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Episode 113: Website Tools: Part 2
197 Plays5 years ago
Krista joins me on the podcast to continue our discussion of different website tools. Today we discuss the options for email marketing, including one of our favorite tools for building an email list, different e-commerce and cart platforms, and tools for designing lead magnets. We also chat about how to embed Instagram feeds on your website and actually what we recommend doing instead, even though I think we covered that on our last episode together.
For the show notes, visit https://daveyandkrista.com/btb-episode-113/
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Transcript
Lead Magnets vs. Websites for Mailing Lists
00:00:05
Speaker
People don't understand that their website is not the best way to send somebody a link to a free guide. And in general, the best way to build a mailing list is by giving someone something free, often called a lead magnet, in exchange for their email address, and that can help build your list.
Brands at Book Show Introduction
00:00:26
Speaker
Welcome to the Brands at Book Show, where we help creative, service-based businesses build their brands and find more clients. I'm your host, Davy Jones.
00:00:36
Speaker
Christa joins me on the podcast to continue our discussion of different website tools. Today we discuss the options for email marketing, including one of our favorite tools for building an email list, different e-commerce and cart platforms, and tools for designing lead magnets.
Accessing Show Notes and Feedback
00:00:51
Speaker
We also chat about how to embed an Instagram feed on your website, and actually what we recommend doing instead, even though I think we covered that on our last episode together.
00:01:00
Speaker
Be sure to check out the show notes at DavyandChrista.com for the resources we mentioned during the episode, and we want to hear from you. Let us know what kind of content you'd like to see on the Brands That Book Podcast as we move forward. To leave your feedback, just send us a DM on Instagram at DavyandChrista. Now, on to the episode.
Email Marketing Strategies
00:01:21
Speaker
All right, we are back with another episode of the Brands That Book Podcast, recording from the home office with Christa Jones.
00:01:29
Speaker
on a very snowy Virginia day, which is our first snow here and it's been fun to watch. Yeah, absolutely. Exciting that it's snowing only a little, but makes me excited for potentially more snow later this winter. Yeah. So we are back with part two of our tools and resources podcast. And today we're going to be talking about mailing lists and cart systems and a few of the more technical aspects that you can use to complete your website.
Email Platforms: Flowdesk vs. ConvertKit
00:01:55
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. And I think the hard part about recording an episode like this is that there are so many different tools that we'd like to talk about. And I think we're always discovering new tools as well. So this is a episode I think we'll have to revisit and just continue add to this list.
00:02:11
Speaker
Right, but I think that we could at least get started and give people a few of our favorite options. Yeah, absolutely. So the categories that we're going to be talking about today are mailing lists, then we're going to go through cart systems. So if you're interested in adding a cart or checkout system to your website, a few different ones to consider, and then a few options for creating graphics and lead magnets, and then finally embedding an Instagram feed. Did we talk about embedding an Instagram feed last time?
00:02:40
Speaker
I think we might have actually switched that from from this episode to the last episode. All right. Well, we'll cover it at the end just in case we didn't. Okay. So sounds good. All right. So let's dive in first to mailing lists.
00:02:53
Speaker
Yes. So one of the biggest hiccups I hear from people when they're starting a mailing list is that they don't, people don't understand that their website is not the best way to send somebody a link to a free guide. And in general, the best way to build a mailing list is by giving someone something free, often called a lead magnet in exchange for their email address. And that can help build your list.
00:03:19
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. So yeah, I think that's a point of confusion we see often is that people want to know how to use their web website to send email. And in general, email not being something that most website platforms do, and they do it, you know, typically, it's not going to be as feature rich as and dedicated mailing list
Why Not MailChimp?
00:03:41
Speaker
solution.
00:03:41
Speaker
Um, you can upload files to most website systems, but there isn't a way with at least with show it, um, with WordPress, there might be with a third party plugin to collect somebody's email address and then have them receive the file. But again, like you said, that's not a dedicated mailing list system. So it's not going to be as into like, it's not going to be easy to consistently send people email that way. You might be able to deliver one file, but that's not the best way to build your mailing list.
