Category: Wordpress

Before you decide to create a website for your business, you first MUST consider marketing. IN other words, you have to seriously consider how you will get people to your website

I recently wrote an article that answers the question “What is SEO”. In the article, I made an analogy that compared the internet to a shopping center/mall of information. In other words, the internet today is a place where people go to look for information they want and need.

In this shopping center (like many other shopping centers), there are areas that see more foot traffic than others. These areas are often close to mall entrances, near parking lots. 

If you owned a store in one of these shopping centers, it would be in your best interest to try to have your store located in one of these high-traffic areas. Because this would give you access to more potential traffic every day than other stores in the shopping center.

Now say you happen to decide to open a store in that shopping center. But you don’t do anything to try to get your store in a high foot traffic area, you might struggle to get new customers.

Let’s also say that you spent hundreds of thousands of dollars just to build the store, without having a strategy for getting new customers, all the money you invested in building your store might be money wasted.

Unfortunately, this is a story I have seen far too often in my digital marketing career. Many small business owners spend lots of money on building websites without any strategy on how to get new customers to their websites.

This often ends up becoming a waste of time & money for these small business owners. They build this great digital marketing asset (their website), but the website is useless because there’s little to no traffic going to the website.

I decided to write this section in this article about how to create a website for your small business because I want you to avoid making the mistake that I have seen so many business owners as you make.

So, before you go on google and search for “how to create a website for my small business”, start searching instead for ways to get more traffic to your website. Because if you build a website before thinking about how to get new customers to it, you might end up with a marketing asset that is bringing little to no value to your business.

How to get traffic to your website

In today’s digital marketing world, there are two main ways you’re going to be able to get traffic to your website. I’m going to mention them here to give you a place to start in your search for how to get traffic to your website.

I’ll also mention it because your strategy for getting new customers to your website will dictate what kind of website you decide to create.

  1. Paid advertising
    1. On of the tools you can use in digital marketing to get new customers to your website is paid digital ads. 

Paid digital ads are what they sound like. You pay social media platforms or search engines so they can display your ads on search engine results pages (SERP), websites, social media, and or social media networks.

Advantages of paid advertising

There are a few advantages of paid advertising.

  1. Paid advertising is fast.

Paid advertising is faster than organic advertising. With paid advertising, you can start getting customers to your website on day one.

  1. When done right, and for the right reason(s), paid advertising can be an effective digital marketing tool. 

Disadvantages of paid advertising

Though paid digital ads can be a great tool in certain situations, it has major drawbacks.

  1. Digital ads convert less than organic marketing.
    1. For example on a SERP like this, customers are much more likey to click on organic search results than they do on paid search. (numbers)
    2. Customers are much more like to buy from brands they know (social media)

The benefits of Organic marketing

By the end of this section, it will become clear to you which marketing strategy is my favorite (this one). This is because I believe organic digital marketing is a much better strategy for the long-term viability of any good company.

  1. Organic marketing is more authentic. Paid ads can be impersonal. More over, 
  2. Organic marketing is more effective.
  3. Organic marketing is more sustainable.

In the article I wrote about SEO, I noted that SEO was everything you do to put your store in a high traffic area of a shopping mall. The work you do at the beginning to get your store in those high-traffic areas might be a lot more than creating paid ads.

But it is not only more efficient, but it is also a more sustainable way to grow your business. Think about it, if you don’t do this work to get your store in a high foot traffic area of the shopping mall, you’ll have to consistently think about how to get your customers to walk back to where your store is.

However, if you do the work at the start to put your store in a high foot traffic area, you’ll have to do less work in the long term to get your customers to your store. The high visibility of your store will mean that you’ll have an endless source of potential customers to your store.

Type of websites?

As I mentioned above, the strategy you decide to implement to get customers to your website will determine what kind of website you decide to build.

If you opt for paid advertising, you’ll need one or multiple landing pages. 

