A good resource on using color for conversion

Mobile responsive design data source: www.statista.com

Siteground: The web host Jennie & Alyson use for their hosting needs. Offers a free https Certificate and has great customer service.

Mindmiester Mindmapping Tool: Useful for mapping out your visitor's experience.

Yoast SEO: Great to give you a snapshot of the quality of your posts and pages.

Jotform: Useful for asking people to fill in forms. Integrates with many mail services.

Getting Started with the FB Ads Pixel

Google Analytics for Beginners

Alyson Lex
On today's episode, we're answering the question, how do I make my website work for me and create sales? The big question is this as entrepreneurs, coaches and business owners, how do we consistently sell our products, programs and services without making our customers feel like we're only in it for the almighty dollar? How do we serve the way we know we're meant to serve and still run a profitable business? How do we put good into the world while we put dollars into our pockets? How do we change the lives of our community while also bettering the life we lead? It's not

Jennie Wright
a zero sum game. It's not an either or scenario, it is possible to thrive while serving your clients to the best of your ability. This podcast will show you how. I'm Jennie Wright. I'm Alyson Lex and welcome to the System to THRIVE. It's your online store, your online calling card. It's where you can develop relationships, create brand recognition and create sales,

Alyson Lex
potential customers expected. You competition has it. And unless you're cool with how your business is doing right now via word of mouth referrals, however, you're getting clients, you need a website that converts. If your website is just, they're kind of hanging out, collecting that proverbial internet dust and not moving or growing or thriving, should I say, then it's time to do something about it.

Jennie Wright
Total disclaimer for today. This entire episode came from a really good place. The fact is that me Jennie Wright, at the time that recording this has the ugliest website on the planet right now. And I can say that because I built it myself. I'm cool with it. I know it's ugly. I know. It needs a ton of work. And just to inspire me, Alyson I went through the exercise of really talking about what it takes to create a website that converts now we're going to make an assumption We're going to assume that you know that you need a website and you don't need us to convince you of why. And we're not here to go through the the ramble of what that is. We're here to share how to take what you have, and create a high conversion machine from it

Alyson Lex
like that. Now, to go through this entire process, I want you to set aside everything that you think you know, any preconceptions you might have about how to boost your website conversion rates, just forget that they're there for now. Let's drop the ego. Let's not think we know what's best. It's hard for me. So I know it's probably hard for you. Listen to your customers and your clients. Even if it means incentivizing or bribing ethical bribing them to do it to give you their feedback, okay? their opinion is the only one that matters and this is something that It, Jenny and I have to remind ourselves up all the time. We are not our clients, you are not your customer, and a discussion. We're going to give you a lot of information in this episode, when we were putting this outline together, we went a little crazy. Yeah, just a bit. But don't worry, because we're also putting all of this into a checklist available that we're going to make available to you for you to download. Based on everything that we're going to run through, you can grab that at System to thrive.com slash 14. Once you're done listening, I want you to listen first grab later, I just want to let you know don't freak out about the notes.

Jennie Wright
Exactly. Don't worry about taking notes. Everything is going to be available in that awesome checklist. So what do you want your website to do? You want it to convert Its job is to get people on there and then show them all the beautiful things and get them to take Can action. If it's not doing that? It's not really, really, it's not really serving you in the way that Alison, I think it should, from the the prospect of actually converting. Before we start, let's talk about what conversion is and what we mean. This could be any action that your customer takes. This is signing up for a lead magnet or registering for a webinar, buying a product, program or service, or even scheduling a sales call with you.

Alyson Lex
A lot of times we think conversion equals cash. And in many cases it does, but not always. We want to look at every aspect of your clients buying journey with you, and figure out where those mini conversion steps are. If we want them for example, to join our Facebook group, that's a conversion step. If we want them to sign up for a lead magnet, that's a conversion step. If we want them to buy a product, that's a conversion step. So don't think that when we talk about conversion throughout this episode, that we're just talking about that The end result of dollars, okay? Now, in order to get your website to convert, there are a few things you need to know. First one, you need to know how your site now is hitting your ideal client or customer. You need to know how they're reacting to it. Are they hanging out? Are they clicking more? Are they coming back? This is going to require things like analytics. And I am not the person to talk to about this because I understand the data they give you. And I have no idea how to install it. It's actually pretty easy. So Jenny says it's easy. I'm going to hope that Jenny maybe has a resource, a link to something that she could put in the notes for us.

Jennie Wright
Absolutely. It's not gonna it's actually not that hard. To add analytics to your website. Simply you know, what you're going to do is you're gonna go to google.com Ford slash analytics. Let's just be simple and set up a Google Analytics account. They literally have an online practically at university on how to use it. You don't have to do the crazy developer stuff. There's simple tools in there. And then you're just going to install a plugin if you're using WordPress on the back end of your website that allows Google to trace and track and look at all the pages and the metrics and things like that. And then it spits out a beautiful little dashboard for you, simply so you can look at it and go, Wow, I had 1100 visitors on my website last week. And here's what they did. Right? So over the years, you know, in the beginning, even like 10 years ago, when we were looking at this, in the beginning, it was really hard to figure out this metrics, because honestly, you pretty much had to know how to code it was kind of crazy. Now, it's super easy. It's an installable plugin, you know, it's four or five button clicks, boom, you're done. There's tons of explainer videos. Google is your friend, so is YouTube. And, you know, we'll include the link to Google Analytics in the show notes so you can go and grab that if you haven't already. And, you know, it's not that hard thing figured out pretty quick.

