815 – Bad things for your website: Tom talks Top Fifteen Mistakes

Episode 815 – Top Fifteen Mistakes
[00:00:08] 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 815 of Screw the Commute podcast. Today, we're going to talk about a blog posting I wrote. It was around 2014 and it was called The Top 15 Mistakes People Make on Their Websites. And you know what? People are still making the same mistakes today. I got to apologize again about my voice. I'm still a little bit under the weather here. All right. Hope you missed episode 814. That was story emails. I'm going to be sending one out today actually called the Golden Cabbage. These are things that I do periodically, just a little slice of life kind of things. And I did one last week called I was yesterday I was the milkman. Hope you didn't miss episode 813. That was how to write emails that sell. And I gave you a template that you can use over and over and over again. I probably have about 50 of them in my course on this, but or my e-book on this. But anyway, just make sure that you listen to the episode 815 and you can use that template over and over again. Anytime you want to get to a back episode, you go to screwthecommute.com, slash, then the episode number. That was 813. All right. Make sure you download a copy of my automation book at screwthecommute.com/automatefree.

[00:01:43] All right. Let's get into the top 15 mistakes people make on their websites. And the first 14 of these aren't in any particular order. So here's number one no plan or purpose for the website. People get what I call CSI. And that's not the TV show. That's crappy, stupid idea. And they throw up a website without thinking through what exactly they want to accomplish with the site. And this allows the site to go off on all kinds of directions, with no cohesive content that visitors can depend on. And then they they disappear. And then Google doesn't give you a high ranking because it doesn't know what you're about all the time. All right. Number two, too many topics. See, for the best chance of success, the fastest sites should should be about one topic or the best sites. Excuse me. Google wants to please the searcher by giving the searcher the best possible site based on what they were searching for. See if you lump a multiple topics on one site, you're hurting your chances of being found in the search engines, and you're confusing the visitor to number three. No instant recognition. See, when someone lands on your site, they should instantly know they're in the right place. So you need to put like a tagline at the top of the site if the domain name, especially if the domain name doesn't tell them what it's about.

[00:03:11] I mean, Screw the Commute. I mean, if you have half a brain, you know that that's about entrepreneurship or, you know, quitting work and working for yourself, starting your own business. So I have a site called Fatso Tennis that kind of tells it, doesn't it? Now, people might not know that that there is some stuff on here. So it says the blog for Out-of-shape people who love tennis and, you know, immediately see if the site is for you or not. If you aren't out of shape, then the site is not for you. If you are out of shape, then it is. See, poor recognition is part of the cause of high bounce rates, which means people find your site and then they leave immediately. All right. Number four form over function. Many people let creative web designers who were probably out of work graphic artists the day before run away with design elements for coolness sake, and a website should just look good enough to represent you well professionally and concentrate on the marketing elements rather than the fancy design. All right, number five. Too much navigation. Clear back in the year 2000, a book came out called Don't Make Me Think. It's been revised a couple of times since. It was all about making it easy to move around your site without getting lost or confused.

[00:04:33] So here's something you can do. If on the first screen of your website you have more than, let's say, eight places to click, you probably need another website, or you need to rethink and simplify your navigation. All right, number six. No obvious opt in form. Everybody at my level makes virtually all their money from email. And when you hear the money is in the list, well, you can believe it. You must get serious about getting people to opt into your email list. And then you must get serious about emailing them regularly with great things that will help them. I have a whole course on this. Number seven not including social media. See, social media can be a big waste of time if you get sucked into playing games and yapping about, I don't know, your bunion operation, right? It's a necessary evil for business. Google and the other search engines demand that you have a social media indicators on your site to prove you're worthy of high rankings. Here's their conventional wisdom. If your site is so great, somebody is talking about it and you better be able to prove it with social media. All right, number eight broken links. Nothing screams non professional like links that don't go anywhere. You should review your site regularly or have someone else do it for you. There's a free plugin called Broken Link Checker.

[00:04:33] All right. Number nine disappointment. Okay. I lied to you. This screams non professional. Louder than broken links. When you make people feel by clicking on a link, they're going to see something they want. And then you show them something else. Or make them search all over to find what you promised. You have just committed a website sin. The visitor will immediately think this site is too hard to figure out. Or worse yet, I can't trust this website. All right, number ten. Poor sales copy on a business site. Almost everything should be leading people in some way to buying something, either subtly or overtly. Writing words that sell is one of the most important things you can ever learn to do. And these words don't have to be cheesy or smash you in the face, but they should be crafted to move the visitor to action and to an ultimate conclusion that they should be doing business with you. So that's why I created copywriting 901.com to teach you how to write these words for written audio or video sales messages, and don't get sucked in to just doing it only with artificial intelligence. It won't sound like you. It'll just be generic. You have to really put your own personality into it. All right, number 11 slow loading. Google came right out and said years ago, if your site doesn't load fast, you will never get a high ranking.

[00:07:41] See, the idea behind this is that Google and the other search engines want the searcher to have a great experience. Faster loading websites contribute to a great experience. Now here's a tool. Pagespeed.Web.dev and you can check your page speed. Now you've got to learn what to do about it, right? You might need some geek help for that or we can help you with that in the mentor program. All right. Number 12 poor quality videos hosted on YouTube. Now, don't get me wrong, I love YouTube. I love it to drive traffic to your site. To your site. Once people are on your site, I don't want them to easily be able to leave your site. See videos on your site in most cases should be housed on high quality file hosting like Amazon S3 and connected to your site by means of a video player. An example would. I mean, there's lots of them, easy video suite and those kinds of places. The videos better be good too. All right. You must have good audio as your number one priority. People will sometimes put up with questionable video, but they never stand poor audio. All right, number 13. No call to action. See, in business, you must get people to do something, and you must tell them to do it.

[00:09:04] You can't assume they will read between the lines and do what you want them to do. It could be clicking on a link or filling out an opt in form. It could be reading an article or watching a video or calling you. Whatever it is, you've got to tell them to do it. One thing I like to do to get people to click on a link, is to put a command and a benefit in the text of the link. So here's an example from my wake Him Up speaking system. Click here to get standing ovations around the world. Click. Here is the command and standing ovations around the world is the benefit. And you can put a bunch of different ones all around your site with different benefits. 14 overpaying for services. This is what I preached against since 1997 when Microsoft Front Page came out. This was a program that allowed people to easily make web pages themselves with no web designer involved. This is one of the top two skills which I attribute my success online. The other is copywriting, which I mentioned. And now we use WordPress for all new sites, and with a very small amount of tutoring, you can be making world class websites yourself for less than 100 bucks. I have a course on this that I forget where the link is.

[00:10:24] We'll put it in the show notes somewhere and you can also use Fiverr. Fiverr.com for custom graphics for your site, and it costs you very little to have world class websites if you just get off your butt and learn something. Or you can just, you know, piss away 5000 bucks to some out of work graphic artist. Go ahead, suit yourself. All right. And the number one biggest mistake I see on websites is poor or non-existent keyword usage. For years, I've taught that the number one most important thing you do before developing a website is to do keyword research. If you haven't done that, then nothing else matters. Because for most of us mere mortals who aren't international celebrities, we need to be found by search engines. I currently use the Google Keyword Planner tool, but there's a bunch of them out there that you can pay for, or that one's free. So do that. Fix up these mistakes that you may be making, and you'll probably have a lot more success on the web. And if you want my help with it, check out GreatInternetMarketingTraining.com for my mentor program. It's the longest running, most unique, most successful ever in the field of internet and digital marketing. All right, that's my story. I'm sticking to it. We'll catch you on the next episode. See you later.