If you are going to be successful with any type of online business, then you need to have a great website. This may seem obvious to some of you but there are some really terrible websites out there and I am sure the owners are not as profitable as they could be!
However, the majority of people get put off by the technical aspects of setting up a website and there are a lot of mistakes that you can make. And this is why I wrote this article covering 7 of the most common (and most serious) problems that you may come across when building your website.
Hopefully this article will help you to avoid them and get a great looking website up and running with as little drama as possible, so without further ado, let’s get started…
The first website stumbling block is… BAD HOSTING
Oh yes, I’ve seen bad web hosting happen to good people. Don’t let it happen to you!
Website Hosting Quality
There’s a level of quality you must expect from a web hosting company and there are some very popular programs out there that don’t live up to that quality. Just because everyone registers their domain name at GoDaddy, it doesn’t mean it’s the best choice for hosting your website!
I know when you’re new to this whole process it’s hard to know what companies to trust and who to bring your business too. That’s why it’s so important to education yourself. I recommend a combination of self-education and looking for recommendations from trusted colleagues to decide on a website host for your small business.
Of course it’s a good idea to know what you’re looking for, so here’s a checklist of website hosting features.
IMPORTANT TIP – Over the years I’ve set up more websites than I can count for clients. One of the biggest self-created problems I’ve seen is website owners not knowing their own hosting and domain registration information.
If you get only one thing from this lesson get this –>>> Make sure you know your website hosting information. Save it somewhere safe!
If you’re reading through the checklist above and finding that your current host is a sorry excuse for a hosting company then it’s probably time to switch. The first question you’re probably going to ask is whether this is difficult.
What to Do Next – Step Over That BLOCK
So now that you’re equipped with some knowledge it’s time to take action. Don’t let your hosting be a stumbling block for long… it’s time to step right over it.
Don’t have website hosting? It’s time to go sign up for one!
Remember I said to take recommendations from trusted colleagues? Well I hope by now you’ve realized that my goal is to be a trusted colleague to YOU and provide you with valuable resources for your business.
My hosting company of choice is A2 Hosting. Of course they provide all the features I suggest you look for above. If you want to check them out, you can do so here: A2 Hosting.
The second website stumbling block is… CONTENT THAT’S HARD TO READ
Make Your Website Easy To Read
Nothing turns a new visitor away faster than having to work hard to figure out what you’re trying to tell them. There are a lot of ways you can actually mess up your content’s readability, so let’s do the run-down of things not to do when designing a website you want people to read:
The most important thing to remember above the extra details and the fancy fonts is that your readers don’t really care all that much.
Mostly your readers want the content they’re looking for and if you can deliver that to them, you are doing a good job.
The third website stumbling block is… MAKING A WEBSITE FOR YOU AND NOT YOUR MARKET
Mark My Words – Your Website is NOT For You…
I can’t even begin to tell you how many times I’ve seen websites built purely to fulfil a need to make something awesome for the person who’s building it.
Let me not mince words here: Your website is NOT FOR YOU, it’s for your visitors.
Sure you might like your black background and white font because it’s cool, but is it easy to READ?? Not likely. So are you trying to turn people away or do you just not care if you get visitors who like your site?
Don’t assume everyone who knows your business will know who you are or what your business is, assume they know nothing about you and don’t really care anyway… assume they’re asking themselves ‘What’s in it for ME?’… because they ARE asking themselves that.
Here are some tips to make sure you flip that thinking around and start building your site for your visitors, not yourself:
The fourth website stumbling block is… SITES THAT MAKE IT HARD TO FIND STUFF
Website Navigation is VERY Important
Have you ever looked at a great big corn maze and thought: “No, Not Today!” That’s just what many of your website visitors are going to say if you make them work through a maze of information to find what they’re looking for. They’ll fast-track it out of there before you can convince them it’s worth the effort.
If you WANT them to see your important pages, don’t assume they’re scouring every word on your site; assume they WON’T and put links in multiple spots, so they’ll come across them as they scan.
In terms of making your site easy to get through here are some ways to do that:
Overall you want your visitors to be able to easily navigate your site, consume the content and then either become a lead or buy from you.