Alyson Lex
knew I knew Jennie was the right person to ask him. Okay, the next thing you need to know is who your ideal client is. And I would venture to actually say this is the first thing you need to know. But know it now anyway, if you haven't already created your ideal client profile, if you don't already have all of that information at your fingertips, let's do it now. spend the time do the research, figure out what steps they're going to take through your website, what they're looking for, what problem they want to solve, what's gonna attract them, what's going to turn them off, understand all of that, so that when we go through all of the steps today, on how to create that high conversion website, you know, what you can do as it relates to your ideal client. Mm hmm.

Jennie Wright
And I would also venture to say, do this before you do all the drastic changes Before you can do all the changes on your website, go ahead and do the steps that Alison and I are talking about. So that you have a baseline, we want to know where you were. So that when you get to where you want to be, you can kind of see the results, let's just be honest. What we really want to do is we want to go through your website, as your ideal client would. Its design, its content, its setup. It's always good before you do a massive redesign, to actually or not even redesign. But if you're trying to optimize your website for the conversion aspects that we were talking about, ask for feedback before you start making the changes, big companies do this. Huge companies do this Vimeo, all these different companies, they do all of these things. So asking for feedback from your own clients and customers is ideal. It is not ideal asking your bestie or your sister or your dad because they are not your ideal client. Either is your partner your you know your wife Husband, those are not your ideal client either.

Alyson Lex
There also, are you Yeah, sorry, I had to interrupt there.

Jennie Wright
No, it's true, either you. And we kind of get lost in the, the the way we build our websites or the way that we build landing pages. Now I have focused a lot on landing pages for high conversion. And one thing I tell my clients is you are not your customer. And we've said that a couple times in this episode, this is another one of those awesome, you know, tattoo things that were that we should probably do. You are not your customer. And you need to look at it very, very differently. So one of the things that you can do is you can solicit this really good feedback. And you need to ask the people who are your ideal client who are in that ideal client universe, or adjacent to them, who like the people who would actually be using it. And to solicit that feedback. There's a couple ways you can do it. You can create a survey and reward people for reviewing your site with 10% or 20% off something something or with a free 15 minute Call or whatever you want, whatever way you want to incentivize your people, you can do that. And you can also do things like, get it. This is what I've done, gone into Facebook groups and said, hey, my website sucks, but I really want your opinion. So would you mind doing a quick 10 minute call with me taking a look at it and helping me destroy it inch by inch? Thanks. Like literally like, I want people to come in there and just be like slash burn. Because I have no ego about it. I know it's ugly. And I know that I need to fix it. So I really just want people to help me. And so I'm willing to take all the things now, here's a small caveat. Okay, you know how they say too many cooks in the kitchen. be really, really careful asking for feedback. You want to make sure that the people that are giving you the feedback are the people who are in your ideal client realm. You also want to ask them the right way because honestly, if you if you solicit 200 people or two people or 12 people For their opinions, you might get 12 different opinions. So be really, really careful. And then you have to pull back you have to go the 35,000 feet look and say, Okay, what is everybody say, based on that feedback, and not freak out and not have the ego and saying, everybody thinks I'm crap. So that's just my two cents.

Alyson Lex
I really love the idea of a that big top level view. You want to collate the data and say, out of those 12 people, 11 of them did not connect with the colors. That means my colors are off. Out of those 12 people 12 of them thought this the tech was good, great. Out of those 12 people X number of thought this was so really looking at the specifics. And that is another thing to consider when you're talking to your ideal client. Ask them specific questions. Oh, yeah. How did these colors feel to you? Can you read The font. So we're going to talk about all of these things in just a minute. By the way, does this headline feel like does this headline make you want to read more? get very specific on the questions that you're asking so that you get specific answers. Otherwise, you're going to get people who are maybe eating about it.

Jennie Wright
And if you give people too wide of a spectrum, if you just ask them to say, tell me what you think. It's not been like Alyson said, it's not specific enough. I've even gone so far as to had two mock ups of two different pages. And said, okay, version a, version B, which one appeals to you and why? Oh, I really like the headline and version a, I really like the font and the colors and version B, but I really don't like the placement of the video and version B, but I like where it is. And then and then all of a sudden, that makes me create version C. And then I present version C, and people like Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. I really like that. That's really, really good. I'll give you an example. This I have a client right now who's summit just went Live. And her opt in page is converting at 45%, Alison

Alyson Lex
45%

Jennie Wright
for a summit. It's incredible. And the page has gone through many iterations. And there was a lot of feedback, there was probably feedback from about 12 eight different people. And things got moved, headlines got moved, this got moved, that got move videos got moved above the fold below the fold buttons, this and that the other, everything got changed around, I saved every single version. And what we found is, is that one point, too many changes have happened. And the page didn't look as good as it had maybe two iterations before, but because I saved it, I had those versions, we could take a step back and go to the one that felt comfy because we just sometimes you go a little overboard, right? And then you got to you got to walk it back a little bit. So you know, things to consider when you're doing this and we're gonna you know, we're really breaking this point down and I think we're going to move on to a new one, but I just wanted to make sure that we covered that

Alyson Lex
well and it's important to break it down. feedback is important. We also want to make sure that your tech is where it needs to be. So, obviously, your website is a technical thing. It's a technical beast. And there are tech things that you can look for. Again, this will all be in the checklist that's available in the show notes page. First thing you want to check is your site speed, your loading speed. I used to have a site on a different host than I use now. And the loading speed was terrible. I could not get a site up faster than 10 seconds, which means I had no conversions. Alright, so I did pull some data for you guys. A healthcare software company called m pulse mobile, found that pages that loaded in 2.4 seconds had a conversion rate, if that same page took 3.3 seconds to load. So we're talking about point nine seconds slower, that conversion rate dropped by 4% points down to 15%. At 4.2 seconds again, not point nine seconds slower. The conversion rate was less than 1%. That's insane. So we're looking at less than two seconds difference killed the conversion rate.