Landing pages are web pages that are meant to advertise a specific product or service. With a landing page, you won’t need to have a website with many pages (About, Contact, Services etc). All you’ll need is one webpage with a clear description of what your product or service is, and how they can purchase or subscribe to it.

You’ll also need to know how to run ads or hire someone that can help you do it.

If you go instead with an organic strategy, you’ll have to develop a comprehensive strategy to get customers to your website.

In this case, you’ll have to dedicate some time for content creation, or you’ll have to pay someone to do it for you. When it comes to SEO, content is king. You cannot rank without sufficient content.

How to create a website for your business

Now that you know what to do before you decide to create your website, let’s talk about how to create a website for your small business.

There are a few things you’ll need in order to create a website for your small business. I’ll go step by step and explain each of the steps and why each of them matters.

Get A Domain Name

Whether you choose to drive people to your website using ads or organic marketing, you’ll need a domain name.

A domain name is simply the address of your website. In other words, what server in the world is your website located on? A domain name typically looks something like this: domainname.com.

Why a Domain name matters?

Your domain name matters because it plays an important role in SEO.

Consider the following scenario.

You’re a restaurant owner, and you’re getting ready to open a new vegan restaurant in your city of Los Angeles.

Your grandfather’s name is John Smith, and in his honor, you’re planning on naming the restaurant after him: “Smith’s Place”.

After you take care of all the legal paperwork it’s time to choose a domain name for the new website you will be creating for your restaurant. You’re torn between smithsplace.com, smithsveganrestaurant.com & smithsveganplace.com.

Which one of these domain names would be the most beneficial from a digital marketing perspective?

If you chose smithsveganrestaurant.com, you’ve chosen correctly.

As a vegan restaurant owner, your target audience will be users/customers searching for “vegan restaurants”.

Nothing will inform search engines like Google, that your website has to do with vegan restaurants, more than have the words “vegan” & “restaurant” in your domain name.

If you go with a domain name like smithsplace.com, you’re going to increase your chances of ranking high for the search term: “Smith’s Place”. But what is smith place? Google doesn’t know. Neither do your users. They are unlikely to search for your restaurant using those terms.

So, you might be missing out on many customers searching for “vegan restaurants”.

It’s tempting to want to come up with unique names to try and differentiate yourself from the competition. However, unless you have a huge budget and can afford to do some market and competitive research to determine what kind of a name you might use to differentiate yourself from your competition, it’s better to make it clear online what your business is about. 

Choose your hosting provider

Simply put, website hosting is a rental service similar to renting apartments. In the case of website hosting, however, the hosting providers rent space/storage on specialized computers called servers to businesses who need the storage space.

While choosing your website hosting platform, you probably will have to choose your website building platform as well. This is because many of the website builder platforms out there (like Wix, and Squarespace) come with website hosting built-in. So, if you choose a website-building platform like Wix or Squarespace, you won’t have to give website hosting another thought.

I recently wrote an article about why I believe WordPress is the best website platform for small business owners.

If you go with WordPress you will have to be selective when choosing your website hosting provider.

As with many things in life, with website hosting, you get what you pay for. Companies like Bluehost, or GoDaddy provide hosting services along with domain registration services.

However, their web hosting services are not built for WordPress. They are generic web hosting services.

Companies like WPEngine or Kinsta are specifically built to handle WordPress websites. Full disclaimer: I personally use WPEngine for all the websites I manage.

Do it yourself or Hire a professional

Once you have your domain and website hosting service it’s time to create a website for your small business.

For this step, you’ll have two options:

  • Do it yourself or
  • Hire a professional

Do it yourself

At the dawn of the internet, creating a website by yourself might have been impossible for the average person. You had to know how to code.

Today, with the advent of website building companies like Wix, and Squarespace, creating a website alone is as easy as dragging and dropping elements onto a screen.

No matter what website platform you choose, if you decide to create the website yourself, the process will be relatively the same:

  1. Choose a theme/template
  2. Customize the theme/template
  3. Create the pages for your website

Platforms like Wix, Squarespace, and Weebly are much easier to use than WordPress. However, that ease of use comes at a price: They are harder to scale.