00:04:10
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, sure. So talking about a few different email platforms. All right, so these are the platforms that you're going to use. One to send what's typically called a broadcast to your mail list. So anytime you want to send a one-off email to a bunch of people who have subscribed to your mailing list, that's typically called a broadcast.
00:04:28
Speaker
Mailing list solutions can also allow you to send sequences. And so sequences are typically automated. So if somebody were to opt into your mailing list for a given lead magnet and you wanted to send them a series of emails that are based on either the actions they take or different time intervals, then that would be an email sequence. So
00:04:48
Speaker
All of that you can do with a mailing list solution. We have another podcast episode. I think that has been dedicated to this topic. So if you're interested in more of the ins and outs of how mailing list solutions work, check out that podcast
Flowdesk or ConvertKit?
00:05:03
Speaker
episode. I think it's just called the super simple guide to mailing lists. For now, I guess we'll just go through a few of the ones that we have on our list and the ones we have on our list are Flowdesk, ConvertKit, and Entreport.
00:05:14
Speaker
Right. We used to recommend MailChimp, but I want to note that that is not one of our favorite platforms. I think that even though it's great for broadcasts, it doesn't do a lot of these automations that Davey just mentioned very easily. And I found that it can be really hard to embed a free file to send to people. If you're brand new to mailing lists and you don't have the budget to pay for one of these other softwares,
00:05:38
Speaker
MailChimp might be a good solution for a short time, but we found that most people outgrow MailChimp pretty quickly, especially if they're actually putting time and energy into their mailing list. Absolutely. And it should be noted too that ConvertKit now has a free plan and they previously didn't.
00:05:55
Speaker
ConvertKit might be an option for a lot of people just getting started because they have that free plan. That free plan though, pretty limited. So as soon as you want to do anything really extra or anything that's even relatively advanced, you're going to have to start paying for it. But again, if you're putting effort into your mailing list, then you'll probably outgrow the free plan of ConvertKit or MailChimp pretty quickly. And you don't want to be in a position where you have to switch again right off the bat.
00:06:23
Speaker
Right. So I would just say, start with, you know, something like Flowdesk ConvertKit or Entreport. Flowdesk or ConvertKit is probably where most people are going to want to end up. We have a blog post as well comparing the two, both Flowdesk and ConvertKit. It's a couple months old now. Both platforms have rolled out new features since, so it might be a little bit dated, but I think the gist of it is
E-commerce Cart Systems
00:06:46
Speaker
still good.
00:06:46
Speaker
We're big fans of Flowdesk. For most people that we work with, I think Flowdesk is what we recommend because it's really, really easy to use and it's beautiful and it's designed for creatives. So depending on what you need, this is probably our first recommendation. They make sending free files to people who put in their email address really, really easy and they also have really beautiful templates and they have great fonts and great colors
00:07:13
Speaker
And I feel like you can customize it enough to make it look beautiful and match your brand, but it's not so much that it's overwhelming. And so they have pop-ups that you can add to your site. They have landing pages that are already built and then are really easy to connect to everything. And then they have forms that you can just embed in a blog post or on your website.
00:07:34
Speaker
Personally, I find when I'm working with clients we use the landing pages a lot because pop-ups can be a little funny sometimes when you click on them from a website, so we're big fans of the Flowdesk landing pages.
00:07:46
Speaker
Yeah. And I think landing pages just in general, because more and more browsers block popups. There's just more chances that maybe a pop-up doesn't fire correctly. Then rather than if someone click a link and go to a landing page, right? So there's definitely time and place for popups. Not saying that you shouldn't use them on our website. If you come to our website, you'll notice that we use popups. So, um, but we also have a lot of landing pages and we typically link to a landing page, especially cause you can't actually link to a pop-up.
