Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Episode 132: 7 Cool Things You Can Do on Your Website
471 Plays3 years ago
In today's episode is a bit random but Krista and I thought it would be fun to have a quick casual conversation about 7 fun ideas for your website. Hopefully you find one or two of these ideas interesting and if nothing else it gave us quite a few ideas for future podcast episodes. As Krista mentioned in beginning the episode just because you find idea interesting, cool, or fun doesn't mean that you have to implement it. There is often a lot of wisdom in simplicity and keeping things straight forward especially when it comes to your website.
For show notes visit...
Recommended
Transcript
Creating Free Landing Pages
00:00:05
Speaker
A lot of people don't realize that you don't need extra systems like lead pages or click funnels that you can do free landing pages on your own website. So if you're using one of our designs, the thing I'd normally recommend is to duplicate one of your existing pages, rename it, and then from there, you can tweak to your heart's content. So you can embed mailing list signups from ConvertKit, Flowtest, or just about any third party that offers embed codes.
Introduction to the Podcast
00:00:36
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. Today's episode is a bit random, but Chris and I thought it would be fun to have a quick, casual conversation about seven fun ideas for your website. Hopefully you find one or two of these ideas interesting, and if nothing else, it gave us quite a few ideas for future podcast episodes.
00:01:04
Speaker
As Krista mentions in the beginning of the episode, just because you find the idea interesting or cool or fun doesn't mean that you have to
Keeping Website Ideas Simple
00:01:11
Speaker
implement it. There's often a lot of wisdom in simplicity and keeping things straightforward, especially when it comes to your website. Anyways, be sure to check out the show notes at dvandchrista.com for the resources with that we mentioned during the episode, and we want to hear from you. Let us know what kind of content you'd like to see
00:01:27
Speaker
on the Brands of Book Podcast as we move forward. Especially in this episode, if you find one of the things we mentioned interesting, let us know and we'll create an entire episode around it. To leave your feedback, just send us a DM on Instagram, at DavianKrista. Now, onto the episode. Welcome back to another episode of Brands of Book Podcast, back with Krista.
00:01:51
Speaker
Thank you. I'm excited to be here. You live here. I'm excited to be in my own house. You're still the one on like the cover. I'm excited for you to join us in our office. Maybe when the baby after the baby's here for a while. Yeah.
00:02:04
Speaker
I've been working a solo in the office, which is fine, but then I'll go down into the kitchen and I'll get yelled at for disrupting work, but you know, I'm in our kitchen and there's an office. Anyways, we didn't just have an argument about that. That didn't just happen. I'll tell you, but while we're on the subject of pregnancy,
00:02:26
Speaker
Krista has had the house temperature set to like 65 degrees, which is frigid. Like you have to walk around in a sweatshirt and sweatpants to stay warm in our house. But the problem is as soon as you step outside, it is 100 degrees. So there's just no comfortable climate. There's this thing called layering.
00:02:48
Speaker
And you don't have like a little heater on your belly. This is how bad it's been people is that I woke up feeling like I was nearly sweating last night and I went to check the temperature in our house and it was 68 degrees because my body is just acclimated to it being so cold in our house. You like it cold at night too. I do but I just this is a problem.
00:03:12
Speaker
it having to be 65 for me to sleep is not good. Just getting ready for the winter. Yeah. No, no, don't say that. Anyways, we have sort of a random topic today.
Seven Ideas to Improve Websites
00:03:24
Speaker
We're going to be talking about seven cool things that you can do on your, your website. So just sort of seven interesting things that you can do on your website.
00:03:30
Speaker
And I would say that there's not a big theme here, would you? No, there's not. Yeah, there's not. So admittedly, it's not a big theme. We're going to go through this pretty quickly. But you know, if you're thinking through your website, and you're thinking about different things that you can do, maybe you find one of these ideas interesting and something that you would like to pursue, I think, for instance, to the last things that we're going to talk about, I think are interesting, especially if you're looking to level up your website, all right, these two things.