We’ll talk about these important pieces in our remaining stumbling blocks so check them out in the navigation to the right (see what I did there)
The fifth website stumbling block is… THINKING “If your build it, they will come” WORKS FOR WEBSITES (it doesn’t!)
Traffic Must Be Funnelled to Your Website!
Let’s say you’ve built your site and it’s ready for visitors. Now you sit and wait for them to start filing in, right? WRONG!
There are plenty of ways to do this so you can pick your favorites. They include:
I know you want your website to be seen by as many eyeballs as possible so get on out there and promote that baby!
Good luck and happy traffic building.
The sixth website stumbling block is… becoming trapped with a website you can never update or edit.
When Hiring a Website Designer, Be Smart, PLEASE!
I’ve seen it far too often with my customers and clients. They’ve hiring a website designer to build a fantastic site and the site looks awesome.
But what now? They have NO way to update it, NO idea how to do it and NO clue what to do next. So what they end up doing in many cases is starting over and using WordPress so they have a website they can actually use.
In the worst of these cases a website design company uses ‘proprietary’ software to build your website and you are completely trapped into staying with them or losing your website all together.
One of the smartest things you can do for your online business is to learn how to control your own website. I firmly believe if you have that full control over your web presence you will be MUCH more successful.
Running a business requires you to react and respond quickly. Maintaining your own website will keep you on top of the market you’ve chosen to serve.
Another important reason to at LEAST know how to USE your site is that you can hire the right people for the job. Let’s say you’re not the DIY type (and that’s OK) and you really need to hire a website designer.
It is a smart idea for you to first learn the basics of building a website so that you know how to spot trouble before you hire it!
The seventh website stumbling block is… not giving your visitors (and the search engines) enough content to decide they want to do business with you.
Content is Your #1 Tool For Getting Leads & Sales
There are many types of content you can use to grow your business, including:
You might be wondering how you’ll make money if you decide to give away tons of content for free. It’s a great question and the answer is that people will NOT buy from you at all if they can’t see the value in what they offer.
They can get that value from the free content you give away and they are more likely than not to be impressed to know where they can find more, learn more, hear more.
The key to giving away free content is to always have something to follow it. Some people might tell you to never give away your best stuff but I don’t agree. Sometimes you want to give away the very best of what you have so you can really impress your potential market.
If you only give away mediocre stuff, do you really expect they’ll be overjoyed and wondering where they can get more?
Throughout this training I have told you about using WordPress for your website and its many benefits. As a content manager, WordPress is known as one of the very best available. Let me tell you what WordPress can do for your content:
I’ve dedicated a large chunk of my time to helping small business owners like you learn how to use WordPress to grow their business.
I hope it will help you avoid many of the mistakes that I and many others have made along the way to building a successful online business.
If you want to know more about increasing conversions in your business, check out the featured resource below to grab a free report which will teach you how to boost your conversion rate. Download, read it, and take action 🙂
You may have heard before that some people use meditation to increase their focus and to help them clear their minds. This is true, it does work well for a lot of people.
However, if you’re trying to do something specific with your focus or creativity, you probably won’t benefit as much from a random generic meditation class. You may need something a little more purposeful or specific to assist the creative process!
You shouldn’t be thinking about anything whatsoever during it, allowing your mind to go entirely blank. This helps people destress and relax, because they’re not thinking about all the things they have to worry about.
However, while this is helpful for that, it might not be as conducive to helping you focus or figure out a project. You should instead try more purposeful meditation, where instead of having your mind go blank, you focus on one thing and one thing only.
By clearing your mind of all other distractions, except for the project at hand, you’re going to be able to completely focus on that and come up with much better solutions.
Ideally, this would be accomplished in a space where you’re free of any noises, obnoxious sights, or people trying to get your attention.
There aren’t many places that would fit this bill perfectly, so just work with what you’ve got. The most important thing should be to not have people interrupting you, so if you can get to a space like that, even if it does have errant sounds and sights, you should still be able to focus well.
You might end up finding that different things help you more or less while you’re meditating. Try experimenting a little bit. You might not be able to focus in dead silence, so you might have some ambient nature sounds playing through some headphones.