00:08:11
Speaker
Yeah, but you can create a click action so that a pop-up appears upon click. But anyways, not the point. Yeah, I think everything you said about Flowdesk, ConvertKit though, also pretty easy. Not quite as beautiful as Flowdesk. No, not even close.
00:08:27
Speaker
But it does have probably a few more features than Flowdesk. And I think in part just because ConvertKit's been around a bit longer. So ConvertKit's a solid platform and a great place to start for sure. Certainly if you're trying to find a free plan and you really don't want to start with MailChimp, then ConvertKit's probably the way to go.
00:08:49
Speaker
EntrePort is a little bit more serious email tool. So if you have a sales team, for instance, EntrePort might be where you want to go. EntrePort is going to be more expensive than the other two, so that's something to keep in mind. But again, if you have a dedicated sales team for sure, then you're going to want a tool like EntrePort that acts a little bit more like a CRM in addition to being an email marketing tool.
00:09:13
Speaker
So Entreport is what we use for Till Agency. We've been really happy with it so far. I don't think we've really even scratched the surfaces on what it can do, but because we have more of a sales team over for Till Agency, we just found that we really needed something like Entreport to be able to do the things that we needed to do.
00:09:30
Speaker
And at Davy and Crystal we use ConvertKit because we've been using it for several years at this point and we have a lot of like flows built into it, which has been great. It's also integrated really well with our WooCommerce software on our website. Yeah, and that's important too. I mean, that's important to keep in mind. It's just what do these mailing list platforms integrate with? Because that might dictate what decision you make on mailing list platform. Something like ConvertKit, because it's been around for quite a bit longer than something like Flowdesk, going to have more native integrations.
00:10:00
Speaker
So, if you don't need a bunch of integrations, Flowdesk is probably a great place to start. And again, they seem to be rolling out new features at lightning speed. And they integrate with Zapier, which in turn allows you to integrate with a lot of other tools. If you don't know what Zapier is, it sort of acts as a middleman so that you can connect different tools that don't natively integrate with one another. And then Onchaport, again, has a lot of integrations as well.
WordPress and WooCommerce for E-commerce
00:10:25
Speaker
That I think wraps up our conversation on mailing lists. Should we move on to cart systems? Yeah, that sounds good. All right. That sounds good. And we're going to come back to, I saw convert boxes on the list. We'll come back to convert boxes. It's not a mailing list solution. It just is an integration add-on kind of. Yeah. And definitely can enhance any mailing list solution that you go with. So we'll come back to that when we get maybe down to creating graphics and lead magnets. Okay. That sounds good.
00:10:49
Speaker
there are tons of different cart systems out there. I think the biggest thing to keep in mind when you're trying to choose a cart system for your website is to make sure that it's gonna integrate well with your current platform. So for our website, we have a WordPress website and we use WooCommerce because WordPress and WooCommerce and Elementor let us create a very dynamic website that has a whole lot of products and it gave us the most design control.
00:11:19
Speaker
Yeah. And I think even beyond design control, the most functionality that we need or the functionality that we need to have the kind of shop that we have. So a lot of our products have different variations. So there is some complexity in how we show off products, how we sell products, how we deliver products. And payment plans and all sorts of stuff like that.
00:11:42
Speaker
Yeah. And so WooCommerce is going to allow us to do that. And, you know, of course it's built for the WordPress platform. Um, so WooCommerce gives us a lot of e-commerce functionality, um, and even more, like there's really not much that I can think of, uh, that we would need, need to be able to do that. We wouldn't be able to do on WooCommerce.
00:12:03
Speaker
I think another one that's good to talk about right now is Shopify and Shopify Lite. If you're looking for a dedicated e-commerce solution, of course we're going to recommend the WordPress WooCommerce environment just because we think that's going to give us the best combination of design control along with the e-commerce functionality that we need.