Jennie Wright
Yep. And there's lots of ways to fix that, with the speed and the loading time, and sometimes Yeah, it is absolutely your provider like your web hosting, but also has to do with the amount of images and things on your website. So there's where you know, that's where you want to look at some if you're using WordPress, and I don't use Wix or any of those, I use WordPress. That's where you look at some really good plugins that are going to help compress files. You know, this is where you don't want to have massive, massive photos and huge videos. That's why having them externally hosted is better. Just my two cents. Absolutely. But yeah, so there's lots of ways of optimizing that speed but the main point is Get the speed up.

Alyson Lex
And the reason is, is we're impatient. If I'm on my phone, and something takes too long to load, I'm out of there.

Jennie Wright
Oh, yeah, I give it two seconds. Honestly, exactly. I give it two seconds if I can't get something open, and I'm always searching recipes and things like that.

Alyson Lex
Mm hmm.

Jennie Wright
If that stuff doesn't open for me quickly, I'm like, boom, done, gone.

Alyson Lex
Right? It's so consider the mental state and how your ideal client is thinking at the moment that they're hitting your website. If it's going to take too long, they don't have the time or the patience or the inclination to stick with you.

Jennie Wright
100% Now, here's one of my big pet peeves. Oh my gosh. broken links. Oh, can we all please do an audit and find the broken links? Like I will literally hire somebody at 12 bucks an hour if I have to. to comb my website, not the one I have right now because again fugly.

Alyson Lex
But you know me

Jennie Wright
to find the broken links, find the links, fix the links, right? So broken links interrupt the flow that was designed for your ideal client. When you think about the flow of your website, it's, you know, then I'm using my hands here and nobody can see it, but it's coming into the website, you know, taking an action following the next thing following the next thing. It should feel smooth, it's lazy river. It's sitting on a nice big inner tube with a nice, you know, fuzzy drink and just chillin. It should not be whitewater rapids, it should not be Oh my god, push into this, you know, like it shouldn't be like that should be nice and smooth. And anything that stops your client from having that smooth journey and getting them to the natural next step means that they're going to bounce. And one of the things that you'll see when you look at your analytics is what's called a bounce rate. Right and your bounce rate is People came to your website. And then they went not for me, I'm out of here, whatever the case now bounce rate can do that that can be pertaining to a lot of things. One of the things is absolutely that break in the customer journey. And also, if a link is broken, how do you expect them to get to the next step and actually convert whatever that conversion is. So take the time. And that means combing through and one of the things that I would recommend that you do, and Allison and I both love this, because we're a Google Sheets fiend. I highly recommend having a Google Sheet with all of the links on your website, list them out, you know, just copy paste, copy, paste, oh, this is on this is on homepage, link, link, link link link. And then you can easily go back to that document and audit the document versus trying to comb through if you have like, you know, 32 pages on your website. You can go through the document versus just the website. You can do stuff like that. And keeping it nice and up to date. That would be an idea. What do you think?

Alyson Lex
I love that idea. Anything It gets me into a new spreadsheet I'm really happy with.

Jennie Wright
That's not a lie. That's the truth. Just,

Alyson Lex
I really do love spreadsheets. Okay. So another thing that you want to look at is whether or not your website is secure with the HTTPS protocol. If you're on WordPress using your own hosting, this is something to look at. I'm not sure again about Wix or Squarespace or what have you. I think that's kind of built in or maybe an up level. The reason this matters is that people have been burned. They've ordered stuff online, and it hasn't shown up, or they've been disappointed by what they received, or it hasn't lived up to the hype. And in addition to that, Google and other browsers again, I'm a chrome user. So but Google Chrome, and I think Safari and other browsers, they actually warn your people. If your site isn't secure, Google will put you higher in the listing. So this matters for SEO. Having a secure site matters. It also matters because it's a visual indicator that you're trustworthy, that you've taken the time and the investment, and the effort to show that you have a secure site. This shows that your information, the information they're giving you is not liable for hacking, or any of those other malicious things. If you take payments on your site, it is absolutely required. If you use an external payment processor, or if you have a merchant account, that's one of the things they're going to require before you can take payments on your site and have discussion. Okay, so I've recently not recently but I've done this, and I've done this with a couple of different hosts. So there are some hosts that do not include it as part of their package. If that's the case, you have to call them an ad and pay for it. So call them and ask pay for it. If your host does include it as part of their package, my current host siteground does, they will probably have a dashboard, or something like that where you can go ahead and click and just get it set up. Or you can do like me and you call tech support, and then we'll walk you through how to, because I feel like I can click some buttons and get myself into trouble. But then I don't know how to get myself out. And I'm always worried about breaking my sight. So I always call tech support, to make sure that I'm not breaking things. You also want to ensure that any third party resources that you use, Jenny and I are big clickfunnels fans, we want to make sure that they have an HTTPS as well. Mm hmm. clickfunnels does I know this, right, but if you're using lead pages, check them make sure that those are secure because you're transmitting information through those portals. You want it to be secure. It's a visual indicator again, that your customers And data is safe. It's a visual indicator that you are trustworthy.

