#105 Maximizing Your Personal Brand and Website Performance: Insights and Tools

Hello and welcome. It's episode 27 of the Website Mastery Podcast series. We are live on YouTube, we're live on LinkedIn and for the first time we're live on Instagram as well. So if you're there, Let us know. And if you're listening to the repeat on the podcast, thanks for being here. As always, we love our listeners and viewers. This is the companion to the 90-day website mastery

program. We wanted to find a way to continue to share more advice and insights about making your website work harder and for you to feel proud about your website again. Pascal Fintoni is with me, my co-host, and each episode we go through 4 segments. We have the You Ask, We Answer where we take a question that's been submitted by the community or that we've seen online. We've got the website stories, which is segment number

2. We have the website engine room where we share an app or a piece of kit that's gonna make your life easier as a website manager and content creator to start feeling proud of your website again. And of course, we always finish with the website call to action. What piece of content can't finish with a call to action? That's 1 change or adjustment that you should be making to your website right now. Pascal, episode 27, what have we got in store?

Well, you know, what's interesting about listening to the presentation, you do say we're doing this with prepare, we research, we capture this in the show notes for our audience, but we're doing it for ourselves. I mean, you know, what luck to have a profession that is also your passion. I mean, your week, my week is spent talking at events, doing

one-to-one coaching. My week has been about branding a lot, lead generation, AI, using AI to make good decisions, to get support with your website decisions. And right now I'm working on 3 website projects for clients from brand new startups to well established companies who just seem to have everything about their user experience. But you make a good point because we are in the creative industry. I'm currently reading a book by Rory Sutherland, who's really got me to stand back and think

about, don't just use logic. And that's a very good point. We're in this creative industry where we've got to have the space to be able to think and brainstorm and come up with ideas and more importantly make mistakes. You know we need to test and try and make those mistakes because actually the faster you make mistakes the quicker you can find out what works and be ahead of the game.

So this space as you say is just as much for us to be able to be that creative and move away from the logic and, well, I don't mean fully, but in terms of just having that thinking space and yeah. We should move on to our first segment, but before we do so, very, very quickly for our audience, the way in which we structure those episodes, it's almost the agenda of a meeting you should be having with your

colleagues. So what you should do is by all means is listen to Johnny and I take away the information, but use what we are sharing for your next get together with a team or with your suppliers and so on, saying I've got a question or I've got those apps I want to experiment with in the same kind of R&D department. So yeah, there are a lot of value to be gained and we do this in a very compact way. Half an hour, It's more so unlike us because we

are long form content creators. But the value you get from just the learning but also the structure for your next team meeting I think is very important. Let's start with you ask, we answer. Now this is a question from a coaching session that I had about a week ago and we were really wrestling with the client. So here it is. It is obvious to me that my customers are using my name when searching for my business online.

Therefore, should I change the website address and domain name to my first name plus family name and add .co.uk.com or shall I leave it as it is? This is interesting, isn't it, Jonny? Yeah, I mean, well, I personally have a marketing agency, Fleek Marketing and the website, the domain for that is fleek.marketing. I also have my personal brand, which is JonnyRoss.com. I think some of it comes down to what people know you as, what people know the business as,

and also where you see the future. So Do you see the saleability of the business? Do you see the wanting to perceive as a big business? Or is this about personal branding? I think there's huge benefits to changing a domain name or using a domain name that's got your name in it, but there are downsides as well. So you've got to sort of take everything into account. And I guess what I was insinuating is that I've cheated by creating both.

