Gift biz unwrapped episode 254 most people that are creative of doing it for the love of what they do and that passion is just intoxicating and attracts people Attention. Gifters, bakers, crafters and makers pursuing your dream can be fun whether you have an established business or looking to start one now you are in the right place. This is gift to biz unwrapped, helping you turn your skill into a flourishing business.
Join us for an episode packed full of invaluable guidance, resources and the support you need to grow your gift biz. Here is your host gift biz gal Sue moon Heights. Hi there, it's Sue. Welcome to today's show. I've got a topic for you that I know is going to be of interest or at least it should be to almost everybody here, but first a past guest spotlight. Do you recall Patty from enchanted events? We heard from her last summer and she's using a business building strategy that I love.
She's bridging one career into another, so going from years of nursing into her very own floral business. You can hear all about it on episode 225 as you'd expect with a floral business. Weddings are a big target industry. That's exactly where Patty set her site and it's paid off since we talked.
Patty's done a number of weddings including one in a Frank Lloyd Wright house, a beach wedding, one that included a dog in the ceremony and a wedding where the bride was from India with a lot of her family coming to America to attend. Patty reached her goal of ten five star reviews, which means she's eligible to be entered into best of not award consideration. All this while growing her business on the side and really just starting out goes to show you that when there's a will, there's a way.
Congratulations Patty. I love seeing your quick progress and success. We continue with the wedding theme. As we move into our conversation today, Brian has spent his entire life in this industry, so if your product aligns with weddings, you're going to find some really valuable nuggets here. Equally and even more important, we're talking everything about websites.
I don't know if it's in the water, but this topic has gotten a lot of attention lately in my communities in the breeze, which is my free Facebook group and also in my coaching programs. So here you go. Tips, tricks, and best practices when it comes to your website. Today it my pleasure to introduce you to Brian Lawrence. Brian is one of the true thought leaders in the stationary and wedding industry, a multi-store retailer who won top dealers for numerous invitation brands.
He then became VP of Encore studios for 14 years and went on to consult, do web design and marketing for hundreds of stationary and wedding retailers and wholesalers in the past year. Brian has targeted in his efforts to meet the tremendous demand for industry focused, website design and effective yet affordable digital marketing and social media strategies. Brian has spoken at both wedding MBA and the national stationery show numerous times.
He's also the author of the wedding's expert guide to sales and marketing. Welcome to the gift biz on wrapped podcast. Brian, I am so happy to be here and very excited to be creative with the creatives. Oh, I love that. And it's perfect timing for us to be coming together with all of this because it's the start of the new year, just a little bit in and popular wedding season is going to be upon us. So this works out perfectly. Yeah, it's amazing.
There's so much psychology that goes on in both with the wedding client and with the industry. It's sort of a switch that gets turned on like right after the holidays. Yeah, seriously. I totally agree with you there. Well, before we dive into everything, I'd like to do what has become a tradition here, which is have you described yourself by way of a motivational
candle? So if you were to share with us what color resonates with you and a quote that you would put on a candle that speaks completely to you, Brian, what would your motivational candle look like? Well, second side of me is a deep spiritual practice on a daily basis. So this, I did put some thought into this and sort of close my eyes and I saw my candle as an eternal, bright yellow light where I always want to be.
My true self to just manifest and always want to choose kindness and mindfulness over self-interest and be able to see clearly in front of me with this internal illumination and the quote that I've also written a lot of my own quotes. So I chose a quote that I thought is really great for a creative audience and that quote is the genius that could be found in moments. Your quiet inside and your tank is full, is worth more than hours expended on running on empty.
Oh, tell me more about what that means. Well, it means that if you really take care of yourself and are balanced, that if you get the right amount of sleep, because I know a lot of people that are creative just get lost in the process and then all of a sudden they find themselves overtired and they're not just operating on the highest level.
But if you're mindful of that, sometimes you can get so much more done in such a short period of time when you have the bandwidth rather than struggling when you don't. And to try to do more to Knoxville enough. I mean, sometimes it's just a confusion. You feel the void that you're feeling when you're trying to continue to work. It's really the void of being tired that you just need to stop.
Yeah. You know, I so agree with you because I also think the majority of us, when we've started our businesses decide that we're going to be super women or men and then just do everything and conquer everything and we get worn down like you said. But it's so scary to start paying somebody else to do some of these things. So we hold on to things way longer than we should.
And I think to your point, if you're not healthy and balancing everything, your work's going to suffer and your growth will suffer as a business. Absolutely. The other thing I was reading into it, and maybe it's just because I was combining it with what you were talking about with your color, is when your trying to work so fast and juggling so many balls, I think you lose all the things that you were talking about. Valuing being true to yourself, letting the inner light flow, being mindful.
And all of that because you're being so tremendously busy meeting deadline after deadline order, production, product creation, all of that, you lose some of what is so valuable for you as an artist.
