609 – More tips to make you money: Tom talks Dozen Website Tips

Episode 609 – Dozen Website Tips
[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.

[00:00:24] Hey everybody, it's Tom here with Episode 609 as Screw the Commute podcast? Today, I'm going to give you a dozen website tips that you can implement to make the people that visit happier and Google happier and everybody happier. Maybe, except the web designers, they might not be as happy, but we don't care. We want you to make money. All right. Hope you didn't miss Episode 608. That was side hustles. Listen, I know sometimes you just need some cash, and so I gave you a bunch of cool ways on that episode that you can bring in some cash, part time side hustles, all kinds of things, something you can do from home. Some you go out to out places and do stuff that's a lot of fun. So check that out. Anytime you want to get to a back episode, go to screw the Compucom Slash and then the episode number. Side hustles was 608 today. 609. I know you'll want to refer back to this when you go into your website and check all these things and fix them up.

[00:01:25] Okay. Let's get to the main event here. And these are in no particular order, but your website must be fast loading. You're several years ago. I don't know. Three, four or five years ago, I lose track. Google came out and said, if your website doesn't load lightning fast, you're never going to see the light of day and the results. And you can check this online by joining in.

[00:01:54] They changed the name of this. You know, so some executive can earn his salary here. Her salary. All right. But it's basically Google. Google webmaster tools. It's called Google Search Central or Google Search console. If you just type in Google Webmaster Tools, you'll find the latest name that they're calling it. But what it is, it's a place where. You can register your website, you've got to have a Google account, like a Gmail or something. And. Google will tell you what they like and they don't like about your website. And the parameter we're talking about now is load speed. Now, here's the thing you can't trust. If it loads fast for you because your site is what they call cached. In other words, once you load a web page, your browser saves most of it so that it will load lightning fast the next time you visit. This is definitely not what a new visitor experiences, so don't get sucked into that. Oh, it looks like it's loading really fast. No. That's because you're used to looking at it and your browser is remembering it. So make sure your site is fast loading and that Google search console, Google Search Center, or whatever they're calling it now tells you all kinds of things about your site. And if you don't understand them, that's when you get a good geek. Or, you know, you get in my mentor program and me and my tech people help you fix all that stuff.

[00:03:27] All right. So fast loading number two. Quit hosting YouTube videos on your site. Now, we love YouTube. We love YouTube to catch people and send them to your website. But once they're there, YouTube is always going to make it easy for people to go back to YouTube and forget about you. So you send them to your site with You Tube or however you're driving traffic and then host your video files on something like Amazon SE three. Which is a super dirt cheap place to load big files and it connects with a video player to your site. Now the visitor has no idea the videos are hosted on Amazon. They are just happy the videos play without stuttering and hopefully they forget all about YouTube and stay on your site. See if you load the files just up to your cheap shared hosting. God help you. You're getting over. You know they're not going to play, right? Right. You're going to overload your hosting and bandwidth and get extra overage charges. And I mean, just there's nothing good about it, put it that way. All right. So quit hosting YouTube videos on your site even though we love YouTube to drive traffic. All right. Number three, easy navigation. I won Best of the Web in Ink Magazine and beat out $3 million websites. And after afterwards, the panel of CEOs, the people that hold big, big purse strings, was asked, why did Tom site get beat out these other sites? And here's what they said.

[00:05:19] They said it was easy to navigate and they could find what they wanted fast. They they did not care about fancy. The people that have money to spend don't care about fancy. For the most part. They care about finding what they want, giving you the money and getting their product. That's that's it. All right. And so back to navigation. Be careful about using what are called hamburgers. A hamburger is three horizontal lines on top of each other. That's kind of the icon name for those three little lines. And typically they're used to click on it and it opens up your navigation system. Well, guess what? Older people don't know to click on them to navigate. And they sit there and they say, Oh, I can't get around the site and they leave. So be careful with your navigation. Make it easy to navigate. And again, you're probably too close to it. Get somebody else that doesn't know anything about your thing to evaluate. Pay them if you have to, and just tell them, Hey, what didn't you understand? What they don't understand? And that's I have a really cool method for that where you put a video camera on them. And here's the way I explain it. I say, you get yourself a video camera, you get yourself some people that don't know you, and you get a baseball bat, and then you put them in front of your website and you videotape them and have them write down things, not asking you questions.

