Hey, welcome to the e-commerce alley podcast, where we believe the great brands are built on passionate leadership, smart operations, and of course, powerful marketing. I am your host, Josh coffee. And today we have the guest of honor, good entrepreneur and friend of mine, John Saunders, where we're gonna be talking about websites and we're gonna be talking about websites because this is what we believe. The first pillar in the foundation of any successful e-commerce business is.
So without further ado, ladies and gentlemen, we have the wonderful John Saunders. Let's do this. Josh. What is going on, man? I hope everybody as well. I'm excited to provide value to the community's. So Let's do it. Let's do it. So if anyone has never followed John, I'm gonna give a little introduction here. So we have been friends for, I feel like five years or six years maybe online. Yeah. It's been a while. Yeah, it's been a while. Um, thank you,
man. So John owns five, four digital, which is his agency and just, is it, uh, he owns black illustrations, which they sell digital illustrations, which is a, we'll talk a little bit about that. He owns five, four investments. So he's investing in real estate in property. He is an author of an amazing book and he also owned urban wallet, which I believe you sold. Right? I did, I did. It was acquired a couple months ago. Okay. That's awesome. How did that feel?
Was that like your first business that you built and sold. It actually wasn't man, you know, there's a, there's a, a small community of, they call it micro acquisitions where you can build up an e-commerce store and you don't have to have a ton of sales. Right? You can have five figure sales and you can have a micro acquisition where a company will reach out. You can put it on a platform and they'll essentially buy that company out from
you. And the main reason I did it was because I just had a lot of different businesses on my plate. I wanted to really alleviate some of that stress. So I figured I can, you know, build up this business, sell it, and then I can focus my efforts on the main core things that I'm working on. Yeah. That, so like, I'm curious, like what platform or what marketplace had you listed on? Yeah, so that one, there's a couple
marketplaces that I like. Uh, and the main reasons being is they have a different, uh, audience. So one is Shopify marketplace mm-hmm . So Shopify actually has its own marketplace where you store and it'll pull the data. So it'll pull Google analytics, it'll pull sales and it'll aggregate that data into a landing page where you can sell that business. So I actually sold that one through. Um, and, and then there's also Flippa, which is another platform. That's great.
Again with Flippa sometimes you get a little bit of, uh, uh, characters that are, that are, that might not wanna buy a business, but more so wanna learn more about it. And so I, I prefer the Shopify exchange platform. Mm-hmm you have Flippa and then you have direct sales, right? So with urban wallet, it was a direct sale through a Facebook group. So I was in the Facebook group. I said, Hey, my business has this amount of sales.
I'm looking to get acquired because I just don't have time to run it and anybody in interested. And so one of the team members in that group, her name is Tiffany Che. She she's the founder of the budget Misa, which she's like a financial literacy mobile mm-hmm . And she was like, this would be great for my portfolio. We talked about it went into escrow and then a couple weeks later the company was migrated to her. And one of the big selling points was building systems and operating than that
business. Mm-hmm to make it easier for her to take. It over. And, and if one thing I do know about, um, you is that , I don't know anyone else who's more qualified to talk John has a, he has a course on standard operating procedures and all I see on your Instagram, your stories. And I just see raving reviews about that. Um, and, and, and you're, you're so process oriented, which I'm not. So I have to say, I admire that. , I, I admire that.
Um, and, and, and that makes, so it makes so much sense that you were able to transition that because like, I don't know any businesses that have sold, they don't have those, those pieces in place. You have to have that. It can't do, man. Yeah. So like, I I'm, I'm just curious, I know this, this isn't website stuff we'll get to that, but, but overall, like how did from a sales standpoint of your business, uh, like what was the multipl like, how does that work with like a
multiplier on revenue? Is it like, what kind of model did you do as far as valuation? It's usually around 12 X of what you're making, uh, net basically for the year, right. Or you can stagger it out to two to three years based on what it's, what the allocation is, but that's usually what you're looking at, like a 12 year kind of thing, because it was a small business. It was probably doing four to six K in revenue a month. It wasn't a big business.
So just about that 12 X, and you'll usually get your number. That's amazing. That's amazing. Um, what, what now, what I wanna do is I wanna transition here, but before we do, I have John's book right here. Oh my gosh. That's. Wow. Yeah. I, I think I got this, I got this right. When you released it. When did you, was this two years ago or a year ago? Yeah, man. It might be like almost
three years now almost. Wow. So we go, we do go back a little bit, but his John's book is called a step by step guide to building wealth from $1. And I have to say, so there was, when I read books, I have an app called Bookley and I take notes as I go of like key phrases, things that I like. And then at any point I can reference those and it'll have the pay age in the quote. And so I have this from when I read this three years ago, I had my notes on my phone with that app.