Jennie Wright
Let's talk about the navigation bar on your website. This is a like, and you can tell you know, some people call it the hamburger if you're looking on mobile, and let's, let's be honest, 75 80% of people are looking at things on mobile. And that's totally true. So if you look on your phone at a website, it's four lines, I think four lines, and that's called the hamburger. Right? That's where if you click on it, you see the menu. But if you're looking on a desktop, it's the navigation bar. People really see this as one of the first things that they see it's the top. And there's a lot of data right now, that conflicts Some people say, take the navigation bar out. Some people say leave it in what I do with a landing page, I will actually remove the navigation bar on a sales page and less. I want the navigation to help move the people through the page like Long Form sales page. What do you think, Alison? I love that. I do too. Yeah. But if it's a short landing page for a webinar, trust me, no navigation on their

Alyson Lex
zero,

Jennie Wright
because all I want them to do is take the action. You know, there's a lot of talk and data about the navigation bar simply because it can kill your conversion rate. If it's not done well, it can actually lead people away from where you want them to go on your website, and lead them to different things. So when we look at your navigation bar, it's a really important piece of information and it should be very specific. I've seen navigation bars with 18 different things. Holy moly, no, no, no. Your navigation bar should not exceed maximum my opinion, six or seven different things home about blog, products contact podcast, okay as an example. Okay, let's just be an example. And then you can have sub navigation under there. But be very, very careful. If people have too many choices, they make none. So if they look at and it says, if you go to, you know, if you hover over products, and there's 17 different choices below that, guess what they're doing? Nothing. Zero, zilch, nada, no conversion. They're freaking out. Holy moly. There's way too much stuff. And also quite honestly, Allison, I would look at you and go, dude, you need to streamline, you do not need 17 programs, products and services right now, we need to streamline to your three or four core. Right? Stop, stop all the noise, right? The navigation bar can be noise.

Alyson Lex
I think a lot of people want to put all their pages in the navigation bar, because it's there. So they want people to be able to get to it. And we're going to talk about this a little bit when we talk about copy on your site, but you want to map out the experience. Your persons going to have not all pages aren't designed to be a top level page. And by top level page, I mean one that they can get to without going through another page. I have on my website, I have pages that are not in my navigation. They're not designed to be found, unless they're by people who are searching through my site, looking for specific information and following the journey that I've laid out for them. So this will be in the checklist that you can get on this show notes page, but do an audit of the navigation pages that you have. Do they all need to be there? My website has very simple navigation. I think one of my navigation items has maybe three in a sub nav. And that's the work with me page because there are different things that people hire me for. Other than that, it's home about work with me blog, popular cost and contact. That's it.

Jennie Wright
And there's a really good tool to use for this as well. And I want to put this in the show notes as well. And it's mind Meister, right. So mind Meister, you can go to this, it's mind Meister calm, it's really easy to find. And you can create a very visual looking representation of if you're a visual person of what your website is. So it's like the, it's the flow. If they go here, then they go here, then there's this, there's this, there's this, there's this. And there's nothing wrong with having a very simple navigation. But within that navigation, when they go to a page, you can lead them down the garden path to where you want them to go. Right. Not all the links, like Alyson is saying, need to be there, you can make sure by using a tool like mindmeister, which by the way, has a free component. So go check it out, to make sure that everything is accounted for and you can use a tool like that to really make it work.

Alyson Lex
Now, the thing that a lot of people focus on, I think in the wrong way, is Seo or they just ignore complete Which I've been guilty of in the past is ignoring SEO. Because I did not want to trade my user experience for SEO. Now, that was a number of years ago, the whole idea behind SEO has gotten much more complicated. and much more. I want to say user friendly user friendliness is now more important in SEO than it used to be. Oh, yeah, all of the penguin and Panda and polar bear and platypus updates. I don't even know. I just know penguin and panda. I was just making a cute, I was just thrown out p animals. You do need to be optimizing, optimizing for SEO and optimizing for user experience. It's honestly not that hard to do it. You don't need an SEO expert team. Again, there are plugins Yoast SEO is a big one and it has a free component

Jennie Wright
as Allison Write it down. So as I

Alyson Lex
write it down in the notes, I got your bad girl, I got it. You want to make sure that you're using keywords in your page descriptions that help search engines find and categorize your pages. Yoast SEO will help you with that. And like editing it, you don't need to decoding. But basically, the search engines are gonna categorize them anyway. If you tell them where to categorize them, it's only going to benefit you. Now, don't over focus on the SEO to the point where you remove all of that good user experience from your site like, you know, those crappy articles that are basically just keyword stuffing where it's, you know,

Jennie Wright
it really makes sense. Let's go get a

Alyson Lex
beer ale IPA. And I've seen shirts like that that are like shirts, and it's just a bunch of synonyms and you don't want to do that. You want to make it really readable. We'll talk about this in a couple minutes when we talk about copy, want to make it really readable and easy. For your person to get, but the tech side is that back end SEO stuff up.