You might want the lights up or down, and you might want to keep your eyes open or closed. It’s different for everyone, so try a little bit of everything at first to see what helps.
For most people, this is worth a try, but don’t be upset if it doesn’t work for you. A handful of people don’t focus well under meditation conditions, so you might find it’s simply not right for you. At least with a purposeful meditation, you have something to focus on (your task) rather than just trying to clear your mind which can be very difficult for some people. Give it a try; what have you got to lose?
Unless you’re particularly lucky or skilled, creative ideas probably don’t just happen on demand for you. In fact, in most cases, creativity will appear whenever it happens to, and you tend to have very little control over when it will occur.
The purposeful meditation techniques described above may help you to get yourself into creative flow so may be worth a shot.
Otherwise, creativity can come up and interrupt you at any moment, even if you’re in the middle of something important. You could be trying to focus on your normal work, trying to sleep, or in the middle of a call or meeting with someone very important.
In these cases, you have to treat it the same way you would a toddler. The first thing you should try to do is train yourself to reserve your creative thoughts for later.
If your mind wanders even a little while you’re trying to focus, you can get flooded with all these different ideas that you can get lost in.
Sometimes a creative idea will pop up that could be life changing for you, and in that case, you need to stop what you’re doing and at least write it down quickly. Don’t ignore your creativity outright if it’s something that’s a really good idea or something that you really want to work on.
If that’s the case, try to come back to it later and continue expanding on it. You just can’t let random intrusive thoughts take over your work. Focus can be extremely important while also being rather fragile.
The slightest wandering thought or break in your concentration can pull you way off track in some instances. While some people’s focus isn’t easily broken, yours might be one little distraction away from crumbling, allowing you to get fully enveloped in that distraction.
As you can appreciate, all of this purposeful meditation, creativity process and maintaining focus can take a lot of self-discipline and a positive attitude. If you don’t have this, you will probably struggle to maintain any focus and creativity, so it is well worth your while to adopt the correct mindset; I know this may sound a little cliched, but it does really work.
If you want to develop more self-discipline, click on the featured resource below to get a free report, The Power Of Self-Discipline; download, read it and take action 😊
Do you ever wonder, is blogging still profitable?
Many people dream of blogging for profit, and this goal is not far beyond the reach of someone with average intelligence, a willingness to work hard, and a basic grasp of blogging technology.
Most people who attempt to make money with their blogs do not succeed for two reasons.
Often, bloggers have unrealistic expectations of how fast their readership will grow and how much money they will make, and when these expectations are not met the disappointment can crush the desire to continue blogging.
The other trap that many bloggers fall into has to do with lack of planning. If you want to turn a profit as a blogger, the key to success is to make a realistic plan and stick with it.
To succeed at blogging for profit, the main thing that you will need is a large readership. The higher your traffic, the more advertisers will agree to pay you.
As more and more blogs appear each day, having a great idea or a wonderful writing style is no longer enough to get attention. You need to be able to market your blog effectively.
Too many bloggers spend all of their time writing posts and almost no time marketing their project. To be certain, updating as often as you can is a great way to keep your blog high on blogrolls and high in blog search engines, and once your readers know that you update frequently, they will return to your site on a regular basis.
However, it does not matter how often you update if nobody is reading your page, so don’t skimp on the time that you spend drawing visitors to your site.
Of course, even if you are a marketing genius or have a really great idea for a blog, success is not going to happen overnight. Building the kind of readership that blogging for profit requires takes time, and in all likelihood, it will be at least several months before you are able to turn much of a profit.
Try to stay committed to your blogging project during this initial rough period. To stay motivated, set goals for how often you will update and how many readers you want to attract, and then reward yourself for sticking with your plan.
Also, when you are writing blog posts, you need them to be focused and engaging and the best way to do that is to write it for one particular type of reader.
People end up on your blog a number of ways. They may be referred to you by friends or colleagues or reach one of your blog posts through an Internet search. However someone finds your blog, that person doesn’t care how many other people you are trying to reach.
