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This week, we dive in and discuss SEO-friendly tips that will make your WordPress site faster. And you don t have to take my word for it. Today s episode is based on a blog post over at Copyblogger by Loren Baker, the founder of Search Engine Journal. Listen to Site Success: Tips for Building Better WordPress Websites below ... Download MP3Subscribe by RSSSubscribe in iTunes Important links from this episode: Try StudioPress Sites Sites Weekly Newsletter Subscribe to Sites on Apple Podcasts @JerodMorris on Twitter 6 SEO Friendly Tips to Improve Site Speed on WordPress Blogs The Transcript Jerod Morris: Welcome to Sites, a podcast by the teams at StudioPress and Copyblogger. In this show, we deliver time-tested insight on the four pillars of a successful WordPress website: content, design, technology, and strategy. We want to help you get a little bit closer to reaching your online goals, one episode at a time. I m your host Jerod Morris. Sites is brought to you by StudioPress Sites — the complete hosted solution that makes WordPress fast, secure, and easy without sacrificing power or flexibility. For example, you can upload your own WordPress theme, or, you can use one of the 20 beautiful StudioPress themes that are included and just one click away. Explore all the amazing things you can do with a StudioPress Site, and you ll understand why this is way more than traditional WordPress hosting. No matter how you ll be using your site, we have a plan to fit your needs — and your budget. To learn more, visit studiopress.com/sites. That s studiopress.com/sites. Welcome back for another episode of Sites, and another week of adding a strategy to your toolbox that will help you create a powerful and successful WordPress website. Last week we discussed content — specifically, the persuasive power of analogy, and I challenged you to make your best attempt at working an analogy somewhere into your website or email copy. I hope that went well. This week, we re going to roll design, technology, and strategy all into one by discussing some proven tips that will help you improve the speed of your WordPress website. As an important bonus, these tips are all SEO-friendly. And that s important. The last thing you want to do is make an enhancement in one area of your site that has negative side effects in another area. And it makes sense — we would expect most site speed improvements to help out with SEO, because better speed leads to a better user experience, and because of the increasing importance that site speed and performance have as indicators that search engines look at. So let s dive in and discuss these SEO-friendly tips that will make your WordPress site faster. And you don t have to take my word for it. Today s episode is based on a blog post over at Copyblogger by Loren Baker, the founder of Search Engine Journal and the Vice President of Foundation Digital, an SEO & digital marketing agency. Loren was one of the early pioneers in online SEO education, and he really knows his stuff. So make sure you earmark at least one of these tips for immediate implementation on your website. Hint, hint. Call to action. Okay, without further ado, here is my reading of Loren Baker s blog post 6 SEO Friendly Tips to Improve Site Speed on WordPress Blogs. —– In the world of SEO, user experience on websites has always been a factor, as has the time it takes for a site to load. However, with the use of mobile devices surpassing desktop use (in most consumer-facing industries) and the wide adoption of broadband, people expect sites to load instantly. Long gone are the days of waiting 10 seconds for a site to load. If a page takes more than a couple of seconds to load, users will instantly hit the back button and move on to the next result. Accordingly, Google officially started paying attention to site speed and declared its importance as a factor in rankings. In order to keep up with Google s site-ranking measures, WordPress blog users need to know exactly what they can do to improve their own site speed. Remember when Google rolled out AMP (accelerated mobile pages)? They now serve up publisher content in a simplified Google-hosted experience that renders superfast. I like AMP from a user perspective because I know that AMP content will load incredibly fast on my mobile device, but as a publisher: I d rather speed up my blog and attract traffic directly to my site than have users stay on Google. If you use StudioPress Sites or the Rainmaker Platform, your site will already load quickly. However, adding ad scripts, featured images, tracking codes, 301 redirects, etc. will slow down the loading of a site and increase demand on your server/hosting company. Here are six simple tips I recommend since we used them to dramatically speed up the Search Engine Journal (SEJ) load time it s at 1.8 seconds! 1. Use a content delivery network A content delivery network (CDN) is a group of servers that deliver web pages and other content according to the location of the user, the webpage origin, and its server. It can handle heavy traffic and speeds up the delivery of content to different users. For WordPress blogs looking to improve site speed, Cloudflare is a great tool to consider. Cloudflare offers a free content delivery network that speeds up the performance of your site and optimizes it for efficiency on any device. It also offers security services that help protect websites from crawlers, bots, and other attackers. 2. Compress your images Another effective way to reduce page-load time and increase site speed is by compressing your images. A CDN will help with this, but it doesn t take care of 100 percent of the job. There are several different plugins available that compress all the images on your website and even compress new images as you upload them as well. ShortPixel is a WordPress plugin that allows you to compress both new and old images on your blog. We use it on SEJ and various other sites, and absolutely love it. It allows you to quickly compress images in batches for greater convenience, reduces the time it takes to do backups, and ensures all your processed files are kept safe and secure. The best part about it is that your image quality stays the same, regardless of the size of the image. Other image-compression plugins also maintain the quality of your pictures and improve site speed. 3. Prevent ad scripts and pop-ups from slowing down the user experience Many web pages today contain some form of third-party script that either runs ads for revenue or uses pop-ups to promote conversion. You want to build your audience and get more customers of course, but balance is key here. Although it s difficult to completely get rid of them to improve your site speed, you can tame their performance impact while keeping them on your website to provide their intended benefits. The trick is to first identify the third-party scripts that run on your site, where they come from, and how they impact your blog. You can use different real-time monitoring tools that track and identify which scripts delay your site-loading time and affect your site metrics. One of my favorite tools to do this is Pingdom s Website Speed Test, because it breaks down each file and script, and tells you which takes the most time to load. The same rule applies for pop-up plugins that you add on to your site. Knowing which ones work best to improve conversions and bring in email signups allows you to gauge which plugins to keep and which ones to uninstall. One of the fastest pop-up plugins on the market is OptinMonster (a StudioPress partner). Its founder, Syed Balkhi, is a WordPress expert who stays on top of factors like site speed and overall user experience. So those are the first three SEO-friendly tips for improving the speed of your WordPress website: Use a content delivery network Compress your images Prevent ad scripts and pop-ups from slowing down the user experience Next, we ll discuss numbers 4-6. 4. Install a caching plugin Another effective way to reduce site-loading time is by installing caching plugins onto your WordPress blog. Caching plugins work by creating a static version of your WordPress blog and delivering it to your site users and visitors, which conveniently cuts your page-loading time in half. Several cache plugins work best for WordPress, such as WP Super Cache and W3 Total Cache. These plugins are easy to install and can be disabled anytime. They allow you to select certain pages on your blog (or all of them) to cache, and offer many other content compression settings that you can turn on or off. WordPress supports many other plugins that allow you to optimize your blog to get rid of any latency in page-load time. It is important to test out these plugins to find the one that works best for you. 5. Disable plugins you don t use Tons of WordPress plugins can also make your site super slow, especially ones you don t need. It is important to review the plugins you have installed in the past and disable those that offer no significant value. Many WordPress users install different plugins when they first create their blogs to enhance how they look, but realize over time that great-looking blogs don t always attract traffic, especially if your page-loading time is slow. Also, I would highly recommend making sure your plugins are updated. This may help improve page-load speed, but more importantly, it makes your site more secure. We discussed this topic in more depth back in episode 15 of Sites. 6. Add one more layer of media optimization One thing we realized at SEJ when speeding up the site was that even after optimizing images, ad scripts, and caching, there were still multiple forms of media that slowed down load time. The internal fixes we implemented did not help with third-party media load times, such as embedded Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram content, or infographics from other sites. One solution we found to assist with that is BJ Lazy Load. Essentially, this lazy-load plugin renders all written content first, then as the user scrolls down the page, images and other forms of media load. This way, the user doesn t have to wait for tons of media to load before reading the main content. What I really like about BJ Lazy Load is that in addition to images, it also lazy loads all embeds, iFrames, and YouTube videos. For a WordPress blog that uses a lot of embeds, it was ideal for us. Bonus tip: ask your web host for help If you run a WordPress blog or WordPress-powered site, then you should work with a hosting company that specializes in WordPress, such as WP Engine, Presslabs, or StudioPress Sites. I ve worked with all three, and one thing I can absolutely tell you is that if you contact them and ask how your site can be sped up, they will help you because the faster your site is, the less the load is on their servers. As more and more people turn to mobile devices to access the internet, it is essential to optimize your blogs for mobile use and find ways to minimize page-loading time. Remember, bounce rates increase when your page-load time is slow, which impacts whether or not your content gets read or skipped for other sites that load pages faster. Okay, one more time, here are Loren Baker s six SEO-friendly steps to a better performing WordPress website: Use a content delivery network Compress your images Prevent ad scripts and pop-ups from slowing down the user experience Install a caching plugin Disable plugins you don t use Add one more layer of media optimization Bonus tip: ask your web host for help Now, stick around for this week s hyper-specific call to action. Call to action Simple CTA this week: pick one of the six, actually seven, tips and just do it. Maybe you sign up with a content delivery network. Maybe you add a plugin to compress your images. Perhaps you just email your host and ask them for tips on how to optimize your site. But take a step toward a faster site. The benefits really are endless, because, as Loren said, a faster site leads to a better user experience, which leads to fewer bounces and longer time on site, which leads to better search rankings, which leads to more visitors who are having a good experience and on and on. This is like a gift to your audience that keeps on giving — which makes it like a gift to yourself too. Okay, that s it for this week. Stay tuned for our next episode. I ll have a special guest with a special announcement about the future of the Sites podcast. In the meantime … Subscribe to Sites Weekly If you haven t yet, please take this opportunity to activate your free subscription to our curated weekly email newsletter, Sites Weekly. Each week, I find four links about content, design, technology, and strategy that you don t want to miss, and then I send them out via email on Wednesday afternoon. Reading this newsletter will help you make your website more powerful and successful. Go to studiopress.com/news and sign up in one step right there at the top of the page. That s studiopress.com/news. Rate and Review Sites on Apple Podcasts And finally, if you enjoy the Sites podcast, please subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts (formerly known as iTunes), and consider giving us a rating or a review over there as well. One quick tip on that: to make the best use of your review, let me know something in particular you like about the show. That feedback is really important. To find us in Apple Podcasts, search for StudioPress Sites and look for the striking purple logo that was designed by Rafal Tomal. Or you can also go to the URL sites.fm/apple and it will redirect you to our Apple Podcasts page. And with that, we come to the close of another episode. Thank you for listening to this episode of Sites. I appreciate you being here. Join me next time, and let s keep building powerful, successful WordPress websites together. This episode of sites was brought to you by StudioPress Sites, which was awarded Fastest WordPress Hosting of 2017 in an independent speed test . If you want to make WordPress fast, secure, and easy — and, I mean, why wouldn t you — visit studiopress.com/sites today and see which plan fits your needs. That s studiopress.com/sites.

Do you understand how to craft an analogy that is actually an analogy (and not a metaphor or simile) and that holds the power to persuade? You will after you listen to this week s episode. Listen to Site Success: Tips for Building Better WordPress Websites below ... Download MP3Subscribe by RSSSubscribe in iTunes Important links from this episode: Try StudioPress Sites Sites Weekly Newsletter Subscribe to Sites on Apple Podcasts @JerodMorris on Twitter The Persuasive Power of Analogy The Transcript Jerod Morris: Welcome to Sites, a podcast by the teams at StudioPress and Copyblogger. In this show, we deliver time-tested insight on the four pillars of a successful WordPress website: content, design, technology, and strategy. We want to help you get a little bit closer to reaching your online goals, one episode at a time. I m your host Jerod Morris. Sites is brought to you by StudioPress Sites — the complete hosted solution that makes WordPress fast, secure, and easy without sacrificing power or flexibility. For example, you can upload your own WordPress theme, or, you can use one of the 20 beautiful StudioPress themes that are included and just one click away. Explore all the amazing things you can do with a StudioPress Site, and you ll understand why this is way more than traditional WordPress hosting. No matter how you ll be using your site, we have a plan to fit your needs — and your budget. To learn more, visit studiopress.com/sites. That s studiopress.com/sites. Welcome back to another episode of Sites, and another week of adding a strategy to your toolbox that will help you create a powerful and successful WordPress website. Last week we discussed the power of focusing on quality over quantity — why you need to do more with your best ideas and how exactly to do that. This week, we go back to talking about content, and that means we go back to Brian Clark for another useful idea that will help you improve your content marketing strategy. You re probably familiar with metaphors, similes, and analogies. But do you know the differences between them? And do you understand how to craft an analogy that is actually an analogy and that holds the power to persuade? You will after you listen to this week s episode. And you ll also come away with a funny joke to tuck away for your next dinner party, as well as evidence that Arnold Schwarzenegger may be one of the great analogists of our time. Seriously. Let s dive into this week s episode of Sites, which is based on Brian Clark s blog post The Persuasive Power of Analogy. — An elderly man storms into his doctor s office, steaming mad. Doc, my new 22-year-old wife is expecting a baby. You performed my vasectomy 30 years ago, and I m very upset right now. Let me respond to that by telling you a story, the doctor calmly replies. A hunter once accidentally left the house with an umbrella instead of his rifle. Out of nowhere, a bear surprised him in the woods so the hunter pointed the umbrella, fired, and killed the bear. Impossible, the old man snaps back. Someone else must have shot that bear. And there you have it, the doctor says. Persuasion comes from understanding At the heart of things, persuasion is about your audience understanding what you re communicating. Understanding leads to acceptance when the argument is sound, well-targeted, and the conclusion seems unavoidable. When it comes to creating effective understanding, analogies are hard to beat. Most of their persuasive power comes from the audience arriving at the intended understanding on their own. The doctor could have simply said that the old man s wife had to be cheating on him. But the analogy allowed the cranky patient to come to that conclusion on his own, which is much more persuasive. Let s take a second to make sure we re all on the same page with analogies. It first helps to distinguish them from their close cousins, metaphor and simile. A metaphor is a figure of speech that uses one thing to mean another and makes a comparison between the two. A simile compares two different things in order to create a new meaning while using the words like or as. An analogy is comparable to a metaphor and simile in that it shows how two different things are similar, but it s a bit more complex. Rather than a figure of speech, an analogy is more of a logical argument. The structure of the argument leads to a new understanding for the audience. When you deliver an analogy, you demonstrate how two things are alike by pointing out shared characteristics (a hunter with an unloaded umbrella and an elderly man who is firing blanks sexually). The goal is to show that if two things are similar in some ways, they are similar in other ways as well. Let me give you an example of a killer persuasive analogy. It comes from that master of sophisticated rhetoric, Arnold Schwarzenegger. No, really. The Terminator analogy Schwarzenegger is an advocate for renewable energy, both for California and the world at large. Given his celebrity status and prior political experience as Governor of California, he has quite the platform to share his views. Just over a year ago, Arnold published a piece on Facebook called I don t give a **** if we agree about climate change. That provocative title set the stage for what could be called a terminator analogy, in the sense that it puts any intellectually honest person in an inescapable box that supports the conclusion Schwarzenegger wants you to arrive at. First, Arnold says forget whatever you think about climate change. He goes so far as to say that climate change deniers can assume that they re right. He then turns to the facts of the here and now: 7 million people die every year from pollution 19,000 people die every day from pollution from fossil fuels Renewable energy is driving economic growth Then, Arnold turns to an analogy that illustrates his argument in a very personal way: There are two doors. Behind Door Number One is a completely sealed room, with a regular, gasoline-fueled car. Behind Door Number Two is an identical, completely sealed room, with an electric car. Both engines are running full blast. I want you to pick a door to open, and enter the room and shut the door behind you. You have to stay in the room you choose for one hour. You cannot turn off the engine. You do not get a gas mask. I m guessing you chose Door Number Two, with the electric car, right? Door Number One is a fatal choice who would ever want to breathe those fumes? This is the choice the world is making right now. Talk about putting someone in a box literally. By sidestepping the controversy over climate change and making the outcome of exposure to fossil fuel emissions a matter of personal life or death, Arnold likely changed the minds of more than a few reasonable people. Now, this is the internet. So, I m sure some people simply refuse to be swayed no matter what, and some trolls probably said they d rather choose the deadly Door Number One than do anything perceived as good for the environment. To which I say I mean, there is a way to set up a real-life demonstration of this analogy if anyone s interested. Now let s talk about why marketing analogies work like a charm I shared Schwarzenegger s analogy because it s a brilliant example. But keep in mind that unlike with contentious social issues, your prospects want you to convince them. If someone has a problem they want solved or a desire they want fulfilled, they want to find a solution. If they re currently a part of your audience, they want you to be the solution. That means they want to understand why you re the best choice. Which means they want to be persuaded. And that s the essence of content marketing strategy. Tell your particular who exactly what they need to hear, exactly how they need to hear it. The right analogy, at the right time, told the right way, may be exactly what they need to do business with you And there you have it. Now, stick around for this week s hyper-specific call to action. Call to action Here s my question for you this week What are you trying to TELL your readers — or, to be more specific, what are you trying to persuade your readers to do — through expository prose or facts and figures, that you might be able to better communicate through analogy? Identify something. Maybe it s in a previous blog post. Maybe it s in a previous podcast episode. Maybe it s some email copy you wrote, or maybe it s on your About page. Just identify something. Then give it a try. If you haven t used analogies much in the past, and I lump myself in this group, then this surely won t be easy at first. It will probably feel a little bit awkward. And you may not end up publishing whatever you write. But just give it a try. Because you won t really know until you try. Think about it this way Say you just moved into a new house. And upon inspecting the basement, you notice a sealed door you d never noticed before. Unfortunately, it s not going to be easy to open, and maybe you re not exactly handy with tools — another group I will lump myself into. So you re a little hesitant about trying to pry the door open. Anything could be in there. That s a little worrisome. Plus it won t be easy, and you ll have to step outside of your comfort zone to open it. But you decide to do it anyway. And lo and behold there s $10,000 in there. You report the finding, have it investigated, and find out it s not counterfeit or stolen. It s just yours. Pretty cool huh? Well, you never would have found that money if you hadn t been willing to overcome your initial hesitancy and awkwardness to pry that door open. What kind of valuable analogies might you find if you pry the seal off your thinking and give it a try? So, there was my attempt at an analogy. I couldn t ask you to do it and not be willing to do it myself! And it wasn t great, I know but it was a start. And now I m one step closer to my next good analogy. As with anything, improvement comes with practice. Now go fight through any hesitancy and create your own analogy! If you want to email it to me, or tweet it to me, please feel encouraged to do so. Okay, that s it for this week. Next week we are going to combine design, technology, and strategy all into one episode and discuss some SEO-friendly tips that will help you improve the speed and performance of your WordPress site. And finally, before I go, here are two more quick calls to action for you to consider: Subscribe to Sites Weekly If you haven t yet, please take this opportunity to activate your free subscription to our curated weekly email newsletter, Sites Weekly. Each week, I find four links about content, design, technology, and strategy that you don t want to miss, and then I send them out via email on Wednesday afternoon. Reading this newsletter will help you make your website more powerful and successful. Go to studiopress.com/news and sign up in one step right there at the top of the page. That s studiopress.com/news. Rate and Review Sites on Apple Podcasts And finally, if you enjoy the Sites podcast, please subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts (formerly known as iTunes), and consider giving us a rating or a review over there as well. One quick tip on that: to make the best use of your review, let me know something in particular you like about the show. That feedback is really important. To find us in Apple Podcasts, search for StudioPress Sites and look for the striking purple logo that was designed by Rafal Tomal. Or you can also go to the URL sites.fm/apple and it will redirect you to our Apple Podcasts page. And with that, we come to the close of another episode. Thank you for listening to this episode of Sites. I appreciate you being here. Join me next time, and let s keep building powerful, successful WordPress websites together. This episode of sites was brought to you by StudioPress Sites, which was awarded Fastest WordPress Hosting of 2017 in an independent speed test . If you want to make WordPress fast, secure, and easy — and, I mean, why wouldn t you — visit studiopress.com/sites today and see which plan fits your needs. That s studiopress.com/sites.

This week, we talk about the power of repurposing. And I have an example from one of my own projects to use to illustrate my point. Listen to Site Success: Tips for Building Better WordPress Websites below ... Download MP3Subscribe by RSSSubscribe in iTunes Important links from this episode: Try StudioPress Sites Sites Weekly Newsletter Subscribe to Sites on Apple Podcasts @JerodMorris on Twitter Quality Over Quantity: Repurpose Your Best Ideas and Distribute Them Far and Wide The Transcript Jerod Morris: Welcome to Sites, a podcast by the teams at StudioPress and Copyblogger. In this show, we deliver time-tested insight on the four pillars of a successful WordPress website: content, design, technology, and strategy. We want to help you get a little bit closer to reaching your online goals, one episode at a time. I m your host Jerod Morris. Sites is brought to you by StudioPress Sites — the complete hosted solution that makes WordPress fast, secure, and easy without sacrificing power or flexibility. For example, you can upload your own WordPress theme, or, you can use one of the 20 beautiful StudioPress themes that are included and just one click away. Explore all the amazing things you can do with a StudioPress Site, and you ll understand why this is way more than traditional WordPress hosting. No matter how you ll be using your site, we have a plan to fit your needs — and your budget. To learn more, visit studiopress.com/sites. That s studiopress.com/sites. Welcome back to another episode of Sites. It s a pleasure to have you here with me. Last week we discussed the importance of keeping WordPress and your theme framework up to date, and why you might as well just abandon your plans now if you don t plan to take this simple but essential precaution. The security of your site depends on it. And this week, we re going to dive back into how you use your website to grow your audience and build a business. One mistake that too many content creators make is moving too quickly from idea to idea. On the one hand, I get it. Our websites are insatiable beasts that demand new content, and we want to hit Publish as often as we can but sometimes we do this to our own detriment. Because we churn out idea after idea without ever stopping to truly engage and further develop our BEST ideas. And even if we can t or don t want to explore and develop these ideas further, we can certainly at least spread them further, and use them to bring more audience members into our orbit by distributing them in a wider variety of ways than we are currently. So that s our topic today. We re going to discuss the power of repurposing. And I have an example from one of my own projects to use to illustrate my point. Here we go now, a reading of my own blog post at Copyblogger, entitled Quality Over Quantity: Repurpose Your Best Ideas and Distribute Them Far and Wide. I hate to be the one to break this to you, but Your audience does not need your ideas. Sorry to disappoint you. It s true though. Your audience is exposed to plenty of ideas. Everywhere they turn online and offline, they are bombarded with ideas. Ideas, ideas, ideas. Mostly filler and fluff. Think about yourself. Do you need any more ideas to consume and consider? No. What you need are someone s best ideas. And what your audience needs in fact, all that your audience needs are your best ideas. The ideas that cut through the crap and clutter to make a difference The ideas you ve thought through, spent time with, and sculpted The ideas that are closer to finished products than initial impressions And you should invest more time distributing these premium ideas further and wider, in different ways and in different places. You shouldn t simply hit Publish and then run to the next idea. This way you can meet more of your current audience members where they are and you increase the likelihood of reaching potential audience members with your best work. Let me show you an example of how I m doing this on one of my sites It all starts with a blog post Given my responsibilities at Rainmaker Digital, and being a new dad, I don t have a ton of extra capacity for side projects. So when I do have an idea worth sharing over at The Assembly Call, I want to maximize the impact and distribution of that good idea. I can t afford to spin my wheels. In the immortal words of Sweet Brown: Ain t nobody got time for that. This is why I ve shifted my strategy and begun taking one well-thought-out idea and repurposing it into several different types of content, distributed in many different places. The idea is given birth in a blog post. Why? Because I do my best thinking when I m writing. Writing forces me to clarify my thoughts in a way that I m never able to by simply ruminating, or even talking. I need to sit down, think, write, edit, think a little more, edit a little more, and chisel the idea from rough stone into something smooth and polished. A lot of the fluff, filler, clutter, and crap gets removed, and then I feel much more comfortable turning the idea loose in the world. (This process also makes me more prepared to speak extemporaneously about the topic in the future a very useful side benefit for a project that involves a podcast and radio show.) You may be different. You may thrive working it all out in your head. You may find that you clarify your ideas best by talking them out. I urge you to learn what works best for you and follow it. But for me, it starts with writing. Hence why I began a blogging series titled 3-Point Shot where, basically, I take a topic of interest to IU basketball fans and come up with three useful observations about it. Simple. Consistent. Repeatable. Sometimes I know what the observations will be before I start writing. But usually the process of conducting basic research, and then synthesizing it into three clearly articulated ideas, reveals new insights that are useful to me and, in turn, to my audience. I write the first draft. Sometimes I rewrite or rearrange parts. Then I edit and proofread. Soon thereafter I hit Publish. The entire process usually takes 60 75 minutes. Now I have a blog post, usually in the 1,000 1,250 word vicinity, that I can distribute via social media, use to attract search traffic, and send to our email list. One piece. One format. A few distribution channels. All done? Hardly. I m actually just getting started. The beautiful part of this strategy is that the most difficult and time-intensive part is now done. I developed a high-quality idea it s not just something I slapped together in 15 minutes as a cheap traffic grab. Next, it s time to leverage this fully-formed idea into a blitzkrieg of distribution. This is where the blog post becomes a podcast episode and video. Keep in mind as we go through this example that the specific steps and channels that work for me over at The Assembly Call may not necessarily be the steps that you need to take. That site is built around a podcast, and we re also trying to grow our YouTube audience. Therefore, getting content out to our podcast audience and publishing more content to our YouTube channel are priorities. That might not be true for you. But the big idea that I m describing here combining the power of quality over quantity with repurposing and smart, widespread distribution will work for you. Just take the basic principles and apply them to your situation. The next basic principle for me is this: turn the blog post into a podcast episode and there just so happens to be a way that I can do that while simultaneously creating a video version too. When time is of the essence (and when isn t it?), you have to take any chance you can to work smarter, not harder. So here s what I do: Double-check my microphone cables and settings, and do a test recording. (Always, always, always do a test recording!) Open up my Assembly Call episode template in GarageBand, so I can record locally. Create a YouTube Live Event to broadcast the recording live. Open up the blog post in a web browser, so I have it ready for reference. Tweet out the link to the YouTube Live Event, so anyone who is interested can watch the live recording. (For what it s worth, I ve never had fewer than 16 people watch live online, and occasionally that number is up in the 50s and 60s.) Hit Record in GarageBand, hit Start Broadcast on the YouTube Live Event, welcome the audience, and start reading the blog post. From time to time while reading, I ll interject something extra the kind of comment that might have been a footnote to the written piece. But for the most part I just read the blog post verbatim, trying to sound as casual and conversational as I can. I was worried when I first starting doing this that our podcast and YouTube audiences wouldn t be too enthused about this content since it s just me (without my co-hosts) and I m basically just reading something they could get on the blog. My worries proved to be unfounded. The response has been unequivocally positive. I ve received numerous tweets and emails thanking me for finding a way to deliver this written content in the preferred consumption medium for podcast listeners, which make up the majority of our audience. These folks would never get to see or hear the content otherwise. And it is so easy to do. The entire time investment to record and post the podcast is about 30 35 minutes: 5 minutes to set up 15 20 minutes to record 10 minutes to publish the podcast (the YouTube Live Event is automatically archived on our YouTube channel for on-demand viewing) Furthermore, while our blog posts only publish in one place our blog we are set up to distribute our podcast episodes far and wide, with only a few button clicks required. Every episode goes to: iTunes Google Play TuneIn Radio Stitcher iHeartRadio Spreaker SoundCloud This doesn t even account for the many individual podcast apps that scrape places like iTunes for podcast feeds. (For example, I use Podcast Addict on my Android device, and The Assembly Call is available there even though I never signed up or submitted it there.) And here s a fun, little side benefit One of my favorite bonuses about tweeting out direct links to podcast episodes or YouTube videos over blog posts is that typically people can consume the content right there in their Twitter feed. All someone has to do is hit the play button, and the episode will play right there in the Twitter feed. Less friction, less distance between my audience being intrigued and then actually consuming my content. So that s how you do it. That s how you turn one quality blog post into a traffic and attention engine. If you re scoring at home, we ve now gone from one blog post, one distribution channel, and a few traffic sources to: A blog post A podcast episode A video At least 11 different distribution channels Countless traffic sources And here s the crazy thing it could be more. I could: Repurpose the blog post someplace like Medium, or as a guest post Create a slide presentation for SlideShare Find additional video channels besides YouTube Extract clips of the audio for a service like Clammr Make clips or GIFs from the video to post in visual channels like Instagram And on and on. The main reasons I don t do those are a) time and b) because I d get diminishing returns. I ve tried to be strategic about investing the limited time and effort resources I have for this project into the channels that will deliver the best and most immediate returns. SlideShare, for example, isn t going to do much for a sports audience, but it may be a great option for you. What s been the impact of all this? It s only been a month, but already: I added 400 new email subscribers We doubled our YouTube subscribers (in just a month!) Traffic to our blog increased by 31.91 percent Podcast downloads in just March of 2017 (the majority of which was during the off-season, when attention is usually lower) were nearly equal to the combined total of January and February So what you should do next? Ask yourself if you re maximizing the distribution of your best ideas. Not your best blog posts, but your best ideas. Because if you have an idea that s a winner, but it s only distributed via text as a blog post, then you re missing out on a wide range of additional attraction options. Can you turn your blog post into an audio recording? Can you then turn that audio recording into a video even if you just use a fixed image rather than filming yourself? Or, if you have a great podcast episode, can you go the other way and turn it into a blog post? If you already create transcripts for your podcast episodes, this is incredibly simple to do. The bottom line is that rather than focusing on the quantity of the content you publish, you should invest more time in creating fewer, higher quality pieces of content and then find efficient, scalable ways to distribute these high-quality pieces to as many nooks and crannies of the web as you can. You ll reach more people with your best ideas in the way they re most comfortable consuming content. And there s no better way to build an audience and authority, brick by brick, than that. Now stick around for this week s hyper-specific call to action. Call to action Here s my question for you this week What is a great idea of yours that is currently only being distributed one way? Maybe it s a blog post that you ve never repurposed into an email, or a podcast, or a video. Or maybe it s something you said on a podcast that made you say, You know, that was really good. I like that wording. But you haven t yet turned it into a blog post. Or maybe it s something else. But my guess is that you have at least one idea, and probably many more, that you haven t squeezed all the juice out of yet. So before you go and create something NEW, leverage work and thinking that you ve already done to get more mileage out of something that already exists. What idea is it? Pick one. Spread it far and wide. Okay, that s it for this week. Next week we are going to move back to content. We will be discussing the persuasive power of analogy. If you re looking for good ways to improve your content and illustrate your ideas more clearly to your audience, this episode will be like a cool glass of lemonade on a hot summer day. And finally, before I go, here are two more quick calls to action for you to consider: Subscribe to Sites Weekly If you haven t yet, please take this opportunity to activate your free subscription to our curated weekly email newsletter, Sites Weekly. Each week, I find four links about content, design, technology, and strategy that you don t want to miss, and then I send them out via email on Wednesday afternoon. Reading this newsletter will help you make your website more powerful and successful. Go to studiopress.com/news and sign up in one step right there at the top of the page. That s studiopress.com/news. Rate and Review Sites on Apple Podcasts And finally, if you enjoy the Sites podcast, please subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts (formerly known as iTunes), and consider giving us a rating or a review over there as well. One quick tip on that: to make the best use of your review, let me know something in particular you like about the show. That feedback is really important. To find us in Apple Podcasts, search for StudioPress Sites and look for the striking purple logo that was designed by Rafal Tomal. Or you can also go to the URL sites.fm/apple and it will redirect you to our Apple Podcasts page. And with that, we come to the close of another episode. Thank you for listening to this episode of Sites. I appreciate you being here. Join me next time, and let s keep building powerful, successful WordPress websites together. This episode of sites was brought to you by StudioPress Sites, which was awarded Fastest WordPress Hosting of 2017 in an independent speed test . If you want to make WordPress fast, secure, and easy — and, I mean, why wouldn t you — visit studiopress.com/sites today and see which plan fits your needs. That s studiopress.com/sites.