That’s why I recommend business owners with plans to grow and scale their business to choose WordPress. Furthermore, plugins like Divi and Elementor can give WordPress features comparable to easier platforms like Wix, Squarespace, and Weebly.

Pros of doing it yourself

One of the main benefits of doing a website yourself is that you’ll save money from not having to hire a web designer/developer.

Cons of doing it yourself

There are a few disadvantages of creating a website yourself

  1. Time consuming. 
    1. One of the biggest disadvantages of creating a website yourself is the time it takes to create it. You’ll have to spend time not only creating the website, but also learning the platform.
  2. Bad/inconsistent design
    1. If you’re not an expert designer, or don’t have a good feel for design, the design you create for your website might not be adequate. User interface is an important part of creating a website. Bad user interface can have many bad effects including: 
      1. High bounce rate
      2. Lower rankings on search engines
      3. Low conversion rate

Because of the two disadvantages listed above, my recommendation is if you can afford to hire a professional, do it. It’ll be worth your while if you find the right designer/developer for the job.

Hire a professional

If you choose to hire a professional, there are few things you will need to know.

First, it’s important that you understand the difference between a web designer and a web developer. Knowing the difference between those two will help you save time and money. For your convenience, I have written an article on the subject that you can read here.

Second, it’s important that you understand web design pricing. Here is the most comprehensive article I have ever read about web design pricing.

This article will give you a great starting point when you think about a budget for your website.

Finally, you’ll need some resources on where you can find good developers/designers.

Personally, I have successfully used UpWork on many occasions to hire designers. Though I like UpWork, a company that is built specifically for customers who use WordPress is Codeable, which I have also used successfully.

Other companies where you can find freelancers of all types are Thumbtack, and Fiverr.

Final Words

So, there you have it: How to create a website for your business, including the most important thing to consider before you start creating your website: marketing.

I hope you enjoyed the article. If you did, have any questions or feedback, please feel free to leave a comment below.

Category: Wordpress

You are a small business owner. Over the past couple of years, you have been working on this amazing idea for a new company.

You created the businesss plan, carefully crafted your service packages, & made plans to incorporate your business.

After all of this planning, you knew you would need a website to tell the world about your company and why customers should do business with you. So you hired a web developer or web design company, and they created an amazing website for you.

You’ve now launched your company and your new website, but months into starting the company and making your website live, you are stuck with the question that plagues too many small business owners: How do I get people to my website, so they can see (and hopefully purchase) all these services I offer? In other words: How can I increase website traffic to my small business website.

If you’re struggling with this question, you’re like most of the small business owners I have worked with thus far in my web development career: You’re using your business website solely to sell your products or services.

Business owners who use their websites to “sell only” typically have websites with the following few pages:

  • A home page
  • An about page
  • A services page
  • A contact page

I recently wrote a blog post about how to succeed at social media, by shifting focus from trying to sell at every turn, to being more helpful.

The same concept applies here. One of the best ways to help drive more traffic to your website is to find a way to be helpful to your customers.

How Helping Can Help You Increase Website Traffic

It’s not always easy to find ways to help your customers using your website.

Fortunately for you, I have identified 5 surprising ways to increase website traffic and grow your business without selling.

These surprising uses for your website are all designed to help you grow your business online by showing you different ways you can be more helpful to your customers using your website.

Focusing on being more helpful to your customers offers these 3 main advantages:

Improve your SEO

This image shows a screenshot of the ranking for a website we created and are currently managing. It shows how someone can increase website traffic with better SEO metrics.

Organic traffic is one of the hardest traffic to get. Organic traffic is traffic you get to your website without having to pay for ads.

Finding ways to help your customers using your website will give your customers a reason to come back to your website over and over again.

Having more traffic to your website will enhance your SEO metrics. In short, SEO is how you get webpages on your website to rank higher in search engine pages such as Google, Yahoo, and Bing.