But maybe that's what you need to do to give you time actually to really reflect and make the final decision. What I will say, and certainly that's what I did all those years ago, that will prevent you from setting the business if that's part of your strategy. If you have an exit strategy that says, I'm going to build the business, whether it's B2B, B2C or something in between, no one's going to be able to buy or there'd be a lesser value and appeal if it is committed to a

personal brand. But if that's not part of your plan whatsoever, and you've looked at the data, you know that that's what's happening, you do a lot of work, I'm thinking, Johnny, about putting your personal brand out there as a speaker, as a guest blogger, maybe you're on podcasts, maybe you're writing columns, intra-publications, who won, then the argument will be that people will remember you and they'll make an association with your services, but they may not remember the product brand or the

service brand. Yeah, and what a way to build authority and to build that personal connection as well. So if they do know your name and they associate your business with your name, you can still build that professionalism and even in fact, even more trust by having that personal connection and the memorability of it. So there's huge advantages, but yes, as you've said rightly, a big disadvantage is the exit strategy, but also perhaps your name is, what's the word I'm looking

for? Common is, I guess is the word I was looking for, that John Smith, for example, perhaps you're not gonna stand out by using your name and you also need to do a bit of research to see what appears in Google already for your brand name, because you might have some stiff competition in terms of actually getting high in the ranks. So there's pros and cons. Sure, you reminded me, I'm gonna go back 10, 15 years ago, but that was a similar

exercise with a client. So we did just punch in first name, surname in Google. And what came back was a murderer in Australia. Now in other way you get based, but that story of the murder with that name was over dominating the search results. We could try it again today, maybe things have changed. So I think, yeah, do the research, do the prep. I'm kind of tempted to go back to my clients. You know, I'd rather think about it. I've spoken to a guy called Johnny Ross, and

let's cheat and do both. Because what I like about doing both, that means that your personal brand website can then become a signposting website to different programs and campaigns and different facets of what you do. And then you can retain the product-based or the service-based website at the same time and give you just more months and years to reflect before making that final decision.

And I think 1 of the big points you've just made there, which is do the research because forget about personal brand,

forget about name. I've got 2 clients that I can think of within the last 3 months where they've gone through a branding exercise prior to engaging me and at no point has anyone thought let's Google this new brand name and it just it's like it beggars belief it's like you're you are senior leaders you've got you I can see that you've got lots of strategy and all sorts of stuff, But no 1 has thought of Googling it. And these 2

significant companies. And I was just, and in both cases, we've found big problems. But anyway, there we go. Let's move on then because we can make this but into that almost a mini rant about the lack of research. But I get it, it's so much more fun to get into action mode than it is into reflection and research mode, but you've got to do it. That's part of your duties as leaders and marketers, whether that's your full-time

or part-time occupation. Let's move on, if you don't mind, with our next segment, website stories. So for episode 27, we've chosen a video that came from a great company that I'm very fond of called Orbit Media. Orbit Media, if you don't

know them, they do some incredible research and data crunching on website user experience. They also sometimes partner up with other specialists. And I have to tell you, Johnny, I've been a student of their research papers because it kind of helps you reflect and keeps you right on the way in which a website experience should be crafted. And they

have years, if not decades of... This video was recorded or hosted, should I say, by Andy Creston-Dinna, who is the co-founder and chief marketing officer of Orbit Media. And the title is that follows, 13 things to remove from your website immediately. So sounds very, very dramatic. I'm very aware of that. And what I was able to do then is watch the video, I know you've done it as well.

I've got a list of 13 to go through and I picked 3, because time is against us, and 1 where I'm not totally in agreement with Andy, and 2 where I'm like, exactly, and you're not actually share this advice. So very, very quickly for viewers and listeners, I'm gonna go through all 13. So remove immediately vague homepage headlines. And actually similarly, generic navigation labels. Meaningless subheadings is number 3. Number 4, long homepage sliders. I mean, everybody's

trying to shove in their information. I get it, the poor marketing team is being bullied into having 8 to 10 sliders for all the different departments, but a visitor would not go beyond the first 2 or 3. Annul D, but still happens, avoid stock photos of people, or should I say nowadays AI photos of people. Number 456 now, social media icons, remove them from the homepage. Remove the dates on blog posts, interesting 1. Remove long paragraphs, think about mobile phone

viewers. Press releases, stop copying and pasting press releases as is, You've got to rework them and add more media content. Question mark on PDF files. Do they help really the traffic, the experience that you want? We move on to testimonial pages. Long list of people saying wonderful things about you but unsupported by evidence. Email links, contact forms are better, or are they?