And I pulled up because there was one point that I, that I pulled out in here that perfectly transitions into this. And you said, according to a 2016 article in Bloomberg, there are 1700 millionaires minted every single day. And you said, so it's possible for anyone to create substantial financial wealth, but more often than not simply identifying the appropriate things to do can seem like an insurmountable first
step. And I think that that's, that is, that leads right into what we're gonna talk about because of the lot of people don't know where to start or the appropriate things to do first. And I'm, I can't believe I took that note because, uh, and I still had it because it's so I'm. Dude, I'm honored. . It's so tough. It's so relevant because your, we there's a lot of things you can do, but most people will just get their website out there not really put a lot of thought
behind it. And then what I see, because I'm a marketer is on the marketing front marketing isn't as impactful. If your website isn't powerful or your website isn't built and prepared, like you can have, you could open the front, the flood gates, but if the back door's open, everything's just gonna be going out and nothing's gonna be staying in. A hundred percent, a hundred percent. It's um, it's one of those things where, you know, for example, we had a, we had a website about a year ago.
It was solid. You know, it wasn't, it wasn't terrible. And we hadn't allocated a lot of time to our internal business because we were working on client projects, but I made it a point to say, Hey, team, let's work on revamping our purse, our brand that's given it more of an elevated feel. We want to be able to target larger clientele and, and book bigger business. And so that's what we tailored the brand toward. We did competitive analysis.
We looked at other agencies in the space that were at the price point we wanted to be at. And we emulated a lot of that. Now, great thing is we already had the systems we already providing that high quality, these service, but the website wasn't reflective of that. Once we made that transition, we literally saw a, a 15% uptake in lead gen. We were able to charge a higher premium because clients were seeing the projects that we were working on and the site was reflective of that. Right.
We had case studies that showed them, oh, wow. They took this website here and they brought it here. And that website showcased directly on our agency site. So it, I really wanna make a point that people understand that your website is the first place people go. It's your first impression. Think of it as like a digital storefront. That's gonna provide people with an understanding of what you do and if they wanna collaborate and work with you.
Yeah. Yeah. And I, and I think one thing that I, I actually just had this conversation. We have a max profits membership, um, coaching program. And we, I was talking with, uh, I was talking with somebody yesterday in a session and we were talking about pricing and, and I had to explain, like with pricing, there are two ways to price in the e-commerce world. I believe you price based on the market.
So there's a market based pricing, or you can price your business based on the value that you provide or the emotions that you elicit. And that's really important because there's not a lot of product. You'll see products that are a hundred dollars, but the same product will sell for 9 99 on another platform. And so those people are the people at 9 99 are competing on the market, but the other people, you have to emulate what you sell.
Like if you just use a basic template or you use a website, you don't give thought to the color, you don't give thought to the typography, but you're trying to sell a luxury product or something at a higher price point than others. That may, it makes so much sense. Like you, it doesn't absolutely there's disconnect. Absolutely. There's a book. Uh, I think his name is Blair elves or NS called the win without pitching manifesto. I would implore anyone listening to check that book out.
It changed my entire like mindset on pricing and, and going towards that value based pricing side, uh, of the business. So definitely check that. Out. And it's called the wind without what it's. Called the wind without pitching manifesto. It's like, you can read it in the afternoon. It's like super. Short. Awesome. Mind you, I just jotted that down. We'll include, make sure we include that in our show notes with a link to that,
as well as John's book. I think that, I think that, um, any entrepreneur they're, they're out to leave a legacy they're out to build wealth and there's so much more to it than just building a single business. I think that you need to look to diversify when it comes to wealth building. You know that I know, I agree. I've, I've ventured into real estate just like you. And I've seen the light to a lot of those things. Yes. Man. It is. It is crazy.
Cool. So to do a, we're going to be talking about websites. We're gonna talk a little bit about branding. And the reason John is our official first guest, because I don't believe that anybody else is more qualified to talk about this. In fact, anytime somebody comes to our agency flight media and they say, and we do market digital marketing, and they say, Hey, we need to do a website.
We need to do a, whatever that kind of design is, is I'm like, go talk to John because John designs, gorgeous websites. Not that our team can't do it, you know, we like to specialize, but I think that John does it better than anybody. His processes are. Great. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, no problem, man. We're honored, man. You know, we, we really work hard to, to make sure our products are up there. So. Thank you. Yeah, of course, of course.
So we're gonna gonna start with websites because if you, if you've watched the first few episodes, anyone who's listening, if you, if you've, or if you listen to the first few episodes, uh, we've been talking about the marketing operating system, the MOS, and there are three pillars to that. And in order to grow in order to have sales, the first piece as a business is you have to have your website in place.
And once you have your website in place, then you look at com uh, funnels and communication, and then you look at traffic and those are our three pillars, just as kind of a brief recap. And so today, John and I are gonna be talking about, uh, about websites, the importance of them, how to improve, uh, maybe some conversions and any other stuff that we dive into, uh, because your website is the hub.