00:12:27
Speaker
And the bet, one of the big benefits is that everything can be on one website URL, which is huge for simplicity sake and for SEO. Sure. But not with, so not talking about even Shopify light, but comparing it to just full Shopify, right? Right. Where Shopify is another alternative that we're asked about a lot and we just don't build on Shopify because we find it's harder to get exactly what we want in a website.
00:12:51
Speaker
It takes a lot of code and a lot of more, more paid plugins than WooCommerce needed to be able to do exactly what we would have needed to do. Yeah. And so Shopify has a whole, they call them instead of plugins, they call them apps. Shopify has a ton of apps that are available to extend functionality, you know, in the platform.
00:13:11
Speaker
But typically like you just mentioned you have to pay for them even more so I mean we pay for a lot of plugins for WordPress But even more so than on WordPress and then also it's not that you can't get a beautiful looking website with with Shopify You absolutely can but it takes a little bit more. I think development know-how. Yeah to really customize it
00:13:33
Speaker
Definitely. I've worked on Shopify sites before and it took a lot of writing HTML and CSS in order to get it to really look the way we wanted to. Whereas if we build a site on WordPress with Elementor, all of the shop stuff integrates really well. And so we could get it to look exactly the way we want it without hardly any code. What is the code that Shopify runs on? Is it like liquid or something like that?
00:13:57
Speaker
I think so you need to know PHP too, in order to edit a whole lot of stuff. So yeah, so maybe a little bit more complexity with Shopify. But again, that's not the knock on Shopify, but our platform of choice, or platforms of choice as a lot of you who listen regularly now are WordPress and show it.
00:14:14
Speaker
So if you want to add e-commerce to a show at website You can do that by adding WooCommerce to your website you have to have the highest tier of show it to do that and You're not gonna get the full functionality of WooCommerce if you're using a show at website So you're gonna be a little bit limited there I think not only just in terms of shop shop functionality, but also the design in design as well
00:14:39
Speaker
Yeah, I've learned that you have to do a pretty good amount of CSS and HTML again in order to get the WooCommerce shop to look okay with Showit. And that's because Showit wasn't designed to be an e-commerce platform.
00:14:54
Speaker
And I think since then there have been different hacks and workarounds to get more functionality, better design aesthetic out of WooCommerce when using Showit. But again, if you are an e-commerce company, why wouldn't you just go with a true e-commerce platform? And so that's kind of our philosophy on that.
00:15:14
Speaker
although there are a lot of people out there that are that are selling you know digital or physical products using their show website so it's not that you can't do it it's just that if your business relies on is an e-commerce company why would you use it an e-commerce platform.
00:15:29
Speaker
especially considering, you know, at least last time I checked when you looked at the help documentation for WooCommerce and show it is, you know, it says right there that it's technically a beta integration. Right. So things could break, things potentially might not work the way that you need them to work. And you kind of relying on a show it at that point to, you know, fix the integration for you. Right. So it's not that they're not helpful, but that's not the main source of what they do. And so if they're helping you, it's kind of they're going above and beyond at that point.
00:15:58
Speaker
Yeah, and I think even beyond that too, it's not that a WordPress WooCommerce integration couldn't break because it totally could. We recently had an issue that we had to sort through, but it's more that you want to be kind of in control of fixing that rather than waiting on somebody else to hopefully fix it, especially if your business relies on that revenue.
00:16:18
Speaker
So something to keep in mind there, again, we build a ton of show at websites. I'd say that the majority of custom semi-custom websites that we do are show at websites.
Thrivecart for Funnel Checkout
00:16:27
Speaker
So we love building show at websites. When it comes to e-commerce though, we prefer a WordPress WooCommerce stack.
00:16:33
Speaker
If you are going to do a show at site and you have a really small shop, you might be able to use Shopify Lite, which is, I think it's like $10 a month and it lets you embed a like buy now button onto your show at site. And so then you're technically linking off to Shopify to do the checkout, but it does let you have the show at pages with the cart system in it.