As an ever-evolving open source venture, WordPress changes a lot, and often, for the better. And it s up to you to make sure you update to the latest version. Listen to Site Success: Tips for Building Better WordPress Websites below ... Download MP3Subscribe by RSSSubscribe in iTunes Important links from this episode: Try StudioPress Sites Sites Weekly Newsletter Subscribe to Sites on Apple Podcasts @JerodMorris on Twitter Original blog post: Automatic Updates for Website Security and Peace of Mind Why You Should Always Use the Latest Version of WordPress The Transcript Jerod Morris: Welcome to Sites, a podcast by the teams at StudioPress and Copyblogger. In this show, we deliver time-tested insight on the four pillars of a successful WordPress website: content, design, technology, and strategy. We want to help you get a little bit closer to reaching your online goals, one episode at a time. I m your host Jerod Morris. Sites is brought to you by StudioPress Sites — the complete hosted solution that makes WordPress fast, secure, and easy without sacrificing power or flexibility. For example, you can upload your own WordPress theme, or, you can use one of the 20 beautiful StudioPress themes that are included and just one click away. Explore all the amazing things you can do with a StudioPress Site, and you ll understand why this is way more than traditional WordPress hosting. No matter how you ll be using your site, we have a plan to fit your needs — and your budget. To learn more, visit studiopress.com/sites. That s studiopress.com/sites. Welcome back to another episode of Sites — another week of unpacking a strategy that will help you build a better, more powerful, more successful WordPress website. Last week, we discussed how to create visually effective calls to action with some sage advice from Rafal Tomal. Hopefully you took the opportunity to analyze the calls to action on your website and figured out a tweak or two that will help you convert better. This week, we re going to discuss a topic that needs to be top of mind for every single person running a WordPress website — and it needs to stay top of mind for every single person running a WordPress website. It s that important In fact, if you are not going to take this seriously, you might as well just toss your hands up in the air and start over right now — without WordPress. I m not kidding. This is that important. What am I referring to? WordPress updates. As an ever-evolving open source venture, WordPress changes a lot for the better. And it s up to you to make sure you update to the latest version. And, while we re on the subject, theme framework updates too. A lot of times they go hand in hand, with theme framework updates following soon after a WordPress update. You might remember back to episode 15, when we discussed plugins, and I implored you to only install plugins that are up to date, and to make sure you keep them up to date. The same is true for WordPress update, and updates to your theme framework. And in this episode I m going to explain the three massively important reasons why this must be, and remain, a top priority for you as a WordPress site owner. Let s start off with the most important and urgent reason why you need to keep WordPress and your theme framework up to date: Security. The number one way that bad guys infiltrate a site is through outdated themes, plugins, and, of course, old versions of WordPress. It s become such an issue that many WordPress site owners pay a decent chunk of money each month to have an outside service keep things updated and safe. Think about it hackers are always trying to come up with new ways to weasel their way into our sites so they can steal data or plant malicious code. If you stick with today s version of WordPress, how safe do you think you ll be a year from now? Not very. The developers of WordPress work hard to stay out in front of the hackers — patching known holes, and doing everything they can to prevent future vulnerabilities. But the only way for your site to benefit from these efforts is to stay updated. Which is why this is a non-negotiable if you re going to run a WordPress website. You have to stay up-to-date — whether you do it yourself, pay a service do it for you, or host someplace like StudioPress Sites that includes an automatic WordPress update option. Speaking of which this leads me to theme framework updates too. Often a WordPress update is followed by a theme framework update. Makes sense, right? If the base code gets an update, the theme framework, which is layered on top of that base code, needs to be updated to maintain compatibility and take advantage of any new features. Plus, theme frameworks also have to worry about security — which means patching holes and preventing future ones. So just as you need to keep WordPress updated, you need to keep your theme framework updated too. However you do this, just make sure you do it. We believe so much in the importance of these kinds of updates that we built both right into StudioPress SItes — automatic WordPress AND Genesis Framework updates. It doesn t cost a penny more. So whether you do it yourself, pay someone else, or go with a host that has it built in — again, just make sure the updates are happening. It s essential to keep your site safe from the Internet evildoers who would love nothing more than to cause you and your website harm. So that s the #1 reason to keep WordPress and your theme framework updated: security. Now let s discuss two more massively important reasons to stay up to date … Reaons #2 is new features and bug fixes. New versions of WordPress aren t JUST about keeping bad guys out. They are also about making it easier and more enjoyable for you to use, and about giving your audience a better experience. If you stay on an old version of WordPress, you miss out on these new features. Plus, sometimes new features roll out and they don t work as intended. These are bugs. And they can be a real bummer. In that way, bug fixes can essentially be like new features because they allow you to fully embrace and use a feature that wasn t functioning correctly before. Let me give you a couple of examples On June 8, 2017, WordPress 4.8 rolled out. It included new features like link improvements, three new media widgets covering images, audio, and video, an updated text widget that supports visual editing, and an upgraded news section in your dashboard which brings in nearby and upcoming WordPress events. Useful features. Then in subsequent months, security and maintenance releases rolled out as well. These didn t include new features, but did fix bugs and update security measures. WordPress is in a competitive market. They want as many people as possible building sites on their platform. And to keep up, they have to keep adding new features that keeps WordPress ahead of the curve. There is no reason for you to not take advantage of those new features on your websites. And the same thing goes for your theme framework as well. Updates often include new features and functionality that you ll want to build on. So that s reason #2 to stay up-to-date: new features and bug fixes, so your site is even more powerful. And reason #1, remember, was security. How about reason #3? It s speed and performance. If you want a refresher on the importance of speed and performance, go back and listen to episode 3 of Sites. We discussed why it matters so much. In short — better site performance leads to a better experience for your users, which leads to more conversions, repeat visitors, and better search rankings, all of which increases your opportunity to build your audience and, ultimately, build a business around it. I d say that s a pretty compelling case for taking performance seriously. Well, with each new WordPress update, all the under-the-hood stuff is made more efficient. As was noted in a blog post at WPBeginner.com, WordPress 4.2 improved JS performance for navigation menus, and WordPress 4.1 improved complex queries which helped with performance of sites using those queries. And the same is true for your theme framework. Its code gets updated to be more efficient and deliver better performance. So, in review, here are the three massively important reasons why you need to keep WordPress and your theme framework up to date: Security — it keeps your site safe. New features and bug fixes — it keeps your site on the cutting edge. Speed and performance — it keeps your site humming along like a well-oiled machine. Now stick around for this week s hyper-specific call to action. Call to action Here is my question for you: what is your current process for keeping WordPress and your theme framework updated? Maybe your host does it for you. Maybe someone manages your site and that s part of what they do. Maybe you have a recurring to-do item that reminds you to check for updates regularly. Or maybe you have resolved to update yourself whenever you log in and see that an update is available. Whatever your process is — just make sure you have one. And if you don t, get one. And if this is something that you just don t want to worry about, that s fine. Totally understanding. But you need to hire someone, or choose a host, that will handle it for you. We ll obviously welcome you with open arms at StudioPress Sites. Just go to studiopress.com to learn more. Okay, that s it for this week. Next week we move on to strategy, and we re going to discuss repurposing content, and why focusing on quality over quantity is a smart idea. That s next week, here on Sites. Finally, before I go, here are two more quick calls to action for you to consider: Subscribe to Sites Weekly If you haven t yet, please take this opportunity to activate your free subscription to our curated weekly email newsletter, Sites Weekly. Each week, I find four links about content, design, technology, and strategy that you don t want to miss, and then I send them out via email on Wednesday afternoon. Reading this newsletter will help you make your website more powerful and successful. Go to studiopress.com/news and sign up in one step right there at the top of the page. That s studiopress.com/news. Rate and Review Sites on Apple Podcasts And finally, if you enjoy the Sites podcast, please subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts (formerly known as iTunes), and consider giving us a rating or a review over there as well. One quick tip on that: to make the best use of your review, let me know something in particular you like about the show. That feedback is really important. To find us in Apple Podcasts, search for StudioPress Sites and look for the striking purple logo that was designed by Rafal Tomal. Or you can also go to the URL sites.fm/apple and it will redirect you to our Apple Podcasts page. And with that, we come to the close of another episode. Thank you for listening to this episode of Sites. I appreciate you being here. Join me next time, and let s keep building powerful, successful WordPress websites together. This episode of sites was brought to you by StudioPress Sites, which was awarded Fastest WordPress Hosting of 2017 in an independent speed test . If you want to make WordPress fast, secure, and easy — and, I mean, why wouldn t you — visit studiopress.com/sites today and see which plan fits your needs. That s studiopress.com/sites.

The greatest call-to-action copy in the world won t make a lick of difference if your CTA isn t visually compelling enough to draw attention to it. So that s what we re going to discuss this week: how to create visually effective calls to action. Listen to Site Success: Tips for Building Better WordPress Websites below ... Download MP3Subscribe by RSSSubscribe in iTunes Important links from this episode: Try StudioPress Sites Sites Weekly Newsletter Subscribe to Sites on Apple Podcasts @JerodMorris on Twitter Original blog post: How to Create Visually Effective Calls-To-Action by Rafal Tomalk The Transcript Jerod Morris: Welcome to Sites, a podcast by the teams at StudioPress and Copyblogger. In this show, we deliver time-tested insight on the four pillars of a successful WordPress website: content, design, technology, and strategy. We want to help you get a little bit closer to reaching your online goals, one episode at a time. I m your host Jerod Morris. Sites is brought to you by StudioPress Sites — the complete hosted solution that makes WordPress fast, secure, and easy without sacrificing power or flexibility. For example, you can upload your own WordPress theme, or, you can use one of the 20 beautiful StudioPress themes that are included and just one click away. Explore all the amazing things you can do with a StudioPress Site, and you ll understand why this is way more than traditional WordPress hosting. No matter how you ll be using your site, we have a plan to fit your needs — and your budget. To learn more, visit studiopress.com/sites. That s studiopress.com/sites. Welcome back to another episode of Sites — another week of unpacking a strategy that will help you build a better, more powerful, more successful WordPress website. Last week, we talked about how your content can seduce your audience. This week, we re going to talk about how to capitalize on that moment when the seduction actually works. How do you close the deal? Whether it s a small, relatively easy deal — like getting an email signup. Or a larger, more complex deal like asking for a recurring purchase. It s all about crafting effective calls to action. And the greatest CTA copy in the world won t make a lick of difference if your CTA isn t visually compelling enough to draw attention to it. So that s what we re going to discuss this week: how to create visually effective calls to action. And we have a great blog post from Rafal Tomal to help us do it. Here is my reading of Rafal s blog post: How to Create Visually Effective Calls-To-Action. How to Create Visually Effective Calls-To-Action Designing your pages for conversion is a tricky job. It s a constant fight between what works and what doesn t. It s a never ending process of testing, measuring, and making changes. One of the most difficult tasks I have found in my work is to point your visitors right into your call to action — in order to catch their attention and interest them in your offer. While your copy is probably the most important part of this process, it s still very important to support it with suitable design techniques that can put an emphasis on your message. The good thing is that human behavior is mostly predictable and we can use it for our own advantage. People love repeatable visual patterns. People will also quickly find any distractions from a well-defined pattern. We can use that knowledge to get their attention. The question is, how can you lead your visitors right into your call to action in a subtle way without being too annoying and screaming with exclamation marks? Every call-to-action wants some attention Ok, before we dive into talking about the design of your website, let s think about getting attention for a moment. Why do you even need to get someone s attention and why is it so hard that you have to use some kinds of visual tricks? The purpose of most websites is to attract the target audience and call them to action. The action can be an email sign up, social interaction or a product purchase. Of course, the action you want people to take is usually not that attractive for first time visitors. You can t just invite people to your website by saying come and sign up for my email newsletter! That wouldn t convert well So, it is the content that attracts your target audience. It can be a sales page with compelling copy, your blog posts, an infographic, a free ebook, you name it. Once you have them in, and you have their attention, that s the time when you want to point them in a certain direction — the next level of your conversion funnel. Now, getting someone s attention and calling them to take the action is hard. The bigger the commitment to make, the harder to convert. Different types of actions may also require different approaches. For example, asking people to sign up for your email newsletter in exchange for valuable free content is much easier than asking them to pay for something. A call to action with a smaller commitment can be more direct. You can put it right in front of your visitors in the form of a popup or a big top banner. However, the same approach wouldn t work well if you used it for your buy button on a sales page. Before asking someone to purchase your product, you want to prepare them, educate them, resolve their concerns and build interest. That s why a sales call to action should be positioned more strategically. You need to be careful not to ask for the conversion too early or your visitors may not be ready yet. If you want to think about how this would look visually, just think about websites that you visit every day. Where do you typically see an email sign-up form — which is a low-commitment call to action? In the sidebar, in a banner beneath or even sometimes above the header, or maybe even in a pop-up that appears when you start scrolling. Contrast that with where you see the CTA for a sales page. It s typically near the end of the page after a lot of copy — the more complicated and expensive the product, the longer and more explanatory the copy (typically). Okay, now let s talk about defining visual patterns — because you have to define them first, before you can break them. Define your visual patterns first As I mentioned before, you can t convince someone to take the action just by your design. It s your copy that does all the heavy lifting, but you can help to emphasize the message and point some visitors right into your CTA through design. And this brings us to the main point of this whole episode, which is how to effectively break your visual patterns to get a visitor s attention. Your website s visual identity is defined by typography, colors, layout and all the user interface elements. Together, all of these elements create certain repeatable visual patterns. Try to make navigating and browsing your website predictable. You want to create a consistent and positive user experience in reading your content. That should be your base and foundation. Now, consistency is the main point here. The more consistent your visual patterns are, the easier it ll be to break it in a more subtle and elegant way. And why would you want to break your beautiful design? To lead your visitor s eye right into your offer on a busy page full of content. In other words, to get your visitor s attention where you need it. To explain better, imagine you re invited to a party where everyone is dressed in whatever they want. So, you have all different colors and styles. It would be pretty hard to stand out from the crowd if you wanted someone to pay attention to you. It s still possible, but you would need to take some ridiculous steps to do so. Now, imagine that you re going to a party where everyone is dressed in black and white. What could you do to stand out from the crowd? It would be as easy as wearing a red t-shirt. People would notice you and you wouldn t have to run around and scream. As you can see in this analogy, it all makes sense only when there is a certain consistent theme applied as a base. Without it, when everything is different, nothing can clearly stand out. Now, break your visual patterns In your design, emphasizing your call to action can be easily achieved by using contrast. I m not talking about just color contrast, but a contrast in size, boldness, space or even position. Some techniques work better for some people and may not even affect another group of visitors. So, the best idea is to combine at least a few of them. For example, your call to action can be placed on a contrasting background and the title font set in bold. Additionally, you can add some extra space around it to make a bigger content/space contrast. Using white space is a great way to make something more prominent without adding more noise to your design. By simply creating more space around something, you separate it from the rest of the content. That separation and a clear layout break can quickly draw the user s eye. You can also break your grid if your design is set on a layout grid. Layout grid is a common design tool used by web designers these days. It s a good topic for a whole new episode, and Rafal covered this concept deeper in his ebook, The Essential Web Design Handbook, if you re interested in learning more about it. For now, all you need to know is that a grid is nothing more than just an invisible web of vertical and horizontal lines that dictate your entire layout. By placing all your content elements along those lines, you can create an organized and consistent design structure throughout the entire page. It helps to create a visual pattern in your website layout. Breaking that grid will make your call to action stand out. It s that simple. Just by positioning a certain element loose on the grid will put more emphasis on it. Our eyes love patterns and we follow them. Every human eye will catch such a distraction in a perfectly designed layout. And that, my friends, is how you get your visitor s attention. Now stick around for this week s hyper-specific call to action. Call to action Here is this week s call to action: Open up your website Take a look at it. What visual patterns do you see? Don t spend any time judging yet. Just look. Get a feel for it. Next, focus on your calls to action. What jumps out about them? How do they fit in with the visual patterns on your site? Do they fit in too much? Do they clearly stand out? In other words, why is your eye drawn to them — or, conversely, why is your eye NOT drawn to them? Take what you learned from Rafal s insight and use it to make your CTAs stand out more. Perhaps it s adding more contrast. Perhaps it s adding more white space around it. Perhaps it s moving a sales page CTA further down the page — so you re not asking for the sale before someone is ready to move forward. Look at your site, analyze the patterns and then break them. Do this for at least one call to action. Then track it. Okay — coming next week, we re back to technology. We re going to talk about WordPress updates. Finally, before I go, here are two more quick calls to action for you to consider: Subscribe to Sites Weekly If you haven t yet, please take this opportunity to activate your free subscription to our curated weekly email newsletter, Sites Weekly. Each week, I find four links about content, design, technology, and strategy that you don t want to miss, and then I send them out via email on Wednesday afternoon. Reading this newsletter will help you make your website more powerful and successful. Go to studiopress.com/news and sign up in one step right there at the top of the page. That s studiopress.com/news. Rate and Review Sites on Apple Podcasts And finally, if you enjoy the Sites podcast, please subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts (formerly known as iTunes), and consider giving us a rating or a review over there as well. One quick tip on that: to make the best use of your review, let me know something in particular you like about the show. That feedback is really important. To find us in Apple Podcasts, search for StudioPress Sites and look for the striking purple logo that was designed by Rafal Tomal. Or you can also go to the URL sites.fm/apple and it will redirect you to our Apple Podcasts page. And with that, we come to the close of another episode. Thank you for listening to this episode of Sites. I appreciate you being here. Join me next time, and let s keep building powerful, successful WordPress websites together. This episode of sites was brought to you by StudioPress Sites, which was awarded Fastest WordPress Hosting of 2017 in an independent speed test . If you want to make WordPress fast, secure, and easy — and, I mean, why wouldn t you — visit studiopress.com/sites today and see which plan fits your needs. That s studiopress.com/sites.

If you don t know what to say, then how you say it isn t going to matter. That s one of the concluding points of the blog post by Brian Clark that is featured in this episode — a blog post that was inspired by one of the great films of our time. Listen to Site Success: Tips for Building Better WordPress Websites below ... Download MP3Subscribe by RSSSubscribe in iTunes Important links from this episode: Try StudioPress Sites Sites Weekly Newsletter Subscribe to Sites on Apple Podcasts @JerodMorris on Twitter Original blog post: Content Marketing as Seduction by Brian Clark The Transcript Jerod Morris: Welcome to Sites, a podcast by the teams at StudioPress and Copyblogger. In this show, we deliver time-tested insight on the four pillars of a successful WordPress website: content, design, technology, and strategy. We want to help you get a little bit closer to reaching your online goals, one episode at a time. I m your host Jerod Morris. Sites is brought to you by StudioPress Sites — the complete hosted solution that makes WordPress fast, secure, and easy without sacrificing power or flexibility. For example, you can upload your own WordPress theme, or, you can use one of the 20 beautiful StudioPress themes that are included and just one click away. Explore all the amazing things you can do with a StudioPress Site, and you ll understand why this is way more than traditional WordPress hosting. No matter how you ll be using your site, we have a plan to fit your needs — and your budget. To learn more, visit studiopress.com/sites. That s studiopress.com/sites. Welcome back for another of Sites. It is wonderful to have you here with me for another week of talking about how we can build more powerful and successful websites. Last week, we discussed how to decide which content to sell and what to give away for free with some excellent rules of thumb from Chris Garrett. This week, we re going to talk about how to use your content to properly seduce your audience members and prospects to continue along on their journey with you. Because whether it s free content or paid content, you re always trying to help people take the next step — and you want that next step to be with you, of course. But how do you establish that strong of a connection? Your content has to do a lot of the heavy lifting. But if you don t know what to say, then how you say it isn t going to matter. That s one of the concluding points of the blog post by Brian Clark that I m about to read to you — a blog post that was inspired by one of the great films of our time. Let s jump right into it. Let s talk about content marketing as seduction. Content Marketing as Seduction Phil Connors is having a bad day over, and over, and over. The arrogant Pittsburgh weatherman has once again been sent to cover the annual Groundhog Day event in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania. He soon discovers that visiting once a year wasn t all that bad, given that he s now living this particular Groundhog Day again, and again, and again. It all begins at 6:00 a.m., the same way each day. The clock radio clicks on with Sonny & Cher s I Got You Babe, followed by the declaration, Okay campers, rise and shine, and don t forget your booties cuz it s COLD out there today! After the initial shock wears off, Phil (played by national treasure Bill Murray) realizes he s in a time loop. No matter what he does each day, there are no lingering consequences for his actions, because he wakes up and starts over again fresh the next morning. This initially leads to hedonistic behavior, such as binge eating and drinking, manipulative one-night stands, and criminal acts. Eventually despair sets in, and Connors repeatedly attempts suicide. No dice he still wakes up the same way the next morning. It s not until Phil commits to bettering himself and serving others that he achieves redemption and breaks out of the loop. The film Groundhog Day is regarded as a contemporary classic. In 2006, it was added to the United States National Film Registry and deemed culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant. Further, the movie has been described by some religious leaders as the most spiritual film of our time, in that it represents the concept of transcendence. Buddhists and Hindus see the repeated day as a representation of reincarnation on the long path to enlightenment. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, the time loop can be thought of as purgatory. Don t get me wrong. Groundhog Day is a hilarious film, and Bill Murray considers it his finest performance. But it s also seriously deep. Jonah Goldberg of the National Review said, we have what many believe is the best cinematic moral allegory popular culture has produced in decades. Groundhog Day also contains an example of marketing gone terribly wrong. This travesty happens all too often in the real world, which means it s what you want to avoid at all costs. A tale of a data-driven marketing fail In between his hedonism and subsequent despair, Phil decides to achieve a different goal. He begins romantically pursuing his news producer, Rita Hanson (played by Andie MacDowell). He starts by being uncharacteristically kind to her, and then asks her to describe her ideal man. Through day after day of similar encounters, he amasses an amazing amount of information about her. Phil finds out her favorite drink, and her ideal toast to drink it to. He knows she hates white chocolate and loves Rocky Road ice cream. He even quotes from Baudelaire (Bodell-air) after finding out she majored in 19th-century French poetry. Through his unique situation, Connors discovers all the right information in order to arrive at the perfect romantic evening with her ideal man. It takes weeks, but as far as Rita knows, Phil has simply transformed from the jerk she works with to an amazing person in a single day. Talk about marketing research, huh? He s got his who down cold. Except there s one problem Phil s only goal is to have sex with Rita. There s literally no tomorrow for him, so he has to close the deal on the first date, or not at all. Hence, he can t contain his insincerity despite all the valuable intelligence he has on her. Phil even stoops so low as to tell her he loves her when she resists his advances. Each evening invariably ends with Rita slapping Phil s face, and what she says to him is especially telling: I could never love you, because you ll never love anyone but yourself. Content marketing as seduction In marketing and sales circles, there s a running joke about losing a prospect thanks to the equivalent of trying to propose marriage on the first date. And yet, it doesn t stop it from happening, even with people who should know better. Phil has a treasure-trove of data about Rita, just as modern marketers have big data about you. And yet Phil tries to fake authenticity, engagement, and connection, which Rita sees right through. The same thing happens every day at all levels of the marketing spectrum. Think of it this way Rita reveals her core values, and Phil tries to reflect them back to her. It works, up until the point that Phil s desire to close the deal on his terms, based on his own desires, tramples all over Rita s core values. I ve described content marketing as a story you tell over time. If that story places the prospect at the center of the story and delivers the right information at the right time, you have a courtship. If you take it a step further and deliver the information in a way that delights the prospect at each step, you have something even more powerful. You have a seduction. The word seduction can certainly have a manipulative connotation. But when you truly know your prospect, and your core values truly do align with theirs, and you truly do communicate based on their needs first, well They get what they want, and you get what you want. That s not manipulation; that s just good business. Empower the journey Before the internet, inadequacy marketing ruled. Without access to alternative perspectives, prospects were targeted by marketers with messages that positioned the brand as the hero, which promised to save the poor prospect from the anxiety manufactured by the message. The imbalance in access to information favored the seller. Now, prospects are empowered to self-educate, which means the buyer s journey is well underway before any particular seller is even aware of it. Today, prospects face a different form of anxiety. The abundant access to information from thousands of competing sources threatens to overwhelm the prospect. That s where you come in. Your brand becomes heroic in the sense that you arrive to further empower the prospect to solve their problem. You help them make sense of the relevant information. And in the process, you demonstrate rather than claim that your product or service is the perfect solution for that particular person. So yes, your brand can become a hero. As long as you never forget that the prospect is the main hero, or protagonist, of a journey that they are at the center of. This is why Joseph Campbell s monomyth, or hero s journey, provides the perfect metaphor, and map, of a content marketing strategy that succeeds. It forces you to keep your focus on empowering them, with you and your content playing the role of the mentor, or guide. The easiest way to understand this is to look at the character relationships in some of the best-known examples of Campbell s hero s journey in popular culture films such as Star Wars, The Matrix, and The Wizard of Oz. The prospect is Luke Skywalker; you re Obi-Wan Kenobi. The prospect is Neo; you re Morpheus. The prospect is Dorothy; you re Glinda the Good Witch. Structuring your content marketing strategy in this way leads to success. By understanding your prospect as well as possible, you re now in a position to guide and empower her to solve the problem with you. What you say matters most What you say in advertising is more important than how you say it. David Ogilvy It might come as a surprise to hear that from Ogilvy, a famous Mad Man and copywriter who made millions by finding just the right way to say things. But he s right if what you re saying is wrong, it doesn t matter how well you say it. And the when matters too. The key point of this episode is for you to understand that because we re guiding the prospect on a journey, when is an inherent aspect of the what. You can choose to rush things and lose, or travel alongside the prospect and eventually win. Phil Connors does end up with Rita, but only when he actually becomes her ideal man instead of trying to fake it. The time loop ends thanks to an authentic seduction. Here s to not making the same mistake over, and over, and over again at least with your content marketing. Now stick around for this week s hyper-specific call to action. Call to action Here is my question for you, based on what we just learned about content marketing as seduction How are you empowering your prospects to solve their problems? If you don t know the answer to this right off the top of your head, if it isn t a guiding principle in what you re doing, then it now might be a good time to rethink how you view your relationship with your audience. Remember: you are not the hero. THEY are the hero, and you are there to further empower them to solve their problems, to help them make sense of the relevant information they are bombarded with, and, in the process, you demonstrate rather than claim that your product or service is the perfect solution for that particular person. So try to answer that question: How are you empowering your prospects to solve their problems? And if you have trouble answering it, take this as an opportunity to rethink how you re approaching your content so you can be better at properly seducing your prospects. Okay — coming next week, we re back to design. Once you ve properly seduced someone, you do eventually have to close the deal — and when we re talking about the closing the deal online that usually gets done with a button. We ll discuss how to create visually effective Calls-To-Action based on insight from Rafal Tomal. I hope you ll join me. Finally, before I go, here are two more quick calls to action for you to consider: Subscribe to Sites Weekly If you haven t yet, please take this opportunity to activate your free subscription to our curated weekly email newsletter, Sites Weekly. Each week, I find four links about content, design, technology, and strategy that you don t want to miss, and then I send them out via email on Wednesday afternoon. Reading this newsletter will help you make your website more powerful and successful. Go to studiopress.com/news and sign up in one step right there at the top of the page. That s studiopress.com/news. Rate and Review Sites on Apple Podcasts And finally, if you enjoy the Sites podcast, please subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts (formerly known as iTunes), and consider giving us a rating or a review over there as well. One quick tip on that: to make the best use of your review, let me know something in particular you like about the show. That feedback is really important. To find us in Apple Podcasts, search for StudioPress Sites and look for the striking purple logo that was designed by Rafal Tomal. Or you can also go to the URL sites.fm/apple and it will redirect you to our Apple Podcasts page. And with that, we come to the close of another episode. Thank you for listening to this episode of Sites. I appreciate you being here. Join me next time, and let s keep building powerful, successful WordPress websites together. This episode of sites was brought to you by StudioPress Sites, which was awarded Fastest WordPress Hosting of 2017 in an independent speed test . If you want to make WordPress fast, secure, and easy — and, I mean, why wouldn t you — visit studiopress.com/sites today and see which plan fits your needs. That s studiopress.com/sites.

