Welcome to episode 12. 

In this episode, we're gonna look at five mistakes speakers make on their websites. 

As you'll have heard in the intro, I'm commonly known as Mr. Web Marketing. No, I didn't crown myself that. It was given to me by another speaker who watched me answer a room full of questions one day.

That said, I love the title and it really does describe me so much so that I have used it for many years. . Why? Because my last name is unpronounceable. I think I've heard every variation of how H A U C K over my 53 years, and now my kids get to live that too. That said, I earned the name Mr. Web Marketing.

Having been marketing online since 1996, I've seen a lot of trends come and go. Worked with some of the biggest and smallest companies in the world on their marketing and helped thousands of people make more money. So how does that help you? Let's say that I have a little bit of knowledge on what makes websites convert and how to make them number one online.

So let's take a look at the five mistakes that I see time and again on speaker sites when I get asked to evaluate them, which I do on a regular basis. Number one thing is that they're outta date. And this is a common problem. Styles and colors change. That doesn't mean you can't have brand colors, but you know, if you've got a site that's bright purple and your brands change and now you're using pink, for example, you need to change colors on your site.

Alternatively, if you've just used a generic style template and you don't have brand colors, you might be using certain colors that are, are no longer popular, or they really just don't work well on. But more realistically, the issue is with the style, I can tell by looking at a site straight away how old it is roughly.

There's been a lot of changes in the way that designs are done and how things are laid out. So, for example, you often have a banner image at the top of the page, and that's called the hero shot, as we know. And that used to be in a box, so it would. Be in the center of the page and there'd be white space left and right of it.

These days, that hero shot, of course, goes right across the page, so it doesn't matter whether the page is, you know, the size of my 49 inch monitor, or it's on a little tiny phone, the picture covers the whole of the screen. So little things like that, and having rows of color that are full width rather than in a box, things like that have changed over the years, and so by looking at that and rounded cornered buttons and all sorts of things straight away, you can tell a site's old.

And the fact of the matter is that the people who are looking to hire you as a speaker or buy your services, they look at websites every day and they're gonna notice the difference. And believe me, there's some sites out there that I think haven't changed, you know, in the last 15 years. So it really is one thing that you've gotta look at.

First of all, the second thing without date stuff is photos. I've seen websites with photos of speakers that are well over 20 years old, to be honest. They're head shots that they had back in the eighties almost in some cases, which is great if you're sharing historical information. But when you got a picture of yourself with lovely brown hair and you turn up and you're bald, it's gonna surprise the person that you're speaking for.

Why? Because that's not the image you were presenting on your website. So please get some new head shots or just take some new head shots. They don't have to be fancy these days. The software can tidy it up. What you, you know, shoot with a mobile phone, quite frankly. Just make sure you turn the lights on and get some good lighting, but update your photos, new photos of you on stage or doing virtual presentations, whatever it is, but get it up to date.

The text, the fonts used are different. Okay. For example, we used to use serif font. That ones with the little footers on them that, you know you'll see in times Roman, those sorts of fonts. These days we don't use SIF fonts. They're really out of style. So, you know, have a look at your fonts. The content is often out of date, and I'm gonna cover that a little bit more later.

But make sure your content is accurate. Don't say, you know, this website down the bottom, it says copyright 1992. Well maybe updated to 2022 or something. Spacing on your website. The, the websites often you've got too much space. So the people have used a template and they put a little bit of text in where on the template there was actually, say 15 lines of text.

They put two lines of text. So it looks like there's just, you know, one little sentence and all this space there that you've gotta scroll through and it really looks unprofessional. The reason that the templates have a lot of information there is because you wanna block things. So if you've got a picture that is, say 500 by 500 pixels, You know, square, then your block of text should be the same height as your picture.

Now you can space that out with bullet points. You can do all sorts of things. You can break it down into three paragraphs. Whatever you do, your picture should match your text when you've got them side by side. Okay. Some websites are dormant, and this is really obvious, as in no one goes there they haven't been looked at in a long time.

You can just tell that nothing's changed. There's no new content on there, and they look really neglected. You know, from my perspective, being someone who's in marketing, they, they look very. And they'd really like someone to, you know, dress them up, make them look pretty again, and and launch them back into the world.

As I always say to people, you know, is your website the laziest member of staff? Because you gotta remember that website's out there working for you 24 7. If one of your staff member. Turned up and you had a, you know, a neat uniform that everybody wore and you had logos on everything, and you all looked tidy, and then one of your staff members turns up in a pair of, you know, cutoff jeans, flip flops, and a singlet with a, you know, a hat or something.