One of the metrics Google uses to rank webpages is engagement. Engagement refers to how long and how well users interact with webpages on your website.

Having customers come back to your website over and over again will increase your engagement metrics by telling Google and other search engines that user thouroughly enjoy whatever content you have on your website.

This will increase the chances that search engines ranks your content higher than that of your competition.

Improve User Experience

User experience is how people feel when they interact with your brand, your business or one of your products. How do these items make your customers feel? Happy? Sad? Frustrated?

A better user experience means happier customers. Happier customers means repeat customers.

Whether you’re a fitness trainer, yoga instructor, or dog groomer, having a booking system directly on your website can lead to a better user experience than forcing your customers to leave your site and rely on third party software.

In this case, the better user experience will make your customers happy/satisfied after interacting your website, which will increase the chances that they come back for more satisfying experiences.

Improve efficiency/workflow

Finding ways to be more helpful to your customers can also have the amazing unintended consequence of making your own life easier.

Take the previous example of having a booking system on your website. Doing that could help you not only create a better user experience for your customers, but also help you work more efficiently.

I have had clients who run classes/bootcamps rely on emails, text & phone calls to book their clients appointments.

This method is so time consuming, that it can lead you to spend too much time on unnecessary tasks such as the back and forth communication it takes to book an appointment.

Having a booking system on your website in this case is a win-win situation for both you and your customers.

5 Ways to Increase Website Traffic to your small business website

Share Your Expertise

Sharing your expertise online is one of the easiest (though time consuming) ways to grow your business online.

It falls into the better SEO benefit category, as more content will help increase the chances that you rank higher on search engine page, but it will also help increase the chances that you get more recurring traffic.

Who is it for?

Any type of business owner can choose to share their expertise one their own website.

However, sharing one’s expertise is would be more useful for business who who’s services tend to be more expensive, such as law firms, financial advisors, web design agencies.

How does sharing your experience help?

Most marketers believe that it takes a customer 7 times to interact with a brand/company before they take an action (make a purchase, join a newsletter, subscribe to a services).

Sharing your expertise is better suited for such business because it allows customers to freely interact with the company (content) over and over without making a huge commitment (making a purchase).

If your content is good enough, it can leave memorable mark in the mind of your customer, which increases the chances that they will remember your business, when they need the products/services you offer.

Furthermore, sharing your expertise online could help you gain more readers. These readers could turn into recurring traffic.

If your readers liked your content enough, you could start a newsletter, and leverage those emails to conduct email marketing campaigns for your business.

Start a loyalty/reward program

Who is it for?

This way of using a website especially comes to mind when thinking about small restaurant owners, fitness coaches etc.

Although a loyalty/reward program can also be considered “selling”, it offers additional benefits that a simple website doesn’t.

How can a loyalty/reward program help?

This is another way of generating recurring traffic to your small business website by enticing your customers to come back over and over again by to track, use and/or redeem their points.

If done right, a loyalty/reward program can also help you improve user experience. If your customers feel good about interacting with your loyal/program, their pleasant experience with your website could also entice them to come back to your website.

Save time & money by automating payments

Who is it for?

Though any business owner can benefit from automating payments, this way of using your website is more useful for business owners who sell low cost products/ services.

In the past I have worked with ect.

Too many coaches, trainers, instructors and other small business owners who teach classes, run bootcamps, some of these small business owners still rely on checks, venmo payments, paypal, ect.

This causes 3 main problems.

1. It’s hard and time consuming to keep track of payment platforms

Imagine you have to keep track of each one of these acounts. That would mean each time you have to do accounting, you have to pull each one of these accounts to find out who paid you and who didn’t.

You’d be looking at many different dashboard reports, which can significantly increase the time you have to spend doing accounting.

The more time you have to spend doing accounting, the less time you get to spend doing what you actually love: running your business.

2. It’s almost impossible to keep track of your customers.

In addition to the difficulty of tracking different payment applications, it’s also almost impossible to keep track of clients.