Jennie Wright
And I had to learn that when I was creating pages because I can create a really good looking page. But I had to teach myself the fact that every single page had to have some metadata, I had to give the browser's something to look for. So that they could we could get it nicely, you know, indexed properly. And so pulling out those keywords and things like that. So I don't ever build a page for the SEO side of things, but then I will go back and make sure that those keywords are definitely within the copy, or at least the the way it's being built. And I know Allison on the copy side, we're going to get into that soon. And honestly, you want to hear the copy side. It's really important. The next thing we want to talk about is a couple little things that come from my world. And these are the things that help with optimization. There are little extra things. They're a little bit beyond, you know, the tech and the copy and everything like that. Little things. And these are just a couple tips and tricks that I've learned over the years and one of them is never asking for more information than is truly necessary to get people to take an action. I'll give you an example. If you're hosting a webinar, or you have a landing page with a download on your website, and you want people to fill out the form, there is no need to ask them for their phone number, their state, their address, the name of their firstborn child, the name of their pet, you know, their biggest problem in life, like you don't need to ask all those questions unless it's incredibly pertinent to the discussion at hand. The more barriers you put in front of people, to get them to register for whatever it is or to take that action, the more chances you'll get less people. Now, there is an opposite side to that. Some people think that by having more forms and more information and more questions, that you'll absolutely get rid of the tire kickers Okay, and that's, you know, that's a that's a field of thought. But for me, what I say is get them in the door, and then start creating that segmentation as to who's actually good, you know, gonna fit in your process. That's just kind of me.

Alyson Lex
The only time that I think asking for a phone number is good is one if it's optional. Sure, and two, if it's specifically stated why, right, I'm signing up for a webinar, and it's like name, email, and then maybe more text. It's like, phone number for text reminders, optional. Cool, right, but make that phone number required and one of two things is going to happen. One, I'm going to hit X or two, I'm going to enter in 0000000000 because I'm not giving you my phone number. Yeah, I'm just not doing it. Yep. I have seen and this can be used in really good ways behind the scenes tech, the Again, not my thing, you get the name and email address up front. And then on the thank you page, hey, in order to serve you better. Could you answer this one question?

Jennie Wright
Absolutely. That's way better.

Alyson Lex
Cool, do it. Not everybody's going to fill it out. But you're going to get more information and you're going to get more leads. First.

Jennie Wright
I love having a two or one or two questions survey on a thank you page. And you can easily set that up using something like a jot form, which you can embed. So we're going to add that to the resources as well and make sure that you guys can go and grab jot form is completely free as well. We'd love giving free resources out. So jot form is awesome. You can embed that on the page. And then those things that information can then be ported over into your email marketing provider, you know, using Zapier and things like that, so there's lots of ways to make all this sort of tech stuff work for you. The other thing that helps and I know this is going to seem odd, but people want to buy from people that they trust. And they know that companies have taken the time or the businesses have taken the time to create things like a privacy policy, or Terms of Service, or even a refund policy guarantees, things like that. Now, you can go ahead and create those, you know, I'm not going to put a resource for this one, but I will tell you that if you go into Google, and type in privacy policy generator, there are lots of them out there, be careful, some are free, some are not free. And also you have to remember that we don't say that those are 100% compliant with the law. You know, buyer beware, okay.

Alyson Lex
Always consult your own expert advice when it comes to any legal documentation that you put on your website, or in your business.

Jennie Wright
Absolutely. And there's another thing that it works really, really well as you grow. One of the things that people love having is is having a live chat tool. Okay? These are really interesting things. Now what they do is people can click on a little box on your website, and it can pop up. You've seen them. Hey, it's Jennie from tech support. Do you have any questions about such and such, right now, the great thing is, is that those things actually send an email to you. And you can, you know, enter in the question that you have, and then in real time, or you can reply to the email. So take a look at those. Those are really, really cool.

Alyson Lex
But one thing I do want to warn you about and this goes directly to user experience is I will go to a website, and at the top, it'll say this website wants to send you notifications. And then I'll get a thing at the bottom. That's the chat bot and then I'll get a thing in the middle. That's a pop up, you know, for a lead magnet and then I'll get a thing on the side for social. Holy, no,

Jennie Wright
yeah, that's too much.

Alyson Lex
So If you use a chat bot, make sure that you're not using other pop ups. Right, really look at how your customer is going to see the site for the first time, so that it's not crazy for them. Check it on mobile, check it everywhere. That's my only thing about the live chat is sometimes they're obtrusive, intrusive.

Jennie Wright
Absolutely. And I have one more thing to add about this. And that is about ads. If you really want to get your website to convert, even if you're not paying for paid ads right now, it doesn't hurt to grab a facebook pixel from your Facebook Ads Manager, which you have completely for free to grab that and to make sure that it's on your website tracking data. And then what you can do is even if you're and you know, even if you decide to run ads a month from now, 12 months from now, you've been tracking the data of who's been visiting the website and you can always look at retargeting those people so it's worth having it on there. I'm not running ads right now. But trust me, the facebook pixel is doing its job.