00:03:58
Speaker
I'm excited to chat about because I think they could be even their own topics at some point as well. Just a word of caution though, I wouldn't just add some of these features just because you can. You want to make sure that wherever you're adding is intentional and it actually boosts your client experience because some of them like embedding things or adding a lot of background video can actually slow it on your site and so that could hurt your overall search engine ranking client experience.
00:04:26
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. I think that's a good – I think if you take away anything from this episode is maybe it's that. Just don't do things just for the sake of doing them, I guess. There are all sorts of – especially – I'm listening to podcasts all day and
00:04:41
Speaker
There's all sorts of interesting things that people talk about and it's like, oh, I could do that. But should I do that? That's a whole another question. So hopefully if you find one of these things interesting and you give it some thought and it's worthwhile to do on your website, then hopefully this helps. And if not, maybe just ideas for the future.
Enhancing Engagement with Background Videos
00:05:00
Speaker
So maybe we should just dive in.
00:05:01
Speaker
Okay, the first cool thing that you can do is adding background video. So most people know that you can embed a video from something like Vimeo or YouTube, but a lot of people don't realize that you can also embed a video into your site and have it kind of span the width of the page. A lot of times these are looping videos that maybe set the scene, set the mood, make your content seem a lot more engaging.
00:05:23
Speaker
I've seen videographers do this really well with little clips that repeat in their hero spot and then they have welcome text over top of them or venues that have great drone footage that showcase the property or even craftsmen or photographers who use a looping video to show what it's like to work with them.
00:05:45
Speaker
So a lot of times these videos are smaller. You definitely don't want these to be big, long videos. One key is to make them less than eight megabytes, especially if you're going to upload them to show it. And ideally they don't have any sound and they just kind of play over and over again.
00:06:01
Speaker
Yeah, a few notes about this just from like a optimization practical standpoint, too. And I think you maybe you mentioned this is a lot of times these won't work on mobile or aren't appropriate for mobile, especially if you're in an area where not everybody has great cell service, you know, if you're in a city where people have access to 5g or whatever, you know, you're probably okay. But in general, you want to you might want to limit this desktop. Well, I'm sure they don't work on mobile.
00:06:24
Speaker
Well that and then in addition to that maybe keeping the background video out of the hero spot especially with the new core web idols update content that moves and shifts video in general takes a while to load so. Might be best to save that for further down the page and maybe you're like a videographer.
00:06:43
Speaker
Yeah, unless maybe you're a videographer. And again, all these are trade-offs. On one hand, these videos very much can elevate your brand. And I'd say that this, especially background videos, I always think like luxury, elegant brand. Yeah. Well, I feel like it takes a lot of extra work to have a video.
00:07:00
Speaker
produce especially if you're in the video. Sure. I think it's very appropriate for some luxury level brands at the same time. Keep in mind that there's going to be some performance trade-off. We make those decisions all the time. That's all I'll say about that because I've gone on and on and on about that in other episodes. Should we move on to the next one?
00:07:18
Speaker
Yep.
Integrating Shop Elements with WooCommerce
00:07:19
Speaker
The next cool thing you can do is integrating a shop on your website. I mean, even as recently as a few years ago, I feel like you had to have your shop on a different platform than your website. So a lot of people use Shopify or they used Etsy or some other third party shop in order to show off their products and have their checkout. And then they'd have their website with all of their content.
00:07:41
Speaker
These days, it's a lot easier to integrate everything together. So personally, we're big friends of WooCommerce. It allows for all of your elements of your website and your shop to live in one place. There's no need to send people to another URL to do checkouts. And so that's good for surgeons. It's good for Facebook ads because everything is staying at the same URL. And we actually have a few designs in our shop that are fully integrated with WooCommerce, including one for Show It, which is a new kind of thing that Show It is doing.