If you receive 1000 unique visitors to your blog each month, none of those human beings is thinking about any of the others.
This is why it is extremely important to write in the second person. This means addressing your content to the words you, yourself and yours.
People love being recognized for who they are as an individual.
When you write your content as if you are speaking to that individual, a single person, that person that reads your content as if you were doing exactly that. When the human brain encounters the word “you” in communication, in print or online, in regards that communication is personal.
That person then becomes alert to the message you are sending. This sense of intimacy leads to your blog visitors reading more of your content and staying on the page longer.
This helps with search engine rankings, which means you get more generic traffic, and those additional web surfers also feel as if you are speaking to them in a one-on-one conversation.
Yes, it is true that you are marketing to more than one person. Unless you found a single client with unlimited means, you’re going to need to do business with many people for your blog to be a success. However, each one of these people is an individual, not a faceless group member.
Remember, your blog is only read by one person at a time.
This is why you should write to one individual. It is also why it is extremely important to deeply understand the needs and wants, worries and problems of your “perfect prospect”.
Consider the following two statements, as if you found them on a blog post you are reading:
“Why do people want to lose weight?”
“Why do you want to lose weight?”
Which one of those statements seems more personal to you? Which one of those questions is likely to keep you reading, and make you feel like you are important to that blog writer?
The second question is obviously more intimate and personal in nature, which shows you exactly why you should create your content as if you are delivering it to a single person in a one-to-one conversation.
If you want a premium training on blogging the right way, check out the Rapid Blogging Blueprint which includes over the shoulder training on blogging the right way.
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People want to make money. You see the lavish lifestyles of celebrities and other famous people and wish you could have the same lifestyle yourself. But is your drive for money blinding you to what is truly important in your life? And, what is money mindset?
It is often said that if you do something you love, the money will follow. There seems to be something to this because you will approach whatever you love with passion. You’ll get better at it to the point where you are better than everyone else, or at least that is what you strive.
You may be successful in the short term of getting that extra dollar from a new job or squeezing a quick buck from your business. But you will constantly be in search for more money.
You could even put yourself into a position where you can’t handle the new job because you lack the necessary experience. In other words, you didn’t give your previous level enough time to develop a foundation. You jumped ahead, and now you are unclear what to do. It’s a concept known as the Peter Principle, named after the person who came up with the idea, Peter Drucker.
Money isn’t as important as many try to make it out to be. For instance, what good is having a high-paying job when you have to work 80-90 hours a week? What kind of life is that?
Many people who do this, look back at their lives and wonder why they did it. While they may have a lot of money when they get older, they likely don’t have anyone to share it with. Another possibility is the heavy workload to obtain that wealth gets them to an early grave. The money they earned is useless to them if that happens.
And having a good work-life balance is becoming increasingly important for people; this is why more and more of us are looking at ways to make money online.
If you can find a way to make money from home you can have a great work-life balance, but it isn’t for everyone. There are many distractions around the home, and you need to be laser focused on your work or your productivity will drop like a stone.
This is why mindset is so important in everything you do and having a money mindset is no different.
Anyone can make money. You can post an offer in your supermarket for services you are willing to provide. You can post offers on Craigslist to sell your services. You can sell old merchandise on eBay and other online sellers. You can get a part time job. There are many other ways people can make money. The question is, why do you even need a money mindset if making money is easy?
While the dynamics of making money may be easy, if you are not taking the right steps, you won’t be making enough for it to be worthwhile. You not only want to optimize your money-making abilities, but you also want to keep the money that you do make.
You need to focus your efforts on opportunities that will give you the highest return. Most people aren’t taught how to do this. They learn it by trial-and-error. Which means, they will likely do the wrong things that will cost them a lot of money.
That money took a long time to make. As people age, they have less time to recoup the losses. It’s also tougher to get jobs when you get older. Companies would rather pay a younger person a lot less money even if they need to be trained.
Learning about the right approaches to money management can counter all of these problems. You can still use the methods discussed in the first paragraph to earn money for yourself, but you want to take that money and get them earning more for you.