Alyson Lex
Exactly. Okay. So we have gone through all the tech. And now I really want to talk about the copy because the tech and the copy fine, which we'll talk about in a couple minutes to create your overall user experience, this user experience is what drives conversions. Okay, so we're really creating, we're talking about the three facets of the user experience right now, technology, copy, design, the copy portion is just as important as the others. You could have a site that loads up in one nanosecond, and if the copy is off, it's not going to convert. Okay, the first thing to do, and this really goes back to that flow and that plan that Jenny was talking about with mind Meister, make sure that you know what you want them to do on each page, each of your sink every page and I could do a whole So don't just as each page of your website will have its own job, right, you may decide that on your homepage, you want them to sign up for your webinar, you may decide that on your blog page, you want them to sign up for your lead magnet, you may decide on your contact page, you want them to join your Facebook group, whatever it is, that you want them to do for each individual page needs to be pre determined. It can't just be willy nilly. You're going to create that plan before you write, you're going to have that flow of what you want them to do. And each page is going to lead just authentically and I can't think of the word but it's going to lead right to another thing right to another page, right to a call to action. You want to have one specific call to action on every page. One, the only place that I have more than one call to action is the homepage Okay, the like the System to thrive.com homepage, no slash, write more than one call to action because this is where they're getting a feel for you. But on every subsequent page, there is one call to action. One thing that you want them to do. The exception is blog posts or podcast show notes, because you are giving them resources and links. But if you look at our show notes page, we may give you resources or links. But the call to action that we want you to take has a whole button, not just an embedded link. That's the thing we actually want you to do. We want you to sign up for our list. Okay. So make sure you know what you want them to do on each page. And make it known make it singular and right according to that call to action that you want them to take. Does that make sense?

Jennie Wright
Oh yeah, I love that. It No, it works perfectly because in the overall design, we already know that a person has too many choices makes no choices, right? They don't do anything. They get overwhelmed. And they don't do anything. And like we said before your website is lazy river. We want easy flow to the next thing to the next thing to the next thing and it should all make sense.

Alyson Lex
Exactly. The other thing, let's go back to the lazy river, you can't have a lazy river if it's full of rocks,

Jennie Wright
because it turns it into white water.

Alyson Lex
So you want to make sure that you admit any stumbling blocks and this is actually for website copy, sales page, copy, landing page copy social media, I don't care every copy every bit of copyright, omit all your stumbling blocks, hard words, crazy fonts that we'll talk about with design later, confusing metaphors, as we talk about lazy river. Right, but we've explained that already if I was just like, by the way, you know, when you write copy, avoid the rocks, but I didn't explain the lazy river thing. We hadn't talked about it kind of ad nauseum. It wouldn't make sense to you and you'd be like, what? And it would just pull you out.

Jennie Wright
Yeah. pulls you out of the experience. It pulls you

Alyson Lex
experience. Yeah,

Jennie Wright
exactly. We want it to be an immersion experience. We want you to get immersed in the content, feel pulled in by the copy, the design fits, the feel fits. Everything feels like a comfy, comfy sweater. And, you know, I, I'm making some laughs right now. But you really just want it to feel like the, you just really want to feel cozy with it. And you really want to feel welcome. And you're, you know, all those wonderful things and the copy and all that just make it happen.

Alyson Lex
Yes, in order to make it happen, you're gonna have to do some testing. You're going to test what call to action works, right? If you tell everybody Hey, I've got this lead magnet and you've got it on your website, you have a landing page and this headline is great and all that and it's still not converting. Make a new lead magnet. Maybe it's one they don't like, or ask people what they want and create it for them. But you have to test. Same with your headlines. headlines are very important. They capture and grab attention. And I'm not just talking about sales page headlines, I'm talking about the headline of the page on your website. Tell them what's there for them and why they should stay on that page. The one of the biggest things that I see that kills me Are these expert pages, that literally the headline of their homepage is their name. What the make frickin do. Okay, then, talking about yourself before or instead of talking about your ideal customer, is the number one biggest mistake that I see people make. I'll probably talk all the time about talking about your customer. Even goes over to your about page guys. It even goes over To your about page, you want to talk about them, and you want to talk in language that meets them where they are. I have this thing I call it Homer Simpson. And it's the idea that it doesn't matter how educated, how sophisticated, how smart, how anything your audience is, they at some point, are Homer Simpson. They don't have the energy, they don't have the attention span, they don't have the mental capacity to handle difficult stuff. And because of that, you need to make it easy for them to consume your copy and your content and to stay on your site. If I'm throwing around what I call SAP words, I think Jenny calls them five or $10 words. Yeah, if I'm throwing around all these big words, that takes them mental strength to understand Don't need to do that. It's costing them energy that I don't want them to have to spend, the less energy that they can spend consuming my copy, the less time they spend waiting for my site to load, the less effort they spend wondering if I'm trustworthy, the less you see where this is all coming together. Mm hmm. And it's gonna keep going with the design. The design starts with the colors of your website. And I know this sounds crazy, and we actually just a couple episodes, talk to attorneys about this bright colors matter. And since that episode, I've done some research, and I found a couple articles. We'll put them in the show notes. But basically, people make this subconscious unconscious decision or judgment about you and your website in the first 60 to 90 seconds. Like the first minute and a half guys,

Unknown Speaker
judgment

Alyson Lex
This reverse data showed that between 62 and 90% of that judgment is based on color alone.

Jennie Wright
Oh my gosh.

Alyson Lex
Okay. That means that your ideal client, your visitor is judging whether they can trust you, whether they want to get to know you, whether they're interested in you, whether they want to read more, whether they're ready to hit the big red X, whether they want to share you with their friends, all of it simply based on the color. It starts as as high level as masculine versus feminine. If your audience identifies more with masculine colors, and you have all feminine colors, there is a disconnect. And I'm not talking about gender or any of that. It's how they identify and what they like and what me them where they are, there are certain colors. Red can mean danger, it can mean stop, it can mean fast. There are so many details about color that I've really been diving into lately. I'm going to give you a resource to help you start that for yourself, because I think it's important that you learn what those colors mean. But that's where it starts. It goes from there.