00:08:08
Speaker
Allowing for more blue commerce integrations on their platform. Yeah, it's definitely integration that's being more Built out or it seems more built out. There's been more exploring I think in that direction than there has been in the past. So that's really interesting. I agree I think that what used to be you see a lot more, you know, if there's a shop maybe somebody linking off their website to Etsy it's not that necessarily like WooCommerce and Shopify or
00:08:31
Speaker
are new things. But it is easier than ever, I think, to start a shop on your website. And especially in the last year, people have found that to be a good thing because... So many more people are shopping online. Yeah. So many more people are shopping online and businesses with physical locations had to shut down. So that is something that's at least worth exploring. Right. Yeah. I don't know if there's much else to say about that. You can also embed buy buttons from cart systems like Thrivecart, Cartra, Kajabi, Shopify.
00:09:01
Speaker
But that can be a lot of work, especially a lot of products. So that's probably something that you'd only want to do if you have a small amount of products. So like if you sell courses, that might be a good solution because then you can integrate people right into kajabi.
00:09:14
Speaker
or your core system. But if you're like a physical product shop that has like a hundred t-shirts, I wouldn't go that route. That'd be tedious. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, you think about your funnel too, you know, in the type of shop that you're setting up as well. But do we have a podcast episode about that? We definitely have a blog post about it, I think.
00:09:31
Speaker
Yeah, so we have a blog post about it that you can search for on our website and we'll try to track down and put in the show notes here. But maybe that deserves a podcast episode. If you're listening and you find something that we say, you know, one of these things interesting, send us a DM on Instagram, comment somewhere.
00:09:48
Speaker
and let us know and we'll create more content around that. But I think it's about time we do maybe just like kind of all about shops, especially now that I've recently launched a shop with a physical
Utilizing Hidden Pages
00:10:00
Speaker
product. So I've kind of seen both the digital product side of things and the physical product side of things. Yeah. And in the last year with COVID, we've launched a lot of shops for people. Yes. Definitely something top of mind. Next one is what?
00:10:13
Speaker
creating hidden pages. So a lot of people don't realize that you don't need extra systems like lead pages or quick funnels that you can do free landing pages on your own website. So if you're using one of our designs, the thing I normally recommend is to duplicate one of your existing pages, rename it, and then from there you can tweak to your heart's content.
00:10:35
Speaker
So you can embed mailing list signups from ConvertKit, Flowtasks, or just about any third party that offers embed codes. And then you can also use these pages as hidden pages to create sales pages, pricing guides, vendor guides. And in most cases, these pages aren't going to be automatically added to your site's main navigation. And then you can also set them to be hidden from Google. So that way people aren't accidentally stumbling on your pricing if you want it to be hidden.
00:11:05
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. And then I think about some of these what we call add-on pages is that, for instance, let's say you've designed your website, but you like one of the add-on pages we have.
00:11:15
Speaker
you can add that to your existing website. One thing that I want to mention too when it comes to hidden pages and what that means, one of two things, like a password protected page, which is not really possible to show it. There are some workarounds for a show it specific password protected page. We have a YouTube video on how you can create one on show it, but really what we're talking about is a page that's not going to show up in the search results. There's a little check mark.
00:11:41
Speaker
in show it SEO settings. It's either in under the show it SEO settings module or right under that or around that as they advance advanced settings. And there's a box that says ask Google to ignore this page. And you'll want to click that button. If you're only WordPress or like your WordPress Elementor, and you have like Yoast or one of those SEO plugins, at the bottom of the page, you can ask Google to ignore that page too. So what you'll do if you have Yoast or RankMath as a SEO plugin,
00:12:11
Speaker
is you'll go to Yoast or RankMath. We recommend RankMath. I'll put a link to that in the show notes as well. Go to RankMath in one of the tabs within the RankMath module for a post. You can select no index. And so that's what you would want to select for RankMath if you're creating a page that you don't want to show up in the search results.
00:12:33
Speaker
We also have a free landing page template that you can grab, and so we'll include that in show notes.
Building a Local Linktree Alternative
00:12:38
Speaker
Awesome. Yeah, for lead generation. For lead generation. Speaking of free templates, though, the next one is making a link tree type page. Yeah. So since Instagram isn't really known for linking the way that something like Facebook or Pinterest is, I think most of us realize that if we want to send people to our website or our latest blog post or a special offer,
00:12:59
Speaker
the only space that we can really link for a grid and you can do stories if you have a certain number of followers is in the link in bio and so a lot of people in the past have used link tree and there is a free version of link tree but now it's like six dollars a month to use the one i think lets you do very much.