Right? Yes, and one of the greatest tools that I've used over the years as far as resources is finding great interns and I approach the intern process with so much thought and I understand that I'm getting an intern to help me to make things easier for me, but I also look at it as a great learning experience and a great opportunity to mentor. I have interns right now that started as an intern that worked for me and it's for there.
If you are looking to learn, I mean, look, I'm 61 years old and nobody has 25 years social media experience. It's all new to us. The people that are younger that it's intuitive to could be tremendous teachers. For those of us that may have the business savvy but just need a little bit more of an understanding of an innateness of what social media really is.
So just being able to discern in your mind what you do best and if all possible, while it's a good idea to understand and do everything in your business so that you could have a reasonable expectancy to understand if someone that you're giving that privilege to is not doing it right at some point, it's really, really important to delegate. And how do you know when that point is? It's a matter of when you realize that the quality of your work is starting to suffer.
If you're creative and you're realizing and you're finding a stagnation, that's as good a time as any. Okay. So it's not even necessarily a revenue point. Like when you grow your business to this amount of revenue, it has to do with the quality that you're putting out. Really? Yes. And essentially show you want to have goals, financial goals. I personally don't believe in them. I believe they're limiting. Phew. Just put right action and intention into whatever you do.
And most people that are creative of doing it for the love of what they do and that passion is just intoxicating and attracts people. And if you have that purity in the way that you approach your business, you don't have to sell yourself. You're just letting people buy from you. You just making it so enticing Because of the spirit that you put out. Cause passion, influence. That's other people, right? Yes,
absolutely. People love to buy from people that just radiate success and happiness and satisfaction rather than when they feel that being pushed. So true. I mean, today's sales strategy is not a push anymore. It's all about a poll. Right. All right, so we're getting ahead of ourselves just a little bit. I want to back up first and I'm really curious, Brian, how did you get into the stationary and wedding industry in the first place? I actually started very early in life.
I did grow up in catering. I worked in a wedding venue and which was also an outdoor beach club and really learned a lot there. I probably learned a lot more than I learned in school on how to work with people. Part of my job was based on gratuity. So I was very entrepreneurial at a young age and this particular venue, when it became an adult, the owner said, Hey, you know, you can't work here forever. What are you going to do?
And he said to me, if you do something wedding related, I could recommend a lot of people to you. So I really started from scratch and you know, it wasn't a photographer, a florist wasn't a chef. So I researched invitations and favors and I just started that business from scratch and opened up a store and realized that if I wanted to be wedding focused, that that wasn't enough, that I had to look for other revenue streams.
So I ended up sub renting space to a photographer, to a florist and then ended up just realizing that I should just sell those services under one business name. And it's in the Northeast, it's called wedding centers. And that's what I did for 14 years before I left that retail environment. Got it.
And I just want to point out to our listeners too, that you saw an opportunity that just by the course of your life, I mean obviously when you were younger, you weren't thinking necessarily that's where you were going to go, but you saw an opportunity come to light, which was that gentlemen telling you, you know, I have a whole source of contacts who could be really valuable to you if you're interested in this type of a business and that somehow clicked with you to get started.
Absolutely. Interestingly enough, I ended up, I got my degree in food service management and nutrition and while never really went into that field, I've always kept that lifestyle. I've been a vegetarian for over 40 years, so I went to school. A lot of people go to school to learn how to do something that they do professionally. I went to school and learned how to do something for my health. Hmm, And do you see it applying to business at all?
I really did not get a lot out of going to school as far as applying it to business now. No. It's all what I learned at that place that I worked. And then just constant. I've always been a self starter, very internally motivated. Well actually once I became an adult once I was more of a free spirit when I was, you know, in my teens.
Yeah. But I just do want to point out and have everybody who's listening to think about, you know, what is in their current daily life and you know, if you are still working in nine to five, which is absolutely no problem. You know how I feel about that. Starting a business on the side while you still have security, financial security isn't a bad move, but what other opportunities might that job bring you context for the future or whatever it might be, connections, learning, whatever it is.
So don't discount wherever you are right now. And I would even say as you continue to go on, because Brian is, you were like you were talking about with your retail shop, you just saw you analyze situations and just moved and manipulated the situation according to where you saw the value and where you could see the growth.
And at different crossroads in my professional life, I always thought about how I could bring forward something that from what I did, I've stayed in the wedding industry on some level, my entire stationary instrument, entire career. So when I made a decision to leave the retail environment for personal reasons, I had a young family. My last store was in a mall and it really just threw me into such, it was just too much.
I was working 70 hours a week and the wedding industry, you know, most people come on weekends and during in the evenings, but having to be open all those hours because you're in a mall and I learned a very valuable lesson that it's not how much business you do, it's how much money you put in your pocket. So true. Yeah. Expand on that too.