Jennie Wright
I think that's incredible, because people are very judgy on colors. And I get I get clients that come to me with like, here's my color sheet. You know, here's the colors that I use, and I'm like, I can't use those colors. Like I cannot use the most brightest purple on the palette.

Alyson Lex
On

Jennie Wright
your landing page or your website. I just can't because it's going to it's overwhelming, right? It's part of that flow feeling that we want to create, versus you know, super, super crazy stuff that you want to get that people are going to see. So and you know, I want to ask Alison about readability because this is something that I know she's even looked into as well. So what does it say about readability? Yeah, so

Alyson Lex
the thing about readability and I've looked into this, but I'm also very qualified to talk about this because I've been wearing very strong glasses for the majority of my life. So I'm really sensitive to what vision has to do with website content consumption. If it's a whole dark website with white text, I can tell you, my eyes are going to get much more tired much more quickly. And so is everyone else. Okay? If you're like, you know, bright blue background with bright yellow text for get it, End of discussion, right, it's jarring it hurts, it hurts to look at. So we really want to make sure that when we choose the color On our website, it's really easy to read. There's a reason that Kindle books and printed books are white or light background with dark text. Another thing that I've seen that's happened a lot lately is this gray font. And I hate that by the way.

Jennie Wright
Now I use gray font, but I use a darker gray font. Sorry, font

Alyson Lex
is nothing but this light gray, almost like ghostie font is like, How close do you want my face to my screen? Yeah,

Jennie Wright
yep, there's absolutely that.

Alyson Lex
It's this idea of looking modern and I get it, but at the same time, don't sacrifice modern. Don't Don't use modern to sacrifice readability. Additionally, if your target audience is older, it needs to be even more pronounced. The older your audience is, the harder it's going to be for them to read crazy colors.

Jennie Wright
Absolutely. And I Want to say one more thing to this and we're going to move into a bit of another discussion. But I want to talk about whitespace. In your design whitespace is actually your friend, it actually works for you versus against you. Mm hmm. And it makes a heck of a lot more sense to have whitespace. Because whitespace actually gives the eyes a bit of a break.

Alyson Lex
Yes.

Jennie Wright
And it allows the page to flow because your eye naturally starts to look for the next thing. So you can use whitespace as a design element to actually create more flow versus feeling like you have to fill the page with all the things right. And this plays into my next point, which is about fun. And find, oh my gosh, can we just talk about fonts? Okay. Oh, yes, let's please let's talk about fonts. I have seen landing pages and websites with five, six or even seven different fonts when you you know, if you're using a page builder or a native page builder to build your website, or whatnot. Sometimes they come with pre loaded fonts. And, you know, they use one hat, one font for the headline and other font for the sub headline, another font for the body copy and other font for this or that. And if it's too hard to read, nobody's going to read it. And I'll give you an example. If you use serif fonts now cera fonts if you don't know what those are, those are the ones with the little hooks on the end, right? Like Times New Roman think typewriter font. That's a serif font. Sans Serif fonts have no hooks on the end. Those are your What do you call it? That's your home. Ah, yeah, Open Sans Tahoma, things like that. They have no hooks those are actually easier for people to read. Then the sarafan your brain actually gets caught on the sarafan Do you

Alyson Lex
know that? I actually did know that Sarah fonts are best for printed material. Yes, and sans serif or sans serif, as you might say up there and Canada world our best for online Yes, you can use a Sarah font if it's larger and headline and sparingly,

Jennie Wright
sparingly is key here. So sparingly is key. I've used Sarah fonts even recently in a sub headline, just to call attention to something like a date. And the word and that's totally cool. But I switched back to a sans serif font pretty quick. The other thing is cursive. Can we talk about cursive? I have

Alyson Lex
an example for this. That literally just happened to me yesterday, I was filling out a form to be a guest. You know, somebody asked me to fill out a guest information form for their podcast. And they used a very, very cursive font. And it was small. And I literally was squinting and leaning closer to my screen. And it got to the point now this is an exposure opportunity for me an opportunity to grow my business and get visibility and I also didn't do it. There was a direct benefit to me from filling this form out. I asked to fill this form out. Yeah. And I almost didn't do it because it was that hard for me to get through.

Jennie Wright
Absolutely. And you've got to make sure that when you're using a cursive font, that you look at it from the live side to see how it looks and feels because honestly, there's there's things like curling and things like that, like if it's, if it's a cursive font, and it's squished too tightly together, you can't read it. And there's cursive fonts, that the letters overlap with each other. You can't read it. So you have to think about stuff like that it has to look and feel and the fonts that you use have to work for your ideal client avatar, right? So you have to take those people into consideration. Now let's talk about mobile responsive, because there's a lot if you want your website to convert your landing pages to convert, they must be mobile responsive. And I have worked with lots and lots of providers. Okay. And I'm not going to slam anybody here. But I'm going to be talking about one in particular kajabi. kajabi is this huge platform that people use, and they run courses and you can build your website and it is awesome. However, it is not mobile responsive, you have to manually move things around to make it happen. Now I know they're working on it. And it's, you know, it's up and coming, and all these kinds of things. And there's lots of reasons to use a platform like that. But if you're going to make the decision on having high conversion, you need to make sure that the platform that you're using can make sure that it's mobile responsive. That's one of the reasons why I like Click Funnels, I click a button. It shows me how it looks on mobile, and I can fix all the things

Alyson Lex
well, and so the platform that we've built our website on Thrive Themes also has struggles with that it doesn't automatically make it mobile responsive, and it's not necessary to automatically make it mobile responsive. But that means that you have to take the time, effort and energy to manually do it and you know, earlier Jenny said, What did you say? 75% of all traffic, at least mobile. I have found data that mobile and I'm talking mobile phones only excluding tablets, which also counts to me as mobile, by the way, is it generated 51.53% of global website traffic in the second quarter of 2020. Okay, so over half of the people that are visiting your site are visiting from their phones, another large portion are visiting from tablets, another large portion are visiting from Chromebooks or other smaller devices. Yeah. Mobile responsiveness is not necessarily just about phones, either. You're also going screen size responsive. Jenny has a ginormous computer monitor. It's ginormous guys. I Have a gigantic computer monitor, as well as a regular sized computer monitor. And I know other people who have just a laptop computer monitor.

