Category: Web Chat

The Website Guy returns. It’s been a very busy couple of months since I last checked in! Right off the bat – don’t follow my bad example and keep up with your blog. With that said, it’s a forgivable offense if you’re working on building a following elsewhere, which is exactly what this web guy has been up to. 🙂

One of my primary focuses for building up my budding business is local outreach. I have this silly notion of being the Spiderman Webhead of my home town, Virginia Beach. I want the websites of the businesses in my area to be top notch because I know how much it matters to the economy overall. It’s why anyone from the Hampton Roads area should feel free to reach out with any questions – I’m usually giving away great information for free because I’m motivated to improve the digital presence of our area’s businesses and organizations overall.

To meet my fellow local business entrepreneurs, I have been sampling some of Virginia Beach’s local networking groups. Business Referral Network or BNI has been my primary focus, an international networking group that meets weekly. It has been insanely instructive to step back from the national and international clients to focus on some of the most exciting first steps of a building a small business. There’s a palpable excitement in the air …  it’s electrifying. I’m reminded of why my mother (a real estate agent) liked working with first time home buyers so much – it’s such a huge milestone, and I am honored and humbled to play a role in making small business owners’ dreams a reality. Someone pinch me.

Outside of my local outreach, I’ve been busy working on a “meeting of minds” between my brother and I. He is a “web guy” himself, and recently left his place of employment to brave the wild world of freelancing. We have established a joint venture, “The Website Guys”, and we’re initially focused on helping small to medium sized businesses get the most out of the Facebook platform. Being in the #2 spot behind Google, Facebook’s platform gets more attractive every day as Facebook attempts to close that gap. You’ll find more frequent web guy musings on our page there, though now that we’re through most of the startup tasks I plan on blogging more frequently. Long form content just doesn’t do well natively in Facebook, and I’m a wordy kinda guy 🙂

So in closing, if you haven’t already please like our page and follow along https://www.facebook.com/vbwebsiteguys/ ! Thanks!

When a web visitor clicks a link that leads to your website, there is a symphony of digital activity behind the scenes. The number of handshakes happening between the layers of software across a multitude of machines in fractions of a second would truly astound any onlooker, if such a thing were viewable. We all effortlessly stand on the shoulders of giants when we participate in an internet browsing session, and you get a real appreciation for that fact when learning how web pages are assembled on the visitor’s machine. While we all undoubtably benefit, this complexity is not without its own set of costs for those of us looking to make a living on the web. Without a Maestro guiding the process, the performance can derail into a cacophonous mess.

The time it takes a website to fully display any given page is that page’s “load time.” This delay is due to the awesome process I describe above, a concert of software packages, multiple computers, and a labyrinth of networks. Some “pause” is unavoidable, even for the fastest website. It is our responsibility as “webrepenures” to ensure our websites minimize this delay as much as possible. Our visitor’s time is valuable, and extra seconds between each page add up over time.

I put together a demonstration on page load time. It both shows loading times in action and discusses why we are concerned with longer load times. Definitely check it out if you can, but the bottom line is this: Lengthy load times cost you both in the short and long terms. Short term when an impatient but conversion-ready visitor on a mobile device leaves your website for and goes to your speedier competitor’s site. Long term as major search engines like Google make a note each time something like this happens, deranking you and upranking your competitor’s site. Its not something a serious website owner can take lying down any more.

The crowning example of the importance of page load time comes from Amazon. Through careful study and analysis, they determined that a 1 second delay in their average load time costs them roughly $1.6 Billion in sales! I’m sure you can only imagine what kind of a fire this lit under their collective behind to shave off every tenth of a second they possibly could, using any and every tactic available in the book. Its not some abstract trend that only affects Amazon, everyone who maintains some kind of digital space on the web suffers from the impatience of web visitors.

I always encourage my clients to determine their own “cost of excessive loading.” In this exercise, I assist my clients in comparing the group of visitors who did something “valuable” on their website against those that did not. Using Google Analytics, this is often a quick 15 minute investigation (especially when GA has been configured properly.) The trend is always this: the “valuable” group will have a lower average load time when compared to the “no valuable action taken” group. Though there is certainly a degree of “noise” in that measurement, the trend is still worthwhile to note. With smaller gaps between those groups, page speed optimization may fall behind other digital priorities. Larger gaps between these two groups indicates a strong possibility for lost revenue and organic ranking, and that drafting a roadmap to better page speed performance is most likely in order.

In this blog post, I’d like to take the opportunity to explore what this consulting business o’mine is really all about. I think of myself primarily as a translator – someone who stubbornly sits on the border of the technical side of the web and the marketing side. Calling myself a “website guy” encompasses nothing less. Acting as a go-between for both fields provides some serious opportunities as I find people are usually strong in one but not the other. At a point in time where the wall between them is shrinking every day, website owners NEED someone like me who facilitate communication between both sides.