00:13:19
Speaker
And then social schedules like later and plainly will also create link pages for you but again you need one of their paid accounts and all of those platforms tend to be not on brand and you're sending traffic to those websites instead of your own traffic. So you can actually make like a link tree type page on your website. You'll need to manually update it but it keeps the traffic on your website and we actually have another free template for that.
00:13:43
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. Check out that free template. That's a download. Is it for both show it and WordPress or to show it? It's for both. Awesome. One of the advantages though of like Linktree or later or something like that, I would say more so like later than Linktree is it's just a little bit easier to update as you're working in
00:14:02
Speaker
for later. I mean, for our Dave and Chris Instagram, we use later because we share something every day. And so updating that link page every day would be pretty tedious. Yeah. And so, you know, again, trade offs here, you have a little bit more control over your page. If you keep it on your website, you're also not giving away traffic to another site.
00:14:21
Speaker
At the same time, easier to update if you go with the tool. And for later, we're already paying for it anyways. We are, yeah. So anyways, moving on. Embedding a Google Map for directions.
Embedding Google Maps for Local Reach
00:14:35
Speaker
So this is probably only something you need to do if you have a physical location. Well, it's definitely. It would only be something like if you don't have a physical location that you serve people at. If you don't want people coming to your house, don't do this. Or just sending them to a random place.
00:14:52
Speaker
But basically, you can embed a little tiny Google Map on your website. And so if a visitor clicks on that map, it's gonna link directly to your location and offer them directions. And so on some mobile phones, it might even pop up with their Google Maps app and then give them directions to you. So I think it makes helping people get to you really easy.
00:15:14
Speaker
I think for local SEO too, and I think a good feature for local businesses with physical locations to have, where you serve customers at that physical location. So something to consider. With that said, not the prettiest thing always to add to your site. No, they're not very pretty. I think totally appropriate for some websites, maybe in the footer or other websites on their contact page. On the contact page. Yeah, exactly. So maybe something to consider. And just when it comes to your Google My Business listing, there's all sorts of little fun things you can do like that.
00:15:43
Speaker
you can grab a link from your Google My Business listing that you can send straight to people so that they can leave reviews easily. Not going to be pretty. But if you're not familiar with your Google My Business listing, or you haven't created one yet, I highly recommend creating one and then exploring it a little bit more.
00:16:00
Speaker
Next is advanced lead gen targeting. This is a Davey topic. We'll go through these next two quickly. I'd love for this to be a shorter episode. Then, like I said, if you're interested in any one of these topics, let us know and we'll do an entire episode on them. Lead gen targeting, I feel like Elementor in particular, but there's also a lot of tools out there that allow you to get pretty fancy with how you target people on your site based on their behavior.
00:16:29
Speaker
Show it, unfortunately, you can create a very simple pop-up within Show It, but there's not much intelligence to it.
00:16:37
Speaker
No, I mean really it just pops up when somebody clicks on a button or you scroll a certain way down the site. It's not going to know if somebody's already entered their email or seen it before or any of those things. So we build them into our templates but we don't typically use them. We don't typically use them on our own site. So our favorite tool for this is called ConvertBox. I would say it's probably one of the best tools out there just in terms of like if you want to show a certain offer pop-up interstitial to somebody, basically if you want to
00:17:06
Speaker
Show information to somebody based on certain behaviors or actions they've taken in the past. ConvertBox pretty much allows you to do that. So it could be that somebody visited another page and so now they get delivered this pop-up or this message. Things like that. Or if somebody comes from a different, like a certain website like Facebook or Instagram, they can be targeted with a specific offer.
00:17:28
Speaker
Yeah. So like, let's say you're running a Facebook ad and you have like a 25% offer going, but you only want that offer to show up on your website if somebody's come from Facebook. All right, because you can be reasonably sure that they saw that offer, then you could set that to appear, right? So that kind of stuff, it's really helpful to do, you know, especially if you don't want to put information in front of somebody that's not relevant to them.