When a client misses a payment, you have to contact them, sometimes repeatedly so that they make the payment.

The clients/customers also might have difficulties finding where and how to pay, which can create a feeling of unprofessionalism. This could cause lower user experience at best, and a loss of potential repeat customers at worst.

Finally, all this tracking down of customers and the headache associated with potentially losing repeat customers, adds unnecessary (& time consuming) tasks to your workflow, and can make your business run less efficiently.

Turn Your Website into A Booking System

Who is it for?

This way of use your website to increase website traffic is best suited for any business owners who rely on appointments to conduct business or make a sale such as lawyers, financial advisors, fitness coaches etc.

Just as your website can help you easily automate your payment process, it can also help you easily schedule in bookings & appointments.

How can a booking system help?

There are many advantages to implementing a booking system on your own website.

1. Keeps your customers coming back

As many of the previous website uses, having a booking system on your website will help increase website traffic to your website by enticing them to come back each time they need to make an appointment.

2. Better user experience

Having users book appointments directly on your website can increase the user experience for your customers by eliminating the extra step of sending your customers to a third party website to confirm appointments.

It can also lead to better user experience by eliminating the back and forth of emails, text or phon calls, in case you didn’t have any booking system at all.

3. Possible Higher Conversion

Many studies have shown that business owners can increase conversion rates with less steps in the checkout process.

Having a booking system on your website eliminates an extra step (sending user to third party software) and can in turn increase conversions on your website.

Automate Your Hiring Process

Who is it for?

This way of using your website can be used by any business owners who needs to hire employees.

How does it help?

If you have ever had to hire employees, you know how hard the process can be. Between having to send, copy, scan, print, and save forms, the process can be extremely time-consuming.

You can streamline this process and help make your workflow more efficient by automating parts of this process using your website.

You could simply have a form on your website and ask potential hires for the information you need from them. You could also easily store that information in your servers so you could access it whenever you want.

Finally, having automating parts of your hiring process can help boost your trustworthiness by showing potential customers that not only are you hiring, but also that you have a streamlines process for doing so.

Being helpful to your customers is easier than you think

After reading about these 5 ways to increase website traffic, you might think to yourself: ‘Implementing these ways are probably expensive’ or ‘it has to be hard to implement them’.

No, and no. In many cases, implementing these tactics are cheaper and easier than you think.

I recently wrote an article about why I believe WordPress is the best website platform for small business owners.

With WordPress, anything is possible. Moreover, creating applications such as booking systems is easier than most business owners realize. In many instances in comes down to purchasing, installing, and setting up plugins with a few button clicks.

For example, in order to create a legally binding form potential hires can fill in on your website, you’d only need 3 FREE plugins, and setting it all up would just take a few clicks.

Final Words

There you have it, 5 surprising ways to increase website traffic by using your website for more than just selling.

I hope you enjoyed the article and that it was helpful in someway. If you have any question, comments, or feedback, feel free to let your voice be heard in the comment section below.

Category: Wordpress

If you’re a business owner, you probably already know you need a website to survive in this ever-evolving digital world.

In 2018 Salesforce recently found that over 87% of customers conduct research online before making a purchase.

Translation: If you are not online when customers are searching for the products and services they need, your business will not show up. In other words, without a website/being online, you’re invisible to most modern customers.

Most business owners know they need a website, but too many don’t know where to begin. After all, the website design world has turned into somewhat of a jungle these days.

To build a website, you can use the services of website builders, digital marketing agency, web design agencies, freelance web developers and so on.

Business owners could find it harder and harder to determine which website solutions are the perfect fit for them.

I’m here to help. Below are 5 reasons you should prefer a WordPress website if you are a small business owner and you’re still searching for a web design solution.

1. Do more with a WordPress website

Open-source software

WordPress is an open-source platform that allows customers to create websites.