Jennie Wright
And that might be 15 inches.

Alyson Lex
And so, you know, I've seen people that have those big curved ones that like go halfway or like halfway around their heads. That's the screen you're designing for. you're designing for everything from an iPhone five, to a frickin half circle around someone's head. Okay, and so what that's telling me is that you need to think about how things are going to look in different places. The reason is, again, earlier I said, make sure you think about the state of mind that your client is in. Also think about where they physically are and what they're physically doing. Okay, Melissa Quick with the design, the most important information should never be buried on your site. If you have a call to action button, a thing you want them to do put it up top, it's called above the fold comes from newspaper publishing. Right? fold a newspaper in half top section that lays face up in the grocery store rack is called above the fold. The most sensational stuff is there. Same with your landing pages. Same with your website. If you have a video, you can actually I love this trick. put half the video above the fold. The first thing that people are going to do is scroll to see the whole thing.

Jennie Wright
Oh heck Yes, they will.

Alyson Lex
Yes they will. If you have testimonials, put them on your website. This is social proof, but design them in the right way. Don't have one of these sliders that goes one per second and give me a six paragraph testimonial. I can't read it and you've frustrated me. Okay, you want to remove distance reactions from the end goal. And those distractions can come in the form of frustration. If people are frustrated with your technology, with the font that you're choosing with the words that you have, that's a distraction from the end goal, which as we talked about in the beginning, is any kind of conversion, lead magnet, sign up webinar registration, visit and join your Facebook group, buy my thing, schedule, call, whatever you want them to do is the end goal. Sure.

Jennie Wright
And another thing that really helps is using buttons. Okay, I know this seems trivial,

Alyson Lex
but it's not.

Jennie Wright
It's not and this is not grabbing a button from Google. Okay, like a PNG image of a button from Google that looks like it was built in 1994. Thank you very much. You know, and it's like gray and sparkly. It has arrows and it's like, boy, no, put in your cart. No, this is building a button because all page builders and websites, you can do this. It's creating a button. Rather than a link, if you want to say click here, go here, do this, do that, put a button because our brains will see the button. And we get interested in that versus we're not going to see a link and copy as much, especially if there's a lot of it. So use the button as an opportunity to not only break the copy up, but use it as a visual representation of the action you want people to take. That's a big deal. And the next one is pictures of you. Now there's a good side to this, and a bad side to this. And I'm going to talk about both.

Alyson Lex
One.

Jennie Wright
The The good thing about pictures of you are that you're standing in front of your brand you are the brand people want to see who you are and what you do. Pictures can work for you by doing that, but they can also work against you. If those pictures are low quality selfies or you know, bit images or something like really bad stuff. It also doesn't work for you if those images are a professional headshot that you got taken In a mall and they're 20 years old, okay? The other thing is having a picture of you every freaking sentence. I have seen websites where it's like picture, copy, picture, picture, picture, copy, copy, like and it's just holy crap. Like, are you trying to you know, what are you trying to say when there's 15 pictures of you on one page right? So you got to break it up. And although pictures of you are great and we are huge proponents of having you know, something done, it doesn't have to be pro you can take a really you know, you can have somebody take a really good picture of you, but people want to buy for and this is an Allison thing people buy from people,

people buy from people buy from people so make sure there's pictures of you.

Alyson Lex
My little trick to this one, I have amazing lighting in my bathroom, and a really nice wall. And so anytime I feel pretty, you take a bunch of selfies, and some of them look really professional. So you know, take pictures Have yourself candidates are okay? and use them where you can

Jennie Wright
completely agree. And the other thing is usually using images and visual elements. And we're going to wrap this up really soon, we're going to use visual elements as an important tool for creating engagement. Okay, so creating engagement on your website on your landing page, these are the things that are going to help. And they're, they're going to help people like if you're, if your pages are just a wall of text, they're not going to convert. I don't care what it is, if it's just a wall of text, I am not going to read it. I am going to get off of that page. I need to have visuals that go with it that convey the look the feel the problem, the answer, all the things they help and promote the copy. So Allison writes amazing copy. I'll create the page and I'll use images that help enforce and reengage people through those images. Using, you know, really good images. Let's you know, we can go into a whole episode about that. So we're gonna wrap this up by saying make sure you go Grab your website conversion checklist at the System to thrive.com forward slash 14. That's the numeral 14. go and grab that checklist. There's lots of good stuff in there that's going to help you take a look at the website that you currently have. And go through and make sure that it's going to be something that will actually convert for you. So go and check that out. Thank you for listening, and we will be back again another time answering a very big question. Thanks again for watching or listening to this podcast. We hope we've answered some of your big questions today. Be sure to subscribe to the podcast anywhere you're listening and leave us a review.