00:16:58
Speaker
We don't recommend that if you have more than 10 products because there isn't a way to like auto add new products and have them like sort and filter and so if you really start having a good amount of products and you have categories for your products it gets really tedious to update everything.
00:17:15
Speaker
especially if you're running a promotion or something like that. Yeah. Like we used to do that for our site. And if we were going to run a sale and we wanted to cross out the prices, we had to go in and manually update every single price. And it was just really tedious. It was easy to miss things on WooCommerce. You just, you can put the whole shop on sale and just one or two clicks and you don't have to cross out all the prices. So it's a lot easier the way we do it now because we have so many products.
00:17:40
Speaker
Absolutely. Some of the benefits of Shopify Lite is that Shopify does have a pretty good looking checkout. That checkout page, that checkout flow I really like from Shopify. In addition to that, one of the issues that we used to have with Shopify Lite, and one of the reasons that we switched eventually to Thrivecart, which we'll talk about in a minute, is because there wasn't a way to track
00:18:00
Speaker
conversions from people going from your website to the product page to check out to checking out and then that firing the Facebook pixel There is a workaround to do that now So that's not as much of a hang up if you're considering Shopify light So you can make that work, especially if you're running Facebook ads need to track those conversions
00:18:19
Speaker
But like Krista said, you know, it really, if you're going to have, if you are an e-commerce business and you have a ton of products, then it can get pretty tedious updating a website that runs on Shopify Lite. Right. Thrivecart is another option, not so much as a court checkout. If you're thinking about a court solution where you can add a bunch of products to your shop or I'm sorry, to your court at once and then go check out for them,
00:18:45
Speaker
Thrivecart won't allow you to do that, but Thrivecart is a good funnel checkout. And so what I mean by that is if you are selling an online course, if you're selling something where you don't want people distracted by other products, you want them to go through your funnel, add whatever it is to checkout, have them checkout, maybe give them upsells and downsells along the way or bump offers, Thrivecart is a great option to do that.
00:19:08
Speaker
Do they say it's technically still in beta? Are you allowed to just join it now? Yeah, so that's interesting. I feel like this is just how they get people to sign up. It's been an invite only for years now. I remember when I signed up, I thought I got in at the last minute. It turns out I had years to sign up at their lifetime deal, but it is a lifetime deal. So we paid once for this. I forget somewhere between $300 and $500. I don't know what the most up-to-date price is.
00:19:33
Speaker
but we paid once for it. A lot of the alternatives to Thrivecart, Samcart for instance at the time, and I think their pricing has since changed, but at the time I want to say it was somewhere around $100 a month or close to at least the option I was looking at. So the amount of money that we've saved using Thrivecart versus some of these other tools has been
00:19:51
Speaker
has made Thrivecart worth it for sure. You might have to technically use somebody else's link to join. You can go ahead and check that. If you do, we have a link on our website that you can use to join. It is an affiliate link. We get a small commission at no additional charge to you if you use it.
Creating Lead Magnets
00:20:08
Speaker
But Thrivecart is one of our favorite platforms. We still use Thrivecart, but it's for things like courses, things like just one-time offers that we want to put in front of people, and then we don't want them distracted by adding other things to their cart.
00:20:21
Speaker
Or it's also nice too because when they add that to start the checkout, it's easy to add bump offers and upsells and downsells. You can really add a whole lot of integrations with Rivecart that maybe other carts would be really complicated to do. I've also found they have a lot of integrations in general. It's easy to integrate through Zapier to all sorts of other checkout things and all sorts of different website platforms.
00:20:49
Speaker
Yeah. And we, I think specifically integrate with ConvertKit, we integrate with Kajabi. We use Thrivecart for any of our recurring subscription payments. So for the Palm Tree Club, for instance, that's all run through Thrivecart because it's a really easy recurring subscription platform. It's really easy to set that sort of thing up.