If you have a business that isn't scalable and you're just spending a lot of money and you're just working harder and harder to produce the product and the amount of money that you're spending to get that business isn't enough to sustain you. Sometimes it's a matter of just changing the ratio of just spending less money but doing a bit business more on your terms that allow your creativity to stay fresh.
Well and for you giving up that retail shop, I mean huge overhead all of a sudden was released for you. Exactly, and I ended up approaching Encore studios, which is a company that was a great company that no longer in business because the whole stationery is many listeners that are in the business. No has changed a lot of wholesale suppliers.
Ended up going out of business because of so much online competition, do it yourself, et cetera, but I approached them to say, Hey, I've done a lot in the industry. I was a good client of theirs. I also at that point had written the book, the wedding experts got to sales and marketing and I said, I thought I could really make a difference in their business and they created a position for me. I walked into an office, they never had anybody that worked in marketing,
right? They were the type of business that just was talented and attracted a lot of people because of how beautiful the designs were, but they never did any marketing. They always wanted to do marketing, so they just gave me a blank slate to start.
It was like building a business inside of the business and that's one of the things that is a great opportunity sometimes is to bring an entrepreneurial spirit to a job where you own what you do Right and talk about the value then you have for that company because you've created the whole department and the position you have all that knowledge And also if many of the listeners are involved in their pursuit while having a full time job, if you could harness the understanding that now you own your
own business, what it must be like for you, the owner of the company that you work for to own the business and have that entrepreneurial empathy that you bring to that job that could even help you grow in your job.
You said something a little bit ago that I'm really, really curious about and I would direct this to people who are listening, who are stationary designers or possibly make favors for the wedding industry just because that's your area of expertise, but really all of our makers, you made the comment that because of the way things are changing, and I saw this too for sure with the national stationery show, which is why I stopped going, I just saw traffic in diminishing interest in like all of
that. I saw it all changing and I wasn't tied into just that industry. But that's a little bit of an aside, but you said that you saw the industry changing and it was moving away from some of these larger wholesalers because the DIY people were starting to take a firmer hold. Can you talk a little bit more about that specifically directed to other people who are looking at doing a DIY type like so they're stationary designers, you know, custom designers?
Well, the main point that I was making is that online retailers were much better at marketing and because the internet became such an elegant way to look for product, it became the way that consumers would start researching years back. The only choice they had was to order a mail order catalog from wedding magazine or to go into a physical place and look at invitations physically.
So what I'm saying is that the local retailers were caught off guard and they never really marketed themselves to fight for the turf in their area.
A local retailer, well, they need to do is think about what they can do in their local area and if everybody did that did the best that they can in their own corner of the sky, I think the industry would have been different and a lot of the wholesale brands didn't step up to the plate to try to support their retailers and use their faster resources to gain more attention to the retail environment. I had done that when I was with Encore, I had called up advertising programs.
I was all about trying to get brand recognition to try to bring people in and get them off their computer screens and into the store. I know that doesn't exactly answer the questions that you were asking, so why don't you ask me to elaborate on a way that is helpful. Okay. So you will do that.
And then I want to move into the whole website thing, but, so I guess another way to phrase the question and what I'm trying to understand from your perspective, because you have so much knowledge on this is what is the potential and the opportunity for someone who is, and let's just say they're accustomed stationary designer, so they make their own line of stationary.
They might be going wholesale, so they would like to be able to distribute through some brick and mortar shops as well, but they're also online. What do you see as like maybe a definition of the market as you see it today for a DIY or, Well, one thing as you said about the stationary show, it is a totally different show than it was. It doesn't mean that you shouldn't display there. If you're stationary focused, but it's more if you are willing to share samples.
I mean that very generously so people could really conceptualize your work beyond just looking at it on an image. But at the same time, the imagery is just so, so important. So everything that you do has to be lifestyle shots, glamorous shots. If you have a DIY product, that's fine, but don't have DIY photography, right? There's a lot of choices for an invitation business. Your imitation designer, there's only one first page of Google. You really have to find creative ways to stand out.
And there's a 21st century strategy that I don't think will ever end, and it's becoming less used as we go into the 21st century. And that's networking music to my ears, Brian, you know, I find too few people understanding the value of networking and working with influences emails and any type of marketing is so crowded. It's just hard to be looked at most of the time you're overlooked.
But if you have relationships with businesses and entities that have the attention of your audience, where your designs are being introduced by somebody that you know people will pay attention to. To me that's the most important thing. So how do you get in front of these people? How do you identify who they are and get in front of, get their attention? If you have great product, it's a matter of getting it in front of them. Sometimes it is a matter of having some sort of incentive.
Like a purchase incentive you mean? Yeah, I'm sorry, financial incentive. But let me give you an example of a scenario for say event invitations. People don't typically, when they're left to their own devices are not looking for invitations until safe four or five months before the wedding. Seriously, or the event.