And finally, the dead end thank you page or the dead end call to action page where you do something and then suddenly it goes blank or there's like a tiny message on the top left corner saying done or submitted and you have no idea what's happened. So please everyone watch the video, it's great. Here Andy's essentially a case that he makes for all those 13 things to remove immediately. But I wanna go back for the 3. I've got social media icons, press releases, and

testing on all pages. I can't be sure that I agree with what is being claimed that social media icons on the homepage are a distraction and you can lose visitors. My position, they are there to be glanced at, a form of reassurance, but nobody that I can think of is gonna click on the social media icons if the intent is to visit the website and know about the business. Press releases, I agree, they are ugly as hell on website. People are lazy. They copy and paste the press

release as it is written. It's written for the press. The title is enigmatic. The first paragraph is usually weird. And it's just flat on the webpage. This is not how we write on the web. So stop

doing it. And yes, I mean, my biggest kind of pay-peave when testing with all pages, it's like a long, long list of quotes from people, but without any reasons, or they're not grouped around the product, or they're not grouped around the product or they're not grouped around the service and so on and and often it just leaves you thinking where are they real are they not real and so on but yeah great great video great 13 things that you can use your next team

meeting or website meeting and these were my top 3. But did you have any that maybe you were not sure about or that you are clearly in agreement with as well? A great video with lots of really good advice and some obvious things that over the years these things do need removing from your website. I like your point about the testimonial pages. We love

testimonials. They're keyword rich, user-generated content, build trust, give you that professionalism, but let's integrate them into the content instead of having just a testimonials page. Yeah, press releases, you read them and they're like, yeah, what's this? Write the story yourself. So whatever story you're hoping that was going to be produced from the press release, write it yourself, put it on the website instead of just copying and pasting the, the, the, press release

social media icons. I do agree with you, Pascal. I guess the halfway house is removing them from the header of the website and just having them in the footer of the website is a halfway house because the danger is that you've got them there, they click through, and of course, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, they're all designed to keep you there. They're all designed to get

you looking at those adverts. So the danger, I guess, is that you do click through and you start looking at the stories of cats and dogs and you totally forget the business that you were looking at a minute ago. So I guess having them in the footer of the website is a halfway house to build that trust. It certainly

do not remove them completely. But in short, great video, worth watching, and more importantly, a brilliant step in starting to feel proud of your website by removing stuff that just does not work. That does not work. It doesn't actually help people understand what you do sufficiently and particularly when we talk about the vague homepage headlines or the meaningless subheadings. Quick question before we move on to our next segment, this business or the homepage

sliders. So in a way I kind of align them as a feature on the website, but Andy's point about, well, don't put too many, because someone's gonna spend the time watching it, and don't put the most important message at the end of your slider. Start with that. But I've seen good execution on the sliders. I've liked the 1 where actually it's just a text that is changing as opposed to the image, but where do you stand with the home page sliders? I think the data and the analytics show

that the drop off is very quick. And so the chance of people getting to slide 3 or 4 is, you know, you've lost I think 80% by slide 3. So whilst as a website owner and staff within the business want to spend time and have a look at the website and they spend time looking, a user spends less than a second and then scrolls down. So I think slides is full stop. There's got to be a real reason and an obvious indication to the user that you can slide through to look at certain

things. But if it's just there because you want to get across your 10 messages on the homepage, then it's the wrong reason, I think. And therefore, you are almost telling us that they may have a role maybe on a product specific page, maybe on the contact. Think it through. And I think sometime in web design, and that's what happens, isn't it? People just settle on

the first execution. So, many, many years ago, came up with a home page slider, and they really copied as opposed to actually put the slider where people will take time. And maybe it's the FAQ section of your website. Maybe it's the resource section of the website, but somewhere where they tend to give you a bit more time than the home page, which is 0. Something seconds, you know? Yeah, Yeah. Let's move on to our third segment, which is the website engine room.