00:21:09
Speaker
So those are the three to check out WooCommerce, Thrivecart, Shopify Lite. WooCommerce and Shopify slash Shopify Lite are I think two of the similar platforms in that you can add multiple things to your cart. Thrivecart is really for an altogether different purpose. So even if you use WooCommerce or Shopify, Thrivecart I think is worth checking out, especially if you're doing things like selling courses.
00:21:35
Speaker
So should we move on to creating graphics and lead magnets? Yes, I think that's a good idea. So if you are going to deliver some sort of free guide in exchange for an email address, you're probably going to need to put that guide together some way.
00:21:51
Speaker
we found that these guides don't need to be fancy. You actually don't want them to be too fancy because if the file gets over, I think like 25 megabytes, email servers like Gmail might block it from coming in. So if you're gonna make one of these guides, don't load it with images. You don't want it to be too big. I think that, I feel like I've seen ConvertKit or other emails platforms actually not let me upload a file that was too big because it said that it might not be able to be delivered.
00:22:19
Speaker
It's also nice if these lead magnets can be printed easily because some people like to print them. So that said, you don't need to get super fancy with this process. One of my favorite platforms to use to actually create these PDFs is InDesign, but I know that that's a premium piece of software. It can be a little complicated. So I think that anything like Google Docs or Google Slides or even like Canva can all make really great PDFs really easy.
00:22:49
Speaker
Yeah, I would say if I had to make something myself, not being a designer, I would choose Canva, Google Docs, or Google Slides in order to make it. I personally hate when things are designed using InDesign because Crystal will send it to me and you know, I mean just there's all sorts of little stuff like
00:23:07
Speaker
if it's a lot of written text and you start typing it goes on to the next page it doesn't really go on to the next page you have to it can yeah see it can you know but it should just do that in my opinion but not the point um i digress um so you know in design adobe illustrator those are all going to be um
00:23:27
Speaker
a little more, yeah, premium tools, a little more challenging to use, but you can make it, you could even make a guide in Photoshop if you have it. I think the key would be to make sure with any of these pieces of software, you export them as a PDF and you make sure that they're not too big.
00:23:43
Speaker
Our team's favorite design software is probably Sketch because it can be a one-time payment or it can be in monthly, but it's not nearly as expensive as InDesign or Adobe Illustrator or the Adobe Suite. And it's really similar to Illustrator because it lets you export
00:24:00
Speaker
images and files as different types of file types. And it also lets you do graphic and text really well, and the text is editable. And like editing text in Photoshop is not ideal. Photoshop wasn't designed to be a text editor, so it can be really, really tricky there. Like Davey thinks InDesign is tricky, Photoshop is even harder. So if you don't have any of these softwares, but you want something that is maybe less expensive and pretty easy to use, I would check out Sketch.
00:24:28
Speaker
Yeah, and I would say Sketch though is still a professional tool. It is, but I think it's like $100 a year as opposed to like $30 or no, $60 a month for the Adobe suite. But still, I'd say like the free accessible tools or free or relatively inexpensive accessible tools are going to be Canva and then the Google suite.
00:24:51
Speaker
If you want professional tools, then InDesign, Adobe Illustrator, the creative suite is an option. It's going to be a little bit more expensive. Sketch, still a professional tool. What our team uses to design and also what the TIL team uses to design, especially since they've rolled out with Sketch teams, which makes life a lot easier if you need to share files across team members. Sketch is a great option. Right. Any more to say about that?
00:25:18
Speaker
I don't think so. Awesome. I do want to talk about ConvertBox for a minute too, just in terms of, um, you know, I guess along the lines of email platforms and creating graphics and lead magnets. So ConvertBox is basically a solution that allows you to create intelligent popups.
00:25:36
Speaker
or intelligent on-site messages, I think is what they call them. So it can be an embedded inline form, you can do pop-ups, you can do exit intent forms where if someone hovers over the exit on the X on the tab,
00:25:52
Speaker
Right. Something pops up. Welcome mats. If you've ever gone to a website and then all of a sudden something scrolls down the whole page and it's a form asking you to join something, all of those, right? And so I probably wouldn't even be able to scrape the surface in terms of explaining all the functionality that you get in something like ConvertBox, but it's something that we use across most of our sites now.