Sometimes it's even closer when it's a different event, they may start browsing earlier on, but when they're looking online, they're not discerning between retail environment or online retailer. They're just looking through the results. In Google, they're looking on Pinterest or Instagram just to get design ideas. And if they go to a website and they see online retail and they see hundreds of invitations, they're going to say, Oh wow, that's a nice selection.
Let me see the one I like the best within the context of that one environment. But those several hundred invitations may not even touch the elegance of people that are listening to this podcast. But the idea is is that they're never going to be found. So a venue that just like other vendors is a very important source to refer business. And many venues don't really have a station that they recommend.
And the way to approach a venue is not just to say, Hey, I have nice invitations, but to explain that your product elevates the perception that guests will have. That's the first thing that a guest will see with the name of that venue being brought to their attention. And also being creative of saying, I could help you with day of affair, like seating cards and other creative things that could enhance the decor of the reception hall. That's just one example.
So if the venue is saying, I have this great local invitation source, why don't you check them out, maybe give them some sort of gift certificate on the save the dates. Because typically if you sell the save the date, you have a better chance of getting them for the invitations as well. So it's a matter of really just, I call it street fighting, you know, to get your piece of the market.
Yeah. So that's what you're meaning also by networking when often when you think of influences, you're thinking of the big time representatives of any industry. But I think here or in addition to what you're saying, I'm not sure which would be venues. So obviously hotels, conference centers, wherever it might be. And I think that's a great idea, Brian, because often we're thinking direct to customer or wholesale into local boutiques.
Right. But instead going to the venues, and I'm thinking event planners too. Yes. The event planners and wedding planners. The thing with that group is that they typically don't do a very high volume. So if you have more of a luxury product where every order is meaningful, then that's a great source because you could help collaborate with them so that they can incorporate there or their custom his own individual stamp of individuality on their invitation From a customer service standpoint.
Then also your keeping relationships with, I don't know, let's say five or 10 venues and event planners and they're bringing you in multiple clients each year and you're nurturing the relationship with them and continuing to provide them what they need versus going one off all the time. Finding a new bride, selling them on the invitation, you know, that kind of a thing. Yes. I mean it's a combination of both. And also looking for the right social media influencers and bloggers.
There are bloggers that have a very local wedding or event following where people are looking to these bloggers for ideas and those ideas are expressed visually. So sometimes it's, sometimes that does require a pay to play where it's not just editorial, but the right partnerships could be money well spent. So, you know, we've kind of alluded to website in and out here.
We've interweaved it into our conversation so far and you're an expert on websites, so I'd really love to get into this more in terms of our conversation and just to lay it out a little bit, Brian, I see that a lot of people that I work with and a lot of people who are in my Facebook groups, et cetera, it's this tech stuff and the website that holds them up, they get nervous, they get anxious, they go for an easy solution at sea or something like that, which I'm not saying is bad,
but I'm always a proponent of also having a website that you own. So first I want to see if you agree with me there and then I'd love to get into your thoughts and opinions on a website all about websites after this quick word from our sponsor. Yes, it's possible increase your sales without adding a single customer.
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Again with an opportunity to really express the brand and to really get their attention and create a whole platform, but a platform is not a, I'm not talking about something complex, but answers to the question of why. Why should this be a resource for this particular site visitor and just photos that, wow. Then I mean Facebook and Etsy is just such a busy place. It's always an environment where people can go from one resource to another.
At least if you have the right website and you have a website that really is captivating, you have an opportunity to capture the attention of that particular visitor and possibly bring them to the finish line because people have very short attention spans. It has to be done where you're really grabbing their attention with, I would say aspirational photos that people could envision.
It's not just showing a catalog shot of an invitation, but maybe showing like one of the invitation that might be photographed with another event prop. You know, sometimes photographers takes some really great shots of invitations, but so something that people that make it look like it relates to the reason that particular person would use that invitation.
The two biggest categories for custom invitations are wedding and in the Jewish community bar and bat mitzvah is still a very big possible investment in invitations, so having the right type of styled shoots revolving around creating the mood of those events along with the invitation. What do you think about information about the artist who's behind the designing of and the style of the cards? Where do you put that in the waiting of a decision of someone to buy?
I unfortunately don't think that has a lot of weight and it's because of the lack of attention. People are really just driven by imagery and getting to have a preference Well I think it's more about the quality and the workmanship along with the way that it might look and just always offering to have samples available and sometimes a worthwhile strategy is to try for the sample and then say to them that if you decide to order, we'll just deduct the price of the sample.
Okay. I'm just wondering online with all the photos and yes, the samples. If a video of an artist actually a behind the scenes of card creation or something would help deepen the relationship. I think it's a nice second level aspect to have. I don't think that someone is going to click on to that as the first interest. The first interest is really liking the imagery that they see so it resonates enough with them to want to look further.