What content should you give away for free, and what content should you sell? It s a tricky question. There is no perfect, one-size-fits all answer. But there are guiding principles. And some of the best guiding principles I ve ever come across for this question come from a blog post that Chris Garrett wrote back in July of 2015. Listen to Site Success: Tips for Building Better WordPress Websites below ... Download MP3Subscribe by RSSSubscribe in iTunes Important links from this episode: Try StudioPress Sites Sites Weekly Newsletter Subscribe to Sites on Apple Podcasts @JerodMorris on Twitter Original blog post: How to Decide Which Content to Sell and What to Give Away for Free by Chris Garrett The Transcript Jerod Morris: Welcome to Sites, a podcast by the teams at StudioPress and Copyblogger. In this show, we deliver time-tested insight on the four pillars of a successful WordPress website: content, design, technology, and strategy. We want to help you get a little bit closer to reaching your online goals, one episode at a time. I m your host Jerod Morris. Sites is brought to you by StudioPress Sites — the complete hosted solution that makes WordPress fast, secure, and easy without sacrificing power or flexibility. For example, you can upload your own WordPress theme, or, you can use one of the 20 beautiful StudioPress themes that are included and just one click away. Explore all the amazing things you can do with a StudioPress Site, and you ll understand why this is way more than traditional WordPress hosting. No matter how you ll be using your site, we have a plan to fit your needs — and your budget. To learn more, visit studiopress.com/sites. That s studiopress.com/sites. Welcome back for another of Sites. So glad to have you here with me. Last week, we discussed how to avoid a catastrophic plugin decision with five questions that you should ask yourself before installing any plugin. This week, we re going to be discussing another important, and at times perplexing, question that you will undoubtedly end up asking yourself if you ever plan to build a business around your website. What content should you publish and distribute for free and what should you hold back and make people pay for? In other words: what content should you give away for free, and what content should you sell? It s a tricky question. There is no perfect, one-size-fits all answer. But there are guiding principles. And some of the best guiding principles I ve ever come across for this question come from a blog post that Chris Garrett wrote back in July of 2015. The principles Chris lays out in this post were relevant then, they are relevant now, and they ll be relevant well into the future. It s one of the best blog posts I ve ever read, and I m excited to share it with you this week on Sites. Here is my reading of Chris Garrett s blog post How to Decide Which Content to Sell and What to Give Away for Free. How to Decide Which Content to Sell and What to Give Away for Free You are all well aware by now that content is vitally important to your business. But how do you decide which content should be freely available and which content you ought to charge for? Is it possible to give away too much? People struggle with this question all the time. On the one hand, giving away information clearly works. After all, Copyblogger is based on that premise. That said, we know that selling information is good business. So where is the line drawn between freely available content and content that is locked behind a paywall of some kind? Of course the answers will differ between different industries, topics, businesses, and writers. But hopefully this episode can help you arrive at an approach that works for you. First, we need to decide what your free content should do for you. What can you achieve with free content The reason you are putting together all these free articles, podcasts, videos, and presentations, is that you want to attract an audience that grows your business. With that in mind, here are 11 benefits that free content can provide for you and the types of content that you should share: 1. Free content can attract your specific target audience We want more people specifically our most sought-after prospects to be aware of us. Of those, we want as many as possible to keep coming back, and to opt-in to our email. If all of your content is behind a barrier, then this goal is going to be more difficult to achieve because you will have fewer opportunities for visibility. The more content you have out there in the open, the more opportunities to reach your prospect exist. 2. Free content can encourage sharing your ideas In addition to attracting people who might become loyal members of your audience, you also want those people to bring friends. If your content is locked away, then they can say nice things about you, but their ability to share your content is limited. Therefore, your exposure is limited. 3. Free content can connect you with peers It s not just prospects that you want to connect to. With your ideas, experience, and knowledge out on the web for anyone to consume, you are going to attract industry, networking, and partner contacts. 4. Free content can inform the audience of your value What is the problem that you solve? What can you help them achieve? It s going to be tough to get people to pay money before they know what you can do for them! People often put their problems into search engines looking for answers. You want to make sure your solutions can be found when they go searching. 5. Free content can position you against competitors Your free content will not just educate, it will also show your uniqueness. It will inform people why they should connect with you versus other people, and why your approach or solutions have the advantage. 6. Free content can answer objections Once a prospect has started to get to know your value, then they will have more questions of the yes, but variety. It s best to answer these objections and put your prospect s mind at ease before those objections become reasons to not do business with you. Answering objections also demonstrates your empathy and the service provider who best shows they understand a prospect s problem tends to be the one who gets the business. 7. Free content can show proof and results A great way to answer objections, and to establish yourself as the go-to person, is to prove your value through existing results and case studies. 8. Free content can provide more reasons why Sometimes your prospects will not warm up to your solutions right away. They need to know what you are talking about and why it is important to them. Providing serving suggestions and use cases allows your prospect to understand how what you do fits into their life or business, and to imagine getting those benefits. Tutorials and demonstrations can also help existing customers get more out of what they paid for. 9. Free content can give a free taste that builds desire for the full meal When your business makes money by selling advice or information, it is a good idea for your prospects to get some early results. This allows them to build trust with you so that they feel confident that your more in-depth or advanced information will also deliver on your promises. The quicker and easier they get these results, the more bought in they will be. 10. Free content can tell your story and show people who you are as a person In many industries, who you work with can be as important as what they do for you, especially if they will be working with you closely for a while. In general, we prefer to work with people we actually can stand being around. That means establishing your personality in addition to your credentials. Use personal anecdotes and let your voice come through your free content. 11. Free content can reward prospects for their attention Sonia Simone calls the concept Cookie Content. This idea is crucial. You want your readers to look forward to your articles, videos, podcasts, and seminars. That means the time they spend with you should be time well spent. They should be informed and entertained. Your prospect needs to perceive that there is more good stuff to come, so that they will want to deepen their relationship with you. A good habit to get into is to always provide actionable takeaways and ideas the audience can use. Hopefully that will give you plenty of ideas on what free content can do for you. To recap: **- Free content can attract your specific target audience Free content can encourage sharing your ideas Free content can connect you with peers Free content can inform the audience of your value Free content can position you against competitors Free content can answer objections Free content can show proof and results Free content can provide more reasons why Free content can give a free taste that builds desire for the full meal Free content can tell your story and show people who you are as a person Free content can reward prospects for their attention** But with that said Here s when you should hoard information If you are giving away so much value in the free content, what are people going to be willing to pay for? It s my instinct to give a lot, but there is a circumstance where your information is worth holding back and providing only to paying customers. That is when: 1. People really want the information because it has significant value If the information could Provide a massive transformation in their life or business Make them a great deal of money Save them lots of time Make them more popular then they will be much more willing to invest in your solution. 2. The information is difficult to acquire Yes, Google has exposed many things for free that had previously been knowledge reserved for the elite few. But that doesn t necessarily mean that your prospect can find it, or that the information is even out there and indexed. People still innovate. People find new approaches. Every day, new technologies are developed. Brand new systems are tested and released. Many of the thought leaders and gurus we know are in their positions because they hopped on a shiny new platform or tool and mastered it before anyone else. Of course as soon as you start sharing this information, someone you have shared it with will inevitably start sharing it too. As more and more people fight against the noise in their marketplaces, you will see more and more valuable information being shared for free. Here is why people buy content … With all the free content out there, you would be forgiven for believing that s all anyone really needs. But, actually, paid content has never been more in demand from books to coaching to training courses. Part of the reason people will pay is because of trust. It s a weird psychological factor that people will trust education that they paid for more than something you gave away. The reason is because it has a higher perceived value, and also there is an implied warranty. In addition, people will pay for these 5 things 1. People will pay for in-depth, step-by-step guidance In general, your free content is going to be a collection of granular, randomly organized pieces of the puzzle. People will happily pay to be given the whole thing wrapped up in convenient packaging even if the information was previously available for free. 2. People will pay for access and tailored advice I was shocked when this first happened to me (Chris Garrett wrote this blog post, remember), but I have since found this is true in many niches. When I started out, I was giving away articles that helped developers solve programming problems. People started approaching me asking me to train and coach them, even though I thought there was little I could add to the knowledge I had already put out there free to consume. It doesn t matter how complete you think you have made your education, it only serves as better proof that you are the person who can best help. A great example of this is our own Authority training and networking community. 3. People will pay for exclusivity Of course people will always want the secrets or to be an insider especially if these secrets will give them an unfair advantage over competitors. 4. People will pay for higher quality and better technology The quality of your information is paramount, but people will be willing to pay more for higher quality production value, more comfort, and the latest technology. How much of a difference this makes can be difficult to predict. 5. People will pay for experiences It s an often-shared piece of advice, but it is true: People will forget what you say, but they will remember how you made them feel. Yes, people happily pay for things, but we really value a memorable experience. If you can entertain, inform, and provide a stellar experience, then you are going to create something truly valuable. To recap: **- People will pay for in-depth, step-by-step guidance People will pay for access and tailored advice People will pay for exclusivity People will pay for higher quality and better technology People will pay for experiences** So now you have some ideas of what you should give away, and what you can sell, but how do you know if your free content idea is a good choice? What you should never give away It s difficult to give hard and fast rules, because for each of these ideas someone out there will be the exception. But in general here are six things that your free content should not be: 1. Free content shouldn t be too complete Don t be tempted to answer every question or to answer questions too completely. This is partly because you may be overwhelming your audience rather than helping them. And partly because, as mentioned above, someone who has not paid will have less trust and patience for you to get to the point. 2. Free content shouldn t reveal too much of the how Free information should focus more on the what and the why, rather than go deep into the how. It s good to give some ideas and tactics, but you need to work up to introducing your full strategies and systems on the paid side. Consider giving away step one, or even steps one, two, and three, while keeping the remaining steps back for paying customers only. 3. Free content shouldn t provide free access Don t make the mistake I did of being too available, too much. Your time and energy is limited. Don t give away access to you, and certainly limit how much support you provide for your free stuff. Hold the customer s hand through the entire process if you like, but free readers should not expect white-glove treatment. 4. Free content shouldn t involve a high barrier to entry People are willing to jump through hoops after they have discovered there is value on the other side. This means the first free content a prospect discovers should have zero barriers to consumption. 5. Free content shouldn t cover advanced topics with many prerequisites If you need a degree and a spy decoder ring to understand your free content, then people will not put in the effort. They might even think bad things about you. Your job is to help, not confuse people or impress them with your massive intellect. 6. Free content shouldn t require hard work by the reader People will put in effort once they are sure there will be a substantial pay off. But if a reader has only just discovered you, then they will lose interest long before they start seeing results, in which case you will have lost their attention and trust. To recap: **- Free content shouldn t be too complete Free content shouldn t reveal too much of the how Free content shouldn t provide free access Free content shouldn t involve a high barrier to entry Free content shouldn t cover advanced topics with many prerequisites Free content shouldn t require hard work by the reader** The bottom line People worry about this issue of which content to sell and what to give away for free. And yes, it involves a lot of subjective judgment. But the good news is that I have yet to find someone who has given away too much. I don t believe it is possible to be too helpful or too generous provided you manage your time and energy, and that people know you are in business. As I mentioned earlier, you can give away everything you know and there will still be people who want to hear it from you and who will pay you to help them implement it. So share your best ideas, build your Minimum Viable Audience, and then make offers at the appropriate time. It works. Now stick around for this week s hyper-specific call to action. Call to action There are a lot of different directions we could go in for this week s call to action. Let s do this I want you to take a look at your free content. And analyze it through the prism of the six elements Chris Garrett advised that your free content should NOT be: It shouldn t be too complete It shouldn t reveal too much of the how It shouldn t provide free access It shouldn t involve a high barrier to entry It shouldn t cover advanced topics with many prerequisites It shouldn t require hard work by the reader Decide if you need to adjust your free content offering to avoid doing any of those six things. Are you making your info too complete? Are you revealing the how? Are you giving away too much access to yourself? (I fight this problem often). Are you requiring too much of your free content consumers — to the point where they are dissuaded from truly engaging with your content? Chances are there is at least one of these elements that you can improve upon. Determine which one it is and then enact a plan to improve on it! Okay — coming next week, we move from strategy back to content. One thing that you want your free AND your paid content to be is seductive. We ll discuss how content marketing works to seduce browsers into audience members and audience members into customers in next week s edition of Sites. I hope you ll join me. Finally, before I go, here are two more quick calls to action for you to consider: Subscribe to Sites Weekly If you haven t yet, please take this opportunity to activate your free subscription to our curated weekly email newsletter, Sites Weekly. Each week, I find four links about content, design, technology, and strategy that you don t want to miss, and then I send them out via email on Wednesday afternoon. Reading this newsletter will help you make your website more powerful and successful. Go to studiopress.com/news and sign up in one step right there at the top of the page. That s studiopress.com/news. Rate and Review Sites on Apple Podcasts And finally, if you enjoy the Sites podcast, please subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts (formerly known as iTunes), and consider giving us a rating or a review over there as well. One quick tip on that: to make the best use of your review, let me know something in particular you like about the show. That feedback is really important. To find us in Apple Podcasts, search for StudioPress Sites and look for the striking purple logo that was designed by Rafal Tomal. Or you can also go to the URL sites.fm/apple and it will redirect you to our Apple Podcasts page. And with that, we come to the close of another episode. Thank you for listening to this episode of Sites. I appreciate you being here. Join me next time, and let s keep building powerful, successful WordPress websites together. This episode of sites was brought to you by StudioPress Sites, which was awarded Fastest WordPress Hosting of 2017 in an independent speed test . If you want to make WordPress fast, secure, and easy — and, I mean, why wouldn t you — visit studiopress.com/sites today and see which plan fits your needs. That s studiopress.com/sites.

As wonderful as plugins can be, it s wise to use patience and discretion when choosing which ones you will use and which ones you will pass over or replace. In this episode, I will present you with a simple decision tree, in the form of a few short questions, to help you decide whether you should install that plugin or move on. Listen to Site Success: Tips for Building Better WordPress Websites below ... Download MP3Subscribe by RSSSubscribe in iTunes Important links from this episode: Try StudioPress Sites Sites Weekly Newsletter Subscribe to Sites on Apple Podcasts @JerodMorris on Twitter Original blog post: How Creativity Can Kill a Good Website Design by Rafal Tomal The Transcript Jerod Morris: Welcome to Sites, a podcast by the teams at StudioPress and Copyblogger. In this show, we deliver time-tested insight on the four pillars of a successful WordPress website: content, design, technology, and strategy. We want to help you get a little bit closer to reaching your online goals, one episode at a time. I m your host Jerod Morris. Sites is brought to you by StudioPress Sites — the complete hosted solution that makes WordPress fast, secure, and easy without sacrificing power or flexibility. For example, you can upload your own WordPress theme, or, you can use one of the 20 beautiful StudioPress themes that are included and just one click away. Explore all the amazing things you can do with a StudioPress Site, and you ll understand why this is way more than traditional WordPress hosting. No matter how you ll be using your site, we have a plan to fit your needs — and your budget. To learn more, visit studiopress.com/sites. That s studiopress.com/sites. Welcome back to another episode of Sites. So glad to have you here with me. Last week, we discussed how creativity can kill a good website design. As I mentioned in that episode, it seems kind of ironic that creativity can have a negative impact on your web design because creativity is generally good thing. But as we all know from other walks of life, too much of a good thing can often turn into something not so good. The same is true for plugins. Now let me be clear: like creativity, plugins are generally a GOOD thing. In fact, plugins are one of the best elements of running a WordPress site. Solid, well-coded plugins extend the power and capability of WordPress far beyond what it can do out of the box. For the vast majority of us who use WordPress, plugins aren t just a nice option to have — they actually provide essential functionality that we wouldn t be able to run our websites without. So what s the problem? Well, beneath the sunshine and daffodils, plugins do have a dark side. They require updates. Sometimes they don t play nicely with other plugins or your theme. They can introduce security holes into your website. They can get out of date and stop working with newer versions of WordPress. Plugins that were once cutting edge can become obsolete. Worst of all, they can be abandoned by their developers. I don t say all of this to scare you. But I do bring this up to open your eyes to the reality of hosting plugins on your WordPress website. The WordPress plugin repository is a fantastical place. It s like Willy Wonka s Chocolate Factory for WordPress owners. But you can t just gobble up everything in sight. If you do, your website will get bloated, which can lead to performance degradation on the front end for visitors and on the back end when you re in your dashboard. Plus, you will be committing yourself to all kinds of extra time and worry when it comes to maintenance and updates. This is one reason why hosting your site with a provider who offers recommended plugins is so nice. For example, StudioPress Sites has recommended plugins for a bunch of different features: building landing pages, running affiliate programs, managing membership communities, etc. The plugins have all been vetted to ensure they work well in the Sites hosting environment, and they are accessible via one-click install from any Sites website dashboard. It s peace of mind and convenience, to help you get the essential features you need. But if your host doesn t offer recommended plugins, or you need a feature that isn t among the plugins recommended, then you re going to need to install one on your own. And the bottom line is that as wonderful as plugins can be, it s wise to use patience and discretion, and even consider a minimalist s mentality when choosing which plugins you will use and which ones you will pass over or replace. In this episode, I will present you with a simple decision tree, in the form of a few short questions, to help you decide whether you should install that plugin or move on, so that you can experience the benefits of plugins while avoiding the potential catastrophes they can bring to your site. 5 Questions to Help You Avoid a Catastrophic Plugin Decision Here is the first question to ask yourself: 1. Are you willing and able to keep your plugins updated? If your answer to this question is no, then just stop right now. You have to keep your plugins updated. It s the only way to keep your site safe and functioning. WordPress is always being updated, and new security threats are always emerging. This means that plugin developers have to be constantly updating their plugins to make them up-to-date and compatible with WordPress, as well as secure as possible from the ever-present risk of hacking. If you re not going to keep your eyes peeled and stay vigilant, so that when plugin alert notices happen you take action, then you re not a responsible enough WordPress owner to use plugins. I m sorry — that may seem harsh, but it s true. Okay, can you answer in the affirmative to number one? Then you can move on to number two: 2. What problem are you trying to solve? This can be a problem for your audience members who visit your site, for customers who make purchases on your site, or even for yourself when it comes to managing your site. There are plugins of all shapes and sizes that do endless multitudes of things. But notice the wording of the question. It s very specific. What problem are you trying to solve? It s not: what feature would you like to add? Or, what element would be cool to have on your website? Or, what is my competitor doing so I can match them? No. What problem are you trying to solve? For example, one of the first plugins I often put on my WordPress sites is a Google Analytics plugin. Why do I do this via plugin instead of just pasting the Analytics code into my theme file? Well, because I know I m likely to change my theme in the future. And if I do that, and then forget to add the Analytics code to the new theme, then I ll lose data. I don t want that to happen. That s a problem. Adding a plugin helps me solve that problem. What problem are you trying to solve that a plugin can be the answer for? If you can t identify the problem, then you shouldn t even start trying to identify the plugin. If you have a defined answer to number two, then you can move on to question number three 3. Are there plugin options that actually solve your problem? Note that I said options, with an s. Not just option. It s easy to get into a hurry when you re building your website. You don t want to spend time on plugins. You want to spend time on your content, and building connections with your audience. So it can be tempting to find the first plugin that purports to offer a solution to your problem, install it, and move on. Don t. This is an easy way to make a less than optimal choice. There can be multiple solutions for the same problem. And they may all work adequately, but one may be more optimal for your particular situation and website than another. Research the different options, judge the features against what you need for your site, and then make an informed decision rather than a default one — which is what you d be doing if you just pick the first plugin that pops up. Of course, your research could uncover that no plugins solve your problem. This is why it s so important to be clear about the problem you re trying to solve. Because while it might be disappointing to not find a quick fix with a plugin, it s much better than having a vague idea of the problem and then being tempted to install any old plugin that you think might solve it. No. It s better to be clear about what you re looking for, so then you can be clear about whether you find it or not. And if you don t, good. At least you know. And if the problem is important enough, you still have options. You can hire a developer to build you a custom solution — or you can go back to the drawing board and reconsider whether the problem is really that important, or if there is another way to work toward a solution for it. Remember: sometimes constraints are blessings in disguise. Okay, so you ve identified the problem you re trying to solve, and you have identified plugins that solve this problem. What next? 4. Are any of the plugin options trustworthy? What do I mean when I say trustworthy? I mean can you count on it. How do you know? Ask yourself a few of these questions, all of which can be answered in fairly short order: Is there any social proof suggesting many different site owners have used this plugin successfully? Does this plugin developer show a track record of success? Is the plugin updated often? Is support offered? (Understand that you may have to pay a premium to get plugin support. It s often worth it. Don t let that scare you.) If you re looking at a plugin, but the number of sites it s installed on is in the hundreds, not the hundreds of thousands, or it s the first plugin of a developer you don t know, or it hasn t been updated in the past few months I d run in the other direction. Why risk it? Chances are there are other options, or it will be worth paying for something custom. The risk just isn t worth the potential reward if you re going to be living in constant fear of a plugin breaking or becoming obsolete. And remember: the problem you re trying to solve with this plugin should be an important one. So if it could simply break or stop working without your site being impacted, my question is why are you even installing it in the first place? And finally, the fourth question you should ask yourself about a plugin before thinking you re done and ready to move on 5. Does installing and activating the plugin break anything? This is a big step people often forget. I know I have in the past. Usually it doesn t come back to bite me, but every now and then it does. Just because you download a plugin, install it, activate it, and adjust all of the settings does not necessarily mean everything is working well. Things can go wrong. Plugins can interact weirdly with different versions of WordPress or different themes. Sometimes they place code or text in places you didn t anticipate. To be safe, just expect the unexpected and then make sure that you take a quick tour of your site after installing any plugins. Check the home page, click around to some content pages, scroll down to your footer, etc. Everything look okay? Good. It s always smart to check. Don t be lulled into a false sense of security. Even a 5-star plugin might have an issue with the particular configuration of YOUR website. So just do your due diligence. Once again, here are the five questions you should ask yourself to avoid potential plugin catastrophes: Are you willing and able to keep your plugins updated? What problem are you trying to solve? Are there plugin options that actually solve your problem? Are any of the plugin options trustworthy? Does installing and activating the plugin break anything on your site? Now stick around. It s time for this week s hyper-specific call to action. Call to action For this week s call to action, I want you to review your plugins. All of them. Go down the list and identify the problem that each one solves. Every time you can define a specific problem that it solves, great! Keep that plugin. But if you get to a plugin that doesn t solve a specific problem, or upon further review the problem is actually not that important, then consider removing it. The upside is one less plugin to have to worry about an update, plus one less potential area of exploit for hackers, and a little bit less bloat on your website. Can you get rid of a plugin or two? My guess is that if you ve never done an exercise like this, you probably can. Okay — coming next week, we move on from technology back to strategy. And we discuss one of my all-time favorite and most oft-recommended articles ever written on Copyblogger. It was written by Chris Garrett. The title: How to Decide Which Content to Sell and What to Give Away for Free. That s next week on Sites. Finally, before I go, here are two more quick calls to action for you to consider: Subscribe to Sites Weekly If you haven t yet, please take this opportunity to activate your free subscription to our curated weekly email newsletter, Sites Weekly. Each week, I find four links about content, design, technology, and strategy that you don t want to miss, and then I send them out via email on Wednesday afternoon. Reading this newsletter will help you make your website more powerful and successful. Go to studiopress.com/news and sign up in one step right there at the top of the page. That s studiopress.com/news. Rate and Review Sites on Apple Podcasts And finally, if you enjoy the Sites podcast, please subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts (formerly known as iTunes), and consider giving us a rating or a review over there as well. One quick tip on that: to make the best use of your review, let me know something in particular you like about the show. That feedback is really important. To find us in Apple Podcasts, search for StudioPress Sites and look for the striking purple logo that was designed by Rafal Tomal. Or you can also go to the URL sites.fm/apple and it will redirect you to our Apple Podcasts page. And with that, we come to the close of another episode. Thank you for listening to this episode of Sites. I appreciate you being here. Join me next time, and let s keep building powerful, successful WordPress websites together. This episode of sites was brought to you by StudioPress Sites, which was awarded Fastest WordPress Hosting of 2017 in an independent speed test . If you want to make WordPress fast, secure, and easy — and, I mean, why wouldn t you — visit studiopress.com/sites today and see which plan fits your needs. That s studiopress.com/sites.

There comes a point for any website when more creativity actually becomes too much, and becomes a negative. In this episode, we discuss a couple of important points to keep in mind so that creativity with your web design doesn t harm your users experience. Listen to Site Success: Tips for Building Better WordPress Websites below ... Download MP3Subscribe by RSSSubscribe in iTunes Important links from this episode: Try StudioPress Sites Sites Weekly Newsletter Subscribe to Sites on Apple Podcasts @JerodMorris on Twitter Original blog post: How Creativity Can Kill a Good Website Design by Rafal Tomal The Transcript Jerod Morris: Welcome to Sites, a podcast by the teams at StudioPress and Copyblogger. In this show, we deliver time-tested insight on the four pillars of a successful WordPress website: content, design, technology, and strategy. We want to help you get a little bit closer to reaching your online goals, one episode at a time. I m your host Jerod Morris. Sites is brought to you by StudioPress Sites — the complete hosted solution that makes WordPress fast, secure, and easy without sacrificing power or flexibility. For example, you can upload your own WordPress theme, or, you can use one of the 20 beautiful StudioPress themes that are included and just one click away. Explore all the amazing things you can do with a StudioPress Site, and you ll understand why this is way more than traditional WordPress hosting. No matter how you ll be using your site, we have a plan to fit your needs — and your budget. To learn more, visit studiopress.com/sites. That s studiopress.com/sites. Welcome to Episode 14 of Sites. Last week, we discussed how to create content that deeply engages our audience. One element of content that is deeply engaging is, of course, creativity. You aren t going to capture attention, and keep it, if you re saying the same thing everyone else is — and saying it in the same way everyone else is. So creativity is unequivocally a good thing. But like any good thing — basketball, beer ballroom dancing — indulging in too much of it can have negative consequences. This is especially true when it comes to creativity and web design. Now you may be thinking, Wait a minute, why wouldn t I want the most creative web design possible? Won t that help me break through the noise, differentiate myself, and get much-needed attention? Sure to a point. The key is knowing where that point is. Because after that point, additional creativity may no longer be helping your web design. It might actually be killing it. That is the thesis of Rafal Tomal s blog post titled How Creativity Can Kill a Good Website Design. He wrote it in February of 2016. I m reading it here in September of 2017. And while the post is written to an audience of designers — and you may not consider yourself a designer — it s still relevant to you. Because if you re creating a website, then you have to pick a design and tweak it, or you have to hire a designer. And that means you need to have some idea where the line is between the right amount of creativity and too much of it. Here, now, is my reading of Rafal Tomal s blog post: How Creativity Can Kill a Good Website Design. I ve adapted it slightly for clarity. Make sure you stick around after the reading, as I ll have this week s hyper-specific call to action for you. How Creativity Can Kill a Good Website Design How in the world could being too creative kill your design? I always thought the more creative someone is, the better designer he or she must be. Then, I started studying design more and realized that it s actually not all about creativity. Most of us start as visual designers, and then we grow and learn more about user interface, conversion, user experience, accessibility, or usability. Your creativity brought you here and that made you interested in design, but if you really want to evolve and become a better designer, be aware that being too creative may actually hurt your design work. How? Because we re designing for users — not ourselves. The sooner you realize this, the better. User psychology is a complicated subject, but one thing is for sure: people by default are lazy and will look for the least-resistant way to accomplish their task. Layouts that are too complicated, solutions that are too creative, and reinvented wheels won t make your users life easier. So, how can we find a good balance between a creative, artistic, and original design while still making it intuitive, maintaining usability, and providing good results for the business? Here are a couple of ways … 1. Start with a prototype in mind According to Google s research, users prefer websites that look both simple (low complexity) and familiar (high prototypicality). People make their aesthetic judgment on your design in less than 50 milliseconds. That first impression can tell them if they want to stay or leave your website or how they feel about your brand and product. As Javier Bargas-Avila, Senior User Experience Researcher at YouTube UX Research, said: Designs that contradict what users typically expect of a website may hurt users first impression and damage their expectations. You ve probably seen thousands of different websites by now. If I asked you to draw a layout of a blog website, it would probably look something like this: A header area with logo to the left and nav menu to the right A sidebar to the right with a CTA box at the top Then to the left in the body section is the main content area We could repeat this exercise with almost every kind of website: e-commerce, a doctor s office, university, portfolio, magazine, etc. A prototype of a blog website has the content area on the left side and the sidebar on the right side. The sidebar has widgets that mostly includes the email sign-up form as the first one. Does every blog look like that? No, but most of them do and that s why this is a prototypical image of a blog layout. When people visit your blog and want to sign up for your email newsletter, their expectation will be to find it in the right hand sidebar. How convenient is it when they find it right there and how frustrating would it be if it s not there? I believe it s always good to start designing with a prototype in mind. Then, you can alter it from there and test different ideas and decide how much you can afford to change the original look. Variation 1 might be a special widget just below the header that spans the content area and sidebar with a CTA box Variation 2 might be a footer widget with the CTA box Variation 3 might be the sidebar flipped to the left side. Of course, everything depends on your targeted audience. If you re designing a website for creative people, their expectations may be completely different. Looking at a prototypical website could be too boring for them and they may actually be open to a more creative approach from you. On the other hand, if you re designing for a non-specified group of users, you may want to go a safer route and stick as close to the prototypical design as possible. Being too creative here could actually hurt the basic expectations, which would lead to confusion and result in abandoning your website. So that is point #1: Design with a prototype in mind. Now let s discuss point #2 2. Don t make your users think There are many established web conventions and standards like the placement of your logo, navigation, search bar, or login link. There are even conventions for an icon s meaning, website element names, (e.g. Home, Sitemap, Contact), button styles, layout and visual hierarchy. All of these standards will help your users to navigate and find what they need much faster. Try to always stick to some of the most popular conventions and use your creativity elsewhere. Avoid reinventing the wheel. You don t want to change your users expectations from where the navigation is or make them wonder what that icon means. Remember that users are looking for the least resistant way to accomplish their task. So, simply don t make them think. Every website has its own level of user interface complexity and a certain amount of content. The more complex your interface is and the more content you have, the more energy it requires from visitors to explore the website. There are some exceptions when you may want to break the web conventions on purpose. Maybe you know exactly who your audience is and the goal of your website is to entertain and create an environment where your users are having fun exploring your creative ideas. You ve probably seen many clever portfolio websites with an original navigation or a horizontal scroll instead of vertical. It is fun to explore these and I m sure all other designers enjoy it too. It is OK in this circumstance. Similar creative approaches certainly wouldn t work for a local library or hospital website, where many users are older people or less experienced web users and they don t have time or energy to play with your design. Again, I would strongly recommend to start designing with the conventions in mind, and then try to alter some elements, after testing them first. Don t just trust your own gut see what your users think. If you can afford to come up with completely new design solutions, then you should be able to afford to test the usability of that solution as well. So, point #1 is to design with a prototype in mind. Point #2 is to not make your users think at least, not think in terms of how to use your website. You d rather them spend that time and energy thinking about your content and your ideas, not how to go to the next page. Now here s the final point … Use your creativity mostly in visual design So, where is the fun part of designing websites if you can t be too creative in many of the previously mentioned aspects? You can be and should be creative when it comes to the visual design. Try different color schemes or interesting font combinations. You can play with spacing, visual balance, and hierarchy. Design original illustrations or clever hover and scrolling effects. Look for creative ways to simplify your design. Minimalism is not about hiding features or content, but about doing less, just doing it better. Yes, actually simplifying design very often needs more creativity than making it complex. Help your users to complete the same tasks in a shorter amount time using fewer steps. Come up with creative ways to solve your users problems or to increase the conversion rate by breaking your visual patterns and directing your users right into your call-to-action. There is so much room for creativity in these areas while still sticking to design conventions, standards and common website prototypes. Don t get me wrong be creative and have fun designing websites. Just be careful how and where you use your creativity so it won t work against you. Now stick around. It s time for this week s hyper-specific call to action. Call to action For this week s call to action, I want you to think about Rafal s two big points from this episode: #1 — Design with a prototype in mind #2 — Don t make your users think I want you to think about them in relation to your website and your audience. What do your users expect when they visit your website? Are you giving it to them? Consider whether there are standard website elements you don t currently have. Ask some people who are representative of your audience members to use your website. Do they have to think too much? Try to identify an element of your website that would be a simple tweak but that would make it conform better to audience expectations and/or make the experience of using your website better. Any improvement along these lines will make your site easier for users to interface with, which is going to bring them closer to taking you up on your calls to action. And, as always, please feel encouraged to report back to me on Twitter. What did you learn by following through with this week s hyper-specific Call to Action? I want to know! Okay — coming next week, we move on from design to technology. We re going to talk about plugins. They are one of the greatest elements of WordPress. And they are one of the most worrisome and terrifying elements of WordPress. Let s discuss now to navigate those two extremes comfortably, shall we? That s next week on Sites. Finally, before I go, here are two more quick calls to action for you to consider: Subscribe to Sites Weekly If you haven t yet, please take this opportunity to activate your free subscription to our curated weekly email newsletter, Sites Weekly. Each week, I find four links about content, design, technology, and strategy that you don t want to miss, and then I send them out via email on Wednesday afternoon. Reading this newsletter will help you make your website more powerful and successful. Go to studiopress.com/news and sign up in one step right there at the top of the page. That s studiopress.com/news. Rate and Review Sites on Apple Podcasts And finally, if you enjoy the Sites podcast, please subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts (formerly known as iTunes), and consider giving us a rating or a review over there as well. One quick tip on that: to make the best use of your review, let me know something in particular you like about the show. That feedback is really important. To find us in Apple Podcasts, search for StudioPress Sites and look for the striking purple logo that was designed by Rafal Tomal. Or you can also go to the URL sites.fm/apple and it will redirect you to our Apple Podcasts page. And with that, we come to the close of another episode. Thank you for listening to this episode of Sites. I appreciate you being here. Join me next time, and let s keep building powerful, successful WordPress websites together. This episode of sites was brought to you by StudioPress Sites, which was awarded Fastest WordPress Hosting of 2017 in an independent speed test . If you want to make WordPress fast, secure, and easy — and, I mean, why wouldn t you — visit studiopress.com/sites today and see which plan fits your needs. That s studiopress.com/sites.

