audience age of your expected target market. If it's a young gaming market and they're all young kids with super sharp eyes well yeah you can have a lot of stuff that you wouldn't do on a normal site for older people or older.

[00:20:31] I mean start at 40 years old people have trouble with their eyes start deteriorating and even before that sometimes so don't make it the font size too small and don't make it gigantic as if it was a child size or something. Unless you're catering to children. All right. No fancy fonts here's the problem with fancy fonts. If the person looking at your Web site on their computer doesn't have that fancy font their browser reverts to the default font so you have no idea what it's going to look like. So just use standard stuff. Verdana time Swiss Arial there's a list of them on the Internet.

[00:21:14] The standard fonts for browsers also contrasts so people get fancy again and you're trying to say where the heck where do I click and the button is almost the same color as the background.

[00:21:27] I mean some people used to use that in the old days as tricks the stuff in more keywords for the search engines but that went out 15 years ago. Nowadays it's usually they just made a mistake. They've got a theme that super cool but the contrast is poor and contrast directly affects readability and readability. If it's not readable then people are going to leave that 1/20th of a second.

[00:21:55] All right. What's the next thing here.

[00:21:57] Poor alignment if you get a theme most of your alignment problems will be taken care of. See people slop stuff all over the place and then you know it just looks like a jigsaw puzzle that went through an earthquake. So you don't want that. Avoid italics on a screen. The screens are are made up of vertical and horizontal little dots called pixels and as soon as you start cutting on an angle with a small font they get all fuzzy in it kind of ruins the professional look of your site so avoid italics on a Web site. Now

[00:22:33] You can use italics in graphics if they're big enough and they were created by somebody that knows what they're doing.

[00:22:40] Don't you try to do it and if you have a really big font for some reason like a pull quote, a pull quote where some really great part of what you said you pull it out and make it real big like a quotation. Yeah you can get away with italics there because they're really big but usually italics you want to avoid.

[00:23:01] Now you want to avoid underlining like the plague because if you just underline something to emphasize it underlining on the Web means clickable and so somebody goes to click on it and it doesn't go anywhere. They're all of a sudden thinking there's something wrong with your site and you don't want them thinking that. So avoid underlining.

[00:23:24] I told you earlier on how you check if your site is responsive you put up on your cell phone and has a look. Can you just scroll up and down to see everything or do you have to use your fingers to expand or be able to even read it. Well that means it's not responsive. All right the next thing is too many navigation buttons. I see some places with 20 navigation buttons. I try to force people when they're making the site to limit it to five. And that includes about home and contact right. I mean it really just forces them to think. All right what needs to be combined. See if there's too many choices people vote no. That's straight from our copywriting and all sales experience I have. You don't want too many choices. You want to lead people through where they're clicking and getting involved to stuff that they want to see. But if there's too many choices no way. All right let's take a little brief break for our sponsor which is me. See I turned the Internet marketing training world on its head around the year 2000 people like me were charging 50 to 100 thousand bucks upfront to teach what we know to clueless business people who refuse to learn it on their own.

[00:24:45] Now I'm a small business advocate and I knew many small businesses couldn't. I mean they could never afford that kind of upfront money. So it made all those gurus mad by charging a relatively small entry fee to my mentor program that also got a percentage of profits that was capped so you're not stuck with me forever. And so for me to get my big money you have to make way bigger money. And the other thing people loved about it was they know that I'm not going to disappear because I won't get any more money. All right and I went one step further that's never been done before. I have a big estate home and TV studio where my students as part of their yearlong program come in and actually stay in the House for an immersion weekend. And that's just one of the unique features of the program so check out the full details at greatinternetmarketingtraining.com. That's greatinternetmarketingtraining.com and it will also be in the show notes.

[00:25:48] All right let's get back to the common mistakes keyword word placement.

[00:25:52] I reminded you to listen to Episode 1 because that goes into all stuff about keywords. But the whole internet still works on keywords even if you're using pay per click. You have to know what key words to bid on and you might be missing a bunch that could bring you a lot of business so do your keyword research. Listen to that in episode 1. But once you get your keywords the mistakes that I say is either incorrect or non-existent use of the keywords. See the most important place on earth on a Web page is the title tag or title bar. That's clear at the top like if your see browser windows you see text in the little tab. That's your title tag it doesn't even look like it's part of the site but it is part of the code of the site and if that just says Home Page Well that's you know the search engine is going out looking for keywords that somebody is searching for and if says Home Page I mean how many people sit around and say you know what I think I'd like to find a home page today. Type in home page to Google. No they don't do that. They type in the stuff they're looking for. So you have to learn about keyword placement on your website. So the title tags the most important in a blog posting the title of the blog posting is the most important keyword articles in the title of the articles. But you still have to spread them out other places there's like 20 different things you can do with keywords on a website. So you have to learn about them.

[00:27:28] Next thing is people don't know where their site is hosted. They don't have the passwords to get into the site. This is not acceptable if you own a business. You can't just stick your head in the sand and think oh it's all going to be fine. My web guy or web woman will take care of it. No you're the principle of this. And speaking of passwords I can't tell you. People pay me all this money and they're on a call with me and it's 20 minutes goes by since the start of the call and they can't get the find the passwords to get in what they wanted to show me. This is not acceptable is just a waste of time. So get yourself on a PC. I use robo forum and on the Mac. One password it's called. Now some security people say oh no you don't want to do that. You know but it's no worse than anything you're doing online has a risk to it so I don't put my most critical banking and financial keywords in it. But almost all this regular stuff I do all day long. If somebody hacked into one of my dumb accounts it's just some service online.