And if someone is buying invitations online, I mean that is a process that's going to take time, but if it's a product that is sold through face to face, then you're not selling the product. Just selling the appointment. And most retailers, that's what they're doing is they're selling the meeting. So if you have a physical location, it's showing the physicality of the location. It's sharing the benefits of having a face to face experience as opposed to a faceless experience ordering online.
And if you are selling online, you have to be really accurate and helping them with ideas to help them avoid mistakes because left to their own devices, the littlest mistake that's made could ruin the whole process. That's a big benefit for the retailer to tout that we're going to take you by the hand to make sure that every detail and we guarantee the work.
You don't have to worry about any problem with your invitations if there's a mistake, never even know about it because we'll have already corrected it rather than you having to first deal with a problem. So I find that the process of being very elegant but also being benefit driven in talking about the experience of working with you I think is really important. Tandem to get across.
And also if you're a local business showing the locality, the first thing that people need to see when they go to a website is what you do and where you do it. And a lot of people miss that they don't have contact information. Well they rely on to contact them is sometimes they don't even have a phone number and email. They just have a form. You want to make yourself accessible. It's a really important thing.
And have contact information, tell people what to do, create a guided experience on trying to help them navigate through your site. In a way that beats what your intention is. And for many listeners, I would imagine that it would be to set up a meeting or to get an email with questions and if it is somebody that's working with Etsy or another third party, it's driving them to that platform.
But one of the mistakes that I think people make is that say they have a nice image that they also have on Etsy, they may just drive them to the homepage of the Etsy site rather than driving them to the product. If someone is interested in that product on your website, take them to the product on Etsy. Right, exactly. Yeah. Especially if you're doing social media posts or something with a picture.
Right. Yeah. So I am hearing from you and what I think is fair to say, tell me if I'm following along properly, is when you're building a website, you would put the customer flow of the website differently if you also have a physical location versus if you're just selling online and the physical location. Really your main of your website is to convince people to come in and have a meeting with you.
And online, I'm thinking if I were purchasing myself, we're going to have a wedding in our future probably within a couple of years, but like you can't feel the paper and the texture and see the true depth of colors of paper online. So pointing out things like that would be reasons why taking a little bit more time and actually going to a location consulting going through some of those books.
And man, I never knew how expensive those stationary books are until I had our mutual friend Cheryl Oberman telling me all about that. That's crazy how expensive those are. But that whole experience of purchasing a custom wedding invitation would be completely different in store than online. Absolutely. And also if you think about it though, when you're a retailer and you're investing in inventory, it's a constant necessity to replenish. But when you invest in an album that's just sales tool.
So typically one order and you recover your investment. But of course it does add up when you're having a lot of different lines. But I just wanted to clarify that in case anybody in the listening audience is not as clear on that. It's not a high investment for the potential return because usually these albums last for a few years. Got it. It isn't a brochure or a full color catalog. It's an actual sample album that is hand created. You know, each album is done individually.
It's a very expensive, laborious process to create. Okay, so brick and mortar is all about, as you were saying earlier, getting the appointment, having people come in and then working with them from there and then online. If you're just ordering online is an entirely different experience, then you really have to sell your product, which means lots of options. I'm pulling from this what you had said before, many choices.
So people just don't go and see two or three cards and if it's not their style, then they're going to jump and go somewhere else. And also the quality of the photos I would say for both are extremely important. But the content of the photos is different because if you have a brick and mortar shop, you're going to want to show maybe where the consultation room is and people looking through some of the options and working together on what font it's going to be in. All of that.
But then if you're just selling online, then you're going to want all the options of all the different cards, paper choices, you know, that kind of thing. Am I following you right? Yeah. You're all following my, but let me elaborate a little bit. So number one, the vest choices that an online retailer would have needs to be woven into the website in an elegant way. And I've seen too many websites where they just start off with just a page of thumbnail images and that is not the way to go.
The way to go is to still have a very elegant front lobby homepage where people could get a sense of the brand and create an inviting experience to look further rather than just start off with an overwhelming amount of images on a page that isn't displayed in a large enough way or elegantly enough to really capture their attention. So that's number one.
Number two, most invitation retailers have a thirst to have some sort of online exposure and while it doesn't always work out to be financially rewarding, the online part of it, it's still an opportunity for people to view a lot of things if they want to just dig a little bit deeper before going to a place.
So the hierarchies are very, very important where you have to think of your homepage as this virtual receptionist that very, very clearly and simply and elegantly showcases what are the things that you would want people to see first and help them click onto that.
One of the important things that a lot of invitation retail is miss is the importance of having separate landing pages for the important events rather than just clumping the fact they sell invitations and stationary into one melting pot. So if someone's getting married, I want them on a page that talks about their wedding and their wedding invitations.