Now that we know who we re talking to and what we want to say, we just have to fine-tune how we say it to achieve maximum impact. Listen to Site Success: Tips for Building Better WordPress Websites below ... Download MP3Subscribe by RSSSubscribe in iTunes Important links from this episode: Video: Nike commercial – Instant Karma Video: Total ad, 1987 Try StudioPress Sites Sites Weekly Newsletter Subscribe to Sites on Apple Podcasts @JerodMorris on Twitter Original blog post: How to Create Content that Deeply Engages Your Audience by Brian Clark The Transcript Jerod Morris: Welcome to Sites, a podcast by the teams at StudioPress and Copyblogger. In this show, we deliver time-tested insight on the four pillars of a successful WordPress website: content, design, technology, and strategy. We want to help you get a little bit closer to reaching your online goals, one episode at a time. I m your host Jerod Morris. Sites is brought to you by StudioPress Sites — the complete hosted solution that makes WordPress fast, secure, and easy without sacrificing power or flexibility. For example, you can upload your own WordPress theme, or, you can use one of the 20 beautiful StudioPress themes that are included and just one click away. Explore all the amazing things you can do with a StudioPress Site, and you ll understand why this is way more than traditional WordPress hosting. No matter how you ll be using your site, we have a plan to fit your needs — and your budget. To learn more, visit studiopress.com/sites. That s studiopress.com/sites. Welcome to Episode 13 of Sites. Last week, we talked about SEO. We discussed a fantasy world in which we could simply eliminate SEO from our lives … but then thought better of it because of the important insight we gain from associated activities like keyword research — which gives us such important insight into the phrases our target audience members use when they have urgent and specific problems to solve. We learn how they seek answers to these problems. The kind of problems we want to be the solution for. Well this week we re also talking about the how — how we create content that really moves the needle for our audience once they ve reached our content and are consuming it. We ve already spent considerable time during our content episodes talking about the who and the what of content creation. This episode brings it all together. Because now that we know who we re talking to and what we want to say, we just have to fine-tune how we say it to achieve maximum impact. Here, now, is my reading of Brian Clark s blog post: How to Create Content that Deeply Engages Your Audience I ve adapted it slightly for clarity. Make sure you stick around after the reading, as I ll have this week s hyper-specific call to action for you. How to Create Content that Deeply Engages Your Audience Art Silverman had a vendetta against popcorn. Silverman wanted to educate the public about the fact that a typical bag of movie popcorn has 37 grams of saturated fat, while the USDA recommends you have no more than 20 grams in an entire day. That s important information. But instead of simply citing that surprising statistic, Silverman made the message a little more striking: A medium-sized butter popcorn contains more artery-clogging fat than a bacon-and-eggs breakfast, a Big Mac and fries for lunch, and a steak dinner with all the trimmings combined! Yes, what you say is crucial. But how you say it can make all the difference. How you say it is determined by your who Marketing succeeds when enough people with similar worldviews come together in a way that allows marketers to reach them cost-effectively. Seth Godin When you create a well-rounded representation of your ideal customer, what you re really tuning in to is the way your people view the world. And when you understand the worldview your prospects share the things they believe you can frame your story in a way that resonates so strongly with them that you enjoy an unfair advantage over your competition. Consider these competing worldviews, framed differently by simple word choices: Crossfitter vs. Gym Rat Progressive vs. Snowflake Businessman vs. The Man These are extreme examples, and you can certainly cater to audience beliefs and worldviews without resorting to name-calling. For example, the simple word green can provoke visceral reactions at the far sides of the environmental worldview spectrum, while also prompting less-intense emotions in the vast middle. Framing your story against a polar opposite, by definition, will make some love you and others ignore or even despise you. That s not only okay, it s necessary. You ll likely never convert those at the other end of the spectrum, but your core base will share your content and help you penetrate the vast group in the middle and that s where growth comes from. Based on who you re talking to, you have to choose the way to tell the story so that you get the conclusion you desire. It s the delivery of the framed message that keeps your heroic prospect on the journey so that their (and therefore your) goals are achieved. The how is essentially the difference between success and failure (or good and great) when it comes to content marketing. You must tell a compelling story with the right central element for the people you re trying to reach. It s all about the premise When you think about how a story is told, you ll hear people talk in terms of hooks and angles. Another way of thinking about it is the premise of the case you re making. As a term in formal logic, the premise is a proposition supporting a certain conclusion. Applied to content and storytelling, we use the word premise to mean the emotional concept that not only attracts attention but also maintains engagement throughout every element of your content. In other words: The premise is the embodiment of a concept that weaves itself from headline to conclusion, tying everything together into a compelling, cohesive, and persuasive narrative with one simple and inevitable conclusion your desired action. And yes, you re telling smaller stories along the buyer s journey that forms an overall empowering narrative. You ll have a big idea that s told one step at a time along the path. The premise connects you to the emotional center of your prospect s brain, stimulates desire, maintains credibility, and eventually results in the action you want. This happens when you understand how to frame your message and overall offer to mesh so tightly with your prospect s worldview that the this is right for me trigger is pulled subconsciously. Of course, each piece of content reflects your core values and overall positioning in the marketplace. Here s a famous example from the world of advertising. Nike has one of the most powerful positioning statements on the planet, expressed in three little words just do it. Beyond selling shoes, this is a way of viewing the world boiled down to its essence, which is why it s so powerful. Now, think back to Nike s commercial from the 80s featuring John Lennon s song Instant Karma. If you have never seen this ad, or don t recall it, I ve placed a link to it near the top of the show notes at studiopress.blog/sites13. What s the premise? First, notice how you don t see a logo or company name until the very end. Even then, it s only for a few brief seconds. In fact, the camera barely shows the shoes of the athletes. It s all about the lyrics married to the visuals. The first lyrical tie-in hits with Join the human race when an image of Olympic champion Michael Johnson is shown lining up for a race. Then things really kick in with Who on Earth do you think you are, a superstar? Well right you are! And then the unifying chorus paired with images of athletic adversity punctuated with triumph, as John Lennon repeats, We all shine on . This individual promotion supports Nike s overall brand positioning of just do it in a powerful, unique way. Did it resonate with everyone? Not at all and I m guessing that very same commercial today would be absolutely despised by a certain segment of the U.S. population. But the Instant Karma clip did highly engage the people it was aimed at. Repeat this to yourself over and over: The content you create is for a particular who, and no one else. Let s now look at a process for finding your how, both with your overall positioning and at each step in the prospect s journey. 4 steps to creating your winning story concept Great ideas are unique. There s no formula for innovative ideas, and anyone who tries to tell you otherwise is selling the slickest of snake oil. That said, great premises always have certain elements in common. It took me many years to understand that, beyond all the tactics, it s the premise of the message that matters first and foremost. The work you ve done so far on who and what was the heavy lifting of the how. But to refine your content marketing strategy even further, here are four essential elements of a winning story concept. 1. Be unpredictable The first thing you absolutely must have is attention. Without initial attention, nothing else you ve done matters. And nothing kills attention faster than if your prospective reader, listener, or viewer thinks they already know where you re going. Beyond curiosity, a great premise delivers an unpredictable and unexpected element that makes it irresistible. It all comes back to knowing who you re talking to at an intimate level and what they are used to seeing in the market. What messages are they getting from your competition? This is what you must use as the benchmark to create your own unique and unexpected angle that forms the foundation of your premise. In this day and age, you might have to dig deeper for a new and unexpected message that startles or downright fascinates people. A creative imagination combined with solid research skills help you see the nugget of gold no one else sees. Part of why people tune things out is a lack of novelty, which makes even a previously desirable subject matter mundane. Taking an approach that differs from the crowd can help you stand out, and that s why unpredictability is crucial for a strong premise. Just remember that things change. What was once unpredictable can become not only predictable, but trite. This is why being able to come up with a fresh premise is a valuable skill for anyone who creates content or markets anything. #1: Be unpredictable. 2. Be simple One of the fundamental rules of effective content marketing is to be clear and simple. Because a premise by definition is an unprecedented and grand idea, sometimes boiling it down to its essence is difficult, or worse, neglected. Don t get me wrong. I m not saying to water down your big idea to the point of stupidity. That defeats the purpose. What I m saying is you ve got to make it so simple and clear that it travels directly into the mind of your prospect, so he begins to tell himself the story. Your copy must guide him and inspire him, not beat him over the head. So, you ve got a grand premise that s unpredictable and destined to shake up your market. Reduce it to a paragraph. Now, take it down to two sentences. Get it even shorter. Just do it. At this point, you may find yourself with a great tagline. At a minimum, you ve now got the substance for the bold promise contained in your primary headline. #1: Be unpredictable #2: Be simple 3. Be real You ve heard that in this day of social media, you ve got to keep it real. Speak with a human voice. Be authentic. Be you. You also hopefully know that social media hasn t changed the fact that it s about them, not you. In fact, it s more about them than ever. How do you make that work? What makes a premise real to the right people? First of all, your premise must be highly relevant to your intended audience, while also being directly in line with your core values. Without relevance, you can t inspire meaning. And it s meaningful messages that inspire action. Meaning is a function of what people believe before you find them. As we discussed earlier, what your ideal customers believe reflects how they view the world, and your content has to frame that view appropriately to be effective. As a function of belief, meaning is derived from the context in which your desired audience perceives your message. That context is the heroic journey of the prospect, with your brand serving as a guide. There s another aspect of being real with your content. Your messages must communicate meaningful benefits that are also tangible. This is the second important aspect of an authentic premise, and it s critical to help your prospects understand and connect with your message. In this sense, tangible means real or actual, rather than imaginary or visionary. This is the aspect of your premise that is express, meaning the part where you tell the story in a way that concretely injects certain information into the prospect s mind in a specific way. Remember the Total cereal ad from the late 1980s? (Again, if you ve never seen this ad or don t remember, I ve placed a link to it at the top of the show notes at studiopress.blog/sites13.) How many bowls of YOUR cereal equal one bowl of Total? You then saw stacks of cereal bowls filled with various competing brands, with one case reaching 12 bowls high. Powerful, right? Instead of saying something pedestrian like, Total has 12 times the nutrition of the leading brand, they showed you a tangible expression of the benefit. But it doesn t need to be done with visuals to work. Words alone are plenty powerful to paint a picture in the mind. Think back to the beginning of this podcast episode, and the way Art Silverman explained the saturated fat content in a bag of popcorn. He took a dry statistic and brought it to life. A medium-sized butter popcorn contains more artery-clogging fat than a bacon-and-eggs breakfast, a Big Mac and fries for lunch, and a steak dinner with all the trimmings combined! You ll note that both examples — the Total cereal example and the Art Silverman example — contain the element of unpredictability and simplicity. But it s the relevant and tangible expression of the premise that creates instant understanding. Make your messages as real to people as possible, and you ll create the kind of instant understanding that all truly great premises contain. But there s one more critical element to a premise that works. #1: Be unpredictable #2: Be simple #3: Be real 4. Be credible If you re writing to persuade, you have to hit the gut before you get anywhere near the brain. The part that decides I want that is emotional and often subconscious. If your premise doesn t work emotionally, logic will never get a chance to weigh in. If you flip that emotional switch, the sale (or other action) is yours to lose. And I mean that literally. Because our logical minds do eventually step in (usually in a way that makes us think we re actually driven by logic in the first place). If your premise is not credible (as in it s too good to be true), you fail. That doesn t mean hyperbole never works, as long as the prospect wants to believe you badly enough. That s how some desperate people in certain markets are taken advantage of. But belief is critical in any market and with any promotion, so credibility is the final key to a winning premise people must believe you just as your premise must match their beliefs. Remember, the more innovative your idea or exceptional your offer, the more you re going to have to prove it. This brings us right back to an unexpected, simple, and tangible expression of the benefit in a way that s credible. Every box of Total cereal contains the cold, hard data about the nutritional content. And although attitudes have changed toward saturated fat, Art Silverman s popcorn claims were supported by the FDA recommendations at the time. The kind of proof any particular premise requires will vary, but the more credibility that can be baked into the premise itself, the better. #1: Be unpredictable #2: Be simple #3: Be real #4: Be credible Now put it out there Consider this metaphor from the 1991 Soundgarden song Outshined, written by frontman Chris Cornell, who, sadly, passed away recently. I m looking California, and feeling Minnesota He shared an interesting anecdote about writing those very personal words in a magazine interview: I came up with that line I m looking California / And feeling Minnesota, from the song Outshined and as soon as I wrote it down, I thought it was the dumbest thing. But after the record came out and we went on tour, everybody would be screaming along with that particular line when it came up in the song. That was a shock. Instead of the dumbest thing, those are the most famous six words Cornell has ever written. In addition to being a fan favorite, the line inspired both a movie title and an ESPN catch phrase whenever Minnesota Timberwolves player Kevin Garnett was in the news. Why did it work? Because with those six words, Soundgarden s audience understood instantly what Cornell was trying to convey. He spoke to them. And yet, what if Cornell had cut the line because it was the dumbest thing? I suppose that would have been unfortunate, because he would have missed out on a level of engagement with his audience that the rest of us would kill for. The content marketing strategy we ve been working through is putting you in the position to get things right the first time. You smartly spent a ton of time on your who, and then you outlined the critical points of your story by mapping the buyer s journey and the customer experience. The who and the what inform the how. You might even be surprised at how easily the fresh ideas are coming to you now. But ultimately, we as content marketers don t know for sure what will resonate. Only the audience can determine that, so you ve got to put it out there. When the audience magic happens, you ll know it. Now stick around. It s time for this week s hyper-specific call to action. Call to action For this week s call to action, I want you to consider the four steps to creating your winning story concept that we discussed in this episode. To recap: #1: Be unpredictable #2: Be simple #3: Be real #4: Be credible Now — quick! I want your gut reaction. Which of these do you feel is MOST lacking in your content right now? Is it unpredictability? Is it simplicity? Is it authenticity? Is it credibility? Pick one. Go with your gut. It s probably right, after all. Now — resolve to really focus on this area in the content you create over the next week or two. Review the examples in this episode. Use them as a guide. Think of other content that you appreciate for its unpredictability or simplicity or authenticity or credibility — whichever one you re focusing on — and figure out ways to apply what that content does well to what you re doing. Pick one, and focus. Get better at the how — so you can connect better with your who. Oh, and if you want extra credit, then after these next couple of weeks are up, and you ve properly focused on one element, pick out a second element and focus on it for a couple of weeks. And so on. Get better. And, as always, please feel encouraged to report back to me on Twitter. What did you learn by following through with this week s hyper-specific Call to Action? I want to know! Okay — coming next week, we move on to design. In this week s episode, we went over some very creative examples of content. So you might think creativity is always good right? Well, next week we re going to discuss how creativity can actually kill a good website design. That s next week on Sites. Finally, before I go, here are two more quick calls to action for you to consider: Subscribe to Sites Weekly If you haven t yet, please take this opportunity to activate your free subscription to our curated weekly email newsletter, Sites Weekly. Each week, I find four links about content, design, technology, and strategy that you don t want to miss, and then I send them out via email on Wednesday afternoon. Reading this newsletter will help you make your website more powerful and successful. Go to studiopress.com/news and sign up in one step right there at the top of the page. That s studiopress.com/news. Rate and Review Sites on Apple Podcasts And finally, if you enjoy the Sites podcast, please subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts (formerly known as iTunes), and consider giving us a rating or a review over there as well. One quick tip on that: to make the best use of your review, let me know something in particular you like about the show. That feedback is really important. To find us in Apple Podcasts, search for StudioPress Sites and look for the striking purple logo that was designed by Rafal Tomal. Or you can also go to the URL sites.fm/apple and it will redirect you to our Apple Podcasts page. And with that, we come to the close of another episode. Thank you for listening to this episode of Sites. I appreciate you being here. Join me next time, and let s keep building powerful, successful WordPress websites together. This episode of sites was brought to you by StudioPress Sites, which was awarded Fastest WordPress Hosting of 2017 in an independent speed test . If you want to make WordPress fast, secure, and easy — and, I mean, why wouldn t you — visit studiopress.com/sites today and see which plan fits your needs. That s studiopress.com/sites.

Could it really be possible? Well, back in March of 2017, no less an authority than Brian Clark wrote a blog post on Copyblogger with that very headline. Let s hear him out before we make our judgment. Listen to Site Success: Tips for Building Better WordPress Websites below ... Download MP3Subscribe by RSSSubscribe in iTunes Important links from this episode: Try StudioPress Sites Sites Weekly Newsletter Subscribe to Sites on Apple Podcasts @JerodMorris on Twitter Original blog post: What if You Could Simply Eliminate SEO from Your Life? by Brian Clark The Transcript Jerod Morris: Welcome to Sites, a podcast by the teams at StudioPress and Copyblogger. In this show, we deliver time-tested insight on the four pillars of a successful WordPress website: content, design, technology, and strategy. We want to help you get a little bit closer to reaching your online goals, one episode at a time. I m your host Jerod Morris. Sites is brought to you by StudioPress Sites — the complete hosted solution that makes WordPress fast, secure, and easy without sacrificing power or flexibility. For example, you can upload your own WordPress theme, or, you can use one of the 20 beautiful StudioPress themes that are included and just one click away. Explore all the amazing things you can do with a StudioPress Site, and you ll understand why this is way more than traditional WordPress hosting. No matter how you ll be using your site, we have a plan to fit your needs — and your budget. To learn more, visit studiopress.com/sites. That s studiopress.com/sites. Welcome to Episode 12 of Sites. Last week, in episode 11, we discussed site security. I gave you five important steps that you need to take to build a fortress of security around your website. If you missed that episode, please go back and listen to it. It s both important and urgent that you take the security of your website seriously. Without security, your content and your design and your plugins, and everything else can too easily be rendered meaningless. Take security seriously. Once you have strong security in place, then you can start thinking about things like SEO. Which is our topic this week. You may recall that we discussed SEO back in episode 7. In that episode, I highlighted a common mistake website owners make with SEO — namely, not thinking clearly enough about each of the three components parts of Search Engine Optimization. I also provided you with three important SEO action steps you should take right away. Like the security episode, Episode 7 about SEO is well worth going back and listening to if you missed it, or if you re new to the podcast. And if you are new — welcome. It s great to have you here. Please take a moment to send me a tweet and let me know you re listening. I m @JerodMorris on Twitter. And that goes for you too if you re a long-time listener. I love being able to make a personal connection with listeners, so please take a moment to say hi. Okay — back to business. SEO. We know we need to think about it. We know we need to have smart, proven strategies and technology systems in place to maximize its impact. But what if What if we could simply eliminate SEO from our lives? Yeah, that s right, I said it: what if you could eliminate SEO from your life? Is that really possible? Well, back in March of 2017, no less an authority than Brian Clark wrote a blog post on Copyblogger with that very headline. The original headline was actually Forget SEO. I say let s hear him out before we make our judgment. Here, now, is my reading of Brian Clark s blog post: What If You Could Simply Eliminate SEO From Your Life? I ve adapted it slightly for clarity. Make sure you stick around after the reading, as I ll have this week s hyper-specific call to action for you. What if You Could Simply Eliminate SEO from Your Life? Imagine a world without search engines. It s easy if you try. No more surprise Google updates. No more worrying about XML sitemaps, robots.txt, and content analysis and optimization. And perhaps most importantly, no more keyword research. That last one means you re going to have to go old-school to figure out the language of your audience to reflect it back to them. It s going to take a lot more work. You didn t think you were going to get out of that one, did you? Let s talk for a minute about choosing the right words Here s a relevant quote for you: The difference between the almost right word and the right word is the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning. Mark Twain When you re executing on your content marketing strategy, what you say is crucial. But when it comes right down to engaging and converting your intended audience, how you say it becomes the definitive difference. You need to speak the language of the audience. In a world with search engines, you get a glimpse directly into the mind of your prospect, based on the language they use when seeking a solution to a problem or looking for the answer to a question. Back before search engines, writers and advertisers still had to discover the language of the intended audience. It just took more work. You ve likely heard of Eugene Schwartz, one of the most influential copywriters in the history of the craft. This is what he said on the topic back in the 1960s: One hour a day, read. Read everything in the world except your business. Read junk. Very much junk. Read so that anything that interests you will stick in your memory. Just read, just read, just read There is your audience. There is the language. There are the words that they use. In that scenario, you d have to rely solely on other content creators to get the language right. How do you know they did the proper work? Still want to live in a world without search engines and keyword research? You re already doing the work Let me be frank it s simply negligent to not use keyword research to understand the language of your audience so that you can reflect it back to them. You re simply doing content marketing poorly if you re not discovering and addressing the related topics that your prospects care about. And once you re covering the topics that matter, and using the language your audience uses, you re doing most of what matters for search engine optimization. You don t have to obnoxiously repeat keyword phrases anymore Google has been smarter than that for years now. For example, voice search has increased sevenfold since 2010, thanks to mobile. This gives you a more conversational glimpse into the minds of your audience, while also allowing you to write in a natural, engaging manner that Google still understands. Plus, Google s semantic abilities continue to improve. The algorithm interprets queries based on what users mean, even if that differs from what they searched. And Google s AI is even beginning to understand metaphors. In short, if you do the work that s required to understand the language and cover the topics your audience cares about in the context of doing business with you, you re doing the bulk of the work that constitutes modern SEO. From there, the rest of the learning curve isn t that bad. And you ve got technology on your side for that. Here s the real danger of focusing on SEO The real danger of SEO isn t that you ll create content designed for robots. People use search engines, not robots so you re always creating for humans. And Google not only wants you to do that, they require it. No, the real danger is that you run into problems when you chase search traffic as if it s an end instead of a means. The intentional nature of search traffic makes it a potential gold mine, but only if you do something with it. In other words, ranking number one in Google for a coveted search term means nothing if that traffic doesn t further a business objective. Are they likely to click deeper into the site? How about a content upgrade that gets them on your email list? Can you get them to check out your product or service? There s nothing worse than a quick bounce. And search traffic bounces even if you do a great job of answering the initial question if you don t give them a next step, that is. Traffic doesn t mean squat without some form of conversion. And search traffic is not your audience; it s just a highly qualified missed opportunity unless you get them onto an email list or prompt them to make a purchase. This is the SEO last mile If you re doing the real work of understanding the problems, desires, and language of your audience, you might as well do the remaining work of optimizing for search engines. And most of that is handled by technology. Primarily, you need a mobile-friendly site that loads fast. Which, let s face it, you d need even in our imaginary scenario where search engines don t exist. People are still people, and that s why Google wants you to optimize for their experience. If you ve done the extra work to rank well in search engines, you now owe it to yourself to optimize for conversion as well because that s what you need to do for any kind of traffic, right? Which brings me to my real point here. Outside of purely technical issues due to legacy website problems, SEO is not separate from content marketing. It s an integrated aspect of content marketing. So, to go back to the original question posed in the headline: Can you really eliminate SEO from your life? Yes and no. You can certainly eliminate having a separate, siloed focus on SEO from your life. It doesn t work, and it wastes your time and effort. Because once you stop viewing SEO as something separate from your content marketing, and start viewing SEO as an integrated set of activities that help you empathize with and better serve your ideal audience, you will find yourself in a much better position to achieve your content marketing goals. And when you combine smart, integrated SEO with basic, proven conversion techniques well now you have the formula for a powerful, successful WordPress website. Now it s time for this week s hyper-specific call to action. Call to action For this week s call to action, I want you to take a few minutes and gain a greater understanding for how people are currently finding your site in search engines. So go into your analytics program and take a look at the keywords driving traffic to your site. Look at the top keywords, then dig into some of the medium- and long-tail keywords as well. And don t just look at the list of words, look at the landing pages people are ending up on when they search those terms. Are they landing pages you WANT people ending up on for those terms? And are those landing pages set up to convert? Check. Double check. Are there terms you think, or you want, to be driving referrals to your site that aren t currently? Doing this can give you important insight into new pages you should create, or perhaps even assumptions on your part that are wrong. The different types of insight that you can gain from an exercise like this are plentiful. So take 10-15 minutes, poke around, and see what you find out. I bet you ll find it to be worth your time, as you ll gain a better understanding of your current search visitors, as well as holes in how search engines see you that new content can help you plug up. And please report back to me on Twitter. What did you learn by following through with this week s hyper-specific Call to Action? I want to know! Okay — coming next week, we move back to content. And I promise you next week s episode will be the perfect next step after an episode like this week s about SEO — because, as we discussed earlier in this episode, the best search rankings in the world won t matter if your content doesn t engage visitors once they reach your site. So listen in next week to learn how to create content that deeply engages your audience. Finally, before I go, here are two more quick calls to action for you to consider: Subscribe to Sites Weekly If you haven t yet, please take this opportunity to activate your free subscription to our curated weekly email newsletter, Sites Weekly. Each week, I find four links about content, design, technology, and strategy that you don t want to miss, and then I send them out via email on Wednesday afternoon. Reading this newsletter will help you make your website more powerful and successful. Go to studiopress.com/news and sign up in one step right there at the top of the page. That s studiopress.com/news. Rate and Review Sites on Apple Podcasts And finally, if you enjoy the Sites podcast, please subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts (formerly known as iTunes), and consider giving us a rating or a review over there as well. One quick tip on that: to make the best use of your review, let me know something in particular you like about the show. That feedback is really important. To find us in Apple Podcasts, search for StudioPress Sites and look for the striking purple logo that was designed by Rafal Tomal. Or you can also go to the URL sites.fm/apple and it will redirect you to our Apple Podcasts page. And with that, we come to the close of another episode. Thank you for listening to this episode of Sites. I appreciate you being here. Join me next time, and let s keep building powerful, successful WordPress websites together. This episode of sites was brought to you by StudioPress Sites, which was awarded Fastest WordPress Hosting of 2017 in an independent speed test . If you want to make WordPress fast, secure, and easy — and, I mean, why wouldn t you — visit studiopress.com/sites today and see which plan fits your needs. That s studiopress.com/sites.

What can you do, as a site owner, to protect your website from the evildoers who will stop at nothing to harm your site for their own nefarious purposes? The first step is the most important. Listen to Site Success: Tips for Building Better WordPress Websites below ... Download MP3Subscribe by RSSSubscribe in iTunes Important links from this episode: Try StudioPress Sites Sites Weekly Newsletter Subscribe to Sites on Apple Podcasts @JerodMorris on Twitter The Transcript Jerod Morris: Welcome to Sites, a podcast by the teams at StudioPress and Copyblogger. In this show, we deliver time-tested insight on the four pillars of a successful WordPress website: content, design, technology, and strategy. We want to help you get a little bit closer to reaching your online goals, one episode at a time. I m your host Jerod Morris. Sites is brought to you by StudioPress Sites — the complete hosted solution that makes WordPress fast, secure, and easy without sacrificing power or flexibility. For example, you can upload your own WordPress theme, or, you can use one of the 20 beautiful StudioPress themes that are included and just one click away. Explore all the amazing things you can do with a StudioPress Site, and you ll understand why this is way more than traditional WordPress hosting. No matter how you ll be using your site, we have a plan to fit your needs — and your budget. To learn more, visit studiopress.com/sites. That s studiopress.com/sites. Welcome to Episode 11 of Sites. Last week, in episode 10, we discussed user experience design, and how it benefits website users and can deliver bottom line business benefits as well. But there is one sure-fire way to sink even the most immaculate user experience design and that is with poor security. Nothing will erode your audience s trust in you faster than visiting your website and getting a security warning, or having Google flash a You can t trust this site message in your search results. Even worse, have you ever navigated to a site, started reading, and then been suddenly redirected to some spammy, shady looking sweepstakes page or worse? You try to press the back button, and you can t? I have. It s a pretty good sign that something got hacked on the original site, whether it was the site itself or a piece of code, like an ad script. It definitely makes me think twice about visiting again. Don t make your website visitors think twice! The simple reality is that website security has never been more critical. Hackers, ransomware, and denial of service attacks are all concerns for the modern business. With WordPress, the power of the platform is also the reason that security holes can develop and be exploited. While the ability to mix various themes and plugins with the content management system provides that flexible power, it also increases the potential for malicious access. So what can you do, as a site owner, to protect your website from the evildoers who will stop at nothing to harm your site for their own nefarious purposes? The first step is the most important. 1. Choose a security-focused hosting provider The most important security-related decision you will make is where you host your website. As you peruse different hosting options, or step back and review your current host from this perspective, ask this simple question: what is my host bringing to the table in terms of security? You need a host that is specifically designed to provide an integrated environment that keeps your website safe from the bad guys. What does that look like? Well, a strong host should essentially take care of the rest of these steps for you. Sounds like a pretty sweet deal, right? Absolutely. You don t want to stress about security, you want to work on your content and build relationships with your audience members and, hopefully, future customers. So let s look at these other steps and see what your hosting provider should be delivering to you. 2. Have automatic WordPress updates in place The beauty of open source software like WordPress is that there are thousands of people constantly making it better, as well as thousands of eyes looking for security issues. But it s generally up to you to make sure you update your version of WordPress when there are problems with a previous release. This means you have to keep track of when WordPress updates are available, backup your site, and then cross your fingers that the update doesn t bork something. And then do it again a few weeks later when a new update is out. That s cumbersome. And it can be stressful. But it s necessary. The best solution is hosting your site with a provider that has an automatic update feature — and to turn it on, if it s not on by default. Then, basically, your host is taking this responsibility and pressure off your plate. That s good. That s the value you re paying for. 3. Respect the risk presented by themes and plugins The next question is will your theme or plugins you want to install add security holes? If your host comes bundled with themes and recommended plugins, like StudioPress Sites does, for example, then you can feel comfortable that everything will play nicely together and be as secure as it can be. Shoddy theme and plugin code leads to easy access for hackers. Plus, it can kill your site speed and performance. A double whammy. This is why using themes and plugins that have been fully vetted by a security-conscious host is a smart idea. Take the Genesis Framework as an example. This is the framework on which our themes are built at StudioPress, and every StudioPress Sites website comes loaded with Genesis and 20-plus child themes. Not only does the well-coded Genesis provide a strong line of defense, it also auto-updates when a new version is released and adds a layer of protection on top of the newest version of WordPress. Make sure you watch your plugins too, both in what you allow into your site s environment, and in ensuring that those plugins are always updated to the latest version. Plugins can be the blessing and the curse of WordPress, and you want to stay vigilant in keeping them updated at all times. Helpful hint: if you re running a plugin that does not update quickly after new versions of WordPress come out, start looking for a new plugin. It might mean that the plugin developer has abandoned the plugin, which doesn t bode well for future improvements. At best, you ll be using an outdated plugin, which is a recipe for security disaster. Finally, let s discuss two more areas where you and your hosting provider need to be really serious about security: 4. Protect yourself from DDoS attacks Have you ever heard of a DDoS attack? You ve probably heard the term even if you didn t know what it means. A distributed denial of service — DDoS — is a brute force attack that is the result of multiple compromised systems (for example, bots) flooding your site with traffic. You need to make sure that your site s host has proactive technology that allows it to detect and mitigate attacks quickly, while repeat offenders are detected and banned accordingly. For example, we have a proprietary technology in place for this at StudioPress Sites. It s an always on intrusion prevention technology that works continuously to keep your WordPress install safe from vulnerabilities, intrusions, and exploits. Our team has years of experience, plus we ve sought audit input from multiple third parties, all of which allows us to create configurations and settings that keep the bad guys away without handcuffing your working style. You would be wise to ask your host how they handle DDoS attacks, and you should hope they have a detailed explanation like what I just provided about StudioPress Sites. DDoS attacks are a serious problem, and they need to be treated with serious solutions. 5. Deploy continuous malware monitoring Finally, you need continuous malware monitoring. This really isn t negotiable. Unless you yourself are constantly monitoring all of the folders and files that make up your website, how will you know if a hacker has broken in and left something? Not all hacks and malicious code reveal themselves in a public, obvious way right away. And if your site has a ticking time bomb buried within it — really, if it has anything in it that you didn t put there yourself — then you need to know about it so you can take action. To give you another example, the way StudioPress Sites handles this is to partner with Sucuri for continuous malware monitoring, scanning, and remediation. So if malware is found, we take the responsibility of removing it so you don t have to worry about it. Additionally, we also scan for advanced threats, including conditional malware and the latest cyber intrusions. This is all included as part of your plan. And that s how it should be. Adequate website security shouldn t be an add-on that you pay more for, or something you have to rely totally on third parties for. Strong security should be a standard part of any web hosting package, so make sure you have it. To review, here are the five steps you can take to have a more secure website are: **- Choose a security-focused hosting provider Have automatic WordPress updates in place Respect the risk presented by themes and plugins Protect yourself from DDoS attacks Deploy continuous malware monitoring** Now stick around this week s hyper-specific call to action is coming up. Call to action For this week s call to action, I want you to pick one of the following: You can either One: Create a recurring calendar or to-do list item that reminds you to check every other week for WordPress, plugin, or theme updates. This way, you ll never go more than two weeks without checking, if for some reason you don t happen to log in to your WordPress dashboard and/or miss the alerts in there. Now, if your hosting provider has automatic updates for WordPress and even your theme and certain plugins, you may not need to do this. Just make sure the automatic updates are turned on. Then you can choose CTA #2 Two: If you don t already know, ask your hosting provider how they are protecting you from DDoS attacks and malware injections. You may need to put in a support request, or find the answers in your host s knowledge base or documentation. You need to know this, even if it s just for your own peace of mind. Okay — coming next week, we re back to strategy, and we re back to SEO. We re going to ask — and answer — the question What if You Could Simply Eliminate SEO from Your Life? Come back next week to find out. Finally, before I go, here are two more quick calls to action for you to consider: Subscribe to Sites Weekly If you haven t yet, please take this opportunity to activate your free subscription to our curated weekly email newsletter, Sites Weekly. Each week, I find four links about content, design, technology, and strategy that you don t want to miss, and then I send them out via email on Wednesday afternoon. Reading this newsletter will help you make your website more powerful and successful. Go to studiopress.com/news and sign up in one step right there at the top of the page. That s studiopress.com/news. Oh, and I should mention, we occasionally include special offers in these emails too — stuff that isn t otherwise marketed publicly. So if you like StudioPress products, keep your eye out for special deals in your Sites Weekly email. Again, it s studiopress.com/news. Rate and Review Sites on Apple Podcasts And finally, if you enjoy the Sites podcast, please subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts (formerly known as iTunes), and consider giving us a rating or a review over there as well. One quick tip on that: to make the best use of your review, let me know something in particular you like about the show. That feedback is really important. To find us in Apple Podcasts, search for StudioPress Sites and look for the striking purple logo that was designed by Rafal Tomal. Or you can also go to the URL sites.fm/apple and it will redirect you to our Apple Podcasts page. And with that, we come to the close of another episode. Thank you for listening to this episode of Sites. I appreciate you being here. Join me next time, and let s keep building powerful, successful WordPress websites together. This episode of sites was brought to you by StudioPress Sites, which was awarded Fastest WordPress Hosting of 2017 in an independent speed test . If you want to make WordPress fast, secure, and easy — and, I mean, why wouldn t you — visit studiopress.com/sites today and see which plan fits your needs. That s studiopress.com/sites.