Wikipedia defines open-source software as “computer software in which source code is released under a license in which the copyright holder grants users the rights to study, change, and distribute the software to anyone and for any purpose.”

I will spare you the technical jargon. To put it in simple terms, open-source software is software that allows developers to openly collaborate. This means other developers are constantly building software to work on top of (with) WordPress. As a result of this, there are no limits to what you can do with WordPress.

With WordPress you can build business listings websites, events websites, blogging websites, web apps and more.

WordPress vs Other website builders

Squarespace Screenshot

When I first started building websites, I used Wix, and Squarespace.

After a few months, I quickly found that there were certain limitations with those website builders.

For example, I couldn’t change the CSS source code for those websites. In some cases, this meant that I couldn’t edit certain layouts exactly the way I wanted.

This is not a problem with a WordPress website.

Furthermore, website builders like Wix and Squarespace are closed source. So, there are also limitations when it comes to what kind of apps you can use with these website builders.

With WordPress, if you have enough knowledge, you can build your own software to help you do WHATEVER you want. How amazing is that?

2. WordPress is affordable.

Nothing is really free.

As an open-source software, WordPress is actually (and literally) free to use.

However, as the saying goes, nothing is really free. WordPress is no exception.

Though the software itself is free to use, just like any software, you will need to install it on some hardware, in this case, a server.

You can either build a server yourself (expensive solution), or you can pay a monthly fee to a web hosting company like WPEngine, to host the website for you.

Either way, there will be some cost associated with hosting (storing) the software.

Pay with your time.

Compared to other website building software like Wix, Squarespace, and Weebly, WordPress has a steeper learning curve.

In other words, WordPress is harder to (learn to) use than some of its counterparts. So, though it is free, you’ll have to either spend the time needed to learn the ins and out to make WordPress work for you, or you will have to hire an expert to help guide you in the right direction.

Despite this steeper learning curve, WordPress is still a better option in my opinion.

Sceenshot of a WordPress website that displays list of WordPress themes

Free themes and plugins.

There are two additional pieces of software, that developers can build on top of WordPress, that will help determine how your website looks and functions: WordPress themes and WordPress plugins.

WordPress themes mainly determine how your WordPress website will look like. WordPress plugins mainly determine how your website functions.

I used ‘mainly’ in both sentences above because sometimes, a theme can change how a website functions and a plugin can change the look of a website.

Whether you’re looking for themes or plugins, there are always free options you can use to start.

The free theme and plugin options will usually be enough to help get you started.

However, most of the themes and plugins will have premium options that will help you enhance the look, feel and functionality of your WordPress website.

3. WordPress is secure.

There are over 100k developers that are part of the WordPress ecosystem.

This is a classic case of strength in numbers.

Using a website builder is like having a company with about 1000 workers working around the clock to maintain a piece of software.

Using WordPress is like having over 100k workers in an ecosystem, who are relentlessly working to improve a piece of software.

Which would you rather have?

Though the popularity of WordPress makes it more of a target for hackers, you can rest easy knowing that 100k+ developers are working around the clock to come up with security patches as users discover vulnerabilities.

4. WordPress is popular.

No. WordPress isn’t popular like the ‘cool’ kids in high school.

It is popular like the nerdy kid in high school who always helped others, and was popular (known) for helping. So, everyone went to him for help with homework because he always got the job done.

WordPress powers over 30% of the internet today. Customers love WordPress because of all the reasons I listed above, and you should too.

5. A WordPress website is the perfect fit for small businesses

If you are a company with a budget for web design, hire an agency, and let them do the work for you.

Wix screenshot

If you need a website for a wedding, a one-time event, or a short-term project, use a website builder like Wix, Squarespace, or Weebly.

If you’re a a small business owner, with a small or no budget, and you’d like to eventually grow your business online, WordPress should be your solution.

WordPress is flexible enough to create small websites like blogging websites but powerful enough to power bigger websites such as TechCrunch, Sony or even CNN.

A WordPress website will help you get started, and will help you grow as your business needs grow.

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