If someone's planning a bar and bat mitzvah right into that landing page, that landing page should be so complete that it's almost like a homepage. If somebody is advertising on a wedding industry platform, they could use the landing page to link to rather than the homepage because if someone's getting married, why not bring them right into a wedding page. Makes sense. Any other comments on just overall general web development?
Sure. Another thing that's really important and a lot of people are also very concerned with online visibility. I mean, they want their website to generate traffic. So yes, there should be an emphasis on good practices to help you index your site properly. So that involves installing Google search console, which helps any updates that you make on your site to be quickly indexed by Google.
Having a blog on your site is a way to continually update your site in a way that is also satisfying to your reader, to your visitors as well as satisfying to Google that where they will typically rank sites higher than for businesses that update their sites more frequently.
And also what's called your title tags and meta descriptions, which a lot of people miss even working with when they're trying to do things themselves is that tells Google how to rank you and you have to vary your keyword terms. People don't just search to find you by one phrase and a lot of times people use the same phrase over and over again.
But my main point is that in this industry with creative people that are really trying to radiate the beauty of their work, you don't want to compromise the experience that you want your visitors to have for the sake of Google. You got to pick sides and it's all about the user experience. And what I'm saying is that use the behind the scenes tools that are available on your website and on your website to help your ranking.
Don't compromise the integrity of your site and start trying to play with wordings just to squeeze in what you think of keywords that Google index, because first of all, Google knows better now. They don't weigh that as the way they used to. Right. So in other words, speak the language that your customers speak and understand and don't try to jam in keywords just because you think that's going to rank you higher in Google. That's correct.
Yeah. I remember how people used to do that and like sentences didn't even make sense. You know, It sounded like rain man. Yeah. Or they'd use the same word like seven times on the first page or something. That was crazy. I'm glad we're out of that era that was not, but everyone was trying to figure it out. Right. Still trying to figure it out. Yeah, because it's always changing. What would you say to someone who's building a website and is all done and they've done everything that you've said?
Like Brian, this would be the perfect example that you would put up in one of your lectures about how a website should be done and they just put it up and that's it. That's all they do. What's going to happen to that website If they're a local business, certainly want to have a Google my business account because Google my business is really the best way to rank on Google because the only competition you have is local competition.
When you're trying to rank on Google organically, any body in the world could come up for wedding invitations in Chicago with the right approach to their website and you will have many industry platforms that are trying to intercept traffic that may have been looking for a retailer to bring them to their site to then deliver them to their advertisers. So Google my business is really the way for local business to really focus on getting online visibility. It's much simpler to rank.
Also establishing your business on a lot of other directories like Yelp being Facebook, four square, and there are other secondary directories that in themselves don't necessarily generate a lot of traffic but collectively could be meaningful and also is a way that Google validates your locality. So they differ to how much exposure you have in other directories as a ranking factor. Oh, I didn't know that. That's interesting.
So what you're saying is just because you put up the picture perfect website, your job isn't done. You need to do things to get people to your website and a lot of it is Google. Right. And also there's nothing wrong with doing a website yourself as long as it doesn't look that way. Oh, you mean like you manually doing your own versus hiring someone to do it. Yes. And hiring somebody.
One of the challenges of hiring generic web designers that don't really have industry experience is that you're losing the opportunity to have somebody that has worked with other businesses to take a lead role in helping you to expand beyond your own thinking. And that's why I have success with my clients in the sense that I could help guide them.
A lot of times the whole design process and what to include, what to not include is daunting and to not have to be involved in constantly straining to come up with the answers and just having someone that could run with it makes the whole process with typically a better and faster outcome as well as an easier process where you're not put in the position where someone has to pick your brain before they can help you. Oh right. You're talking about someone who has industry knowledge.
It helps a great deal. Got it. Okay. What do you feel about platforms? You know we've talked a little bit about ethics. If someone's doing their own website comments from you on like a WordPress site or Shopify or you know, some of the other kind of template driven sites there are out there. Well, there's certainly been a lot of talk that Shopify is a good platform for online retailing for a business that is trying to stay, has already established third party things.
With Etsy, for example, and wanting to get the best chance of online visibility and an elegant platform. WordPress is definitely the way to go. Wix has some good themes as well and it's pretty easy to navigate. Also, Squarespace is a very photo rich platform that really has different themes that allow one to display photos in a very nice way. A lot of photographers use Squarespace for that purpose, but in general it's all about any platform. Using the right approach. You can make it elegant.
You have to remember that even the desktop experience is now scrolling. People don't just, they just get onto the site and scroll down. It used to be that you need to have your desktop website above the fold, like everything had to be seen right away for that people to go further and you can't rely on the navigation bars anymore. People just scroll down.