Henrik is getting ready to launch a new website, but he is wondering if he actually should split his content up on two separate sites. He also wonders about options for an ecommerce plugin to get started with. Listen to Site Success: Tips for Building Better WordPress Websites below ... Download MP3Subscribe by RSSSubscribe in iTunes Important links from this episode: Try StudioPress Sites Sites Weekly Newsletter Subscribe to Sites on Apple Podcasts @JerodMorris on Twitter Submit your question The Transcript Jerod Morris: Welcome to Sites, a podcast by the teams at StudioPress and Copyblogger. In this show, we deliver time-tested insight on the four pillars of a successful WordPress website: content, design, technology, and strategy. We want to help you get a little bit closer to reaching your online goals, one episode at a time. I m your host Jerod Morris. Sites is brought to you by StudioPress Sites — the complete hosted solution that makes WordPress fast, secure, and easy without sacrificing power or flexibility. For example, you can upload your own WordPress theme, or, you can use one of the 20 beautiful StudioPress themes that are included and just one click away. Explore all the amazing things you can do with a StudioPress Site, and you ll understand why this is way more than traditional WordPress hosting. No matter how you ll be using your site, we have a plan to fit your needs — and your budget. To learn more, visit studiopress.com/sites. That s studiopress.com/sites. Welcome to another special Q&A episode of Sites. Our question for this episode comes to us from Henrik Blomgren. Henrik s question is as follows: I´m planning on starting up a website that will be both my own portfolio, my first try at selling themes/PSD/Sketch files to visitors, and for this I have a couple questions. Would you recommend having that combination of areas on the same site or would you recommend splitting them up even more? What e-commerce plugin would you recommend? Currently looking at WooComerce and Easy Digital Downloads. Those are my two concerns right now so any help/answers are appreciated. In order to answer this question, I sought the counsel of one the smartest designers I know: Rafal Tomal, our lead designer at Rainmaker Digital. Here is Rafal s response: I would combine both just to get started. It may be easier to sell products as cheaper alternatives to his services. Once he establishes a stronger brand and people start coming just to buy his products then I think it would make sense to start building a separate brand for it and redirect customers there. Yeah, WooCommerce and Easy Digital Downloads are probably good choices for a start. Thank you, Rafal. I agree with him. Since Henrik is just getting starting with this website, I don t see the need to split his content into two separate sites. As Rafal said, if his audience grows, and if he starts generating significant revenue from the digital product sales, then maybe it would be smart to split. Until then, do it all on one site and let all of your efforts push that one site forward. And while I have not personally used WooCommerce, and only have very brief experience with Easy Digital Downloads, I have heard good things about both from people with more extensive experience. Just look at the numbers: WooCommerce is installed on more than 3 million WordPress websites and has a rating of 4.6 stars in the WordPress plugin repository. Easy Digital Downloads is installed on more than 60,000 WordPress websites, and it has a rating of 4.8 stars in the plugin repository. Compare the two and choose the one that works best for you. Good luck Henrik, as you get your new website project off the ground. Please send me a tweet or an email and let me know you listened to this episode, and you can send me any follow-up questions you might have as well. If you have a question you d like to submit for one of our Q&A episodes, please go to studiopress.blog/submit-your-question/ and use the form to submit. You can find that link in the show notes for this episode, which are always available at studiopress.blog. Before I go, remember to activate your free subscription to our curated weekly email newsletter, Sites Weekly. Each week, I find four links about content, design, technology, and strategy that you don t want to miss, and then I send them out via email on Wednesday afternoon. Reading this newsletter will help you make your website more powerful and successful. Go to studiopress.com/news and sign up in one step right there at the top of the page. That s studiopress.com/news. I ll talk to you soon. Join me next time, and let s keep building powerful, successful WordPress websites together. This episode of sites was brought to you by StudioPress Sites, which was awarded Fastest WordPress Hosting of 2017 in an independent speed test . If you want to make WordPress fast, secure, and easy — and, I mean, why wouldn t you — visit studiopress.com/sites today and see which plan fits your needs. That s studiopress.com/sites.

Creating a positive user experience is very important, but it should not — in fact, can not — trample on your business goals. Even the greatest user experience in the world isn t worth it if the cost will cause you to be unprofitable. Listen to Site Success: Tips for Building Better WordPress Websites below ... Download MP3Subscribe by RSSSubscribe in iTunes Important links from this episode: Try StudioPress Sites Sites Weekly Newsletter Subscribe to Sites on Apple Podcasts @JerodMorris on Twitter How User Experience Design Pays Back to the Business The Transcript Jerod Morris: Welcome to Sites, a podcast by the teams at StudioPress and Copyblogger. In this show, we deliver time-tested insight on the four pillars of a successful WordPress website: content, design, technology, and strategy. We want to help you get a little bit closer to reaching your online goals, one episode at a time. I m your host Jerod Morris. Sites is brought to you by StudioPress Sites — the complete hosted solution that makes WordPress fast, secure, and easy without sacrificing power or flexibility. For example, you can upload your own WordPress theme, or, you can use one of the 20 beautiful StudioPress themes that are included and just one click away. Explore all the amazing things you can do with a StudioPress Site, and you ll understand why this is way more than traditional WordPress hosting. No matter how you ll be using your site, we have a plan to fit your needs — and your budget. To learn more, visit studiopress.com/sites. That s studiopress.com/sites. Welcome to Episode 10 of Sites. Last week we discussed content, continuing our series on content strategy by discussing how to know exactly what content to deliver to convert more prospects. This week we move on to design, and once again we are going to feature some simple, brilliant insight from Rafal Tomal, our lead designer at Rainmaker Digital. You have surely heard about UX design — the UX stands for user experience. It won t surprise you to learn that Rafal believes creating a positive, intuitive, useful experience for users of your website is important. BUT It s important to note that doing so should not, in fact, can not, trample on your business goals. Because even the greatest user experience in the world isn t worth it if the cost will cause you to be unprofitable. That s simply an unsustainable formula. Let s dive in and talk about that more now, with this reading adapted from Rafal s blog post How User Experience Design Pays Back to the Business. What does it really mean when we think about designing for better user experience? We often talk about readability, usability, how it should work, and how it should behave. We focus our attention around the users, their problems and needs. We test, research, optimize, and repeat. It s all correct but there is one more big point that it seems like we sometimes forget. UX design — the UX stands for user experience — is not there just to serve users needs but also to serve business needs. Joe Natoli in his book, Think First, calls it a value loop : value loop: creating something that delivers value to users, so that value also comes back to the product s creator in the form of increased use, efficiency, or good old fashioned dollars and cents. So, you have to constantly keep thinking about the business needs when designing for user experience. You should really look for that sweet spot between both worlds. Ok, it all sounds pretty good in theory but how does it translate into real life situations? Let s look at some examples. It s always a good idea to bring in real examples because that puts all the ideas into some perspective that you can easily relate to. I ll try to make it quick and simple, but of course some of these may be way more complex than it sounds. Example 1 So, let s say you re designing a web app. Designing an effective user onboarding process can be the easiest example to show how UX can benefit both the users and your business. User onboarding can be an email sequence, a guided tour, or just a simple welcome message explaining some features of your app. Actually, it can really be anything that can help users to be successful in using your product. For users it can be a huge time saver, and provide an overall good experience since they feel welcomed and guided through the process. It means better retention for your business and fewer support tickets to answer. Simple, right? Example 2 Another example could be designing access to your customer support. The goal is clear: to help solve a user s problems as fast as you can. If you were looking just from the user s perspective then probably giving quick and easy access to your support team would be the best solution. You could add a live chat and always have someone available 24/7 whenever your user has a question. You could add a Get Help link at the top in your navigation and everywhere around the site so it s easy to find it and file a support ticket. However, this could kill the business because the support cost would skyrocket. You need to find a solution that helps your customers while still being cost effective. That s where the real challenge is. So, your solution could be adding a knowledge base with tutorials, guides, and frequently asked questions. You could help users find answers for their problems on their own to limit the need to contact the support team. The challenge here is to make sure that such a knowledge base is frequently updated, comprehensive, and that it s all supported with an advanced search functionality. Then you can keep optimizing and improving it, so users can find answers faster while maintaining a lower volume of support tickets. If executed well, it would be a win-win situation with benefits for both users and the business. You have to sacrifice a little bit on both sides but it s all good as far as you find the middle ground. Of course, keep in mind that every business is different. In some cases, providing accessible support can bring so much value to customers that it would pay back to the business in a long term and cover such a level of customer support. I m not giving any final solutions here, just some examples. Want an example about how good UX design can impact sales? That s coming up next. How about increasing sales? There are many examples of how good UX can help you increase sales based on how you design your sales page, shopping cart, checkout page, or even your service questionnaire form. I like looking at the bigger picture when designing websites. How do users behave on your website and what are they looking for? What path do they take from the moment they enter the site to when they purchase your product? Let s imagine designing a new home page for a company that sells some digital products. The current home page displays some of the most popular products with a prominent Buy Now button and a secondary learn more link. A false assumption could be that if you put the Buy Now button right in front of your users, they just cannot miss it. If you start watching your users behavior, you may realize that they actually wander around your site, read more about the product, and look for some specific information before they re ready to purchase the product. The more expensive the product the more information it needs, of course. So, your redesign could put more information on the home page, and link to product sales pages with all the features, screenshots, social proof, and the actual call to action somewhere in the middle of the page and at the bottom of the page. That way your users can easily get all the information they need to make a purchase decision (benefit of users), and the business gets more sales, a higher conversion rate, and better customers (fewer refunds since customers are better educated about the product). And all of this can be done just by observing the users, enhancing their experience, and providing them with what they really need instead of trying to force them to walk a completely different path. Again, in some cases, your user testing could show something completely different. It could appear that users are so well-educated about the products you re selling that they don t need to learn more about it and are looking for the fastest way to purchase it. That s why it s so important to learn more about your users, their needs, and their behavior on your website. You should never make any assumptions based on someone else s research or testing. I think it s worth remembering that user experience design wouldn t really make any sense if it didn t give value back to the business. It s also work that is never truly finished, because you can keep measuring, optimizing, testing, and iterating new solutions. Fortunately, it s time that you shouldn t classify as being well spent, but instead well-invested. This was a reading the was adapted from Rafal Tomal s blog post How User Experience Design Pays Back to the Business. Now stick around this week s hyper-specific call to action is coming up. Call to action For this week s call to action, I m going to suggest you do something that I, myself, try to do on a somewhat regular basis. That is: go through your purchase and user onboarding processes as a user. Sign up for an account or purchase a product just like your user would and experience exactly what they experience. Pay attention to things like: How is the purchase process? Is it intuitive? Does the thank you page set the right tone and provide useful information for what to do next? Does the timing of your onboarding emails make sense? Do they provide timely value? Does any part of the process throw you off guard or not make sense? It can be really easy to set an onboarding process and forget about it, and think we ve gotten it all right so we don t need to test it. But challenge your own satisfaction in this regard. Go that extra mile for your customers and potential customers to be sure that the user experience you re giving them is a good one and, crucially, that it also makes sense for your business. Is there an opportunity to upsell on the thank you page? Is there another offer you could work into the onboarding autoresponder? Are there places where you can offer help at a critical time that people will appreciate and that will increase customer satisfaction and loyalty? That could lead to more referral business. So do that. And keep it simple, don t overwhelm yourself. Do it for one product, one onboarding sequence. Take notes as you go. And then make improvements. As Rafal said in his piece, You can keep measuring, optimizing, testing, and iterating new solutions. Take this opportunity to do exactly that. Okay — coming next week, we re talking technology. And this is another topic that isn t necessarily fun or sexy — in fact, it s kind of scary — but it is absolutely paramount to the sustainability and success of your site: security. Don t miss that discussion. That s next week, on Sites. Finally, before I go, here are two more quick calls to action for you to consider: Subscribe to Sites Weekly If you haven t yet, please take this opportunity to activate your free subscription to our curated weekly email newsletter, Sites Weekly. Each week, I find four links about content, design, technology, and strategy that you don t want to miss, and then I send them out via email on Wednesday afternoon. Reading this newsletter will help you make your website more powerful and successful. Go to studiopress.com/news and sign up in one step right there at the top of the page. That s studiopress.com/news. Oh, and I should mention, we occasionally include special offers in these emails too — stuff that isn t otherwise marketed publicly. So if you like StudioPress products, keep your eye out for special deals in your Sites Weekly email. Again, it s studiopress.com/news. Rate and Review Sites on Apple Podcasts And finally, if you enjoy the Sites podcast, please subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts (formerly known as iTunes), and consider giving us a rating or a review over there as well. One quick tip on that: to make the best use of your review, let me know something in particular you like about the show. That feedback is really important. To find us in Apple Podcasts, search for StudioPress Sites and look for the striking purple logo that was designed by Rafal Tomal. Or you can also go to the URL sites.fm/apple and it will redirect you to our Apple Podcasts page. And with that, we come to the close of another episode. Thank you for listening to this episode of Sites. I appreciate you being here. Join me next time, and let s keep building powerful, successful WordPress websites together. This episode of sites was brought to you by StudioPress Sites, which was awarded “Fastest WordPress Hosting” of 2017 in an independent speed test . If you want to make WordPress fast, secure, and easy — and, I mean, why wouldn t you — visit studiopress.com/sites today and see which plan fits your needs. That s studiopress.com/sites.

Our first Q&A episode is based on a question from Rene, who wants to know how to increase conversions from all digital media. That s a broad question! So I enlisted the help of our remarkably capable marketing maven Loryn Thompson to answer. Listen to Site Success: Tips for Building Better WordPress Websites below ... Download MP3Subscribe by RSSSubscribe in iTunes Important links from this episode: Try StudioPress Sites Sites Weekly Newsletter Subscribe to Sites on Apple Podcasts @JerodMorris on Twitter Submit your question The Transcript Jerod Morris: Welcome to Sites, a podcast by the teams at StudioPress and Copyblogger. In this show, we deliver time-tested insight on the four pillars of a successful WordPress website: content, design, technology, and strategy. We want to help you get a little bit closer to reaching your online goals, one episode at a time. I m your host Jerod Morris. Sites is brought to you by StudioPress Sites — the complete hosted solution that makes WordPress fast, secure, and easy without sacrificing power or flexibility. For example, you can upload your own WordPress theme, or, you can use one of the 20 beautiful StudioPress themes that are included and just one click away. Explore all the amazing things you can do with a StudioPress Site, and you ll understand why this is way more than traditional WordPress hosting. No matter how you ll be using your site, we have a plan to fit your needs — and your budget. To learn more, visit studiopress.com/sites. That s studiopress.com/sites. Welcome to this special Q&A episode of Sites. A few episodes ago, I made a request for your questions, and much to my excitement many of you took me up on that request. So as we move forward with the show, we will continue posting a new episode every Tuesday about content, design, technology, or strategy. And then I will also be releasing these shorter, less formal Q&A episodes as well. So be on the lookout. This will be fun. Okay, our first question comes to us from Rene, and Rene wants to know about conversion. I sent her a follow-up email and asked her to specify what areas of conversion she is interested in and she said how to increase conversion from all digital media i.e. engagement — from her website, Facebook, LinkedIn, MailChimp, etc. In order to answer this question, I sought the counsel of one of my colleagues at Rainmaker Digital, Loryn Thompson. Loryn s title says data analyst, but Loryn is much more than that. She has proven herself to be a remarkably capable jack-of-all-trades marketing maven, and her splendid ideas and smart work have directly led to several instances of conversion improvement for us since she joined our team. So I wanted to get Loryn s expertise, and she kindly agreed to participate. Here is what Loryn had to say: Firstly, conversion and engagement are two different things. A conversion is an action that has meaningful value to your business the most common is a sale, but you could also include email opt-ins, leads, phone calls, etc. Engagement metrics, on the other hand, are best used for diagnosing problems in your conversion funnel if your emails tend to have a high open rate but few clicks, you know that in order to get more people closer to conversion, you should work to improve your click-through rate. But don t get so caught-up in click-through rate that you forget about actually converting. So, to the individual points of the question As far as SEO, you can use Google Search Console to figure out what keywords send the most traffic to which pages, and then optimize the calls to action on those pages to fit the keyword intent. After you change the CTAs, give it a bit of time, and then check to see what effect your changes had. For increasing overall website conversion, you can use A/B testing if you have enough traffic, but make sure the changes are dramatic enough to give you statistically significant results. Otherwise, you can make adjustments to your website and watch the conversion rate for your desired action, and keep the changes that appear to be correlated to an increase in that conversion rate. Right now, I m particularly interested in using customer feedback to improve marketing messages. If you can, survey your customers and learn why they purchased the product in the first place, and what they love most about it. Chances are, you ll find ways to market your product that you never before considered, and other people will connect with the messaging you hear from your customers and therefore you will increase your conversion rate. As far as improving email and social media conversion rates and engagement, I recommend categorizing your emails and posts by topics and attributes. I do this frequently with the emails we send to customers What was the main message? How long was the subject line? Where was the call-to-action? After you categorize your content, take a look at the engagement metrics for each category. You might find that when you post about a certain topic, your audience responds better, or that video posts on Facebook get more likes. When I first started at Rainmaker Digital, we found that placing the call to action higher in the email content resulted in more clicks. And, sure enough, we were able to increase our overall click-through rate by making sure we put the primary CTA within the first few paragraphs. Thank you for that insight Loryn. I ll piggy-back quickly on a couple of points. First, as to Loryn s comment about improving our email click-throughs, she s absolutely correct. This was one of the first helpful pieces of data she brought to me after just a few weeks on the job. We had typically waited until the end of the email to introduce the CTA link, but moving it higher in the email has helped us to achieve greater click-throughs and, crucially, more sales. I also think what she said about customer feedback is absolutely essential. And if you aren t selling a product yet, think more in terms of audience feedback. Not only will you find out what people like and even dislike most about what you re doing, but you will get to hear it in their own voice. And the best way to get more people like your best current audience members or customers, is to find out what moved the needle for them, how they describe it in their own words, and then highlight that feature and benefit in similar language in your copy. That s an age-old copywriting technique that worked then, still works now, and probably will work 2,000 years from now. Good luck Rene, as you work to improve the engagement and conversion on your website. Please send me a tweet or an email and let me know you listened to this episode, and you can send me any follow-up questions you might have as well. If you have a question you d like to submit for one of our Q&A episodes, please go to studiopress.blog/submit-your-question/ and use the form to submit. You can find that link in the show notes for this episode, which is always available at studiopress.blog. Before I go, remember to activate your free subscription to our curated weekly email newsletter, Sites Weekly. Each week, I find four links about content, design, technology, and strategy that you don t want to miss, and then I send them out via email on Wednesday afternoon. Reading this newsletter will help you make your website more powerful and successful. Go to studiopress.com/news and sign up in one step right there at the top of the page. That s studiopress.com/news. I ll talk to you soon. Join me next week, and let s keep building powerful, successful WordPress websites together. This episode of sites was brought to you by StudioPress Sites, which was awarded Fastest WordPress Hosting of 2017 in an independent speed test . If you want to make WordPress fast, secure, and easy — and, I mean, why wouldn t you — visit studiopress.com/sites today and see which plan fits your needs. That s studiopress.com/sites.

In this week s episode we proceed to the next step in our series on content marketing strategy by discussing how to know what content you need to be delivering to achieve your content marketing goals. Listen to Site Success: Tips for Building Better WordPress Websites below ... Download MP3Subscribe by RSSSubscribe in iTunes Important links from this episode: Experimental study of apparent behavior. Fritz Heider & Marianne Simmel. 1944 Try StudioPress Sites Sites Weekly Newsletter Subscribe to Sites on Apple Podcasts @JerodMorris on Twitter How to Know Exactly What Content to Deliver to Convert More Prospects The Anatomy of an Experience Map How to Use Customer Experience Maps to Develop a Winning Content Marketing Strategy Principles of Persuasion video The Ultra Powerful 7th Principle of Persuasion The Transcript Jerod Morris: Welcome to Sites, a podcast by the teams at StudioPress and Copyblogger. In this show, we deliver time-tested insight on the four pillars of a successful WordPress website: content, design, technology, and strategy. We want to help you get a little bit closer to reaching your online goals, one episode at a time. I m your host Jerod Morris. Sites is brought to you by StudioPress Sites — the complete hosted solution that makes WordPress fast, secure, and easy without sacrificing power or flexibility. For example, you can upload your own WordPress theme, or, you can use one of the 20 beautiful StudioPress themes that are included and just one click away. Explore all the amazing things you can do with a StudioPress Site, and you ll understand why this is way more than traditional WordPress hosting. No matter how you ll be using your site, we have a plan to fit your needs — and your budget. To learn more, visit studiopress.com/sites. That s studiopress.com/sites. Welcome to Episode 9 of Sites. Last week we discussed strategy, outlining 10 content marketing goals worth pursuing. Assuming you are focused on pursuing at least one of those goals, and hopefully many more than one, it s now time to resume our series on content marketing strategy. In Episode 1, we outlined the three-step process for creating a winning content marketing strategy: the who, the what, and how. Then in Episode 5, we took a deep dive into the first step in that process, the who, by analyzing how to attract your ideal customer with perfectly positioned content. And in this week s episode we proceed to the next step, the what, by digging into a decision that can be, at times, really exciting and fun, and at other times somewhat challenging and even frustrating. We re going to discuss how to know what content you need to be delivering to achieve your content marketing goals — one of which, I assume, is to convert more prospects. And since the blog post that I am adapting for this episode was written by Brian Clark, you won t be surprised to find out that there is discussion of the hero s journey and examples from Star Wars right around the corner. Let s dive in now and learn how to know exactly what content to deliver to convert more prospects. How to Know Exactly What Content to Deliver to Convert More Prospects Back in the 1940s, psychologists Fritz Heider and Marianne Simmel conducted an experiment. They showed study participants an animated film consisting of a rectangle with an opening, plus a circle and two triangles in motion. The participants were then asked to simply describe what they saw in the film. Before you continue listening, if you want to take a look at the film yourself, go to the show notes for this episode at studiopress.blog/sites09. There s a link to the film on YouTube right there at the top of the link bullets. It s a short film, about a minute. I ll be here when you come back. So … what did you see? Out of all the study participants, only one responded with a rectangle with an opening, plus a circle and two triangles in motion. The rest developed elaborate stories about the simple geometric shapes. Many participants concluded the circle and the little triangle were in love, and that the evil grey triangle was trying to harm or abduct the circle. Others went further to conclude that the blue triangle fought back against the larger triangle, allowing his love to escape back inside, where they soon rendezvoused, embraced, and lived happily ever after. That s pretty wild when you think about it. The Heider-Simmel experiment became the initial basis of attribution theory, which describes how people explain the behavior of others, themselves and also, apparently, geometric shapes on the go. More importantly, people explain things in terms of stories. Even in situations where no story is being intentionally told, we re telling ourselves a tale as a way to explain our experience of reality. And yes, we tell ourselves stories about brands, products, and services. Whether you re consciously telling a story or not, prospects are telling themselves a story about you. Are you telling a story? And more importantly, does that story resonate with the way your prospective customers and clients are seeing things? This is the key to knowing what your prospect needs to hear, and when they need to hear it, as part of your overall content marketing strategy. And in a networked, information-rich world where the prospects have all the power, this is your only chance to control the narrative. What kind of story should you tell? You need to tell a Star Wars story. And by that, I mean you need to take your prospects along a content marketing version of the mythic hero s journey. In The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell identifies a monomyth a fundamental structure common to myths that have survived for thousands of years. Campbell s identification of these enduring myths from disparate times and regions has inspired modern storytellers to consciously craft their work following the monomyth framework, also known as the hero s journey. Most notable among those inspired by the hero s journey is George Lucas, who acknowledged Campbell s work as the source of the plot for Star Wars. As a content marketer, you can also consciously incorporate the monomyth into your launches, funnels, and general editorial calendar. If you go to Brian Clark s original post, at copyblogger.com/what, you ll find an image that shows the general elements of the hero s journey. They include elements you re likely familiar with if you ve learned about the hero s journey in the past: The call to adventure Meeting the mentor Crossing the threshold between The Ordinary World and The World of Transformation Helpers and Challengers Into the Innermost Cave The Supreme Ordeal Seizing Your Treasure, And finally, The Journey Home It s important to note that not all monomythic stories contain every aspect, but the original Star Wars faithfully follows almost every element of the hero s journey. Let s focus on the first two steps of the journey, in the ordinary world before the journey truly begins. Here s how those elements occurred in the original Star Wars. Luke is living in the ordinary world of his home planet, working on the family farm. The call to adventure is R2-D2 s holographic message from Princess Leia, the classic princess in distress. Luke initially refuses the call due to his family obligations, until his aunt and uncle are killed. Luke meets his mentor and guide, Obi-Wan Kenobi, who convinces Luke to proceed with his heroic journey. Obi-Wan gives Luke a gift that determines his destiny his father s lightsaber. How does this apply to content marketing? Simple. Your prospect is Luke. You are Obi-Wan. The mistake most often made in marketing is thinking of your business as the hero, resulting in egocentric messages that no one else cares about. The prospect is always the primary hero, because they are the one going on the journey whether big or small to solve a problem or satisfy a desire. The prospect starts off in the ordinary world of their lives. The call to adventure is an unsolved problem or unfulfilled desire. There s resistance to solving that problem or satisfying the desire. A mentor (your brand) appears that helps them proceed with the journey. You deliver a gift (your content) that ultimately leads to a purchase. By making the prospect the hero, your brand also becomes a hero in the prospect s story. And by accepting the role of mentor with your content, your business accomplishes its goals while helping the prospect do the same. Which is how business is supposed to work, right? 8 core steps in the buyer s journey Brian Clark has been using the hero s journey to teach marketing and sales since 2007. He has found that just the act of thinking of the prospect as the hero makes you a better content marketer. When you think in terms of empowering people to solve their problem by playing the role of mentor, you re naturally performing better than competitors who take an egocentric approach. This is also the exact way we come up with content marketing strategies for our own launches, funnels, and general editorial calendar. After years of using this strategic process, I ve found that every buyer s journey contains key points where you must deliver the right information at the right time to succeed at an optimal level. Remember, each journey is tied to a particular who that you have documented. Some people create content journeys for multiple personas, but my advice is that you pick one at first and focus. Even Apple stuck with one target persona for the entirety of the Get a Mac campaign, which we discussed back in episode 5. You ll notice I use the word problem here coming up, rather than problem or desire. An unfulfilled desire is a problem in the mind of the prospect, so it works on its own. Here are the 8 core steps in the buyer s journey: 1. Ordinary World: This is the world (and worldview) that your ideal prospect lives in. She may be aware of the problem that she has, but she hasn t yet resolved to do something about it. You understand how this person thinks, sees, feels, and behaves due to the empathy mapping process. 2. Call to Adventure: The prospect decides to take action to solve the problem. It could be a New Year s resolution, a longstanding goal, or a problem that rears its head for the first time. 3. Resistance to the Call: At this point, the prospect starts to waver in her commitment to solving the problem. Maybe it seems too hard, too expensive, too time consuming, or simply too impractical. As we ll discuss in a bit, this is a key content inflection point. 4. The Mentor and the Gift: This is the point that you are initially accepted as a mentor that guides the buyer s journey. The prospect accepts your offer of a gift, in the form of information, that promises to help her solve the problem. 5. Crossing the Threshold: This is the point of purchase where the prospect believes that your product or service will lead to the problem being solved, which will lead to transformation. The most important thing to understand is that, unlike flawed funnel metaphors, the journey does not end at purchase. 6. Traveling the Road: The customer begins using the product or service with the goal of achieving success in the context of the problem. Who cares if the customer stops the journey right after purchase, right? Wrong too often this leads to a refund request; plus you miss out on the huge benefits that accompany a happy customer. 7. Seizing the Treasure: The customer experiences success with your product or service. What does this look like for them and you? How will you know when it happens? 8. The New Ordinary: The customer has experienced a positive transaction with you, and yet we re just now getting to the really good stuff. This is a perfect time to prime them for repeat or upsell purchases or referrals. At this point, deliver content that aims at retention for recurring revenue products, and make savvy requests for direct referrals, testimonials, and word of mouth. Of the eight, only Traveling the Road isn t universal if you re an electrician, you show up and either fix the problem or don t. But if you re selling software-as-a-service, for example, content that gets users engaged with the platform is critical to reducing churn. These core steps can provide you with a beginning framework for a detailed map of the buyer s journey. The next step is to add the touchpoints that are unique to your product or service. Your unique journey map You may be thinking about how exactly you re supposed to map this out. Fortunately, there s already an established procedure for this, just as during the who phase. An experience map is a visual representation of the path a consumer takes from beginning to end with your content, and then with your product or service. By mapping the journey, you know where the additional crucial touchpoints are, and what content can empower the journey to continue. There is an example of an experience map in Brian s original post at copyblogger.com/what. The map demonstrates the journey a consumer would take while riding the trains in Europe. It follows her from the early stages of research and planning to the end of her trip. You see what she is doing (searching Google, looking up timetables), what she is thinking during each action (do I have everything I need, and am I on the right train?), and what she is feeling (stressed: I m about to leave the country and Rail Europe won t answer the phone). Do you see the correlation with the empathy mapping exercise you did back when developing a snapshot of your ideal customer in Episode 5? It s no coincidence that we re now applying what the prospect is Thinking, Seeing, Doing, and Feeling in their ordinary world to the journey they need to travel. In a piece called the Anatomy of an Experience Map, Chris Risdon at Adaptive Path suggests your experience map should have these five components: 1. The lens: This is how a particular person (or persona) views the journey. Keep in mind, this journey will not be the same for everyone. You will more than likely have more than one experience map. 2. The journey model: This is the actual design of the map. If all goes well, it should render insight to answer questions like What happens here? What s important about this transition? 3. Qualitative insight: This is where the Thinking-Seeing-Doing-Feeling of an empathy map comes in handy. 4. Quantitative information: This is data that brings attention to certain aspects of your map. It reveals information like 80 percent of people abandon the process at this touchpoint. 5. Takeaways: This is where the map earns its money. What are the conclusions? Opportunities? Threats to the system? Does it identify your strengths? Highlight your weaknesses? If you want more insight on customer experience maps, I ve placed a link in the show notes to a post on Copyblogger by Demian Farnworth that does a deep dive into the subject. Like empathy mapping, it can be done solo, but works even better as a collaborative process, so that everyone on your team understands the journey from the perspective of the prospect and subsequent customer. Mapping the 7 key influence principles When you consider influential content, you may naturally think that it s about how you present the information. While that s true from an engagement standpoint, which principle of influence to apply and when to emphasize it is an exercise in what as well. In other words, beyond the raw information of the what, you ll also want to identify the order of emphasis for things like reciprocity, social proof, authority, liking, commitment and consistency, unity, and scarcity. Every successful digital marketer I know purposefully applies those seven principles in their content and copy, because they all treat the book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert Cialdini as their bible. If you haven t read it, you should but in the meantime check out two additional links I ve included in the show notes, at studiopress.blog/sites09: one a short video that explains the original six principles of persuasion, and then also an article by Sonia Simone on the all-important 7th principle of unity. At Rainmaker Digital, we think in terms of four different types of content when mapping the buyer s journey. Keep in mind that great marketing content contains all of these elements; you re simply selecting a category based on the primary aim of the individual piece at the appropriate time. First up we have Attraction content, otherwise known as top of funnel information. This corresponds best with the Resistance to the Call point of the hero s journey it addresses the problem while also addressing common objections to moving forward. In addition to creating the feeling that you re reading their mind, you re also invoking early influence through reciprocity, social proof through share numbers, and establishing authority. Next up, you have your cornerstone influence principle thanks to Authority content. The important thing is that you demonstrate authority, rather than claim it. Your Attraction content sets the stage, and your Authority content should be gated behind an email opt-in. At this stage, you re establishing clear authority, continuing to leverage reciprocity and social proof, and adding liking, plus commitment and consistency thanks to the opt-in. Next is Affinity content, which solidly positions you as a likable expert, but it goes beyond that. This is where you let your core values shine. You reflect the prospect s worldview back to them in a completely authentic way, prompting the powerful principle of unity. Never underestimate how often people choose to do business with people they like, and who also see the world like they do. Finally, it all comes down to Action. You don t look for ultimate action at the beginning of the journey. But you do rely on smaller actions along the way, especially at the bridge between Attraction content and Authority content. That said, the key influence principle at this stage is scarcity, which you ve earned the right to employ thanks to the other six principles. People fear missing out more than they desire gain, so make sure to use it ethically. This is the outline of your story It s tempting at this point to try to imagine how you re going to execute on your strategy, but you re not quite there yet. For now, map the journey experience. In addition to your character, you ve now got the plot points in the narrative you re weaving. All that s left is to figure out how to tell the story. That s coming up in four weeks when we hit Content again and continue our series on content marketing strategy. Now stick around this week s hyper-specific call to action is coming up. What you just heard was adapted from Brian Clark s blog post How to Know Exactly What Content to Deliver to Convert More Prospects, originally published at Copyblogger.com. You can find a link to the original article in the show notes at studiopress.blog/sites09. It s a pretty simple link: copyblogger.com/what. Now to this week s hyper-specific call to action … Call to action As usual with these episodes adapted from Brian s content marketing strategy series, the CTA is pretty simple and right there in the post. For this episode, it is to map the journey experience you want your audience to go on as they interact with your content. Think about the 8 steps in the buyer s journey that we outlined in this episode, and then figure out how the four different types of content — Attraction, Authority, Affinity, and Action — will help you create that experience. You can use the experience map example in the show notes to help you, or you can devise your own style of mapping, or even just describing this experience. At a minimum, think about it. Take some step toward being intentional and strategic about the experience you want your audience to have as they go through your content. And remember: THEY are the hero, not you. You are the mentor, the guide, but it s THEIR problems you re looking to help solve, THEIR goals you re looking to help them achieve, THEIR objections you re looking to overcome. This call to action may take you a little bit longer than the others, but it s worth it. Coming next week, it s back to design. We re going to talk about a specific type of design: UX design, or user experience design, and how doing this right is an investment that pays off in numerous ways. That s next week, on Sites. Finally, before I go, here are two more quick calls to action for you to consider: Subscribe to Sites Weekly If you haven t yet, please take this opportunity to activate your free subscription to our curated weekly email newsletter, Sites Weekly. Here s how it works: Each week, I find four links about content, design, technology, and strategy that you don t want to miss, and then I send them out via email on Wednesday afternoon. Reading this newsletter will help you make your website more powerful and successful. Go to studiopress.com/news and sign up in one step right there at the top of the page. That s studiopress.com/news. Oh, and I should mention, we occasionally include special offers in these emails too — stuff that isn t otherwise marketed publicly. So if you like StudioPress products, keep your eye out for special deals in your Sites Weekly email. Again, it s studiopress.com/news. Rate and Review Sites on Apple Podcasts And finally, if you enjoy the Sites podcast, please subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts (formerly known as iTunes), and consider giving us a rating or a review over there as well. One quick tip on that: to make the best use of your review, let me know something in particular you like about the show. That feedback is really important. For example, here is a recent review we received Apple ID Enlightenment Through Food: I was looking for some advice on setting up my site, but I didn t realize how important my content and strategy is. It doesn t matter how pretty your site is if you aren t getting your message out and creating an audience. Thank you for helping with this piece of my site puzzle! You re welcome Enlightenment! Thank you for listening, and for being so open to additional ideas for how to create a thriving web presence. To find us in Apple Podcasts, search for StudioPress Sites and look for the striking purple logo that was designed by Rafal Tomal. You can also go to the URL sites.fm/apple and it will redirect you to our Apple Podcasts page. And with that, we come to the close of another episode. Thank you for listening to this episode of Sites. I appreciate you being here. Join me next week, and let s keep building powerful, successful websites together. This episode of sites was brought to you by StudioPress Sites, which was awarded Fastest WordPress Hosting of 2017 in an independent speed test . If you want to make WordPress fast, secure, and easy — and, I mean, why wouldn t you — visit studiopress.com/sites today and see which plan fits your needs. That s studiopress.com/sites.