00:26:12
Speaker
Um, I do want to note that you can do popups in show it and WordPress alma mater. All of our designs come with built in popups, but those are very basic popups, especially the show a pop up.
ConvertBox for Pop-ups
00:26:23
Speaker
That's it's not truly a pop up and it's not smart or dynamic. Like you're saying you can do with convert box. So regardless of the platform that you use, most people, if you really want to dive into popups and targeting people for different things could benefit from convert box.
00:26:40
Speaker
Absolutely. And it's platform agnostic in that it works on pretty much any platform where you can embed a little HTML snippet. And any mailing list software, right? Yeah. And it should work with pretty much any mailing list software. They have direct integrations with a lot, and then there's a more tedious way to create integration with something that doesn't natively integrate, but it can work.
00:27:02
Speaker
And like what Chris was saying is it just gives you a lot more advanced functionality. So, you know, you can do some advanced segmenting. So for instance, like people can kind of select what they're interested in, and then it can send them through. It can ask them for additional information based on their selections, you know, just so that you can segment your list as you collect email.
00:27:24
Speaker
addresses so you know what kinds of content to send people. If people take certain actions on your website, when they come back, you can deliver a specific pop-up just for that segment of people. So there's a lot that you can do with ConvertBox. ConvertBox, like Thrivecart, one of those where technically you have to, you know, it's a lifetime deal, which is great. You only pay once.
00:27:45
Speaker
but you might also have to use somebody's link to join. So check out that as well. If you go to their website, they'll let you know whether that's the case or not. If it is, we have a link for that as well. But ConvertBox has been one of our favorite tools for sure. You are a favorite tool. You're definitely more into the testing things with
00:28:05
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. And I will say though, for those of you who have a WordPress Elementor site, Elementor has pretty intelligent popups as well. So it's not quite as advanced as something like ConvertBox, but it is pretty advanced. So if you are looking to save some money and you're using, you know, one of our WordPress Elementor designs, for instance, you can create pretty intelligent popups using just Elementor.
00:28:26
Speaker
Yeah, I think that where it would fall short would be the segmenting. So if somebody takes one action when they visit your website the first time, giving them like a different pop up the second time, I don't think it can get that in depth, but it does do click intense and it can appear after a certain amount of time. And then it could not appear if somebody's already seen it once in 14 days and things like that.
00:28:47
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I would say that's pretty advanced.
Embedding Instagram Feeds
00:28:49
Speaker
I think for the majority of people, what Elementor offers would be enough for sure. With that said, especially in some of the latest updates of ConvertBox, and I haven't even dug into those latest updates, but there's like
00:29:04
Speaker
Quiz functionality, they're just getting really, really advanced with what they can do. And that's, I think, the benefit of investing any tool that's specifically designed to create a specific problem, or to solve a specific problem, rather. Going back to mailing lists, yes, you can join website platforms. You can sign up for a website platform that also has mailing list functionality in it. But my guess is that an all-in-one platform like that is not gonna provide the same benefit as
00:29:33
Speaker
a platform dedicated to a specific feature. We hear that often because I know that Kajabi does a lot of those things and we use Kajabi, we're big fans of it, but we use it for our courses because they really, courses are their strength and their mailing list software is not nearly as advanced as ConvertKit.
00:29:53
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. So even their webinar, like even their webinar solution is not advanced to something like webinar jam, you know? So when you're looking at all in one solution, when you're first getting started, I think it can be, it can offer a lot of benefit and allow you to save some money. Um, I think that as you go along and you need something that's a little bit more feature rich, that's when all in ones really start to fall short a little bit. I think that's it. I guess if we want to talk about embedding an Instagram feed just real quick, just two options.