Now in each episode, Jonny and I select an app, a software piece of kit that can make life easier as a website manager. And I just remind you that we have also recently released the ebook, the 50 essential kits that you will need for your website. And Johnny, remind us before we wrap up this episode where people can get their copy of this amazing ebook. Now what is your selection for this episode in particular? Yeah in terms of the ebook I have just put that onto the screen if people are

watching. For people that are listening, it's 90daymarketingmastery.com forward slash e hyphen book. Certainly it will be in the show notes as well, but that's our ultimate toolkit, 50 tools that we've mentioned in the first 25 episodes. But today's tool from me in episode 27, I'm going to highlight CloudFlare. So CloudFlare is designed to make everything you connect to the internet secure,

private, fast and reliable. It's a great way to be able to manage the performance and security of your website to improve the performance, to improve the security, but also to what I'm seeing in the SEO industry is some clever techniques on how you can inject certain elements onto web pages very quickly and easily, so deploying SEO strategies and techniques without having to edit the code, without having to edit the website, and without even having to speak to web developers

because as an SEO agency, we can control some of those elements within a tool like CloudFlare. So whilst it's producing websites that are faster, more reliable, more secure, it's also opened a door in terms of actually there's quite a few benefits in terms of being able to optimize and change things very easily without having to go through development teams, et cetera. So Cloudflare is my suggested app for this episode.

Listen, everyone, you may be thinking, well, I'm not technical, that's not really my area of expertise, therefore I'll pass. But I think back to my statement earlier, This is what you need to take to the next meeting with your developers or with your colleagues who understand this element. You should at least do the research that's part of being that decision maker and being control the website want to be proud of. So My selection actually came out with

something that I needed. Now emojis are not part of the written form of content. They will appear on occasion on video as well. And I will confess, Jonny, I've always been a little reluctant. I'm a late user of emojis because actually I was thinking, could there be

misunderstood? Could you try and express something by adding a visual icon but actually it doesn't match the intent, doesn't match the tone, or you're worried that maybe it could be misunderstood by different individuals, different cultures and so on. So very recently, I needed to write an article, I needed some very specific emojis. And I have mentioned in the past this platform called Yatex, Y-A-Y-Tex, Yatex. That allows you to do a number of things including emojis, but

the library is limited. And that's the point I want to make as well, Johnny. People are using AI, that's all fine. Please make sure you edit. But within that AI, there's also a very limited library of emojis because it's always the rocket ship and it's always the explosion or it's always the flames so please be

careful. But this platform is called Emojis Wiki, emojis.wiki And not only can you find a much richer selection of emojis, the 1 was looking for was based actually on a film, but also they give you the meanings behind those emojis. So it gives you a moment of reflection to go, I don't want to use that, but actually could it be misunderstood or could you simply distract and people say well there's this disconnect between the

words and the emojis. So emojis.wiki gives you a richer library to stand out from the crowd and avoid repeating the same kind of icons and emojis as everybody else, but also you get a moment of reflection because it will tell you about the likely meanings and understanding from your audience. I, emojis, whilst you were talking then, it reminded me that I do use emojis a lot. I like using emojis. They stand out.

But that certainly can be an overuse. And 1 of the things that I realized was I was doing a LinkedIn ad the other day and it got, I can't think the right word, refused is the wrong word but you understand what I'm saying, but the text that came back from LinkedIn wasn't clear at all and it was just saying that there was an issue with the content, it wasn't very clear. And I ended up on a LinkedIn

chat with 1 of their support. And it turns out that their algorithm only lets a maximum of 4 emojis in a LinkedIn advert. So irrelevant of anything else, if there's more than 4, it will automatically get disallowed or whatever the word might be. So yeah, you can end up overusing them, but I do love an emoji. And I think the biggest point there is make sure you know what an emoji means when you're using 1 to make sure that it does fit the context. So that's this week's or this episode's website

engine room. Pascal was talking about emojis.wiki and I was mentioning cloudflare.com. Let's move on to our next segment, which is the website call to action.