In this episode of Sites, we revisit a classic post from Sonia Simone that lists and describes 10 content marketing goals that are worth pursuing. Which ones are you already pursuing? Which ones should you add to your mix? Listen and find out. Listen to Site Success: Tips for Building Better WordPress Websites below ... Download MP3Subscribe by RSSSubscribe in iTunes Important links from this episode: @JerodMorris on Twitter Try StudioPress Sites Sites Weekly Newsletter Subscribe to Sites on Apple Podcasts 10 Content Marketing Goals Worth Pursuing The Transcript Jerod Morris: Welcome to Sites, a podcast by the teams at StudioPress and Copyblogger. In this show, we deliver time-tested insight on the four pillars of a successful WordPress website: content, design, technology, and strategy. We want to help you get a little bit closer to reaching your online goals, one episode at a time. I m your host Jerod Morris. Sites is brought to you by StudioPress Sites — the complete hosted solution that makes WordPress fast, secure, and easy without sacrificing power or flexibility. For example, you can upload your own WordPress theme, or, you can use one of the 20 beautiful StudioPress themes that are included and just one click away. Explore all the amazing things you can do with a StudioPress Site, and you ll understand why this is way more than traditional WordPress hosting. No matter how you ll be using your site, we have a plan to fit your needs — and your budget. To learn more, visit studiopress.com/sites. That s studiopress.com/sites. Welcome to Episode 8 of Sites. Last week we talked about technology and did quite a deep dive into SEO. That means that this week we come to the conclusion of our second full cycle through our four pillars of a successful website: content, design, technology, and strategy. And I know what you re thinking from looking at the title of this episode: strategy? But isn t this about content? Yes. It s about strategy and content. Just like last week, when we discussed SEO, it was really about strategy and technology (and, in some ways, content and design too). As I mentioned when we launched this podcast, and first explained these four pillars that will guide our content, overlap is inevitable. And that is okay. The goal is simply to make sure we don t miss anything essential. It s certainly not going to hurt us if we double up or triple up or even quadruple our focus on these important concepts in any one episode. Plus, as you ll see, while some of the 10 goals we re going to discuss in this episode deal specifically with actual blog content, others don t — #7 especially. And that s why I chose to cover this topic for one of our strategy episodes. Because if you aren t pursuing at least one of these content marketing goals, and probably many more, you clearly don t have a defined strategy for your website that is going to lead you in a positive direction. Chances are, you are indeed following one or several of these goals. But might there be a new one you could add to the mix? Or might hearing these ideas spark a new one in your mind? I sure hope so. This week s episode is based on an article that was originally written by Sonia Simone for Copyblogger. It is called 10 Content Marketing Goals Worth Pursuing. Let s get to it 10 Content Marketing Goals Worth Pursuing Ever wonder why content marketing works so well for some businesses but doesn t seem to do anything at all for others? Curious about why some content that seems great doesn t do anything to build a business? Content is king has been an online cliché for years now, but it s not true. It s never been true. Content all by itself even terrific content is just content. It may be entertaining. It may be educational. It may contain the secret to world peace and fresh, minty breath, all rolled into one. But it has no magical powers. It won t transform your business or get you where you need to go, until you add one thing Content marketing is a meaningless exercise without business goals. So what makes content marketing work? To make content work, you need to understand your marketing and business goals. Then you can create content that serves those goals, instead of just giving your audience something to pass the time. Your blog posts, email marketing, ebooks, podcasts, advertising all of it needs to fit into a larger picture. Now, if you blog purely for creative self-expression, go ahead and write as the spirit moves you. But if you re using content to market a business, you need a strategic framework so you can get the most out of your time and hard work. Here are 10 of the business goals that drive our content marketing at Rainmaker Digital. You might focus on just one or two, or you may use all 10. As you listen to this episode, see which of these you can apply to your own content marketing plan. Goal #1: Build trust and rapport with your audience This is the most obvious use of content marketing, and it s a good one. When you create useful, interesting, and valuable content, your audience learns they can trust you. They see that you know your topic. They get a sense of your personality and what it would be like to work with you. Lack of trust kills conversion. An abundance of valuable content builds trust like nothing else. But too many marketers stop there. In fact, it s just the beginning. Goal #2: Attract new prospects to your marketing system We all had it drilled into our heads by Mr. Godin when we were just baby content marketers: You have to be remarkable. Your content has to be compelling enough that it attracts links, social media sharing, and conversation. Why? Because that s how new people find you. No matter how delightful your existing customers are, you need a steady stream of new prospects to keep your business healthy. Remarkable content that gets shared around the web will find your best new prospects for you and lead them back to everything you have to offer. Goal #3: Explore prospect pain No, you re not doing this to be a sadist. The fact is, most enduring businesses thrive because they solve problems. They solve health problems, parenting problems, money problems, business problems, technology problems, What should I make for dinner? problems. When you understand your prospect s problems, you understand how to help them and then you have the core of your marketing message. Strategic content dives into the problems your prospects are facing. What annoys them? What frightens them? What keeps them awake at night? A smart content marketing program leaves room for audience questions. These might come in email replies, blog comments, or you may hold Q&A sessions or webinars specifically to solicit questions. Listen to the problems your market asks you about, and use those as a compass to guide your future content. Goal #4: Illustrate benefits Obviously, we don t dig up prospect problems and leave it at that. We talk about solutions. We talk about what fixes those annoying problems. Techniques, tips, tricks, methods, approaches. If you have a viable business, you have a particular take on solving your market s problems. Your individual approach is the flesh and blood of your content marketing. Your 10 Ways to Solve Problem X post shows the benefits of your approach. It illustrates how you solve problems and shows customers what they get out of working with you. Strategic content doesn t just tell a prospect My product is a good way to solve your problem. It shows them. And that s a cornerstone persuasion technique. Goal #5: Overcome objections Your prospect is looking for ways to solve his problem, but he s also keeping an eye out for potential problems. Strategic content can be a superb way to address prospect objections the reasons they don t buy. Is price a pain point? Write content that demonstrates how implementing your solutions saves money in the long run. Do your customers think your product will be too complicated to use? Write content that shows customers going from zero to sixty painlessly. Understand the objections that keep customers from buying, and then think about creative ways to resolve those objections in content often before the buyer ever gets to that sales page. Goal #6: Paint the picture of life with your product Ad-man Joe Sugarman was one of the great early practitioners of content marketing. He was a master of long-copy magazine ads for his company JS&A (a consumer gadget company) ads that were often as interesting and compelling as the magazine articles they appeared next to. In his Copywriting Handbook, he described how he might approach writing an ad for a Corvette. Feel the breeze blowing through your hair as you drive through the warm evening. Watch heads turn. Punch the accelerator to the floor and feel the burst of power that pins you into the back of your contour seat. Look at the beautiful display of electronic technology right on your dashboard. Feel the power and excitement of America s super sports car. Sugarman isn t describing the car. He s describing the experience of the driver. Sugarman was a master at mentally putting the customer into the experience of owning the product whether that product was a pocket calculator, a private jet, or a multi-million dollar mansion. It works very nicely in an ad. It works even better in your content. Storytelling is one of the best content marketing strategies, and it s a superb way to let customers mentally try out your offer before they ever experience it for themselves. Use content to show what it s like to own your product or use your service. Case studies are terrific for this, as are any stories that show how your approach to problem-solving works. Pick up Sugarman s book for lots of ideas about how to create fascinating content for products that might not immediately suggest a fascinating story. Goal #7: Attract strategic partners Once upon a time, Copyblogger was one writer. No software business. No marketing education business. No Authority, no Rainmaker Platform, no premium WordPress themes from StudioPress, no super-fast and secure WordPress hosting with StudioPress Sites, no Digital Commerce Institute, no Rainmaker.FM you get the idea. From very early days, the quality of the content posted here has attracted strategic partners the partners Brian Clark worked with to create every line of revenue-generating business we have today. Eventually, that evolved into the creation of a new company Rainmaker Digital (formerly Copyblogger Media). The partnership brings together a great complement of skills, and together we can go farther and faster than Brian could have on his own. Whatever your business goals are, partnerships are often the smartest way to get there. When you re passionate about creating excellent content, you ll find that potential partners are attracted to that passion. Goal #8: Deepen loyalty with existing customers This one is probably my favorite. Every company needs to attract new customers. But the biggest growth potential in most businesses comes from building a tighter relationship with your existing customers. A solid base of referral and repeat business is the hallmark of a great business. Even if you never did any content marketing to anyone other than your customers, you could radically improve your business by improving the communication you have with your customers today. Create a richer experience for the people who have already bought from you. Make your products and services work better by pairing them with useful, user-friendly content. Don t treat the waitress better than you do your date. Give great stuff to the people who have already bought from you, and they ll reward you for it. Goal #9: Develop new business ideas Your content stream is a fantastic place to try out new ideas. Thinking about repositioning your key product? Trying to better define your unique selling proposition? See a new problem on the horizon that your customers might want you to solve? Get those ideas into your content, and see how people react. You can watch what excites people and what fizzles out. Business writer Jim Collins talks about firing bullets, then cannonballs. In other words, when you get a new idea for your business, fire off something low-risk to test the waters. Don t start firing your big ammunition until you re sure you can actually hit the target. (And that there s a target there to hit.) Content is an amazing low-risk way to try out your ideas while risking very little. Your audience will let you know with their reactions which ideas fire them up and which ones leave them cold. Goal #10: Build your reputation with search engines Lots of content creators think this is reason #1 to create content but if you put this goal in the wrong place, you ll probably struggle with SEO. That s because search engines find you valuable when readers find you valuable. Search engines are looking for content that s valuable to their users. If you create that type of content, your SEO battle is 9/10 done. So put the first nine content marketing goals first, and the 10th becomes a matter of relatively simple SEO optimization. Stick around this week s hyper-specific call to action is coming up. Again, that was a reading of Sonia Simone s blog post 10 Content Marketing Goals Worth Pursuing, originally published at Copyblogger.com. You can find a link to the original article in the show notes at studiopress.blog/sites08. Now to this week s hyper-specific call to action … Call to action Answer this simple question: What s the main thing you re looking to get out of content marketing? What is your goal? To be more specific, what is your business goal? Because as Sonia said in her post, Content marketing is a meaningless exercise without business goals. And, as with all these goals, don t just think about it. Write it down. In your journal, on a piece of paper, in Evernote, in an email to yourself — that s actually what I usually do when I m listening to a podcast and think of something important. I shoot off a quick email to myself so that I m forced to see the idea again when I process that email. That works for me, it may not work for you, but just an idea. The point is: think about this question, experience your answer through the act of recording it, and then actually take some action on it. So if your goal is #6 from Sonia s post, paint the picture of life without your product, then really work on getting into the shoes of your audience and then telling a compelling story that will help them experience what life will be like with you or without you, depending on the context. Actually write that blog post. Or if your goal is #2, to attract new prospects to your marketing system, then get content out there that will do that and, of course, have a marketing system for them to opt into. Get your email list going, have an autoresponder, make offers, etc. You get the idea. Again, this week s question: What s the main thing you re looking to get out of content marketing? What is your goal? Write it down. And you know what? Do something else with it. Tweet it to me. @JerodMorris. J-E-R-O-D-M-O-R-R-I-S. I want to know. And if you have a goal that we didn t discuss in this episode, all the better! Send that to me too. We re now 8 episodes into this podcast. Let s start to get to know each other a bit, shall we? Send me a tweet. Let me know your answer to this week s CTA. I want to know. Coming next week, we go back to the beginning. After two complete cycles through our four pillars of content, design, technology, and strategy, we re back at content. And that means we take the next step in our series on content marketing strategy that Brian Clark outlined. We ll be exploring how to know exactly WHAT content to deliver to convert more prospects. It dovetails nicely with this week s episode, because who among us doesn t list among our content marketing goals: convert more prospects? Hopefully we all do! That will be a great discussion. Don t miss it. That s next week, on Sites. Finally, before I go, here are two more quick calls to action for you to consider: Subscribe to Sites Weekly If you haven t yet, please take this opportunity to activate your free subscription to our curated weekly email newsletter, Sites Weekly. Here s how it works: Each week, I find four links about content, design, technology, and strategy that you don t want to miss, and then I send them out via email on Wednesday afternoon. Reading this newsletter will help you make your website more powerful and successful. Go to studiopress.com/news and sign up in one step right there at the top of the page. That s studiopress.com/news. Oh, and I should mention, we occasionally include special offers in these emails too — stuff that isn t otherwise marketed publicly. So if you like StudioPress products, keep your eye out for special deals in your Sites Weekly email. Again, it s studiopress.com/news. Rate and Review Sites on Apple Podcasts And finally, if you enjoy the Sites podcast, please subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts (formerly known as iTunes), and consider giving us a rating or a review over there as well. One quick tip on that: to make the best use of your review, let me know something in particular you like about the show. That feedback is really important. For example, here is a recent review we received, from gembrechts: This show came in the exact moment I needed it. Although I have owned and operated a few businesses, this is my first dip into content marketing. So everything they are converting is the information I need to take in and internalize. Funny, I just love the music on this site. It is very uplifting. Thank you gembrechts. First off, it s great to know that you find this show at a time when it can make a huge impact for you. That s the reason we started it. And secondly, can I just tell you how much I appreciate the kind words about the music? I spend an inordinate amount of time trying to identify the perfect songs for every podcast I host. I actually really enjoy the process. And I ve never felt more enthusiastic about the intro and outro music for a show than for this one. So I m so glad you like it! By the way, I found the music at Premium Beat. It s a good resource if you re looking for podcast music and willing to pay a little bit for it. Anyway — to find us in Apple Podcasts, search for StudioPress Sites and look for the striking purple logo that was designed by Rafal Tomal. You can also go to the URL sites.fm/apple and it will redirect you to our Apple Podcasts page. And with that, we come to the close of another episode. Thank you for listening to this episode of Sites. I appreciate you being here. Join me next week, and let s keep building powerful, successful websites together. This episode of sites was brought to you by StudioPress Sites, which was awarded Fastest WordPress Hosting of 2017 in an independent speed test . If you want to make WordPress fast, secure, and easy — and, I mean, why wouldn t you — visit studiopress.com/sites today and see which plan fits your needs. That s studiopress.com/sites.

In this episode of Sites, I walk you through a critical mistake related to SEO that too many website owners are making. Then I will provide you with 3 action steps that will help you compete in the modern, and future, SEO landscape. Listen to Site Success: Tips for Building Better WordPress Websites below ... Download MP3Subscribe by RSSSubscribe in iTunes Important links from this episode: Try StudioPress Sites Sites Weekly Newsletter Subscribe to Sites on Apple Podcasts Are You Attracting Search Engine Users at the Moment They Need You Most? The Transcript Jerod Morris: Welcome to Sites, a podcast by the teams at StudioPress and Copyblogger. In this show, we deliver time-tested insight on the four pillars of a successful WordPress website: content, design, technology, and strategy. We want to help you get a little bit closer to reaching your online goals, one episode at a time. I m your host Jerod Morris. Sites is brought to you by StudioPress Sites — the complete hosted solution that makes WordPress fast, secure, and easy without sacrificing power or flexibility. For example, you can upload your own WordPress theme, or you can use one of the 20 beautiful StudioPress themes that are included and just one click away. Explore all the amazing things you can do with a StudioPress Site, and you ll understand why this is way more than traditional WordPress hosting. No matter how you ll be using your site, we have a plan to fit your needs — and your budget. To learn more, visit studiopress.com/sites. That s studiopress.com/sites Welcome to Episode 7 of Sites. Last week, we discussed design. I explained three ways that web design can help you better connect with your audience. So let s say you followed the call to action in that post, and you came up with a design change that will achieve one of the three goals we discussed: help your site be read more easily by human visitors, evoke emotion, or tell a better story. What s next? How do you leverage your website s newfound power of connection? Simple: you have to get more people to it. If your website is ready to connect, and you re targeting your ideal audience member (as we discussed in Episode 5), then you simply need to get more such ideal audience members to your website so you can connect with more people. Makes sense, right? And one way to do that — one proven way to do that, which isn t going away anytime soon, if ever — is search engine optimization. In this episode of Sites, I m going to walk you through a critical mistake related to SEO that too many website owners are making. It s a mindset mistake, and fortunately it s an easy one to fix. Then I will provide you with 3 action steps that will help you compete in the modern, and future, SEO landscape. Let s get to it … The Big SEO Mistake Too Many Website Owners Make Let s begin by defining what we mean when we say SEO. You probably know the words that make up the acronym: S is for search, E is for engine, and O is for optimization. But here s the critical mistake too many people make when thinking about SEO: they group the first two terms together. And, even more critically, they then simplify those two terms down to one term Google. And then, people often simply it down even more because when most people think about Google, they think going to Google.com and typing in a search, or typing a search phrase into their web browser s address bar. And that makes some sense. I get it. I do it too. In fact, the entire reason I am doing this episode, the way I came to understand this mistake, is because I myself have been making it! It s easy to see why. We re all so used to typing in our searches. And Google remains the clear #1 search engine. More searches are done there than anyplace else. Google matters. It can make or break some businesses. But typing is only one way searches are being done these days. And Google is only one place where search happens in an increasingly fragmented web where people are always looking for meaningful stuff. So, if you re not doing this already, I urge you to correct this easily correctable SEO mistake and actually think about SEO in terms of its component parts: Let s start with Search — meaning all the ways in which people can search for something. It could be typing, it could be voice, which is becoming increasingly popular with Google s own voice search function, and virtual home assistants like Alex. Heck, at some point when we all have little chips implanted into our brains it could be just thinking, with the search results appearing right there in our sightline via special contact lenses. Good lord, can you imagine? Well, based on some of the podcasts I ve listened to recently and articles read, it s not as far-fetched as it sounds. Anyway — the key here is to remember that the way people type in a search term will likely be different from the way they say it out loud (or, how they think about a query, in the future). Context matters. And your site needs to be prepared for all semantic contexts. How do you do that? I ll share a simple tip coming up. Next, let s consider Engine — meaning all the places where people can search for something. We talked about Google. And you know the other traditional search engines like Bing. But what about YouTube? What about Apple Podcasts? Those are massive search engines for video producers and podcast producers. If you focus only on Google and never consider these engines, you re limiting the potential exposure to your videos and podcasts. And it gets even more micro and focused than that. What about the email newsletter you sent many months ago? Will it surface easily, and be clicked on, if someone searches their archived email for a relevant phrase? Better use that subject line wisely, right? And what about the helpful forum post you submitted the other day? Will it surface when someone comes to the forum next week and uses the forum search to find past answers about a related question? It should. Where else could people go for answers and potentially find you? Wherever it may be, chances are there is some kind of search function to help them narrow down their field of vision and find the stuff relevant to them in that moment. You want to give yourself every opportunity to surface and be the result that gets clicked on. I ll offer you a useful tip for how to do this too, coming up. But first, it s essential that we consider the final element of S-E-O: optimization. You need to structure and deliver your content in such a way that all relevant engines will be able to locate it, understand it, and serve it up in that critical moment of high impulse and action-oriented curiosity when people perform searches for relevant terms. And while there are always subtle tweaks that can be made at different engines to improve your chances of ranking higher, based on the particular algorithms each engine uses, don t let this intimidate you. The reality is that the vast majority of the factors any engine will use are similar. What basic, relevant keywords are in the title or subject line? What basic, relevant keywords appear in the body text? Has this piece of content proven to be helpful to people — as shown by other people linking to it, or voting it up, or favoriting it, or accessing it often and for substantial periods of time? And are basic technical requirements in place? For example, is the website mobile responsive? Is the podcast file type playable across podcatchers? Frankly, once you internalize this, it isn t a lot to keep track of. Search engine optimization is better viewed as a habit you want to practice repeatedly over time than some kind of quick fix that will help you make an immediate splash. And when you think about each component of search engine optimization individually — search, then engine, then optimization — you realize that its importance will not diminish anytime soon if ever. Because even as the Internet trends move toward experiences with virtual and augmented reality, content will always be a fundamental feature of the web. There will always be massive amounts of it, and we ll always need reliable functions for sifting through the morass to find the specific piece we re looking for, at the specific time we need it, in the specific context we re requesting it. So your goal, as a content creator, is simply to make your content as optimized for being found in relevant engines for as many different types of search inputs as you can. That is search engine optimization on the modern and future web. And if you re thinking about SEO in any other way, you re making a critical mistake. You re also making a critical mistake if you ve started to believe that SEO no longer matters. It does. Perhaps even more so, and in a more wide range of ways, than you realized. And it will matter for as far out on the horizon of the Internet as I can see it always will. Okay, now that we have corrected this critical mistake in how we view SEO, let s close this episode by discussing three critical action steps you can take right away to improve each of the three elements of your SEO practice. These are steps that will help you maintain a smart, consistent SEO practice into the future that will deliver reliable results. 3 Important SEO Action Steps to Begin Taking Right Away The first step — which relates to the first term in SEO: search — is to make sure that you are actively working to understand the language that your ideal audience uses. This is how you ensure that your content has as good a chance at surfacing for text-based searches as it does for spoken searches and, eventually, for thought searches. Certainly, using tools to search Google s keyword database is helpful. For example, the Content Optimizer tool that is built into StudioPress Sites helps with this. This is a valuable window into the terms and phrases people actually search for when looking for content related to your subject matter. But remember: this is just one context. What about when people talk about and converse about your topic? What about when they ask casual questions? This is where social media can be a great listening tool. This is where going to meetups and talking to real people in person can be helpful. This is where free response audience surveys can provide great insight. True masters of search engine optimization are masters of listening and empathy. When you know how your ideal audience talks about your topic, and what kinds of questions are most pressing, you have the knowledge you need to create titles, and subject lines, and body content that will be relevant for a wide variety of different semantic contexts. I know you re a content creator if you re listening to this podcast. Starting today: be an even more active listener than you already are. The second action step you should take is to brainstorm all the different engines where people may be looking for your content and then figure out a way to get yourself into a new one. For example, I mentioned YouTube earlier. It s actually the second-most popular engine behind Google itself. Do you have any videos uploaded to YouTube that answer the kinds of questions that a subset of your ideal audience is almost surely typing into YouTube? If not, get one in there. Seriously, start with just one. Do it as a test. It can even be crudely produced: Just take a portion of a blog post and turn into some text and basic imagery that has a voiceover or background music. If you want some help doing this, check out a site like lumen5.com. Then make sure you choose your title wisely and provide a useful description so that YouTube will know what kind of searches your video is relevant for. Try it out and see what happens. Then keep identifying different engines you aren t currently available where it makes sense to provide access to your content. And finally, the third action step you should take, which will help immensely with your optimization, is to make sure your website itself is on the most solid footing it can possibly be on. Because when it comes to any search context (text-based or voice), and when it comes to any engine that may deliver your website as a result (so think Google or Bing), you need to make sure that the hosting and design infrastructure of your site has all the basic elements in place: Your site needs to load fast — a factor that actually influences several different ranking factors because of how it impacts visitor experience Your site needs to be mobile-responsive Your site needs to be safe and secure Your site needs to be coded clearly and cleanly I could go on, but I think you get the point. It s not just about the words on the page. It s also about every single element of the page that will impact the experience that search engine robots and real-life visitors will have on that page. This is why, for example, StudioPress Sites was built to be fast and secure. And this is why, for example, the Genesis Framework was built to be mobile-responsive and as clean as possible in terms of code. I use those as examples because they re each what I use for my personal websites. And sure, I work for the company who makes them, so that s easy for me to do. But the fact is that I am a serious website owner. My side projects are important to me. If I thought I was compromising my site s optimization just to use Genesis themes or StudioPress for hosting, I wouldn t. Take this opportunity to review your current theme framework and hosting. Make sure you aren t making any optimization tradeoffs either. So there you have it. We discussed the critical shift in your SEO mindset that you should make right away, which will help you get better results today and well into the future. And we ve discussed three action steps you can begin taking immediately to put that new mindset into practice: Listen better and empathize more Identify new engines where your content should appear Make sure your hosting and design are as optimized as they can be So, the question is, now that you re motivated by your fresh, new mindset, which action step will you implement first? *** Here is this week s hyper-specific call to action … Call to action It s pretty simple: pick one. I just outlined three different steps you can take right away to start improving your SEO once you make the mindset shift we described in the first part of this episode. So, I guess, if you haven t yet made the mindset shift, start there. Break the term SEO up into its component parts and really consider what that means for not just your website, but your content overall. And once you feel comfortable that you re thinking about SEO in the proper way, choose your next action step: Listen better and empathize more Identify new engines where your content should appear Make sure your hosting and design are as optimized as they can be Once you do one, and you re ready to tackle the next one, proceed. And you can always reference this episode or the show notes if you need to. The show notes, transcript included, will always be available at studiopress.blog/sites07. Coming next week, we transition from technology to strategy. We ll discuss 10 Content Marketing Goals Worth Pursuing. That will certainly be an episode worth listening to, so I hope you ll join me. That s next week, on Sites. Finally, before I go, here are a couple more quick calls to action for you to consider: Subscribe to Sites Weekly If you haven t yet, take this opportunity to activate your free subscription to our curated weekly email newsletter, Sites Weekly. Here s how it works: Each week, I find four links about content, design, technology, and strategy that you don t want to miss, and then I send them out via email on Wednesday afternoon. Reading this newsletter will help you make your website more powerful and successful. Go to studiopress.com/news and sign up in one step right there at the top of the page. That s studiopress.com/news. Rate and Review Sites on Apple Podcasts Also, if you enjoy the Sites podcast, please subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts (formerly known as iTunes), and consider giving us a rating or a review over there as well. One quick tip on that: to make the best use of your review, let me know something in particular you like about the show. That feedback is really important. For example, one of our recent reviewers, the awesomely named teagoblet, says: Sites immediately stood out from other podcasts I ve listened to the focus on content, design, technology, and strategy makes the overwhelming job of building and maintaining your website easier. You have to check out Episode 3 to hear Jerod Morris background with website hosting. An incredible business story. Thank you teagoblet. Yes, in Episode 3 I described a horror story I experienced when I tried to maintain a massively growing sports blog on cheap hosting. It didn t go well and was an important lesson I ll never forget. To find us in Apple Podcasts, search for StudioPress Sites and look for the striking purple logo that was designed by Rafal Tomal. You can also go to the URL sites.fm/apple and it will redirect you to our Apple Podcasts page. And with that, we come to the close of another episode. Thank you for listening to this episode of Sites. I appreciate you being here. Join me next week, and let s keep building powerful, successful websites together. This episode of sites was brought to you by StudioPress Sites, which was awarded Fastest WordPress Hosting of 2017 in an independent speed test . If you want to make WordPress fast, secure, and easy — and, I mean, why wouldn t you — visit studiopress.com/sites today and see which plan fits your needs. That s studiopress.com/sites.