00:30:22
Speaker
Yeah. Well, there's two options and then there's a way to fake it, which is what we've been recommending lately. Um, so we have a lot of questions from people who want to embed Instagram feeds that automatically update on their site. There are really two ways that do it. Well, you can do it with show it. Um, and then both of these ways also work with WordPress Elementor. So the first is snap widget.
00:30:44
Speaker
They have a free plan. The free plan doesn't let you link directly to your Instagram images unless you pay to upgrade it. So what happens is that you embed the widget on your website and then if anybody clicks on any of those images, it takes them to that image on snap widget, which I know a lot of people don't like, but it's free and you don't have to pay to upgrade it unless you want that direct link feature.
00:31:08
Speaker
The other way to do it is through light widget and you have to pay, I mean you pretty much have to pay to do this because it's going to be $10 to upgrade it once in order to use it on an HTTPS version of your website which we highly recommend everyone have an HTTP version of their website because that shows that your website is secure and if you don't have that version of your website then when people
00:31:32
Speaker
visit your website, especially from a mobile device, they probably are going to get like a private message error and not actually be able to see your website. So make sure you have an HTTP version of your website and Light Widget is one way to embed that feed on that type of website.
00:31:49
Speaker
What we've been recommending lately is that you just put images on your website that kind of look like a fake Instagram feed and then link each image to your Instagram account because we've noticed that these embedded widgets have been really finicky and breaking lately. And when they break, you don't get a message to your email telling you that it's broken. So any visitor to your site is going to see that broken feed, but you may not know it until you either see it or somebody else points it out to you.
00:32:17
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think that there are two reasons why, why you should consider doing it. Number one, you can get all the same benefit. You can link those images to your Instagram feeds so that people go to this Instagram feed and really three benefits. So second is you can create, you can select the images that you want to show down there. Not always what you share to your feed might fit necessarily aesthetically on your website. Uh, so that's number two. And then number three, is it just slows down your website. Anytime you're embedding something like that on your website, it's going to slow down your website.
00:32:44
Speaker
We found that it slowed our site down by a couple seconds. Yeah, I mean, significantly. And so that's not worth it for an Instagram feed. I mean, a lot, I think it's the other way around where people find us on Instagram and then come to our website anyways. But again, even if people were to find our website first and then want to check us out on Instagram, just kind of make sure we're legit and see what kind of content we post, you can still link those images to your Instagram feed.
00:33:07
Speaker
So to me, there's really no reason to be paying a company $10 a month so that you can have a Instagram feed that one slows down your website into, I mean the amount of websites I go into and their embed Instagram tool is broken. Sort of insane. It's a one time $10 fee.
00:33:25
Speaker
But still, now we're paying for it. Save $10, have a faster website and have something that looks just as good. Right.
Episode Wrap-up
00:33:32
Speaker
So that's just our opinion. But like we said, we'll have to jump in and do more of these because I know people are always asking about different tools that we use on our website and tools that we'd recommend. And this is just kind of an ever growing list, you know, like ConvertBox, for instance, is, you know, not something we even knew about two years ago and something we use all the time. Or Steam with Fodusk that didn't exist two years ago, I don't think.
00:33:54
Speaker
It's newer. Yeah, it's relatively new. So this is something that I think is always changing. And I think something that we, at least I enjoy playing around with our different tools that are coming out and seeing how they work and potentially seeing how they can give you a bit of an advantage on your website.
00:34:10
Speaker
Anyways, if you have a question about a tool, feel free to drop it in the show notes, send us a DM on Instagram. We're happy to make recommendations, tell you what we think about a given tool and just the questions that you all ask become topics for future podcast episodes. So please feel free to reach out if you have any questions at all. Yeah. And thank you so much for joining us today. All right.
00:34:38
Speaker
Thanks for tuning in to the Brands That Book Show. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider subscribing and leaving a review in iTunes. For show notes and other resources, head on over to dvandchrista.com.