Some people will strike it lucky. They will win the lottery, or they create an app that sells for millions of dollars. Can you depend on either of these? Are you going to come into money from a long-lost relative who passed away? Again, this is not something you should count on (unless you know for sure).
The biggest problem for them is all the relatives and friends that suddenly come into the picture. Also, spouses have differences of opinion on how this money should be spent.
However you spend your money, you need to ensure you don’t spend more than you have! Let’s look at that next.
Living within your means is not as difficult as most people make it out to be. It takes some discipline, but it can be well worth the effort. At the very least, you will be able to sleep at night knowing you aren’t burdened with a heavy debt load.
If you have struggled with debt before, especially credit card debt, consider cutting up those cards and canceling the accounts. This is the surest way to make sure you don’t get yourself into trouble with spending more than you make.
Don’t try to keep up with the Joneses. Just because your neighbor is driving a new sports car and is always buying the latest and greatest gadgets, doesn’t mean you need to follow along. What many people don’t realize is that those neighbors are not living within their means. They will eventually run into trouble as they have the wrong money mindset.
If you happen to be straddled with a lot of debt, consider consolidating all of it into one lower payment. The interest on credit cards can be wicked and makes it almost impossible for most people to get out of the situation.
If you cannot obtain a consolidation loan, consider hitting up your family for the loan. This is not ideal as it can cause tension in the family. But, it is better than having huge interest charges added to your balance each and every month. As long as you show your family members a willingness to pay them back consistently, you shouldn’t run into too many problems. Do make an effort to pay them back quickly, however.
You still need to live, and that may require purchasing higher end appliances when the old ones break down. This is why you should always set aside some cash each month as an emergency fund. Try to accumulate six months worth of cash for this.
For high ticket items that aren’t needed right away, consider using layaway plans. Many retailers have brought this feature back, knowing that people are overextended with consumer debt.
If you are struggling, do you think can you change your financial circumstances with the correct mindset? I hope you said “Yes!”
If you look at the profiles of wealthy people, you will find they have a different mindset than others. They know the value of money, and they know the fundamental factors of how to make their money grow. If you are not yet wealthy and feel you are struggling, take some tips from these wealthy people.
An age-old idiom of money is to use compound interest in your favor. Benjamin Franklin was a big proponent of this principle. He was quite wealthy for his time, so it is likely he knew what he was talking about.
But, it makes sense. If your money grows on its own, and the money that you earn ends up growing as well, it’s only a matter of time when this amounts to a decent sum of money. And if you keep adding to the balance, that money will also grow along with it.
The situation is a bit more complicated today with government taxing the growth of money. But, you can invest in an IRA or 401K and have that tax deferred until some future period.
Another principle wealthy people adhere to is creating multiple income streams. The more income streams you have working for you, the quicker you will become wealthy. When you have multiple income streams, pump up the ones that are working well and dump the ones that aren’t.
After you are financially well off, make sure you never touch the principal. Set up your principal so that it earns the most it can earn and live only within the means of the earnings on that money. If possible, add to the principal with as much of the earnings as you can afford, so that the principal grows. Just never tap into it. If you find any shortfalls, consider taking on some temporary work. Once the principal is gone, it’s gone for good.
The final tip is to stay out of debt as much as possible. The debt will drain your savings and your portfolio. There can be smart uses of debt as long as the result of using that debt brings in more money than the debt itself. But most debt should be avoided to keep your financial outlook stable.
Doing all this money management may seem a little daunting, but you don’t have to do it alone; this is where a financial advisor comes in…
Choosing someone to manage your finances for you is a big step. Who do you trust and how good are they? If you are lucky to find the right financial advisor, will it help develop your money mindset?
The advantage of having an advisor is they are not emotionally attached to your money. The disadvantage is they are not emotionally attached to your money. It is a double-edged sword and one that you have to monitor very carefully. Too many people make the mistake of keeping an advisor employed even when they are not doing as well as expected.
This brings up an important point. You are ultimately responsible for the decisions made by any advisor you choose. While they may not be good and end up losing money on your account, you chose them, to begin with. This is why it’s crucial to pick a good advisor. Try to find people you trust who are happy with advisors they have used. Referrals from people you know are the best type of referrals.