Good design is not just how a website looks; it s how it works. In order to create a web design that connects, we need it to reach new levels of interaction with our audience. Let s walk through three ways we can do that. Listen to Site Success: Tips for Building Better WordPress Websites below ... Download MP3Subscribe by RSSSubscribe in iTunes Important links from this episode: 5 Reasons You Need to Avoid Cheap WordPress Hosting (Note: Blog post contains special offer that expires July 14, 2017!) Try StudioPress Sites Sites Weekly Newsletter Subscribe to Sites on Apple Podcasts Rafal Tomal s article: 3 Ways Your Web Design Can Better Connect You to Your Audience The Transcript Jerod Morris: Welcome to Sites, a podcast by the teams at StudioPress and Copyblogger. In this show, we deliver time-tested insight on the four pillars of a successful WordPress website: content, design, technology, and strategy. We want to help you get a little bit closer to reaching your online goals, one episode at a time. I m your host Jerod Morris. Sites is brought to you by StudioPress Sites — the complete hosted solution that makes WordPress fast, secure, and easy without sacrificing power or flexibility. For example, you can upload your own WordPress theme, or, you can use one of the 20 beautiful StudioPress themes that are included and just one click away. Explore all the amazing things you can do with a StudioPress Site, and you ll understand why this is way more than traditional WordPress hosting. No matter how you ll be using your site, we have a plan to fit your needs — and your budget. To learn more, visit studiopress.com/sites. That s studiopress.com/sites. Welcome to Episode 6 of Sites. Last week we talked about content, walking through how to attract your ideal customer through perfectly positioned content. And while attraction is important, it s only one step. What happens when your ideal customer actually reaches your website? It takes a lot of hard work to get them there, and you want to make sure you capitalize on it. You want to make sure you connect. And that s why this week, we discuss design — specifically, how you can use your web design to help you connect better with your audience. I m excited to share some wisdom on this topic from Rafal Tomal, our lead designer at StudioPress and Copyblogger. Before we get to that, I do want to make a special announcement — which includes a special offer that is extremely timely. You heard me mention StudioPress Sites at the beginning of the show. If you want to build your WordPress website on hosting that will give you amazing performance, StudioPress Sites is the way to go. And this week only, there is a special offer: if you get started with StudioPress Sites by Friday, July 14, 2017, you ll get a coupon code for a free migration. Here s how you can get your code … Head over to the StudioPress blog and read the article I published recently called 5 Reasons You Need to Avoid Cheap WordPress Hosting. The URL is studiopress.blog/avoid. Again, that s studiopress.blog/avoid. The post provides a handful of useful tips on why good hosting is something you should invest in, not just an expense to be minimized. You may recall that this was the topic we discussed in episode 3 of this podcast. Read the post, and then click the link at the end of it. Once you ve clicked that coupon link, you can get started with Sites and you ll receive your free migration. It s that simple. Not only will you not have to pay for your migration, but you won t have to deal with all the hassles and headaches. It will all be taken care of for you. Having migrated many a site myself, I can personally attest to how valuable that is. One more time, the URL is studiopress.blog/avoid. The blog post will be there forever, and always be useful, so visit it anytime. But the special migration offer expires the Friday after this episode is originally published: July 14, 2017. Okay, and with that little bit of housekeeping out of the way, let s dive into today s topic. I actually remember when Rafal originally submitted this blog post to Copyblogger, because I was the editor back then. I learned a lot from it at the time, and I learned a lot from it again reviewing it for this episode. I know you will too. Let s talk about how to use web design to create better connection with our audience. 3 Ways Your Web Design Can Better Connect You to Your Audience How do people recognize good web design? There is a big difference between good and bad design. Many people can identify a good design, but they don t know what makes the difference. Most people are not looking at a website and thinking: That website has well-matched serif and sans-serif fonts and a nice usage of white space! Nope. Only designers think that. In most cases people just feel like there is something good about it. Maybe it s that eye-catching font or maybe that vibrant color, but they never actually know for sure. There is something more to good design than making it just look right. Because you can design your website according to all the major design rules with surgical precision and people may still not like it. Form, function, and feel Good design is not just how a website looks; it s how it works. Yet a website is also not a machine. There is no simple code base or recipe for a good design. You can t program it, generate it, or somehow automate the process. That s why your design needs something more. In order to create a web design that connects, we need it to reach new levels of interaction with our audience. Let s walk through three ways we can do that. 1. Design for humans Your website s design creates a first impression with your users, and you want to make their interaction with your site as human-friendly as possible. Nobody wants to be greeted and instructed by a robot. Making your website human-centered means making it easy to use and not making people guess what they are supposed to do next. It means that you focus your design around people s actions and how your visitors expect your website to work for them. You can improve user experience on your site by easily solving common problems that would otherwise take your visitors time to figure out. Here are the most common problems that visitors find on poorly designed websites: One problem: Is it clickable? All elements that need interaction with a user should be clearly visible or stand out in some way. Links and buttons should at least be marked in a different color than the rest of the body content. Another problem: Where am I? Visitors will feel lost on your website when your design layout is not consistent. When people don t know where to go, they ll always find the exit. You can t move the navigation or change the layout too often between pages. You should use common patterns throughout the entire website so your visitors can learn your website s interface. Consistency is one of the most important aspects of a well-designed website. Another problem: I can t read it! Is your content easy to read? If not, your text may be too small or the color contrast between the background and text color may not be clear enough. Remember that you design your website typography for the human eye. If your targeted audience is a little older, you need to make your typography even bigger and add more contrast. You should focus on your users needs; don t worry if it doesn t look aesthetic to you anymore. Take some time to get to know your typical visitors and study their behavior on your website. Find their common questions and problems, and try to solve them. Make sure your website is usable by visitors that matter to you. Forget about making your design flat or using fancy colors if it s not working for your people. Now let s move on to the second way we can design our website to better connect with our audience 2. Design for emotions Emotions have a big influence on most of our decisions. Therefore, we can t ignore emotions when designing websites. It all matters when it comes to people s feelings. By using specific fonts, shapes, icons, photos, or colors we can affect the way people feel about our products, services, or brand. You can see big brands playing with our emotions all the time. Just look at companies like Apple, Target, or Starbucks. Product design is definitely one of the main factors in Apple s success. Apple spends a lot of time and money making sure their products look sleek, sexy, and modern. It s also not just the way the product looks, but how it works and feels when you use it. Most Apple products have smooth, nice-to-touch surfaces and consistent rounded corners. It feels good, right? So, how can you use emotional design? There are several ways. Let s walk through four of them. Number one: Give your brand a soul. Choose one emotion you want people to feel about your brand or website, then focus on it and be consistent. Do you want your website to be on the light-hearted, humorous side? Then use joyful colors, smooth shapes, funny characters, and combine it with light jokes all over the place. But let s say you re running a blog about sports cars. You want people to associate with your brand, so you need to make them feel cool about it. You may want to make your design sleek, modern, sexy, and use a strong color like red. You wouldn t want to use bright pastel colors or Comic Sans font because that would mismatch your design with the taste of sports car fans. MailChimp is one of those websites that has its own unique style and character. A funny cartoon chimp mascot brings humor to the site and evokes a positive mood. A second way you can use emotional design is by surprising your visitors. Do you want to get some attention? People remember things better and pay more attention when their feelings are associated with it. Surprise your visitors by making something unexpected but positive. For example, show a Thank you message on a simple action, make interesting parallax scrolling effects, or employ animations when the cursor hovers over some elements. D angelico Guitars.com uses parallax scrolling effects and custom designed pages to surprise their visitors and make exploring the website very interesting. You can see an example at their website dangelicoguitars.com. A third way to incorporate emotion into your design is by giving your kids candy when they cry. And yes, that s a euphemism. How do people feel when they go to a website and it s not working or they get a 404 page? They may feel confused, disappointed, or frustrated. You definitely don t want people to feel that way. You can fix it by making a funny 404 page or setting up your own custom page when your website is inactive due to some maintenance work. Make people smile when there is a problem, and keep them busy when they have to wait. Your 404 page doesn t have to be boring. Be creative, write something funny, or suggest another step that should be taken. And finally, a fourth way to incorporate emotion into your design is by simply keeping it positive. This is a general rule of thumb: evoke only positive feelings. You never want to associate any bad feelings with your brand (unless that s really your goal and you know what you re doing). Try to use positive icons like check marks, smiley faces, and thumbs-up signs. You may also want to associate positive feelings with desired actions on your website. For example: Show a smiley face (reward) after completing a task Use a green add to cart button Show check marks for correctly filled out form fields Use a progress bar in multi-page forms Photojojo s shopping cart icon turns to green with a smiling face when you click the add to cart button. It makes the entire shopping experience more pleasant. We ve now gone through two major ways that we can use design to better connect with our audience: number one was Design for humans, number two was design for emotions. Number three is 3. Design to tell a story The age of making home pages look like airplane dashboards is over. We avoid overusing buttons, calls to action, and all the other distractions these days. The new role of website design is to tell a story. Imagine a comic book page. You can see various size strips and illustrations to make the story more interesting. It s designed to get your attention, keep you interested, surprise you, scare you, make you laugh and this is accomplished with only good narrative and images. Your website can tell a story too. Let s walk through three ways to do exactly that. The first way is to design a layout that enhances exploring. Try to keep your page content in a proper narrative and progressive order. Use a simple vertical design for easy visual eye movement and flow. You may want to start with a good eye-catching headline and a simple description above the fold. Then, tell the visitor about your best features, show your clients stories, list people who are using your services or products, and finally lead to one and only one call to action (and optimize it). Divide your content into parts, but make sure there is a clear connection between them. This way your visitors can read it like a real story, with no pause or break. Also remember to have a good visual balance, both horizontally and vertically. Let your readers eyes smoothly move from left to right. If one section is left-hand heavy, make the other one right-hand focused, and vice versa. At StudioPress, on the features page, we illustrated all Genesis Framework features to make browsing the page more interesting and enhance exploring. A second method to tell a story with your website is by using various content elements to keep visitors interested. Make sure your story is interesting. You can use different interactive elements like tabs, sliders, and scrolling animations to keep your users engaged in exploring your website. Avoid using long and boring paragraphs of text. You can chop them into smaller portions supported with videos, graphics, and illustrations. Or you can introduce some organization and make a bulleted list, which is always easier for the eye to read. Don t be afraid to change background colors between the page sections. This allows you to manipulate the balance and can encourage scrolling if the background colors are in a certain order. And finally, a third way to use design to tell a better story is to encourage action. Every story has an ending. Put your main call to action at the end of your story, so people can take the next step. Make sure the vertical flow of the page leads visitors right to the final call to action. You may want to make it more prominent than any other elements, with a headline or button text that looks like a continuation of your story. And there we go. The three ways that you can use design to better connect with your audience: Design for humans Design for emotion Design to tell a story So, what is your next step? That s coming up in this week s Call to Action ***** That was a reading of Rafal Tomal s blog post 3 Ways Your Web Design Can Better Connect You to Your Audience, which was originally published at Copyblogger.com. You can find a link to the original article in the show notes at studiopress.com/sites06. The post includes several helpful visual aids and examples that obviously can t be included in an audio podcast. You ll hear from Rafal again soon here on Sites. He has so many insightful blog posts at Copyblogger and his own website, rafaltomal.com, and I want to bring several more of them to you. Okay, now here is this week s hyper-specific call to action, and it comes from Rafal himself. This is how Rafal ended his blog post: There is always so much we can do to improve our website designs. I encourage you to take it one step further. Go deeper behind the scenes. You can never be wrong by simply taking care of your visitors and improving their experience. Consider their feelings and add more sense to your website content by designing a good story. What is one simple design change you could make today that would improve your users experience on your website? So there it is. To repeat: What is one simple design change you could make today that would improve your users experience on your website? Think about all of the examples Rafal provided in this episode. Listen to it again, or go check out his blog post if you want to review the specific ideas he gave. Then jot down your answer in Evernote, or in a notebook, or email yourself — whatever you ve been doing for the other calls to action from past episodes of Sites. But don t just jot it down — take action on it. That s the key. Because one simple design change could be the difference between a design that better connects with your audience and one that doesn t. Next week, we move from design to technology. We ll be talking about SEO. What really matters when it comes to SEO? How do you make sure that you re spending your time and your money on factors that will actually make a difference? I ll provide some guidance. That s next week, on Sites. Okay now don t forget: head over to the StudioPress blog and read the article I published recently called 5 Reasons You Need to Avoid Cheap WordPress Hosting. The URL is studiopress.blog/avoid. Again, that s studiopress.blog/avoid. The post itself is informative and will spell out clearly why good hosting is something you should invest in, not just an expense to minimize at all costs. A topic we also discussed in episode 3 of this podcast. And, the best part, is that it includes an offer for a free migration to StudioPress Sites. But the offer is only for a limited time. You have to start your StudioPress Sites website by Friday, July 14, 2017 to get the free migration. Click the link at the end of the blog post to claim your free migration. Again, the URL is studiopress.blog/avoid. Finally, don t forget to subscribe and stay connected with the show: Go to studiopress.com/newsletter to subscribe to Sites Weekly, our curated email newsletter. And go to sites.fm/apple to subscribe to the Sites Podcast on Apple Podcasts, formerly known as iTunes. If you like the show and want to leave a rating and review as well, that would be much appreciated. We just had this review left by JimmyJoeATL: Wow, I m early in the startup of my online presence. I am very glad I found StudioPress Sites podcast. I ve listened to the first four episodes back to back and I m ready for more! With SO much competition out there for my target audience it is great to have a coach like Jerod Morris. I m now thinking about MY site in terms of the four pillars of success: content, design, technology, and strategy. And like any good coach, Jerod sends me off with drills and exercises (the calls to action) at the end of each podcast. That s so great to hear Jimmy! Thank you for this review. You are having exactly the experience I hoped listeners would have. Let s keep it going moving forward! And with that, we come to the close of another episode. Thank you for listening to this episode of Sites. I appreciate you being here. Remember: go to studiopress.blog/avoid and click the link at the end so that you can get a free migration if you decide to level-up with your hosting and build your online presence with StudioPress Sites. Be sure to join me next week, right here, same time, same place, and let s keep building powerful, successful websites together. This episode of sites was brought to you by StudioPress Sites, which was awarded Fastest WordPress Hosting of 2017 in an independent speed test . If you want to make WordPress fast, secure, and easy — and, I mean, why wouldn t you — visit studiopress.com/sites today and see which plan fits your needs. That s studiopress.com/sites.

Not only do you want to attract your ideal customer, but you want to repel the people who you know are not right for you. In this episode, we provide specific examples that illustrate why understanding your WHO is so important, and then we lay out a proven strategy for empathy that will help you get into the eyes, ears, and mind of your ideal customer. Listen to Site Success: Tips for Building Better WordPress Websites below ... Download MP3Subscribe by RSSSubscribe in iTunes Important links from this episode: Try StudioPress Sites Sites Weekly Newsletter Subscribe to Sites on Apple Podcasts Brian Clark’s article: How to Attract Your Ideal Customer with Perfectly Positioned Content One-click download of empathy map PDF The Transcript Jerod Morris: Welcome to Sites, a podcast by the teams at StudioPress and Copyblogger. In this show, we deliver time-tested insight on the four pillars of a successful WordPress website: content, design, technology, and strategy. We want to help you get a little bit closer to reaching your online goals, one episode at a time. I’m your host Jerod Morris. Sites is brought to you by StudioPress Sites — the complete hosted solution that makes WordPress fast, secure, and easy … without sacrificing power or flexibility. For example, you can upload your own WordPress theme, or, you can use one of the 20 beautiful StudioPress themes that are included and just one click away. Explore all the amazing things you can do with a StudioPress Site, and you’ll understand why this is way more than traditional WordPress hosting. No matter how you’ll be using your site, we have a plan to fit your needs — and your budget. To learn more, visit studiopress.com/sites. That’s studiopress.com/sites. Welcome to Episode 5 of Sites. As you may have seen, last week we announced the show on Copyblogger — its official public introduction — and the response has been swift and overwhelming. Thank you to everyone who has subscribed, left ratings and reviews over at Apple Podcasts, and reached out to me on Twitter with kind words. I really appreciate it. We are just getting rolling here with Sites, and I look forward to continuing on this journey with you toward better, more powerful websites. So … in our first four episodes, we did one complete cycle through our four pillars of a successful WordPress website. Now in this episode we find ourselves back at the beginning … with content. In Episode 1, we discussed the simple three-step process for creating a winning content marketing strategy — understanding the who, the what, and the how. That episode is an important precursor to this one, so I recommend you listen to it. In today’s episode, we’re going to build on that overview and dive deeper into the first of the three steps: the WHO. Then in the next two content episodes after this one, we’ll discuss the WHAT and the HOW. Why is the WHO so important? Here is a quick review from Episode 1: Before you can get someone to buy from you, you need to know what to say to them, and how to say it. You’ll never get that right unless you know who you’re talking to. Call them personas, avatars, or even characters if you like. Your first step is to do the research that allows you to create a fictional, generalized representation of your ideal customer. Don’t underestimate the importance of the word ideal in “your ideal customer.” That, of course, is an excerpt from Brian Clark’s blog post The Simple 3-Step Process for Creating a Winning Content Marketing Strategy, on which Episode 1 was based. This week’s episode, Episode 5, is based on Brian’s follow up post, titled: How to Attract Your Ideal Customer with Perfectly Positioned Content. I will perform that post for you now, edited slightly to fit the audio medium. Immediately after the reading, I’ll issue this week’s hyper-specific call to action. Here now is Brian’s post, How to Attract Your Ideal Customer with Perfectly Positioned Content. How to Attract Your Ideal Customer with Perfectly Positioned Content “Hello, I’m a Mac.” “And I’m a PC.” You remember Apple’s “Get a Mac” series of commercials that ran from May 2006 to October 2009, right? The commercials were short vignettes featuring John Hodgman as the sweet-yet-bumbling PC and Justin Long as the creative, hip Mac. Those 66 short spots were named the best advertising campaign of the previous decade by Adweek. The success of the long-running campaign leads one to believe that Apple certainly knows who its ideal customer is. Of course they do … because they chose their ideal customer, right from the birth of the Macintosh itself. That doesn’t mean that everyone responded favorably to the ads. While researching for this piece, I ran across a commenter who maintained that the campaign had “backfired” because the PC character had actually been more appealing to him. No, the campaign didn’t backfire (no one runs a series of ads for three years if they’re not working). Instead, Apple chose who not to attract as much as they chose who they hoped to convert. Apple knew they were never going to get hardcore PC people to switch to a Mac. Instead, Apple used these 66 humorous little stories to target those who were more likely to “swing” toward Apple — after being educated about the benefits by the contrast between the two characters. Sounds like really great content marketing to me. In fact, given the nature and duration of the Get a Mac campaign, it resembled serial online video marketing more than traditional advertising. So, the first (and most important) step in our 3-step content marketing strategy is determining your “Who.” Who do you want to attract and speak to, and just as importantly, who do you want to drive in the other direction? It all comes down to your values, first and foremost. What are your core values? Apple’s values were well reflected in the Get a Mac campaign — creativity, simplicity, and rebellion against the status quo. These core values were consistently present in the prior “Crazy Ones” campaign, and before that, the iconic “1984” ad. Some feel that Apple has lost the ability to innovate since Steve Jobs passed. Whether or not that’s true, I think the perception of Apple has changed among those of us who were initially strongly attracted, because their advertising now, for the first time, tries to appeal to a more general audience. Steve would definitely not approve. Modern marketing is about matching up with the worldview of your ideal customer. Outside of a monopoly, there is no such thing as marketing that appeals to everyone, and yet, companies still try and routinely fail. On the other hand, think of Patagonia. The founder of the outdoor clothing and gear company invented an aluminum climbing wedge that could be inserted and removed without damaging the rock face. This reflects Patagonia’s founding core value: “Build the best products while creating no unnecessary environmental harm.” Of course, not every company has a core value built into the founding story. Most businesses exist to simply sell things that people want, so it’s up to management to find the core values that they want to reflect in their marketing to attract the right kind of customer. For example, there’s nothing inherently ethical about ice cream, beyond ingredients. So Ben & Jerry’s adopted the values of its two founders, which had nothing at all to do with ice cream. Not everyone who likes ice cream necessarily agrees with reduced Pentagon spending and the fight against climate change, but the people who do care about those things turned Ben & Jerry’s into an iconic brand. It doesn’t have to be all sunshine and light, either. If your core values fall in line with a “Greed is good” mentality, you’ll certainly find people out there who share this worldview. You just have to unflinchingly own it. You need to understand who you’re talking to, yes. But you don’t just accept who you find — you choose who to attract. What does your character look like? In the Get a Mac campaign, Apple literally created a character that personified what their ideal “swing” customer aspired to be. It’s time for us to do the same. You can call them personas or avatars if you like — I prefer character. That’s because the first step is the research that allows you to create a fictional, generalized representation of your ideal customer. As far as fiction goes, we’re creating a character that will be the protagonist in their own purchasing journey that your content will help them complete. Since this journey is based on as much reality as we can glean from our research, it’s more like a fictionalized drama “based on actual people and events.” When I say the prospect is the protagonist, that means the hero. Your content is a powerful gift that positions your brand as a guide that helps the hero complete the journey that solves their problem. If this sounds like Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey to you, nice work — we’ll elaborate on this aspect in the “What” portion of the strategy. This journey does not take place in the context of you wanting to sell more stuff. It’s understanding how the prospect thinks, feels, sees, and behaves in the context of solving the problem that sets them on the journey in the first place. And don’t forget about instilling them with your shared core values. Why would this person choose you to assist them on the journey, out of a sea of other choices? Because you already see the world like they do in an important way, and they’ll pick up on that shared worldview immediately upon coming across your content. Your core values are your secret attraction spell. Instead of hiding your world views in the hope of never offending anyone, you now realize the power of being loud and proud — and attracting like-minded people who see you as the only reasonable choice. Now, most people don’t end up using this representative character in their content, like Apple did with Justin Long in the Get a Mac commercials. It’s really a composite to refer back to so that you never lose sight of who you’re talking to, what you should say, and how you should say it. On the other hand, the Get a Mac commercials were just two guys standing and talking in front of a minimalist, all-white background. If you’re thinking in terms of online video marketing, you could do a lot worse than looking to this campaign for inspiration. And think about your explainer videos. Wouldn’t a character that represents who you’re talking to give you an edge over competing marketing approaches? At a minimum, contemplating the actual use of the character in your content will force you to get things just right. Let’s look at a method for doing that. You are not your audience Given that you’re seeking to attract people who share your values, it’s tempting to overly identify with your audience. While you’re going to have things in common, it’s dangerous to think your ideal customer is similar to you in other ways. You’re a subject matter expert at what you do, for starters, and they are not. You need to make sure you don’t fall victim to the curse of knowledge, a cognitive bias that occurs when a person with expertise unknowingly assumes that others have the background to understand. This one assumption alone can sink your content marketing efforts. Plus, you don’t want to assume that the audience shares other characteristics that you have — you want to know, as well as you can, what they’re thinking, feeling, seeing, and doing. In other words, for you to have the empathy to walk the buyer’s journey in their shoes, you must first see things from their perspective. Then you’ll be in a position to create the content that “coaches” them along the journey. Let’s take a closer look at empathy, the definition of which consists of two parts: The intellectual identification with the feelings, thoughts, or attitudes of another. The vicarious experiencing of those feelings, thoughts, or attitudes. It’s often said you want to enter the conversation that’s already playing in your prospect’s head. By matching up values and worldviews, you’re also aiming to enter the conversation in the prospect’s heart, and that’s how your marketing triggers the right motivation at the right time. The process we use for achieving this is called empathy mapping. At the foundation of the exercise is this statement: “Our ideal customer needs a better way to BLANK BECAUSE BLANK.” Empathy maps vary in shapes and sizes, but there are basic elements common to each one: Four quadrants broken into Thinking, Seeing, Doing, and Feeling Two optional boxes at the bottom of the quadrants: Pains and Gains To get started, you can download and print a large version of the empathy map we use at Copyblogger and StudioPress. Just go to the show notes for this episode: studiopress.blog/sites05. You’ll find the link to download the empathy map right under the player. The map allows you to easily organize all of your research and other relevant materials. The four quadrants represent the sensory experience of your ideal customer while in the prospect phase. Ask yourself questions such as: What does a typical day look like in their world? How do they think about their fears and hopes? How do they feel about the problem your product solves? What are they thinking when they resist solving the problem? What do they hear when other people solve the problem? Who do they see as viable options to solve the problem? What do they see when they use your product? What is the environment? What do they say or feel when using your product? What are their pain points when using your product? Is this a positive or a painful experience for them? Do they hear positive feedback about your company from external sources? What do they hope to gain from using your product? Jot down needs and insights that emerge as you work through this exercise. Then simply paste those notes in the proper boxes on the large empathy map. At the bottom of your empathy map, you can also draw two boxes: Pains and Gains. In the Pains box, you can put your customers’ challenges and obstacles. Ask, “What keeps my customer up at night?” In the Gains box, include the goals your customers hope to accomplish. Ask, “What motivates my customer to solve their problem?” and “What are their hopes and dreams?” Now … describe your character in detail You’re now ready to create a written composite of your character. Some people do several paragraphs, or perhaps a page of description. You, being the smart person that you are, might consider taking it further by creating a character bible, just like novelists and screenwriters do. In this context, a character bible is a detailed outline that lays out everything about your prospect in one place, so you can easily access their personality, problems, and desires. It may seem like a lot of work, but you’ll be happy you did it once you start coming up with the “What” and the “How” of your content marketing strategy. ***** That was a reading of Brian Clark’s blog post How to Attract Your Ideal Customer with Perfectly Positioned Content, the second part of a multi-part, step-by-step series on content marketing strategy that we’ll be continuing here on Sites. I know it was pretty detailed and a lot to remember just listening, especially everything about the empathy map and all of those questions. You can see the entire transcript for this episode, find a link to Brian’s blog post, and download the empathy map (one click, no email address required) at studiopress.blog/sites05. When we pick up the series again four weeks from now, the next time we discuss content, we’ll take the next step and begin the process of figuring out “what” information your prospect must have to complete their journey with you. You’ll go from stepping into your prospect’s shoes to walking the buyer’s journey with them. Now here is this week’s hyper-specific call to action: Call to action This one’s pretty obvious right? I mean, Brian basically laid out the call to action right there at the end of the blog post when he said, “You’re now ready to create a written composite of your character.” So, that’s your call to action: go create a written composite of your character. But just don’t do it off the top of your head, willy-nilly style. Make sure you do your research. Ask yourself all of the questions that Brian laid out for you. Questions like “How do they feel about the problem your product solves?” and “What do they hope to gain from using your product?” And there were others. Doing your research and answering these questions will help you fill out your empathy map, which is a part of this call to action. Don’t skip steps and don’t look for short cuts! Doing the work at this stage will set your website up for long-term, sustained success. Again, go to studiopress.blog/sites05 to see the full transcript of this episode, which includes all of those questions bulleted out, as well as the link to download the PDF for the empathy map. Coming next week, we move on to design and discuss a topic that is closely related to what we discussed this week. We’re going to discuss 3 Ways Your Web Design Can Better Connect You to Your Audience. And guess what you better know about your audience before you can create a design that helps you connect better? Exactly. The stuff we discussed in this episode. So make sure you take that call to action! That’s next week, on Sites. Finally, before I go, here are a couple more quick calls to action for you to consider: Subscribe to Sites Weekly If you haven’t yet, take this opportunity to activate your free subscription to our curated weekly email newsletter, Sites Weekly. Here’s how it works: Each week, I find four links about content, design, technology, and strategy that you don’t want to miss, and then I send them out via email on Wednesday afternoon. Reading this newsletter will help you make your website more powerful and successful. Go to studiopress.com/news and sign up in one step right there at the top of the page. That’s studiopress.com/news. Rate and Review Sites on Apple Podcasts Also, if you enjoy the Sites podcast, please subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts (formerly known as iTunes), and consider giving us a rating or a review over there as well. One quick tip on that: to make the best use of your review, let me know something in particular you like about the show. That feedback is really important. For example, one of our early reviewers says: “I’ve been a fan of Copyblogger for many years and now I’m ready for this podcast to help my artist brain build my online business (oy). I’m ready to create the site I’ve wanted to build for how many years now?? I’m super excited about the guidance this show will give me for building my dream site. Thank you Jerod Morris.” You’re welcome … and thank YOU. To find us in Apple Podcasts, search for StudioPress Sites and look for the striking purple logo that was designed by Rafal Tomal. You can also go to the URL sites.fm/apple and it will redirect you to our Apple Podcasts page. And with that, we come to the close of another episode. Thank you for listening to this episode of Sites. I appreciate you being here. Join me next week, and let’s keep building powerful, successful websites together. This episode of sites was brought to you by StudioPress Sites, which was awarded “Fastest WordPress Hosting” of 2017 in an independent speed test . If you want to make WordPress fast, secure, and easy — and, I mean, why wouldn’t you — visit studiopress.com/sites today and see which plan fits your needs. That’s studiopress.com/sites.