00:17:51
Speaker
And if you want to kind of act on that information in the future too, it's good to use a tool like ConvertBox. So we're big fans of ConvertBox. I would say check them out. We'll include a link to that in the show notes as well. Downside of ConvertBox, a little bit expensive. Upside is it's one time. I think you get a lifetime account, something like that.
00:18:10
Speaker
And there's other options too. Elementor, for instance, has a really great native pop-up builder. So you can do a lot of the same stuff that you can do on ConvertBox on Elementor. It's not quite as advanced, but it's still pretty good. Yes. So the last thing is location-specific landing pages. This is sort of like a SEO tip too, I would say. And especially if you are
00:18:35
Speaker
let's say a photographer or some sort of wedding vendor and you serve an area like Annapolis where Baltimore is an hour north, DC is an hour south, the beaches are two hours east. Before you even hit the beaches, you have St. Michael's and all these different wedding hotspots, right?
Optimizing Search with Location-Specific Pages
00:18:51
Speaker
It's almost impossible to get your homepage to rank for every single one of those areas, right? So basically, you could create pages on your website that target these different areas. So you could create a page that's called something like
00:19:04
Speaker
St. Michael's wedding photography and optimize that page for that specific search. So show off weddings that you shot there and maybe a list of like your favorite engagement session locations, FAQs, like a vendor guide, all sorts of things you could do to really optimize a page for a specific location.
00:19:22
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. And for wedding photographers in particular, one of the places that's probably booked before you are would be wedding venues. So you could do the same thing that targets specific wedding venues and create these guides around these wedding venues that will hopefully show up as people are looking for a wedding venue. So then hopefully you'll be top of mind in their initial research for wedding vendors.
00:19:43
Speaker
So just one hack to start optimizing for multiple locations. And I would only start doing that after you've really dialed it in for your initial location. So you have kind of your website set up and optimized, you're creating content consistently, and now you want to start targeting different areas. The nice thing about this is you can kind of create a template for this. So your Baltimore wedding photography page and your DC wedding photography page can look really similar, have a lot of the same content.
00:20:13
Speaker
And then just the specific instances where you're talking about Baltimore specifically and DC specifically. And maybe you link to them in your footer. And so this is a good way to be more specific than saying something like destination wedding photographer, which is not the best search engine term. Most people aren't looking for
00:20:31
Speaker
destination wedding photographer they're looking for a Jamaica wedding photographer or a Paris France wedding photographer and so you could make pages that are specific for each one of these and then I'd probably link to them from your footer I don't think you'd want to have a top level of your home page header filled with all these different pages.
00:20:48
Speaker
Exactly. You wouldn't want to throw all these in your top level navigation. You'd want to strategically link them throughout your website and having them in your footer under a column that says something like locations is a good idea. I'm thinking of one exception to that, Chancey Charm. And we had her on the podcast. I'll try to link to her episode, but she talked a lot about this strategy. So if that's something that
00:21:11
Speaker
If you're thinking to yourself, I might want to do that, check out my episode with her because we talk a lot about this. She also has a different team in each region. It's a little bit different than maybe what we're talking about. The essence of it is similar. Anyways, hope you find these things helpful. If there's anything that you want us to cover in the future, just let us know and we'll be sure to do that. Remember, we are releasing a new YouTube video every week as well.
00:21:35
Speaker
Sometimes it corresponds with the podcast episode and the blog. Sometimes it doesn't. This week's is what, seven hacks for? Your show website? Yeah, for designing a show website quickly or something like that. Yeah. Yeah. So check that out if you have a show website and in your process of maybe customizing it or just getting started with designing on show it. Yes. All right. Anything else? I think it's actually eight hacks, but it's fine. Eight, seven.
00:22:03
Speaker
We got a YouTube video. It's up. You know, it's in the show now. I'm sure we're sharing it on the screen. All right. Thanks, guys. Thanks for tuning in to the Brancet 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.
00:22:33
Speaker
you