#12 Savvy Marketer's Guide to Profitable Website Design and Development

Escape The Matrix

Your online real estate is just as important as your offline. Learn how to add some architecture, interior design, and landscaping to it!

“I guess I’m supposed to have a website for my company because that seems to be the thing to do.� “I’m also supposed to buy thousands of boring business cards and set them on my front counter in hopes that people will care to grab one and then all-of-a-sudden become lifetime customers�
Stop iiiit, just stop it. The things you spend your time on, the things you spend your money on should be assets to you, not bottomless liabilities. You DO need a website, but you need it for the right reasons. And the right reason is NOT just because you’re supposed to in the 21st century. Your website is a huge asset, one that can drive tons of foot traffic to your brick-and-mortar business; or tons of leads for your sales company. Whatever business you have, you can showcase it online and gain customers, leads, patients, clients, whatever from your website.
A website is actually similar to a brick-and-mortar building, it’s your online real estate; you own that portion of the web! That’s actually pretty cool, huh? And since it is real estate, you need it looking nice, so it’s time to hire a good contractor, a good interior designer, etc all for your website.
Your website is used for communication. “The Internet is the latest telegram machine, a new type of telephone� it’s simply that, a new way of communicating with people, but lets not forget that you still need to be thinking about the message you’re communicating, you still need to apply basic marketing skills, these things aren’t somehow new online, people are still sold by the same types of techniques. Whatever your message is offline, should be your message online. Whatever sales process works offline needs to be replicated online. The Internet is just a hi-tech phone used for communication.
Simple as it may sound, the idea of creating a website can seem daunting to some. It is kind of a lot, so lets break it down into some simple steps:
1. Step One – Strategy Meeting
A few good things to address in this are:
•   Figure out what you want your website visitors to do; the main goal of the website. Is it to buy something, to call you, to download a document?
•   How can those people find you? What will they type in on Google that you would match?
2. Step 2 – Analyze
Now it’s time to analyze what’s already out there:
•   Search for those phrases from step one and make a list of the best 5 sites that rank for them. (not the top, the best, let me explain the difference)
•   Print out the best 5 websites. Best is determined by rank but also content on the site and website/graphic design of the site. Sometimes there are odd ones with not-so-great looks that slip through the cracks, we don’t want to get ideas from them.
•   Circle all the graphical elements that you like on all 5 pages.
•   Highlight headlines, sentences, and other elements that you like
•   Throw out all of the pages with no writing or highlights, and transcribe all of the writing into a word doc, then scan all of the high lighted pages so you can show your graphic designer those elements.
3. Step Three – Content Idea Generation
At this point we want to identify questions that people are asking about our industry, product, or service and questions that they SHOULD be asking but aren’t. From these questions and answers we can get an idea of some of the pages that our website needs to have. Each of these pages can now correspond to keywords that you’ve determined back in step one.
Dave, Owner of Escape the Matrix, goes deeper into his blueprint for website development in the premium course. He’ll talk about things like keyword divisions and how many to place on the home page, style guides, and keyword-rich content for your site.