[00:06:45] They just have to tell about their experience on your site. And what's a baseball bat for it? Well, if you have the urge to explain to them what you're know. No, no, you should click here, take the baseball bat and hit yourself in the head with shut the hell up. You're not going to be there explaining it to them when they're on your site, trying to buy something or figure something out, you won't be there. You've got to take this feedback that they give you and then improve your site. All right. So that's my baseball bat to the head tip and disclaimer here. If you do crack your own skull, I am not responsible. I warned you. All right. Number four. Multiple pages, not one long page. This is kind of why I own the website for many eight years. I own the domain name having developed it, yet it makes me sick every time I think about it called killyourwebdesigner.com. I own that domain. And the reason is, is because most of the web people out there were out of work graphic artist yesterday they have no idea of how to make a website produce for you.

[00:08:04] Not like a guy like me that's been sitting here for 28 years. That's not an exaggeration. Since the commercial is 28 and a half now, since the commercial Internet started figuring out how to make websites work, not how to make them so cool and so fancy that they'll do your dishes and, you know, confuse the hell out of people that have money. All right. So. The trend is this long ass web page, like one page that's got everything you ever did since you were in grade school art class on one page. Well, guess what? Not only is that overwhelming for people, it reduces their engagement to click in deeper into your site, which makes them more committed to looking at your site. And Google hates it. Google says this site is not substantial. It's got one page on it. So this is why I kind of love my podcast. And we'll talk about and content here in a minute. But but it's got, I don't know, 170 pages and technically it's got 700 pages because a blog posting is a page. Even though you might see ten of them listed, that's each one of them is a separate web page. So it's got six, 700. Well, it's definitely got 600 pages because there's over 600 episodes to this podcast and three per week going up. All right. So if you want your site to look substantial in the eyes of Google, so you eventually get free traffic.

[00:09:37] You better have a navigation system, lead them into your site, have content in there, and multiple pages, not just one long page. All right. Number five, basic keyword usage. Of course, this is the episode one of my whole podcast, I mean, close to four years ago now, because it's the biggest mistake people make. They're clueless about all the ways people are typing or talking. All right. So that's another thing called voice search. So you need to know about keyword usage and that's screwthecommute.com/1. That's the first episode, the number, the numeral one. Also, you can update that with voice search on episode 130. Screwthecommute.com/130. But basically on basic keyword usage and basic search engine optimization. Remember, we're all about paid traffic now because spending money on SEO is futile. I talk about that a lot, but basic stuff I want you to do. I don't want you to shoot yourself in the foot and make us look stupid, which I almost everybody, when they join my mentor program or they come to me for a site evaluation, messes this up. They're making stupid mistakes that are so easy to correct. If somebody would just tell you about them that are telling Google, I'm an idiot, you shouldn't give me a high ranking because I am clueless. I do not know where to put keywords. I put multiple same keywords everywhere.

[00:11:13] So my site looks like every page is identical and all this stuff. So I got a whole episode on that. It's called Basic SEO and that's it. Screw the compucom slash 4694639. Oc next thing. So that's basic keyword usage and basic search engine optimization. But don't go crazy with this and pay people for this. This is all stuff you can do yourself for free. All right. All right. Number six. Backlink program if there was a place that pays off big. It's getting people to link to you because once you get somebody to link to you, that link lasts forever, pretty much. And there's a method to it, though, because if a bunch of worthless sites link to you, you start looking like your work worthless. You know you're in a bad neighborhood, in other words. So Episode 466 Screwthecommute.com/466 shows you what to do to start a back linking program that really is worth your time to do that and that will raise you above your competitors. And it's all all good stuff if you do it correctly. If you don't, it will hurt you really bad to. Oc number seven is Linc related. Be careful who you link to. Because when Google is looking at your site, they don't want a jack of all trades to give as a search result to people looking for specific things. So if you have links going to all kinds of different crazy stuff that's not related to your main business.