So moving forward, I would really like to do these kinds of posts where I answer digital questions specific to people’s context – be they marketers attempting to get the most out of technology, or technologists looking to understand marketing themselves or their products better. So I encourage everyone to submit any question they have and I’ll see what I can do. If its website related, either I know it, or I want to know it. So without further ado, here is the first Q&A style “web chat” post.

Mike, a web and mobile expert dealing primarily with metered paywall based magazine websites, asks a very simple and straightforward question that all small businesses are currently mulling on: How do I get more sales? My answer for Mike’s specific context goes as follows:

Mike,

I took some time to think about your question regarding acquiring more sales for the past few days because I’m in a very similar spot. Our situations are somewhat alike in that we are both young businesses, so it was pretty helpful exercise for me too!

You’ve already taken the first step I would have recommended, which is to pick a specialty area. I understand that you are specialized in issue-based magazine websites that use metered paywalls. I’m also going to make a guess that you deal primarily with WordPress, which makes the next step that much easier.

What I would recommend for you is a WordPress specific theme and / or plugin for metered magazine websites that you & your team author. You are your own client here, which I know can be challenging, but I think its worth it. Here’s why.

The benefits of this approach are many.

• First off, websites that use your plugin should count as a backlink and will pass off some SEO “link juice” over to you (you may already be aware of this trick.) Having one of the “go-to” plugins for running a magazine style website within WordPress will work wonders for your organic ranking within Google. On the SEM side, the specificity involved here will really let you focus in on some high performing long-tail keywords, and your landing pages should practically write themselves. This level of specificity will make it easier for you to compete with the big guys.
• Second, it gives you something more concrete to market. Its easier to sell a tool you have been developing that encompasses all the learning you’ve done in your time working in this specific niche. It would be compelling to me as a magazine style website owner to know that the software I am acquiring reflects the learnings from other domains that use your software, especially if you have performance numbers to back up your claims. It also gives you something to demonstrate in your one-on-one sales meetings rather than just TALK about how good you are in this particular area.
• Third, you get a unique opportunity to craft the software in a way that not only reflects your unique style and capabilities, but also gives you a baseline product to impress your clients with right out of the gate. Why start with nothing in every client relationship when you can deliver early value right in the beginning? Then there’s an upside for you in the duration of the relationship as well. It simplifies the service questions – from “how can I help them” to “how can I modify my tool to help their specific context even more than it already is?” AND, if the further modification would help your other clients / subscribers, you could easily adapt and abstract the new feature for more generic use.
• Fourth, you could build your own magazine style website that demonstrates what your software tool can do for potential clients. It can be as real or as fake as you want. Its a sales tool. You will be able to take more liberties with your own magazine site versus one of your client’s, so this will be a testing ground of sorts. And who knows, if your magazine site became popular, another source of revenue never hurt anyone!
• Fifth, a software package can be scaled where a business that revolves around servicing clients can’t be scaled easily. If your web-solutions business takes off, you may find it especially difficult to maintain the organization you enjoy now as a smaller business. Once these organizational cracks start to show, you’ll realize you’ve hit a ceiling of sorts. While software certainly has its own set of scaling issues, its my belief that they are easier to manage and happen further up the revenue chain – i.e., software scaling issues are usually cause for celebration!
• Finally, there’s nothing stopping you from acquiring work outside of this niche, just think of this as where you will apply most of your marketing effort towards. Once you are comfortable that you have a marketing mix that sells your product to the utmost, you can then revisit this very strategy for other areas of competency, like perhaps adapting your software for ad revenue specific magazine sites versus metered.

I hope this helps, Jay! I know the exercise was certainly helpful for me to think through. If you have any further questions, just let me know!

Welcome to my first blog post! I should probably call it a “labs” or “laboratory” post, but I’m not trying to disguise what this section of my website is. All websites (that want to be successful) need a section like this in their website. The premise is simple – show Google (and other search engines) that your site is kept “fresh”, updated with new content regularly to keep visitors coming back to your website.

It sounds nice in theory. But as with many things on the web, once the idea has taken root, the tactic becomes that much less effective as pretty much everyone else is doing it. So now the race is on the content itself – be funnier, share more wisdom, invoke more emotion, tell a great story, all at the same time and BETTER than everyone else attempting to do the same thing.

All this sounds pretty daunting – I chuckle as I write this, no pressure or anything, right?? This is why I’ve titled this section of my website “The Digital Laboratory”. If you want to pour time and effort into your blog, you’re better off trying to come at it from an angle that showcases your unique voice. My plan is to “show, not tell”, as is often required with web work. This area will be used to showcase not only blog posts, but web tools that I build or active demonstrations of what all can be done with a website. So keep an eye on this page, check back every now and again for some demonstrations of the crazy web capability I can provide.