When using a financial advisor, be careful not to remove yourself from the process. This is common and should be avoided. If this does happen, then you won’t be adopting a money mindset by using an advisor. You need to hold them accountable which means you need to know what they are doing.
On the other hand, you don’t want to micromanage your financial advisor. Good advisors are well trained and know the ins and outs of managing money. If you are constantly calling them to find out why a particular stock or bond is not doing as expected, you are not being fair to your advisor.
Of course, if they set up the plan with one expectation for your entire portfolio and it is not doing what you agreed upon, you need to be critical with the advisor.
Having the correct money mindset requires great self-discipline and many people struggle with this so if you want to harness the power of self-discipline, check out the featured resource below for a free report; download, read it and take action 🙂
Analyzing your web traffic statistics can be an invaluable tool for a number of different reasons. But before you can make full use of this tool, you need to understand how to interpret the data.
However, the data you receive from your host company can be overwhelming if you don’t understand how to apply it to your particular business and website. Let’s start by examining the most basic data – the average visitors to your site on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis.
These figures are the most accurate measure of your website’s activity. It would appear on the surface that the more traffic you see recorded, the better you can assume your website is doing, but this is an inaccurate perception.
You must also look at the behavior of your visitors once they come to your website to accurately gauge the effectiveness of your site.
If you think about the fact that a hit can simply equate to the number of graphics per page, you will get an idea of how overblown the concept of hits can be.
For example, if your homepage has 15 graphics on it, the server records this as 15 hits, when in reality we are talking about a single visitor checking out a single page on your site. As you can see, hits are not useful in analyzing your website traffic.
The more visitors that come to your website, the more accurate your interpretation will become. The greater the traffic is to your website, the more precise your analysis will be of overall trends in visitor behavior. The smaller the number of visitors, the more a few anomalous visitors can distort the analysis.
The aim is to use the web traffic statistics to figure out how well or how poorly your site is working for your visitors. One way to determine this is to find out how long on average your visitors spend on your site.
It could be that your keywords are directing the wrong type of visitors to your website, or that your graphics are confusing or intimidating, causing the visitor to exit rapidly.
Use the knowledge of how much time visitors are spending on your site to pinpoint specific problems, and after you fix those problems, continue to use time spent as a gauge of how effective your fix has been.
Additionally, web traffic stats can help you determine effective and ineffective areas of your website. If you have a page that you believe is important, but visitors are exiting it rapidly, that page needs attention.
You could, for example, consider improving the link to this page by making the link more noticeable and enticing, or you could improve the look of the page or the ease that your visitors can access the necessary information on that page.
As you can see, these statistics will reveal vital information about the effectiveness of individual pages, and visitor habits and motivation.
This is essential information to any successful Internet marketing campaign.
Your website undoubtedly has exit pages, such as a final order or contact form. This is a page you can expect your visitor to exit rapidly. However, not every visitor to your site is going to find exactly what he or she is looking for, so statistics may show you a number of different exit pages.
Once you pinpoint potential weaknesses on that page, minor modifications in content or graphic may have a significant impact on the keeping visitors moving through your site instead of exiting at the wrong page.
After you have analyzed your visitor statistics, it’s time to turn to your keywords and phrases. Notice if particular keywords are directing a specific type of visitor to your site. The more targeted the visitor – meaning that they find what they are looking for on your site, and even better, fill out your contact form or make a purchase – the more valuable that keyword is.
However, if you find a large number of visitors are being directed – or should I say misdirected – to your site by a particular keyword or phrase, that keyword demands adjustment. Keywords are vital to bringing quality visitors to your site who are ready to do business with you.
Finally, if you notice that users are finding your website by typing in your company name, break open the champagne! It means you have achieved a significant level of brand recognition, and this is a sure sign of burgeoning success.
As you can see, measuring website traffic can be difficult to do accurately as it is as much an art as it is a science, but it can at least give you a rough idea of how your website is performing so it is well worth the effort to investigate.
And if you want to learn more about converting those visitors into opt-ins and sales, then check out the featured resource below where you can download a free Conversion Boost report; download, read it and take action 😊