[00:12:56] Google says, oh, this is not a great resource for whatever somebody was looking for, so they're not going to give you a high ranking. So you may have in the old days, I used to teach people trade links. Well, that went out, I don't know, eight, nine, almost ten years ago. That's no good anymore. If you have reciprocal link deals with people, cancel them now unless they're very highly related to what you do because they are hurting you because it's not natural. Looking to link back and forth between sites that aren't related. So be careful who you link to. All right. Number eight, new content regularly. Now, this is why I just mentioned a minute ago about why screw the commute is so great for me to do this easily because three episodes a week go up for almost four years now. Like I said, 600. What is episode is this 609. So that's regular. They love regular stuff. Youtube is the same way, which is owned by Google. You know, in the old days, I would shoot 300 short videos in a month, ten a day for 30 days, and then load them all up there and forget about it for years. Well, that's again, that's not the way it works nowadays. They want if I had 300 videos now to put up, I'd put up three or four a week for 100 weeks.

[00:14:21] Two years. All right. That's how that works now. So put new content up regularly is the way it is. And that's why I should teach you how to do a podcast, because then you're you're kind of doing it automatically. But if you're a good writer and you do blog posts, that's great. Now you don't have to do them every day. That's overkill, because if you get no engagement on any of your posts because you're just burying people with too much content, that again used to be the way it worked. But nowadays, you know, one a week, that's really good. It's far better than five a week that nobody even looks at because they just can't take all that content anymore. All right. So regular context, number eight. All right. Number nine, calls to action. You know, if people are going to come to your website, get them to do something. And that could be to opt in to your email list is which I've concentrated on for all these years and made fortunes with email. But maybe you want them to call you, maybe to email you, maybe to text you, maybe to get on your live chat with you or, you know, book a live Facebook conversation, whatever it is you've got to pay attention to calls to action. That's another thing. When I'm critiquing websites, people say all this great stuff about themselves and then the web page just abruptly ends.

[00:15:48] That's ridiculous. Tell them what to do. People will do something if you tell them what to do, but if you expect them to figure it out on their own, oh, God help you. You're going to hear crickets chirping. Oc number ten used a lot of white space. Not overly, but make sure it's easy to look at your site and people get eyestrain and headaches. So when you have a bunch of dense text, I always see this on high falutin people that got a million credentials and then they want to put their whole CV in the home page and they're so proud of their accomplishments. But the thing is, nobody on earth is going to read that. Maybe somebody will read it that's just like them. That's never going to give them any money. But nobody on earth is going to read that. You have to bulleted these things and you have to open it up. People can't read anymore. People were morons. Didn't you see that state? I think it was Oregon. Oregon that where they said, oh, you don't have to pass a math class or math test or a reading test to get your high school diploma. All right. That's going to be in my highly educated idiot book. You know that, Governor. You know, unfortunately, that's the way it is. People don't read as well. And so you've got to open up white space bulletin.

[00:17:07] These things don't bury them to death with your whole CV. Lead them to deeper stuff if they want to read it. But you've got to catch them with white space images, videos, open it up. So it's interesting, you know, multifaceted, multimedia, you know, videos, audio files, PDFs, text. Well, like, we have this thing, they can leave me a voicemail by using speaker pipe on the home page of screw the commute. You can click on it. I wish you would click on it. Say something to me. It'll come to me via email. I'll answer you with an audio. You know, it's just it's cost almost nothing. I think it's 20 bucks for that service. So open things up, white space, image, video bullet, these things and lead them deeper to the people that want more content but don't force it on everybody or nobody will look at anything. Oc number 11, double check everything on a cell phone and tablet years ago. Again, it's probably five, six years now. They Google and all the search engines said your site must be responsive and that word means it must look good on a cell phone and tablet automatically. And if you have to squint your fingers, you know, and to make it a big enough to read the text, your site is not responsive and nobody is going to do that. You're going to look old, pitiful, out of touch. So make sure your site is responsive.