[00:28:39] Chances are not much is going to come of it and chances are they wouldn't do it in the first place. I mean it's not like I'm AT&T or some major international household name that's where their prestige comes from from hacking into so. So you've got to balance your security with usability and you can't sit and talk to a guy like me for an hour and pay a lot of money and then 20 minutes you wasted just because you can't get your password.

[00:29:09] But anyway you do have to have him for your site.

[00:29:12] Now another mistake is your tech person is hosting your site in their basement and you're paying them some ridiculous amount of money starting at 30 40 50 70 dollars a month and they say well we'll make the updates for you too.

[00:29:27] Now that's a bunch of crap. Do not do that. That's ridiculous. That's one of the dumbest things people can do. I'll say I'll use the term ignorant in that it's unknown you didn't know any better. But that's ridiculous to do such a thing. That person with a thing in their basement doesn't have 10 days of battery backup doesn't have flood protection. It's not buried in a bunker in case of hurricanes or all this other stuff that can happen. You don't have enormous offsite backups and all this stuff.

[00:30:02] So you're at risk so don't do that now. Hosting should have 24/7 tech support that battery backup but don't get sucked in by hosting services just telling you they have backups.

[00:30:16] I mean this to me.

[00:30:18] Some things are just ludicrous so hosting service tells you they have a backup and then they get hacked and you still can't get hold of your backup. All right so that's ridiculous. And then the other thing that I learned the hard way is that

[00:30:35] You must keep a local backup or a separate backup of your site somewhere out of your hosting service because here's what happened to me the hosting service. I'm not I don't know if they got hacked or just had equipment failure and this was my first site ever. I didn't know any better. I thought they had backups. And so yeah they had backups. It took them ten days to find it out of the million Web sites they have and get it restored where the equipment was fixed in a day or so and I could have restored from my own back up within a day. But no 10 days and luckily I wasn't making the kind of money I am now because 10 days is a whole lot of money down the tubes so you must have a local backup. All right now here's one that's just as dangerous financially to you. Unlicensed graphics and photos see some companies business models is just to suit you. That's all they do is sue people like you for copyright infringement and you do not want to get a federal copyright infringement case against you. Guess how I know that. All right. Yeah this is long before the internet. I had one from a nightclub for playing a song that we didn't have license. So you don't want to be in that thing. One person came to me their web designer they paid a company to create their Web site get all the graphics and all that.

[00:32:01] The Web site owner got sued for forty three hundred dollars and had to pay forty three hundred bucks and another one came to me it was sixty seven hundred bucks for one blog posting with an unlicensed picture. So don't do that be extremely careful. Buy and get licenses for any graphics. But here's the thing people there's kind of a backlash against stock photography with the obligatory white person black person and Asian people or maybe some Indians now. So people can see that a mile away that you're not in touch you're just slapping up stuff that you think is PC. I'd rather see you make pictures of you working with somebody or whatever you do. All right. And real taken with your own camera if you want digital cameras have had stuff when the digital cameras came around I had a beautiful picture of my product on a blue background that was flowing. It was an old T-shirt laid over a chair. And the product on there prior to that I was paying 400 dollars a photo to go to a professional photographer for products. The heck with that!

[00:33:13] All right another thing with photos is people don't put captions on them.

[00:33:19] They put some photo that means something to them that means nothing to your visitors and they don't put a caption under it to tell what's going on. See people's eyes are drawn to the photos and you want to use the caption to entice them and tell them something great. And that's copywriting basically to get them to read your other stuff. So make sure you try to use captions under all your photos and make sure they make sense and not just some real tree in a meadow and you know you've got some big meaning that means nothing to them. Use of animations that went out years and years ago like spinning world globes and all that don't do that poor copywriting now we have a course on this. This is the number one skill in my entire 40 plus years of formal business and even since I was 10 years old kids selling stuff. You can check it out at copywriting901.com. This is the number one skill in my entire business career that made me rich. And it's the fastest way to money.

[00:34:25] Plus you can use it the right for other people that are too lazy and get paid a lot of money for that. So check that out. Copywriting901.com and that's not the copywriting for the Library of Congress. This is writing advertising copy so it's C O P Y W R I T I N G 901. And the last thing on this is to let programmers do custom programming that you or anyone else doesn't understand. Then you're stuck with them forever. If they leave town and it was crappy programming which you would know any difference then the next group that comes in has to start over because they can't figure out what was done. So most everything I mean I've been doing this since 1994 and I can't think of ever needing a custom program for anything that we use off the shelf stuff and put it together that way somebody knows how it was made.

[00:35:21] They know how to maintain OK well there you go check the show notes at screwthecommute.com for a recap of all of this and this is by no means a comprehensive list but if you did everything that I talked about properly today you're got a very good start on this. So check out my mentor program. It's the longest running most successful and most unique and one thing I can tell you about. It also includes a scholarship to my licensed internet marketing school that you can either use yourself or gift to someone else. All right check everything out at the show notes at screwthecommute.com this is Episode 0 0 4.

[00:36:01] This is 0 4 or you can go directly to greatinternetmarketingtraining.com if you want to check out that mentor program.

[00:36:09] Now coming up in episode 5 I'm going to interview one of my former students who was able to quit being a marriage and family therapist and become a full time Internet marketer. And in episode 6 another former student has taken off like a rocket and created his own online brand.

[00:36:29] All right this is Tom Antion signing off from screw the commute and we'll see you in the next episode.

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