If you're going to have navigation bars, they need to be sticky so that people see them at all times and those are typically innate on mobile, but you have to start about designing your site for mobile and then optimizing it for desktop rather than the other way around because now the other thing is that the lion's share of internet searches are going to be mobile. It's gone past the 50% Mark.
However, with that being said, I don't think it's going to change for online retail is that the majority of sales are going to take place on desktop, especially with invitations where there's a lot of customization. I don't see people sitting on their cell phone with their other half watering their wedding invitations that much on a mobile device. That makes sense, but a first point of contact for sure could be that And very much likely will be. That's really interesting.
This is the first time I've heard that because I've always heard above the fold, above the fold, you know your most important things and clearly still there has to be a good statement to motivate someone to start scrolling. But I also, and when I redid one of my websites and I hired someone out to help me, he took me through a customer experience. Like you're telling a story on your homepage, you're bringing them through an experience and then leading them to what to do next.
Absolutely. That's very well said. Okay. Thank you. Thank you. With that. Now the other thing, and I'd love any updated information on this. Do you remember, was it like two years ago or something? I believe it was Google who was going to rank much lower. Any sites that weren't mobile friendly? Yes. I think it's even a little bit more recent, but absolutely the case.
Yeah, and also there's now what's called a mobile first ranking, meaning that all new websites, the first thing that Google will look at to index your site will be a mobile site and they're going back to existing sites to do the same thing. So what are they doing? Like kind of scoring the site? Yes. They have different algorithms and criteria to decide if that, how that site, it's also the user experience. Speed is very important. People don't want to wait.
So if your site takes longer to load and sometimes that people have videos on their sites that are actually lodged inside their site, that could be a really slowing down of the site loading. Yeah, and multiple pictures that are really, really big too. Yes, correct. So that's where a pro understands how to find that best balance to create the best user experience, but also to make sure that the site loads quickly.
Okay. Give his listeners, we've given you tips splattered throughout this whole conversation, so might make sense to go back again with a pen and paper and write things down. Compare a lot of the things that Brian's been talking about against what you have going on right now with your website.
You may find just one or two things that you can adjust and change, which is going to improve the user experience and in turn get you more appointments or bring people to some of your product and hopefully bring them over to a sale. Brian, what would you say to someone who's just now? Okay. We've convinced them that a website's important. They've been thinking about it for a while. Tech is scary, but they get it.
What are the first couple of steps someone brand new should take to getting a website up just so that they don't walk away from this and say, okay, I get it, but then still don't start taking any action. Well, the first thing is to choose a domain name. The domain name is something that there's an advantage, I believe in bringing in at least one word in the domain name.
What you do that it just makes it clearer if somebody sees your domain on a third party source that that, So if I'm, this is going to be a stupid name. It's the only thing I can think of. Betsey's crafts, right? That's the name of the company, but she specializes in custom paper invitations. It's a terrible name. I get it. Right? Like I wouldn't say Betsey's designs.
I would say Betsey's invitations, you know, just something that helps people understand a little bit more specifically what the focal point of the website is, is helpful. So maybe it starts with even considering if you've got the right name for your business. Yes, and also you can toy with more than one domain name for marketing purposes.
It's great for you to have the domain name that is the name of your business, but you could also look for keyword domain names that cue people like exquisite invitations or something. I mean, some of those domain names are hard to find, but there is a turnover of domain names where they come and go because people go out of business.
But the domain name itself is important to establish, but it's not that important in the scheme of things because most people in this day and age won't type in your domain name. They'll just click from somewhere else. Oh, that's true. And just a point of clarification for everybody, you wouldn't then have multiple sites under all these domain names. What you do is you have the site under one name and then you've bought these other domain names and you can redirect them to your site.
That's correct. For example, say in the event industry, you're advertising your wedding invitations. You could have Betsey's wedding invitations point to the landing page on the Betty's invitation site. That's a strategy that makes, if somebody sees that domain name on a wedding site, it makes them feel that they're really focused on not only in invitations but wedding invitations. The second thing is finding the right host.
Can I just say one more thing about domain names and this is just for everybody wedding invitations and all that aside. If you have a company name and your website is a variety, like a different unique spelling of a general name, it's best to then buy a domain also in a name that people would normally do. Like let's say Betty's spelled her name, B, E, T, Z, Y instead of S Y she should buy what normally people would type in and redirect that to.
So if you have some type of a creative naming to your business that people wouldn't automatically understand if you're just saying it to them, get that domain name and redirect it to your site as well. It certainly could only be beneficial because it's very inexpensive to, on a yearly basis it's between 10 and $20 a year. So that's not a very big business expense to have domain names that protect your brand from error. I think that that's a good suggestion. Sorry to interrupt the flow.