Now, as our regular viewers and listeners will know, this is the 1 change, the 1 adjustment that can really make a difference to your website for you, your audience, and make you feel proud of that online experience. Johnny, what is your call to action? I'm talking about structured data, schema

markup implementation. So this is about understanding that Google, Bing, all the search engines out there are robots, they're computers and they, you are relying on a computer or a robot to understand the data about your business, about your organization, about the

content on your website. If you imagine that Google is just actually just a massive Excel sheet with rows and columns, you've got the ability to be able to put your data into the correct row and the correct column to ensure that Google uses it at the most opportune time and the most optimized position. So if you want Google to feature you more on search results pages, it's about making sure your data goes into the correct column, the correct row within the

massive Excel sheets. That's the best way to view it. And you can do this by implementing something called schema, which allows you to mark the data up to say, by the way, Google, this is the official service name, the official product name, the official company address, the official name of 1 of our members of staff, this particular piece of content is about this particular subject, this is the sale price, so many different things. There's thousands of

different schemas. Just as an example, if you're a dentist, if you're an estate agent, there's particular schemas just for you to be able to expand on your services and to say to Google, by the way, this is a particular service in our dentistry. This is the opening times. There's a schema for every business and it's about using that schema to put your data into the correct row or column so that Google and Bing start highlighting you way more than you're possibly being

highlighted right now. So this week's call to action for me is schema markup implementation. What's yours, Pascal? So mine is actually linked to yours in some ways, and AI is the bridge and the glue because your recommendation is very

important. We've spoken about it over the years, but people can't delay because the way in which search results are changing and where you have different windows and different ways of things and all that, but also using AI, you have someone like Google and Bing would suggest the next question or the next set of results that you should be investigating. They will need the schema marker. But 1 thing that is obvious to me is that the search engine want to display your FAQs a lot

more than they have done in the past. So my call to action is actually to review and refresh your FAQ section. I would go as far as saying plan to have different sections, a different part of the website. So instead of having 1 almighty FAQ section, almost like in all the testimonials, kind of grumble that we had a moment to go, think about dividing all those FAQs into different parts of the website. And then the question is, have you and your colleagues answered new

questions recently? Because this is really important and it has to kind of be carried over to your FAQ session. And then is it time maybe to introduce more visual storytelling? You know, typically when you start with an FAQ to begin with is very short, so you need to expand on that or put a link to a longer

explanation of what that might be. But also, the stats are very clear that people who can stop for a moment and watch a very simple kind of almost cartoon type things with different scenes, different stages and different steps, as well as the words. It's going to be very, very important. So for me, that's my culture actually. Review and refresh your FAQs. Make sure that the

newer questions have been added. Expand on your kind of answers if need to link into others, but think about visual storytelling and all this will help with your search results as well. And of course, mark your FAQs up using schema. Make it very clear to Google that this is a particular question, this is the answer and it's related to this particular piece of content. Smashing. So what have we talked about in episode 27? Well, it's been about maximizing your

personal brand and website performance. I think We've absolutely touched on user experience as well. Thinking about, should you have your name in your domain name in your URL of your website? Could it be the way to really maximize the personal brand to create that trust, to create the personal connection? But also let's get rid of stuff that we've learned doesn't work on websites that distract, that doesn't give the right messaging, that doesn't help users instantly

understand and be able to engage. So we've definitely covered usability. And then of course we've covered lots about performance, whether that be optimizing content, whether it be optimizing speed, security, using tools like Cloudflare, or even just how to use emojis and making sure you refresh and review your FAQs and marking them up with schema. So it's been an episode all about personal branding, website performance, and for me, usability as well.

I like it. And everyone just do what we mentioned when we started, use to this episode as the agenda for your next meeting. And literally, there's 13 things to remove, you know, according to Andy from Obit Media. That's the checklist for your next meeting. And then ask the question, do we need to talk to our, you know, contacts about the Cloudflare? Do we need to talk about schema market? The answer is yes, and get that meeting in the diary.

This has been episode 27 of our new podcast series, and I'm afraid that is all we've got for today. It's the audio companion to the new 90-day website mastery program. For more information, please visit 90daymarketingmastery.com. You'll be able to book your discovery call with either myself or Pascal. We'll be back with another episode, but for now I'll leave you with a fun video and audio montage whilst you go through your notes and actions. And as Pascal says, this is

the agenda for your next meeting. Let's start feeling proud of your website. We look forward to seeing you soon. Thanks so much for watching or listening. Take care. Thanks for watching!