Five Tips to Turn Your Website into an All-Star Employee
Come take a look inside my business.
Today, I’m giving you a quick peek into how I stay relevant and market my work, whether I’m doing wedding flowers, sharing about my podcast, promoting my book, or inviting people to learn from my online courses.
There are a few tips and tricks that always work for me!
But before I get into my best website tips, let me remind you in case you haven’t yet heard…
Use Pinterest to get people to your website!
Gone are the days when we spend our time trying to get people into our storefronts and retail stores. Nope! It’s all about e-commerce. How are you getting people to check out your online store?
The single best way to do that is Pinterest.
Want to read more about why?
But the truth is, no matter how people find out about you — Pinterest, Instagram, Facebook, or personal referral — they’ll always end up on your website.
Therefore, your website needs to be professional, updated, and optimized to work for you towards making a sale!
Imagine how hard in-store employees work to make sure customers make a purchase. Your online business needs the same salesmanship.
My website functions like an extra employee who’s a marketing master! She finds amazing clients, shows customers who I am, shows off photos of me and my work like a proud grandmother, and shouts my praise throughout the internet!
If you want your website to start working for you, here’s what you’ve gotta do!
My Top Five tips for Updating Your Website
Update your images
When people go to your website in 2020, they need to be looking at 2019 work. You do not have to keep every single gallery, photo, or item that you’ve ever offered or created in your online portfolio.
But make sure you have a solid representation of your best work, some behind-the-scenes, some incredible product photos, some photos of your work in action…
You get the idea! People are visual. They won’t buy from you if you’re not showing off some great, current, updated images.
And news flash… this includes a picture of Y. O. U!
People buy from people.
Make sure you’re telling people who you are and are including a picture of yourself. From my website, you’d think I love pictures of myself! I really don’t any more than the average person, but I know having pictures of myself helps my students connect to me on a personal level, so the website is full of them!
Even if you can’t afford a professional photographer to take professional photos right now, with an iPhone and a great mobile preset, you can get a headshot-worthy photo. And I just happen to have some presets I love.
Create a blog plan
This one is simple: Do you currently blog at least once per month? If not, do you plan on blogging at least that often? Don’t let your last blog be from four months… or four years… ago. Potential customers will assume the last time you updated your blog was the last time you did any work worth sharing.
If you can only blog once a month, set aside time to knock it out all at once. Yupp! Set aside an hour or two and knock out twelve blogs, one for each month of the year.
It may take an afternoon, but that way, your blogs for the one entire year will be ready to go live, and you have a whole year until you have to stress about writing them again!
Blogs are a great source of SEO, meaning they help google know what it is you do and who to share your work with.
They’re also a great source of Pinterest-worthy content.
So keep blogging!
Update your copyright
This simple step will take less than a minute. Changing your website copyright may seem like a no-brainer, but is something that you should do every year.
Always change the copyright at the bottom of your website to the current year. You will literally look out-of-date if you let a year or two go by.
You don’t want your website saying “Copyright 2016” when it’s 2020!
Update testimonials
You want your best and most recent testimonials, product reviews, and praise on your website.
Testimonials act as reviews for your business. Would you buy a product if there hadn’t been a new review in five years? Or any reviews at all?
Update your reviews regularly so potential customers know that people are still loving your work!
Having a hard time getting testimonials or reviews?
Consider sending a survey to each client after you work together.
It can be a simple (and free!) google form that collects responses so you can have consistent regular reviews. If you want to offer an incentive for reviewing, that’s up to you!
Create prominent contact options
When you look at your website from a viewer’s perspective, is it easy to figure out how to contact you?
However you choose to connect with people, whether it’s a contact form or an email address, make sure the process to connect with you is clear and the invitation to connect is consistent.
You definitely won’t make the sale if customers don’t know how to contact you!
If your website focuses on selling your handmade hats but your shop page is impossible to find, you’re going to lose a lot of sales!
If you run a wedding photography business, but the “what to do next” process is unclear to your potential clients, they don’t know whether to email or call you or fill out the contact form… you’re not going to make the sale!
It’s that simple.
And those are my five favorite tips for updating your website, with a little bonus tip of start using Pinterest!!