So we've got the domain name down. What's next? The hosting, you know, once your website goes live, the host is probably more important than the web designer. If something goes wrong, the site goes down. So having a host that is very responsive and communicative is usually a better outcome. And some of the larger platforms that most people tend to gravitate to because they're more well known, take more time to respond that usually have to fill out a ticket. You have to wait a long time on hold.
So looking for a smaller host usually gets better results. I have a source called overhaul X that is a very type of person that you can text if there's a problem and nobody wants to have their site down for something that could be fixed in two minutes down for a day because there's a whole process and a hope bureaucracy that is involved. So that's just a little tip on that. And then also just taking some time to research competitors.
Maybe develop a Google doc with a lot of ideas of things you liked about, you know, other sites or you didn't. And also develop an outline of the different sections that you'd want. So this way, if you decide that you want to hire somebody, you have a clear picture of what you want at that time. Of course, that's open to change and discussion based on trying to collectively arrive at what's for the highest good if the person that you're hiring has experienced.
But otherwise you'd be able to give that site designer that may be generic a little bit more direction. Right. So you come to the table with ideas versus just coming to a meeting with no clue yet. That's right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Great advice. Okay, so for you guys who are just beginning here are the first four steps. Your domain, multiple domains if you need to, and again please don't get in your way about tech tech, all this stuff is not that hard to do.
Some of it you might want to job out some of it you do yourself. So domain name, get a hosting company that's going to be responsive. Then go ahead and look at competitors, not to copy but for inspiration. You know, what do you like about their sites? What do you not like? What do you think might be missing that you would want to add? What kinds of sections based on your offering to your audience, right? Not what everyone else is offering.
Like you don't want to go into competitors and then overwhelm yourself and feel like you have to offer every single thing that they do. If that's not part of what your normal business offerings are. So don't get too swayed off course of what you offer, but then figure out what your sections should look like. And those would be your first four steps. Anything to add to that,
Brian? Well, just if someone is doing it themselves, a platform that they want it, Right, and then select the platform and then get rolling with it. Right. For sure. Wonderful. What is up next for you, Brian? What are your next targets, missions, ideas, incentives, efforts in the future?
I've put in a lot of work in developing a vast or understanding of online marketing to be able to share with my existing clients and when I'm onboarding new clients the best possible ways that they could rank locally. So besides developing a beautiful website, I can also make sure that they're getting the best possible chance for online visibility. And another thing that I'm intending to do is to spend more time consulting with people that are doing the websites themselves.
So look, I have only a certain amount of bandwidth to do websites and I'm not going to take on more business than I can at a particular time. I might say to somebody, well we can get started with the website in three or four weeks depending on how the workflow is, but I could always get involved on a consulting basis to help direct somebody to do a couple of hours of consulting or if somebody wants to run ideas by me. So that's another direction that I'm looking to work with. I do.
I'm still going to stay within my industry because I feel that that's how I can offer the most value. Well, and you have so much experience too. I mean just the knowledge of how the industry has changed and grown and adjusted over time too. It was a wealth of knowledge.
And one other thing that I did want to share is I did do a presentation that a month ago and I recorded a video and I would be happy to share it with any listeners because it has so many different ways to either improve your website or can be an influencer on how to create a website. The things to think about.
So you know, if you want to share the contact information with your audience state, email me, am I able to give my email address to them to email me to request the uh, so they, they could email me@brianbrianatbrianlawrence.com. Just request the, a sample of the video of the video and I'll also send the slides so that you could look at the actual slides of the presentation if you want to take shortcuts just to get an idea of what to expect in the video.
Okay. And is this only for the stationary and wedding industry or virtually for anyone who has a website? I would say that the ideology behind it is very much for anybody. Certainly the examples, the site samples are industry focused. All right, wonderful. And your website is Brian lawrence.com. Beautiful. Perfect. So give biz listeners go over there if you want to learn more to see what Brian's up to and see his website. And I'm quite sure it is a model example of a website.
So that would always be interesting to take a look at. And then if you're interested in getting this video, then just email Brian, brian@brianlawrence.com also all of his contact links will be over on the show notes page. As always, Brian, thank you so much. I didn't really know what to expect with our talk and I love that we just went through and there's so many golden nuggets like just dropped throughout our whole conversation here, so it's been fabulous.
Thank you so much for your time and for sharing all of your knowledge on website development specifically keyed into this unique industry. It's been a pleasure talking with you. My pleasure. Thank you. Wow. Excellent information for us all to review. Whether you're just now putting up your site or are up for a review of an existing site, it may make sense to listen to this all over again with pen and paper at the ready.
Another thing that comes to mind when I think of weddings is the big gorgeous wedding cake and the not to be ignored. Sweet table. We'll dive into this sweet category next week. I do hope you plan on joining me. Remember to subscribe and then for sure you won't miss it. I'll see you then. Are you discouraged because your business is not performing as you had envisioned? Are you stuck and confused about how to turn things around?
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