You'd go, this doesn't look right compared to the rest of our branding. Okay, well the website is the same when someone talks to you and they get this impression of you, and then they think about hiring you. So they go to your website and then they see your website and it looks nothing like you, and it does nothing to really help you look better.

It, it actually doesn't work for you. Okay. And it is, it is a staff member that's selling all of the time. So when you're asleep, that staff member's selling, there might be someone in another part of the world who's awake looking for a speaker like yourself. So think about that. Is your website the laziest member of staff?

Okay, number one, things are outta date. Number two, not enough information to make a decision. , so many websites have got such little amount of information on them. You need to go through and update your copy. Make sure that your sales copy is, is correct. Now every page is sales copy cuz every page should sell.

So go through and make sure that the information is accurate and fill in the blanks. You One thing you know, people will often cut corners when they, you know, put content on a website for the first time. And if you have good information on there, interested people will read it. , okay. You might say, well, people just scan websites.

Yes, they do. But if they're really interested in that topic or they're interested in you, they will read more information. So fill it out. When people are getting their websites built, in my experience, they give you the minimum amount of information because they're so pressed for time. It's almost like they're saying, you know, here's the basics.

Can you please write all this for me? And it's like, well, no. Okay. Cost extra for copywriting. It takes a lot of time, a lot of effort, and a lot of expertise. So go back and look at what you've got there. Based on the, the basics that you put in when you're in a hurry and fill it out further. Make it look better.

Okay. Add extra page. Some sites are still only five pages long. Google is not gonna reward you for a five page website. Yes, you might show up for your name, I've no doubt, but it doesn't say a lot for you or what you do in a business, cuz it shows that you've done nothing except stick up five pages. So think about, you know, writing articles and putting content in so that you show that you're actively involved.

And I'll cover a little bit more of that later. When you go through your website. Please speak it out loud, read it to yourself out loud, not in. Out loud and hear what you've written. When I used to be a school teacher, I used to get my year fours and any grade, quite frankly, they'd write something, they'd come to me and say, oh, can you mark this please, Mr.

How? And I'd say, have you read it out loud? They'd say, no. I'd say, great. Go outside, read it out loud. Go and edit it, and then bring it back to me. And without. Fail. They would find things where they were missing words, missing whole sentences. It didn't make sense. Whole pile of thing. So my advice to you, and I do this all the time, is I read out loud what I've written.

It sounds different when you read it out loud than from when you read it in your head. Google likes content, so please, you know, add articles. Well, what we used to know is blogs regular. And that content needs to be helpful content to the people visiting your site. There's actually been a recent update by the search engine called the Helpful Content Update, and basically this is what they've said, focus on people first content.

The helpful content update aims to better reward content where visitors feel they've had a satisfying experience while content that doesn't meet a visitor's expectations won't perform as. So if you answer yes to these questions below, it means you're probably on the right track with creating content on your website.

Do you have an existing or intended audience for your business or site that would find the content useful if they came directly to you from a search engine? Does your content clearly demonstrate firsthand experience and a depth of knowledge? For example, expertise comes from actually using a product or service or visiting a place.

Does your site have a primary purpose or focus? , I talk about this a lot, making sure that you're focused in on a niche. After reading your content, will someone leave feeling that they've learned enough about topic to achieve their goal, so they should have something to work on. And will someone reading your content leave feeling like they've had a satisfying experience?

Remember, the search engines can actually see how long people are on your website. If you bounce back, they actually track where you click out and when you come back. So if they come to your site and someone comes to your site and they're there for 10 seconds and they bounce out again, Google sees that and they go, that mustn't be good information.

Okay? So remember that. So number two, not enough information to make a decision. Number three, no video or old video still on the site. Surely you must have more video. Okay. If you've been speaking, you should have some video. If you don't set up a camera and record some direct to camera, write a few little short two minute blurbs and shoot it and get it up on your website.

It doesn't have to be in front of an audience. It has to be valuable information from which people can see you speak and go, actually, he speaks fluently or she speaks fluently. It makes sense. They make some great points. Yeah. This is someone I'd like to have speak. Okay, so shoot some video. People need to see you and hear you, and they wanna see you on screen when you upload your videos.