[00:18:44] And everything you do, double check it on a cell phone and tablet. If you're working on your desktop or if your webmaster does, you go to your cell phone, you go to your desktop, you go to your tablet and see if it looks right. All right. Number 12, which isn't the last one, because I always give more than I promise is good copywriting. And of course, I have a whole course on this. It's one of the most cost effective on earth. It's the number one skill in my entire business career. It's copywriting. 901. This is copy w r i t i g. I'm not talking about copywriting. Your content at the Library of Congress, talking about writing words and saying words that make people want to buy your stuff. Number one skill. In my entire 45 years in business and even when I'm ten years old, doing side hustles and putting fliers up and stuff. So get better at that. The course is only 297 bucks. And to contrast that or to compare that, I paid $40,500 just for a headline course one time. All right. So this is just massively powerful. It covers small copy. It covers video sales letters. There's like 60 or 70 sales letter samples on that. It covers advertorials, covers the 31 elements that go into a sales letter. So copywriting 901 go. And if you don't buy mine, get something and learn during copywriting.

[00:20:18] All right. Now, before I tell you, number 13, you know, if you like this kind of content and you want personal attention that nobody at my level will give you, you have come to the right place. Check out my mentor program at greatInternetmarketingtraining.com. It's the longest running, most successful, most unique ever in the field of Internet and digital marketing. And I triple dog dare anybody to put their program up against mine. They won't do it because they'll have to go hide under a rock. Being embarrassed because there is nowhere on earth you can get the stuff that this program provides. And I'll just give you a couple of examples to back up what I'm saying. You get an immersion weekend where you actually live in this estate home with me for an immersion weekend. As part of your deal. We have a TV studio here. We shoot videos for you, edit them, put the graphics on and send them to you. And I have seen just one of these videos sell for as much as $5,500. And that was the trade show price where we have had people get out of here with 50 videos. All right. So nobody on earth is going to do that for you. Then everything we do is one on one. You're not lumped in with a group because half the time I'm talking advanced stuff and you're lost.

[00:21:35] And the other half is you're lumped in with beginners and you're wondering why you bothered getting in the program. So it's one on one, so you get full attention from me and my entire staff. So there's another unique feature you don't get anywhere else. Also, you have I have the only licensed, dedicated internet marketing and digital marketing school in the country. It's certified to operate by Shiv the State Council on Higher Education in Virginia. I've been operating, I think, 12 years now. Nobody has that. Nobody has gone through the scrutiny that I have gone with background checks and and financial checks. And once a year you have to recertify. They do surprise checks. If I make a mistake, it's $1,000 per mistake per student. All right. So nobody is going through that scrutiny. So you get a scholarship to that school. That you can either use yourself for additional training or gift to someone. We've had people gifted to their kids and the kids didn't have to go to waste their money at a four year college. And the one one girl I love her story. She's making $6,000 a month. Four months into the school. First month, she was up to $100 a month. All right. So so it's very powerful stuff. So, again, most unique ever in the field of Internet and digital marketing. Check it out at greatInternetmarketingtraining.com.

[00:21:35] ll right. Let's get to the baker's dozen here. The number 13. A tip to make your website better be consistent. Don't have people click links thinking they're going to another part of the site that they're in or your site, and then they end up at a completely different looking site. Now, the other site still may be yours, but that is so jarring to people. This creates immediate bounces. In other words, people leave because they think, Oh, I got I clicked the wrong link and I got hacked to some site that's going to give me malware or something. So they get out of there in a hurry. That's, that's ruining people's expectations. Be consistent with the look and feel and navigation of your site so that people feel comfortable there. You don't want to click into somewhere that your other site that looks different unless you tell them and make a big deal of it. Hey, I have another site on X, Y and Z. If that interest you, click here. Then they expect to see something different and they won't bounce immediately. So anyway, there's 13 things that are easy to implement now that somebody told you about it. Make sure you share this episode with people, not your competitors. Of course, you know, share with people that have websites that you like and they're not competitive with you because this stuff works, folks. It's cheap or free and it works. All right. That's my story and I'm sticking to it. We'll catch you on the next episode. See you later.