What is digital sharecropping and why is it so dangerous? We explore those questions this week on Sites, with the help of one of the most widely shared strategy articles in the history of Copyblogger. Listen to Site Success: Tips for Building Better WordPress Websites below ... Download MP3Subscribe by RSSSubscribe in iTunes Important links from this episode: Try StudioPress Sites Sites Weekly Newsletter Sonia Simone’s article: Digital Sharecropping: The Most Dangerous Threat to Your Content Marketing Strategy The Transcript Jerod Morris: Welcome to Sites, a podcast by the teams at StudioPress and Copyblogger. In this show, we deliver time-tested insight on the four pillars of a successful WordPress website: content, design, technology, and strategy. We want to help you get a little bit closer to reaching your online goals, one episode at a time. I m your host Jerod Morris. Sites is brought to you by StudioPress Sites — the complete hosted solution that makes WordPress fast, secure, and easy without sacrificing power or flexibility. For example, you can upload your own WordPress theme, or, you can use one of the 20 beautiful StudioPress themes that are included and just one click away. Explore all the amazing things you can do with a StudioPress Site, and you ll understand why this is way more than traditional WordPress hosting. No matter how you ll be using your site, we have a plan to fit your needs — and your budget. To learn more, visit studiopress.com/sites. That s studiopress.com/sites Hi there, and welcome to episode 4 of Sites. It s great to be back with you, and have another opportunity to help you take the next small step toward the continuous improvement of your website and overall online presence. It s time to complete the cycle. In the first three episodes we covered content, design, and technology which means there is one pillar of a successful WordPress website left for us to cover this week before we start the cycle over again next week. That pillar is strategy. So in this episode of Sites, we review one of the most widely shared strategy articles ever written at Copyblogger. As of the day I m recording this, it has 7,447 shares — over 3800 on Twitter and over 2000 on Facebook. Clearly, this is a topic, and a lesson, that has connected in a major way. The reason is because it taps into one of the greatest fears we all have about investing legitimate time and money into building something online: that someday, due to forces totally outside of our control, we could lose what we ve built. It s a frightening proposition, especially if you ve built your business and livelihood around your online presence. But it needn t be so frightening if you own the land on which you build. That keeps you in control. And that is the big lesson of this week s episode of Sites, which is based on a blog post written by Sonia Simone titled Digital Sharecropping: The Most Dangerous Threat to Your Content Marketing Strategy. What is digital sharecropping and why is it so dangerous? Let s explore that now, via words written by Sonia and spoken by me and don t forget to stick around after the reading for this week s hyper-specific call to action. Digital Sharecropping: The Most Dangerous Threat to Your Content Marketing Strategy We have a great bookstore in my town the kind of place you picture in your mind when you think of a great independent bookshop. It s perfect for browsing, with lots of comfy chairs to relax in. The books are displayed enticingly. There s a little coffee shop, so you can relax with an espresso. They get your favorite writers to come in for readings, so there s always an event and a sense of excitement. They do everything right, and they ve always had plenty of customers. But they still closed their doors last year. No, not for the reasons you might think. It wasn t Amazon that killed them, or the proliferation of free content on the web, or the crappy economy. They closed the store because they were leasing their big, comfortable building and when that lease ran out, their landlord tripled the rent. Literally overnight, their business model quit working. Revenues simply wouldn t exceed costs. A decision made by another party, one they had no control over, took a wonderful business and destroyed it. And that s precisely what you risk every day you make your business completely dependent on another company. It might be Facebook. It might be eBay. It might be Google. It s called digital sharecropping, and it means you re building your business on someone else s land. And it s a recipe for heartbreak and failure. What s digital sharecropping, anyway? Digital sharecropping is a term coined by Nicholas Carr to describe a peculiar phenomenon of Web 2.0. One of the fundamental economic characteristics of Web 2.0 is the distribution of production into the hands of the many and the concentration of the economic rewards into the hands of the few. In other words, anyone can create content on sites like Facebook, but that content effectively belongs to Facebook. The more content we create for free, the more valuable Facebook becomes. We do the work, they reap the profit. The term sharecropping refers to the farming practices common after the U.S. Civil War, but it s essentially the same thing as feudalism. A big landholder allows individual farmers to work their land and takes most of the profits generated from the crops. The landlord has all the control. If he decides to get rid of you, you lose your livelihood. If he decides to raise his fees, you go a little hungrier. You do all the work and the landlord gets most of the profit, leaving you a pittance to eke out a living on. Well, we re professional content marketers not subsistence farmers and our work doesn t involve 12-hour days in grueling conditions. So is sharecropping still dangerous? It is, for a couple of reasons Reason #1: Landlords are fickle Let s look at Facebook. What if you moved all of your marketing to a site like Facebook? It s local, it s free to sign up, and it makes businesses feel like they re doing something cutting-edge. But what happens when Facebook thinks you ve done something that violates their terms of service and deletes your account? Or changes the way you re allowed to talk with your customers? Facebook is a particularly fast-changing platform, but it s not the only one. An entire industry has sprung up based on trying to figure out what Google s going to do tomorrow, both as a search engine and as an advertising platform. If you re relying on Facebook or Google to bring in all of your new customers, you re sharecropping. You re hoping the landlord will continue to like you and support your business, but the fact is, the landlord has no idea who you are and doesn t actually care. Reason #2: Landlords go away The other problem with sharecropping is that the landlord may or may not be here next year. Sharecroppers have put millions of hours into sites like Digg or MySpace. And those sites still exist but they re no longer bringing the traffic they once did. Sharecropped land, in other words, has a tendency to become less and less fertile over time. Maybe Facebook, LinkedIn, or Pinterest will buck the trend. Maybe they ll continue to stay healthy and vibrant for decades. The best we can do is guess. And if we guess wrong, our business goes into a slow and steady decline. So are Facebook and Google bad for business? Of course not. Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest and many more search and social sites are all superb tools to add to our marketing mix. The secret is to spend most of your time and creative energy building assets that you control. There are three assets you should be building today and should continue to focus on for the lifetime of your digital business: A well-designed website with your own hosting — go back and listen to episodes 2 and 3 of Sites for more on each of these topics. An opt-in email list, ideally with a high-quality autoresponder A reputation for providing impeccable value Developing these assets are the equivalent of buying your building instead of renting it. Any of these can still fall prey to outside influences. The bookstore s building can burn down. And your site can be hacked, your email account closed down, your reputation smeared. But repairing your assets is in your control. You can fix the hacked code, export your email list to another provider, and respond effectively to manage your reputation. More importantly, you can proactively protect those assets by taking website security seriously, avoiding any spammy or dodgy practices with your email, and cultivating a loyal audience who will vouch for you as being one of the good guys. You ve put a lot of time and effort into your business don t put it all at risk by building on rented land. Again, that blog post by Sonia Simone is titled Digital Sharecropping: The Most Dangerous Threat to Your Content Marketing Strategy and it was originally published at Copyblogger.com. I ll have a link to the original post in the show notes, which you can find at studiopress.blog/sites04 because this is episode number four. Now here is this week s hyper-specific call to action: Call to action Take five minutes this week — preferably right now, since this content is fresh in your mind — and review your content and community mix. How dependent are you on Facebook, Google, Twitter, or any other sites that are great for distributing content and making connections but that you don t own? And here s a way to think about it: when you consider your audience, is your first thought to think about how many Twitter followers or Facebook likes you have, or is your first thought to think about how many people are on your email list or how many site members you have? Because remember: the way you interact with your audience on Twitter and Facebook could be forced to change or even taken away at any time. But you ll always own and determine the rules of engagement with YOUR list on YOUR site. It s an empowering feeling. So think about how much you may be digital sharecropping, even unintentionally, and then the next step is figuring out how to regain any control you may have ceded. Coming next week, we start the cycle over. We ve now done an episode each on content, design, technology, and strategy so it s back to content. In our first content episode, we discussed the three-part strategy for crafting a winning content marketing strategy: the who, the what, and the how. Now we get to explore each of those areas further, starting with the who. We ll discuss how to attract your ideal customer with perfectly positioned content. That s next week, on Sites. Finally, before I go, here are a couple more quick calls to action for you to consider: Subscribe to Sites Weekly Take this opportunity to activate your free subscription to our curated weekly email newsletter, Sites Weekly. Each week, I find four links about content, design, technology, and strategy that you don t want to miss, and then I send them out on Wednesday afternoon. Reading this newsletter will help you make your website more powerful and successful. Go to studiopress.com/news and sign up in one step right there at the top of the page. That s studiopress.com/news. Rate and Review Sites on Apple Podcasts Also, if you enjoy the Sites podcast, please subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts (formerly known as iTunes), and consider giving us a rating or a review over there as well. One quick tip on that: to make the best use of your review, let me know something in particular you like about the show. That feedback is really important. For example, one of our early reviews says: I never knew that there was so much to consider when it came to my website, but thanks to this podcast, I now look at my site through a new constructive lens. Thanks to this show, I ve been taking action to improve my online appearance. I am eagerly awaiting more. That s helpful — both to me, as I look to continue to improve the show, and to people who are browsing shows in Apple Podcasts wondering what will give them the most value for the time they invest in listening. To find us in Apple Podcasts, search for StudioPress Sites and look for the mesmerizing purple logo designed by Rafal Tomal. You can also go to the URL sites.fm/apple and it will redirect you to our Apple Podcasts page. And with that, we come to the close of another episode. Thank you for listening to this episode of Sites. I appreciate you being here. Join me next week, and let s keep building powerful, successful websites together. This episode of sites was brought to you by StudioPress Sites, which was awarded Fastest WordPress Hosting of 2017 in an independent speed test . If you want to make WordPress fast, secure, and easy — and, I mean, why wouldn t you — visit studiopress.com/sites today and see which plan fits your needs. That s studiopress.com/sites.

This week, we are going to talk about an element of your website that will impact every single word and image you publish. It may not be the sexiest topic, but it sure is important. Hosting. Listen to Site Success: Tips for Building Better WordPress Websites below ... Download MP3Subscribe by RSSSubscribe in iTunes Important links from this episode: Try StudioPress Sites Sites Weekly Newsletter High Performance WordPress Hosting The Transcript Jerod Morris: Welcome to Sites, a podcast by the teams at StudioPress and Copyblogger. In this show, we deliver time-tested insight on the four pillars of a successful WordPress website: content, design, technology, and strategy. We want to help you get a little bit closer to reaching your online goals, one episode at a time. I’m your host Jerod Morris. Sites is brought to you by StudioPress Sites — the complete hosted solution that makes WordPress fast, secure, and easy without sacrificing power or flexibility. For example, you can upload your own WordPress theme, or, you can use one of the 20 beautiful StudioPress themes that are included and just one click away. Explore all the amazing things you can do with a StudioPress Site, and you’ll understand why this is way more than traditional WordPress hosting. No matter how you’ll be using your site, we have a plan to fit your needs — and your budget. To learn more, visit studiopress.com/sites. That’s studiopress.com/sites. Hey there, and welcome to episode 3 of Sites. As we continue to rotate through the four pillars of a successful website, we find ourselves at the point of discussing technology. If you missed episode 1 about the fundamentals of content marketing strategy, or episode 2 about how design can impact your content marketing, do take some time and review those episodes at some point. Today, we are going to talk about an element of your website that will impact every single word and image you publish. It may not be the sexiest topic, but it sure is important. Hosting. You may be wondering … is it really THAT important? Aren’t there plenty of cheap $5 per month hosting options out there that I can start with, and upgrade later if my site actually goes anywhere? Seems logical, right? But here’s the problem. Shoddy WordPress hosting will likely keep you from succeeding in the first place, and that’s a big problem. I know. I dealt with this back in the day and it cost me traffic and money — more on that in a bit. The reality is, those cheap WordPress hosting offers — $5 per month! — mean that your site is jammed on a server with hundreds even thousands of other sites. The hosting company is betting that you won’t ever ever get substantial traffic, and that you’ll simply keep paying the paltry fee in obscurity. And what happens if you do manage to get traffic? Your site could crash. Or your traffic might get siphoned off. Or you could be liable for huge overage charges. Or your site could slow to a crawl. And speaking of a slow-loading site … that’s a major issue. Just because your host promotes reliable uptime, doesn’t mean it’s enough. Your site may be “up” … but is it FAST? Because it needs to be. Not only will site visitors reject your site if it’s slow by even a few seconds, but do you know that Google and other search engines will as well? It’s true. Site speed is a ranking factor. And these are two audiences — your hard-earned visitors and search engine robots — that you absolutely do not want to make wait. The quality of your hosting is one of the main factors that will determine whether they have to. The bottom line is this: if you’re serious about building a successful website, then you need serious hosting. You need hosting with impeccable uptime, hosting that can scale when you need it to, and hosting that delivers fast page-load speeds every time a visitor or search engine tries to visit your site. Okay, now, I know what you’re thinking: I work for StudioPress and this podcast is sponsored by StudioPress Sites … so this entire episode is just one big advertisement for our WordPress hosting. Right? I mean, sure, that is obviously true to a point. The entire Sites podcast is a long-term content marketing play to build an audience around useful episodes that will help you get better at content, design, technology, and strategy — no matter where you host your site. In the process, we hope to built some authority, rapport, and trust, and hopefully that translates into you giving StudioPress Sites a spin. As for this episode in particular, I’ll just state the obvious: I wouldn’t outline essential hosting elements, and tell you how important they are, if we weren’t delivering them ourselves with StudioPress Sites. But here’s the thing … this episode is relevant no matter where you choose to host your site. We’re not the only company selling premium WordPress hosting. We think we’re the best, of course, and we’d like the chance to convince you of that, but my purpose in delivering this episode goes beyond trying to convince you to try Sites. I want to convince you that you need premium WordPress hosting, and that it’s worth paying for. Period. Once you’re convinced of that fact, check out all of the different providers, including StudioPress Sites, and see which one fits you best. Each one offers something a little different. For example, if you’re using a Genesis Framework theme, I think you’ll be really hard-pressed to find an option better than StudioPress Sites because it is optimized for Genesis Framework themes. Any WordPress theme will run great on Sites, but there’s a special synergy between Sites and Genesis. And, as another example, if you’re concerned about SEO, then StudioPress Sites has patented SEO tools built right into it, no extra charge. Other providers will have their specialties too. Again, the point is: if you’re serious about your website, then you need to be serious about your hosting. That means you should be ready to pay $30-35 per month for hosting that delivers the reliability, security, and response time you need. Otherwise, you’re setting yourself up for failure. I know, because it happened to me, as I mentioned before. And that’s why I wanted this to be one of the first four episodes of the Sites podcast. I want you to avoid the agony I felt back when I was running my first blog … and didn’t know any better … and went with cheap hosting. The site was MidwestSportsFans.com. I launched it in 2008. It’s still live online, but dormant now in terms of new content. I haven’t posted on it in years. At one time, though, it was one of the most popular sports blogs in world. One post I wrote even got me a guest appearance on ESPN. At its height, Midwest Sports Fans was delivering many millions of pageviews per month — with massive spikes coming for big events like the Super Bowl and March Madness. And with those pageviews came revenue. I wasn’t making as much as I could have made — this was in my pre-Copyblogger days, so I didn’t understand the power of building an email list yet *sigh* — but we were raking in thousands of dollars a month in ad revenue, and thousands more in affiliate revenue. Times were good. This site that I started as a little side project to teach myself WordPress had morphed into a legitimate business. I was proud. Excited about where it was, and enthused about where it could go next. So imagine my disappointment and anger when I found out that a good chunk of my traffic was being siphoned off, and not making it to my site. Even worse, no one alerted me. It seemed that my site had outgrown my hosting plan. And while I certainly share some responsibility in that happening, it sure would have been nice to have a host that looked out for me. But I never got any notices. I wasn’t even overcharged. And I would have gladly paid more! Instead, I was just losing out on traffic month after month. I’m lucky my business partner at the time was smarter about the tech stuff than me and uncovered this. Because I’m a content guy. I want to write my blog posts and produce my podcasts and interact with my community … I have neither the time nor the inclination to get too far down in the tech weeds. You might feel the same way. So we said enough is enough with cheap, crappy, you’re-on-your-own hosting. Instead, we took matters into our own hands. We developed our own innovative hosting stack. Midwest Sports Fans was our first client, and, to no one’s surprise, reported traffic spiked big time after we made the switch. Then we built a small company around it as other serious bloggers and WordPress users decided they were done with bad hosting experiences too, found out about us, and made the switch. Fast forward a couple of years and we joined up with Copyblogger Media, and the latest evolution of the hosting stack and infrastructure we built is what powers StudioPress Sites. It’s what I trust. I’ve seen the other side. I’ve been on the other side. And it sucks. I worked hard for my traffic, and it was being taken away for no good reason. You don’t want anything similar to happen to you. So take it from me, someone who has been in your shoes — and who, actually, is still in your shoes, because I’m in the process of developing a new site right now, and one of the very first bits of research I did was to find the absolute best place to host my content. It’s a simple message: take your hosting choice seriously. Don’t pay less for the cheap stuff. Invest in hosting you can really count on. Your content deserves it. Your audience deserves. You deserve it. Now for this week’s calls to action: I want you to go compare and contrast three premium WordPress hosting providers. Obviously, I think StudioPress Sites should be one of them, but pick whichever three you like. Look at the different plans they offer, look at the price, look at the features, assess whose support your trust, analyze which one is the best fit for your theme (or has an included theme that you like). Etcetera. Do your homework. This way, you can put your best foot forward from the beginning with your new site, or you can ask yourself an important, informed decision about migrating if you realize another provider fits you better. That’s your homework. Take it seriously and it could pay huge dividends down the road for you. Make sure you stay up to date and informed. Sign up for free podcast updates and our curated weekly email newsletter, Sites Weekly. Each week, I find four links about content, design, technology, and strategy that you don’t want to miss and send them out on Wednesday afternoon. Reading this newsletter will help you make your website more powerful and successful. Go to studiopress.com/news and sign up in one step right there at the top of the page. That’s studiopress.com/news. And finally, if you enjoy the Sites podcast, please consider giving us a rating or a review over at Apple Podcasts — formerly known as iTunes. One quick tip on that: to make the best use of your review, let me know if there is something in particular you like about the show — that way I make sure not to remove it as the show evolves! To find us in Apple Podcasts, search for StudioPress Sites. Next week here on Sites, we shift from technology to strategy We’ll be talking about the most dangerous threat to your content marketing strategy. Think you know what it is? Tune in to find out. That’s next week, on Sites. Thank you for listening to this episode of Sites. I appreciate you being here. Join me next week, and let’s keep building powerful, successful websites together. This episode of Sites was brought to you by StudioPress Sites, which was awarded “Fastest WordPress Hosting” of 2017 in an independent speed test . If you want to make WordPress fast, secure, and easy — and, I mean, why wouldn’t you — visit studiopress.com/sites today and see which plan fits your needs. That’s studiopress.com/sites.

In this episode of Sites, I share with you a brilliant little essay that describes a few simple ways that great design can help your content marketing. Listen to Site Success: Tips for Building Better WordPress Websites below ... Download MP3Subscribe by RSSSubscribe in iTunes Try StudioPress Sites Sites Weekly Newsletter Rafal Tomal’s article: How Can Great Design Help Your Content Marketing? Transcript Jerod Morris: Welcome to Sites, a podcast by the teams at StudioPress and Copyblogger. In this show, we deliver time-tested insight on the four pillars of a successful WordPress website: content, design, technology, and strategy. We want to help you get a little bit closer to reaching your online goals, one episode at a time. I’m your host Jerod Morris. Sites is brought to you by StudioPress Sites — the complete hosted solution that makes WordPress fast, secure, and easy without sacrificing power or flexibility. For example, you can upload your own WordPress theme, or, you can use one of the 20 beautiful StudioPress themes that are included and just one click away. Explore all the amazing things you can do with a StudioPress Site, and you’ll understand why this is way more than traditional WordPress hosting. No matter how you’ll be using your site, we have a plan to fit your needs — and your budget. To learn more, visit studiopress.com/sites. That’s studiopress.com/sites. Hey there — it’s great to have you here again, for episode 2 of Sites. If you missed episode 1, we discussed content. Specifically, we discussed Brian Clark’s simple three-step process for creating a winning content marketing strategy. Every fourth episode of Sites will be about content, and we’ll be diving into that three-step process in more depth … so be on the lookout for those episodes in the future. This week, our topic is design — the second pillar of a successful WordPress website. Next week we’ll discuss technology, the week after that we’ll discuss strategy, and then we’re back to content, and then the rotation continues. Design. I have to admit: design has always been one of my least favorite parts of the web design process. Well, it was anyway. I’m not a designer. I’m a writer, a podcaster … I’m a content guy. I like writing and speaking words. I like building digital products. Colors? Font? Grids? Typefaces? They just weren’t my cup of tea. But then I started working for Copyblogger / Rainmaker Digital … which meant that I got to work side-by-side with Rafal Tomal, our lead designer. And through web events we’ve hosted together, reading his blog, and even just the insightful comments he will make on our team calls, I feel like I’ve gotten a crash course in not only design fundamentals but, more importantly, WHY design matters and why, in many ways, content IS design. I mean, I could write the most useful words the world has ever seen, but if I slap them on a poorly designed website, I’m going to significantly inhibit the amount of people who will read them and be moved by them. Design it matters. A lot. Take it from me. I’ve been converted. In this episode of Sites, I’m pulling a classic post out of Rafal’s archive. It’s a brilliant little essay that describes a few simple ways that great design can help your content marketing. Make sure you stick around for the calls to action at the end, too. Here we go. Here is my reading of Rafal Tomal’s post: How Can Great Design Help Your Content Marketing? Some people say that they don’t need too much design because their blog is nothing more than just pure text. What do they think web design is all about? It’s not all about fancy graphics, textures, and flashy effects. Design is every single character on your blog, a space between your paragraphs, an underlined link, or your background color. Design is both what you see and what you don’t see. Design evokes emotions and can create unforgettable user experiences. Websites heavy with content, like blogs and online magazines, require more design and are more difficult to lay out than any other kind of website. Let’s see how a good design can help you to spread your content, attract a larger audience, and improve the conversion — three crucial things for every content marketer. 1. Improve reading experience You spend time and money on producing awesome content. You can write the most interesting articles on the web but nobody is going to read it if you use a light gray, 11-pixel font on a white background. It really hurts. A good design can make reading your content a pleasurable experience and convince people to come back. Bigger font size, shorter paragraphs, and funny/interesting illustrations can pique your reader’s interest and they will be more likely to share it with others. Have you ever read Jason Fried’s book Rework? You would probably be surprised how this book is designed. The chapters are very short and even the author admits that he removed a big part of the book content to make it as short as possible. Additionally, there are full-page, funny illustrations and a lot of whitespace around the text. It made a lot of sense to me and that was one of the best book reading experiences I’ve ever had. 2. Increase the conversion rate Whatever your conversion target is, a good design can help you achieve your goal or multiply the results. If you want to get more subscribers to your email newsletter, there are many crucial design aspects that you may want to consider. Every little detail may improve your results. Think about the sign-up box’s layout, its size, its position and even its colors or other graphical elements. Are you selling online products? You will need a good design to create promotional banners, landing pages, and even the product design itself. If it’s an ebook, focus on the cover design. A lot of people make their decisions based on how the product’s box is presented. You definitely want to make a great first impression with your product. 3. Define your visual brand Branding is not reserved only for big companies. You’re never too small to think about branding. You should keep a consistent look and feel between your blog, online products, and the email newsletter you regularly send out. The brand is not merely a logo somewhere in the corner. A good brand should describe the type styles, colors, and even spacing between the elements. Let your designer define your visual brand and use it everywhere. Be very specific. You don’t want to describe your brand color as ‘red’. Rather, use the exact hex decimal or RGB code that your designer can help you choose. You might think: “It doesn’t matter, it’s just a red color.” To which I say: “Erroneous! It all matters!” If you change your brand colors from website to website and product to product, it will create an inconsistent look and won’t evoke the same brand-feeling effect that you want your visitors to feel on their very first impression. Can you imagine the “red” color of Target to be in different shades in different locations? You would probably notice a change like that. However, it’s always the same and this is why you feel so familiar with it. All of these small details might seem to be barely noticeable, but they create a consistent look and feel for your brand that visitors notice — both consciously and subconsciously. You want to make your colors and type styles easily recognizable. In Summary So as you can see, design is much more than just pretty graphics. A well-designed blog can help you improve the reading experience and increase the conversion rate. Moreover, you should look deeper and carefully design your own visual brand that will help you build trust and make your content recognizable. Keep in mind that most people make their decisions based on their emotions and gut feelings. If you want them back, they need to feel good while they are using your website. You can achieve this by providing a great visual experience on your site and with your digital products. Finally, here is what two well-known bloggers and content marketers have to say about how design helps them be successful: Chris Garrett, at ChrisG.com (who hired Rafal to redesign his website): Rafal’s new design, first of all, gave me a more modern, professional first-impression, which is vital if you want people to stick around and take you seriously. The second boost was to the number of people who join my email list, which is my main way of sharing exclusive content with readers. Email sign up forms were intentionally located and designed to be appealing and highly visible, and have been hugely successful. Gregory Ciotti: The biggest reason a lot of writers cast aside web design or consider it “not important” is that they are under this false assumption that their blog is simply a collection of articles. It’s not. Your blog is a user-interface, one that all readers have to interact with if they are going to read your content and (hopefully) take actions to buy something from you or subscribe. Your site’s design is thus much more important than being a book cover — as in “Don’t judge a book by its cover” — because it’s tied into how your content is read and interacted with. And that concludes Rafal’s blog post. Again, it’s titled How Can Great Design Help Your Content Marketing? And it was originally published at RafalTomal.com. I’ll have a link to the original post in the show notes, which you can always find at studiopress.blog. Next week, we shift from design to technology. We’ll be talking about web hosting performance. I know, I know not the sexiest topic, but it’s one of the most fundamental elements of your website that you need to get right. One of the quickest ways to test the patience of visits and search engines is with a slow-loading website … and those are two audiences you do NOT want to make wait. That’s next week, on Sites. Now for this week’s calls to action: Take out your sheet of paper, or open Evernote, or write yourself an email or text message — however you jot down important notes — and answer this question: What is one element of your design that you’re not satisfied with? Maybe you don’t like your header. Maybe you think your sidebar is too cluttered. Maybe you feel like you don’t have enough white space on your content pages, making them hard to read. Well guess what? If you’re thinking that, your audience may well be thinking about it too. Jot one or a couple of these elements down. And then consider what you could do about them. Even if you don’t know code, a lot of WordPress themes are fairly simple to manipulate with a little bit of online research, or with even a specific request to the team that supports your theme. Resolve this week to fix one small element of your design. It might just be a small change that has a huge impact. Make sure you stay up to date and informed. Sign up for free podcast updates and our curated weekly email newsletter, Sites Weekly. Each week, I find four links about content, design, technology, and strategy that you don’t want to miss and send them out on Wednesday afternoon. Reading this newsletter will help you make your website more powerful and successful. Go to studiopress.com/news and sign up in one step right there at the top of the page. That’s studiopress.com/news. And finally, if you enjoy the Sites podcast, please consider giving us a rating or a review over at Apple Podcasts — formerly known as iTunes. One quick tip on that: to make the best use of your review, let me know something in particular you like about the show — that way I make sure not to remove it as the show evolves! To find us in Apple Podcasts, search for StudioPress Sites. Thank you for listening to this episode of Sites. I appreciate you being here. Join me next week, and let’s keep building powerful, successful websites together. This episode of Sites was brought to you by StudioPress Sites, which was awarded “Fastest WordPress Hosting” of 2017 in an independent speed test . If you want to make WordPress fast, secure, and easy — and, I mean, why wouldn’t you — visit studiopress.com/sites today and see which plan fits your needs. That’s studiopress.com/sites.

Let’s begin here in episode 1 with content. Because, quite simply, if your website has no content, your website has no chance. But it can’t just be any content. It needs to be strategic content. Listen to Site Success: Tips for Building Better WordPress Websites below ... Download MP3Subscribe by RSSSubscribe in iTunes Important links from this episode: Try StudioPress Sites Sites Weekly Newsletter Brian Clark’s article: The Simple 3-Step Process for Creating a Winning Content Marketing Strategy The Transcript Jerod Morris: Welcome to Sites, a podcast by the teams at StudioPress and Copyblogger. In this show, we deliver time-tested insight on the four pillars of a successful WordPress website: content, design, technology, and strategy. We want to help you get a little bit closer to reaching your online goals, one episode at a time. I’m your host Jerod Morris. Sites is brought to you by StudioPress Sites — the complete hosted solution that makes WordPress fast, secure, and easy …without sacrificing power or flexibility. For example, you can upload your own WordPress theme, or, you can use one of the 20 beautiful StudioPress themes that are included and just one click away. Explore all the amazing things you can do with a StudioPress Site, and you’ll understand why this is way more than traditional WordPress hosting. No matter how you’ll be using your site, we have a plan to fit your needs — and your budget. To learn more, visit studiopress.com/sites. That’s studiopress.com/sites. Okay … well, in Season 1 of Sites, we are going to leverage our vast archive of content to present essential, time-tested ideas and advice about the four pillars of a successful WordPress site that I mentioned earlier. Every Tuesday, you will get a new episode dealing with content, design, technology, or strategy — in that order, rotating each week. Will there be overlap? Of course. Heck, to some people, content is design, and vice versa. And of course, neither your content or design is even possible without technology. As for strategy, well, your strategy will determine your content and design, and will influence what technology you use, so strategy is really the through-line that connects your content, design, and technology together. My point is this: don’t be confused by the individual focus on content, design, technology, and strategy in any individual episode of Sites. They are all inextricably intertwined — and our goal with this podcast is to help you improve in each area so that your online endeavors are as successful as they possibly can be. So let’s begin, here in episode 1, with content. Because, quite simply, if your website has no content, your website has no chance. But it can’t just be any content. It needs to be strategic content. See? We’re overlapping already. And as Brian Clark wrote on Copyblogger at the beginning of 2017, there is a simple three-step process that will help you create a winning content marketing strategy. What you are about to hear is a spoken adaptation of Brian’s blog post: The Simple 3-Step Process for Creating a Winning Content Marketing Strategy. Strategy … we all know what it means, right? Just for grins, let’s look at a simple definition: A plan of action designed to achieve a major or overall aim. Clear enough. So why would the majority of content marketers have no documented strategy, according to Content Marketing Institute? And by “documented,” I mean a plan that you literally write down. This is what happens when you document your strategy, again according to CMI’s research: You’ll be far more likely to consider yourself effective at content marketing. You’ll feel significantly less challenged by every aspect of content marketing. You’ll generally consider yourself more effective in your use of all content marketing tactics and social media channels. You’ll be able to justify spending a higher percentage of your marketing budget on content marketing. For many small companies, the “marketing budget” is simply the time you allocate for content creation and promotion. And wasting time can often be more painful than wasting money, so let’s not do that, okay? Here is your mission, should you choose to accept it Before we get to the steps, we need an objective for our strategy. Our “major or overall aim,” per the definition. The major or overall aim for commercial entities is sales. Even if you’re a nonprofit or charitable organization looking for new or repeat donors, it’s dolla dolla bills, y’all. “But Jerod,” the voices in my head object. “What about branding, engagement, social sharing, SEO, comments …” “Let me stop you right there,” I tell the voices. Which is kind of awkward, because I’m trying to record a podcast right now. Pipe down, voices. An effective content marketing strategy will hit on all of those things — branding, engagement, social sharing, SEO, comments, and more — along the buyer’s journey to the point of sale. While larger enterprises may convince themselves that “brand awareness” is a legitimate objective of content marketing, you’re too smart for that. New customers and clients. Repeat and recurring customers and clients. Increased revenue and profit. These are the “major or overall aim” of your content marketing strategy. Trust me, if you invest time and money into content marketing to “get your name out there,” you’ll end up a year from now curled up in a corner, sobbing uncontrollably. No one wants to see that. So, let’s run through the three steps to formulating your strategy. Here are the three simple steps Content marketing strategy ultimately boils down to three simple components. Not necessarily easy, but we know by now that simple and easy are two different things. 1. Who? Before you can get someone to buy from you, you need to know what to say to them, and how to say it. You’ll never get that right unless you know who you’re talking to. Call them personas, avatars, or even characters if you like. Your first step is to do the research that allows you to create a fictional, generalized representation of your ideal customer. Don’t underestimate the importance of the word ideal in “your ideal customer.” Although you always put the problems and motivations of the prospect first, you should proactively choose the type of person you want to reach. And it might be even more important to purposefully exclude the “wrong” people. 2. What? Now that you know who you’re talking to, you can start to figure out what they need to hear from you. You’ll also want to place yourself in the shoes of the prospect along the buying journey, so you can deliver the right information at the right time. It could be a funnel sequence, product launch, or defined period of time on your editorial calendar. What do they need to know to do business with you, and in what order? A big part of the “what” also involves influential touchpoints. You need to figure when it’s best to emphasize, for example, authority and social proof, and uncover the best moments to overcome preliminary objections. 3. How? Now we get to the creative part. By taking the time to understand the who and the what, you now know how to craft messages exactly how the prospect needs to “hear” that information. The “who” reveals the stories you should tell, not just to transmit information, but to create a unifying sense of connection. The “what” tells you how to craft an overall narrative with a through line that ties directly into the prospect’s motivation for change. Instead of guessing blindly, you’ll deliver the perfect analogies, anecdotes, and metaphors that make your ideal prospect view you as the only reasonable choice. And since you chose them first, your marketing will be naturally authentic because you’re reflecting your own values to those who share them. Now — here’s something else to consider, which might be counter-intuitive: You shouldn’t even begin thinking about how you’re going to create and distribute the content. That’s usually where people start, but it’s why so many organizations are doing “content” but not content marketing. As Robert Rose smartly points out, content strategy is about how you get content created, whether in-house, with the help of freelancers, or by hiring an agency. It also involves how to spread that content once it’s created. Content marketing strategy is mapping out the overall plan for what the content creators should be creating and spreading. While you’ll certainly adapt and iterate based on what happens when your content is actually out there, creating a documented strategy will help you get closer to the mark, earlier. You’ll save time and money no matter how you decide to create and spread the content. And no worries if the above leaves you with unanswered questions. For the next three episodes of Sites in which we discuss content — so, every fourth episode — I’ll be taking you on a deep dive to discover the who, what, and how for your own content marketing strategy. But for now, hold that thought. Because next week, we go from content to design. How can great design help your content marketing? I’ll explain — with the help of the single most talented and prolific designer I know. That’s coming next week, on Sites. Now for this week’s calls to action: Take out a sheet of paper, or open Evernote, or write yourself an email or text message — however you jot down important notes — and answer this question: What is the objective for your strategy? What is your “major or overall aim,” per the definition of strategy we discussed earlier. Is it sales? Is it building community? Is it making networking contacts? Be as clear and concise as you can be, and know that you can always change your answer to this question as we move forward. But right now, today, as of this moment, what is your major or overall aim? Write it down. Make sure you stay up to date and informed. Sign up for free podcast updates and our curated weekly email newsletter, Sites Weekly. Each week, I find four links about content, design, technology, and strategy that you don’t want to miss and send them out on Wednesday afternoon. Reading this newsletter will help you make your website more powerful and successful. Go to studiopress.com/news and sign up in one step right there at the top of the page. That’s studiopress.com/news. And finally, if you enjoy the Sites podcast, please consider giving us a rating or a review over at Apple Podcasts — formerly known as iTunes. One quick tip on that: to make the best use of your review, let me know something in particular you like about the show — that way I make sure not to remove it as the show evolves! To find us in Apple Podcasts, search for StudioPress Sites. Thank you for listening to this episode of Sites. I appreciate you being here. Join me next week, and let’s keep building powerful, successful websites together. This episode of Sites was brought to you by StudioPress Sites, which was awarded “Fastest WordPress Hosting” of 2017 in an independent speed test . If you want to make WordPress fast, secure, and easy — and, I mean, why wouldn t you — visit studiopress.com/sites today and see which plan fits your needs. That’s studiopress.com/sites.