I generally recommend actually putting them up on YouTube and using them kind of doubly. So YouTube is a search engine on its own and then inve embedding the videos on your website. But make sure you go and create a unique thumb nail. For your videos using camba.com. Now, CAMBA has all these designs and what I'll often do for clients is I will make a set of thumbnails for their videos and I'll use the same template and just duplicate it and change the the picture and the words.

So the layout is exactly the same. The colors are the same, so they look like a set. So if you've got a set of videos about one topic, make one thumb. Theme through the whole set. So they look really cool and they look awesome when they're in sets On your website, do you have a transcription on your video?

Remember, I dunno about you, but a lot of people I know and Mero in silence. So I'll go to someone's website or I'll be on Facebook or wherever it is, and I'll be watching a video, but I'm actually reading the video because I'm not gonna be bothered putting headphones in. I'm in a group of people. So make sure you got transcriptions on your videos.

Now if you use YouTube, you can actually turn that on automatically. YouTube will even transcribe them for you and, and it's pretty accurate. But if you want to embed them so that they're actually, you know, stuck in the video, there's plenty of tools to help you. , so no video or old video number. Four zero calls to action.

This is a big one, okay? You should have one main goal for your site and maybe a couple of little sub goals. You know when people come to your site, they want to be attracted and encouraged to stay there. So the first thing I'm looking for in calls action is a headline. On the first page, there should be a headline that says What you do or sell should be really clear.

People know that they're in the right place. Okay? When I go down the page, I wanna see some call me or book me buttons or something like that. And I wanna see it repeated too. I don't wanna see it Just once. You know, there should be one in the top right hand. Always, because that's the first place people see.

And their mouse is on that side naturally, on the right hand side. But then as you go through the text, make sure you add another book me now. Book me now. Book me now. Because you want people to realize that that's what you want them to do. Don't leave them to make the decision for themselves. Another thing I often see is there's no offers.

So if they don't click the book Me. Now, is there an offer so you can capture. For example, you know, download my five tips about this, and you capture their email address. Remember, people will sometimes only come to your website once in their life and they might only be there for a minute or two, and then you'll never see them again.

So if you can capture their details, you can market to them ongoing. So if you can get them into a funnel where you send out regular information or you send out a download and then send them your newsletter and inverted commerce, your tips then that's what you really, really want to do. Because I dunno how many times I've been to a website and then wanting to go back to the next day and I can't find it ever again.

It's like it's disappeared into the ether. So, you know, make sure that you do something to capture them while they're there. Have an offer as well as your main call to. And look, if you don't know how to do anything like that, please book a time to chat with me and we can help you. Number five, your website's not mobile first.

Google is focused on mobile first, not desktop first. So websites need to be designed to work on mobile devices first, desktop second. Now, if you're building a website on the desktop, you need to make sure that you're getting, you know, the designer or yourself to switch back and forth between mobile view and tablet view.

You know, multiple times to make sure everything lays out properly. There's a lot of options there. You can turn things off that you don't want on mobile view, et cetera, et cetera. But you have to be mobile first. You are mobile first. You look at your mobile or your tablet before you probably go to the desktop a lot of the day, even though you might not think about it, make sure that it looks right on a mobile, okay?

Some things don't look right when you go to mobile view, for example. Forms can be. You know they might be set to a certain width so they run off the side of the page and actually don't fit or don't auto resize into the width of the mobile device. Think about whether you need a new template, and this is the point where you may need to actually update your website because if your website doesn't work on mobile, you definitely need to put money aside and get it adjusted or get in there and hack that coat.

Don't forget tablets, a lot of people sitting at night with a tablet, not necessarily their phone cuz it's a little bit bigger device, but you can still sit in front of a tally and you know, do two things at once as they say. And please go through and check any embedded tool. So we are embedded video from YouTube.

There's this little piece of code that goes on your page and shows the video. Same with embedded forms or quizzes or anything like that. Make sure that they work on your mobile as well. Cause sometimes they're not right. So number five was not mobile first. Let's review number one, the website's outta date, and it's really obvious sometimes.

Number two, don't have enough content for people to make decisions. Number three, got old or no video Number four, zero calls to action. And number five, it's not mobile first. So your task going forward, go through every page on your website and. Review it, make notes, and then get your webmaster or yourself to update it.

This is super, super important. Now, that should keep you busy for a couple of weeks, and as always, reach out to me. If you need help, you can get me via Facebook, LinkedIn, or somewhere online. You'll find me. And that brings us to the end of this podcast. So that's it for another week, and I look forward to helping you succeed in the next episode.

Till next time.