n00b Website Mistakes That Will Choke Out Your Business

Chris Graham (0:29)

Brian, February 20th in Columbus, Ohio, that's...

Brian Hood (0:34)

Insane.

Chris Graham (0:35)

Global warming.

Brian Hood (0:36)

It's 78 here in Nashville, and I sweated during my afternoon walk, which is a first for the year. So, I'm excited about that.

Chris Graham (0:44)

And I'm inside recording a podcast.

Brian Hood (0:46)

Nice.

Well, spring is here. Not really, it feels like it. And we always constantly brainstorm ideas for podcast episodes. And one of the things we've seen people talk about a lot, especially in the 6 Figure Home Studio community, people are talking about websites. People are posting their websites for critiques.

And there's been some great ones on there, especially for a lot of the students that are inside the Profitable Producer Course. They've made some really good websites in there. But we've also seen some garbage websites. We're not gonna name any names here, but we have seen some mistakes, man.

Chris Graham (1:19)

chrisgrammastering.com, whoever made that, is a moron.

Brian Hood (1:24)

Horrible website.

So, we're gonna talk about some very noob mistakes. That's N00B, nooby website mistakes that will choke out your business.

And there are a lot of things that we could cover in this. We just picked what we thought are the major mistakes. And we will be the first to admit that our website may not reflect all of these things. So, we're just speaking from what we have seen to be mistakes and what we know are mistakes, not necessarily what we've done on our site. So, I haven't actually compared. We just came up with this outline. I haven't actually compared this outline to my own website, but I would guarantee there's at least one thing that we talk about today that I haven't done on my own site. So, take that for what it is. Take all of this with a grain of salt, and this is yet another advice buffet. Let's just say that.

Chris Graham (2:10)

These were hard things to learn for me. When I launched my business, building a website that converted people into customers was difficult. I made a lot of mistakes.

And I was amazed as I learned how to do this better, as I learned how to make a website that quote unquote converts how life changing that was.

Brian Hood (2:32)

And there's two different approaches you can take to web design. You can go the really artistic, artsy approach, which is what you see in a lot of design type freelance positions. So designers, illustrators, people that are just super creative minded, they don't think too much about optimization or conversions. And those websites, although they look great, they are typically not very effective at converting people to customers.

The second approach is the approach that Chris and I both take, and the approach that I would encourage all of our listeners to take is the conversion focused approach. That means you are tracking numbers. You're trying to see for every X amount of people that come to my site, I know exactly what amount of those will turn into customers through, let's just say a monthly period. So for every people to come to my site, every 100 or 500 people to come to my site in a month's period, I know how many of those will turn into court requests and how many of those court requests will turn into paid customers. Or in Chris's case, where he's actually accepting money on his site, where he's actually getting paid on his site, he's booking projects. He knows how many book projects will come through his site in any given month based on the amount of traffic he gets.

And he'll also know how many test master requests he'll get in a given month based off of how many people come to his site. And I guarantee you, if I asked him, I'm not gonna ask him, but I knew if I asked him right now, if I asked him his numbers, he could tell me with a reasonable degree of accuracy what his conversion numbers are.

Chris Graham (3:47)

I could.

Brian Hood (3:48)

Yeah, that's because he is a very conversion-focused person.

And so while everything on his site is not necessarily optimized to be pretty, although it's not an ugly site by any means, it's not a super artistic site, as you might see an illustrator or a graphic designer do, I can promise you it is much more effective than the majority of those types of artistic sites. So we are very much conversion-minded when it comes to website design.

Chris Graham (4:12)

Yeah, and I think the first thing to just totally back you up and completely agree is, yeah, there's a temptation to look at, and even graphic designers are notorious for this, that they think that the point of a website is to look cool. Point of a website is not to look cool. The point of a website is to make sales.