And like, John was just saying, if you don't pay attention to that, you just write it off and you say, Hey, I checked the box, I have a website. It's not going to perform as well when you're putting dollars behind the marketing and when you're really trying to grow. And so I'm excited John, to talk about this, let's do it. Let's dive in. So, okay, cool. So let's dive into this. I'm curious, what are a few components?
Like if you got to put together the perfect website and um, and you're like, Hey, I would never build a website without at least these X amount of components. Like what would those or those, I don't know if it's components or elements, what you would call them, but what are a few, those key elements of the perfect website? Got it.
Got it. Yeah. So, so to preface that we work with a lot of startups and a lot of times startups are they're, they're either beginning from scratch or they have a brand out there. They started to get some clientele and now they need to refresh and really have a website that converts. And so one of the most important components and a outside of this is consistent branding, design, and aesthetics.
So you wanna make sure that your color palette, your typography, your overall look and feel is consistent from page to page, because what happens is it instills a, a likeness in people where anytime they see your brand, they know that that color and that that design is attributed to what you provide and what it does is it, it creates continuity in their mind. Whenever they see your content, they know it's gonna be a
high caliber of branding. Now, another piece is clear and concise calls to action. So as soon as you get to that website, you need to have an experience where you have an initial tagline, which essentially provides a unique selling process You need to have a bold button or call to action that either goes to a contact form or a download or something that's going to cause them to take action on your website. Now you can have that in both the navigation.
And you also wanna have that above the fold before you start to scroll. So essentially anytime someone visit your website, they need to make, be able to make an informed decision before they even scroll. They need to understand what you do and how they can reach out also, uh, E easy to find content and consistent copy copy across your website should be concise. Uh, your H ones or your headlines should be quick and easy to understand your P shouldn't be too detailed and descriptive.
Remember when you're going online and you want people to visit, you need to have your content be at a third grade level, meaning that content needs to be easily readable by clients of all types. Now it depends on your product, but ultimately you want to be able to have that type of readability so you can reach the broadest audience. So. A couple more, I was, I was gonna hop in there. So yeah, you know, it's funny, you mentioned that, um, messaging and the clarity of your
messaging is important. You said, right with a third grade level. It's funny, you said that because I was actually watching a, uh, we were at a, we were, we were our, our whole team attended ad con, or I'm sorry, E eCom world. Um, and in e-com world, uh, we were, I for forget who was doing the training, it was like Harmon brothers, or I forget who it was and. What they did. Yeah. Their content is insane.
Yeah. They have unbelievable content. So, so I always like to emulate the people that are really winning or doing what I want to do. And so I was watching one of the trainings and in it, he was breaking down, they did a, their team built this software, this thing to analyze all their different ads. And they analyzed the copy. They analyzed the creatives, they analyzed the videos, they analyze all these different things for lengths and all these things.
But the most interesting thing that I thought was funny was he's he, they found that when their, when their copy reading level excelled beyond seventh grade, their conversions dropped 14%. Wow. And I was like, that's so funny. And so he said, basically, he's like, if you're not writing for sixth graders or below, you're losing a ton of money. And I thought that was really interesting. And I know I wrote that down and he said, and, uh, he's like regard us to what you think
of Trump. He's like, think about this. He's like Trump's language and how he talked was not super intelligent. A lot of the posts, he's not that wasn't intelligence, but it was just so like basic he's like, so it was basic. English language. Yeah. So talk on a Trump level, minus the crash, crash this minus the language and the vulgarity, you know, he's like, they knew it. They knew that P people in their
demographic weren't strong readers. And, and so I thought that, or didn't have a strong reading level. I thought that was very interesting. So that that's validating. No, definitely. Yeah. And it helps, man, because then anyone can come to your site and understand what you do and what you provide and be able to make an informed decision on if they want to collaborate with you as well. I I'd say a couple things one, and I can't stress this in the of, uh, social proof. Social proof is huge.
I can say this with absolute certainty because we had a client like a couple weeks ago while they were a prospect. And usually they like to ask for references. They visited our site. They saw that we had a hundred plus, uh, reviews on Google. They said, you know, usually we asked for references, but we're not gonna do it this time because we saw that you already had all these reviews. We saw your case studies and the things that you created. So we're going to go ahead and collaborate with you.
So what social proof will do is it'll expedite that process of them, trying to understand if your product is a good fit, and if people have worked you prior. So it's a huge, huge, huge thing to have on your site, whether it's testimonials and text, form video, it's crucial. Um, and if you're a SaaS product, I, I can't tell you how many times I've seen SaaS product websites that have no product examples. Like they don't show the dashboard.
They don't show the inside workings of the SaaS product and they don't show what the end result is because ultimately everyone can have a dashboard, right. But the, ultimately you wanna find out what the main, um, how it's going to help that individual in the future. And, uh, those are just some kind of core components a website should have.
And just to reiterate branding clear, concise calls to action, easy to find content and consistent copy social proof for SaaS products, you know, make sure you have examples. And then of course, you know, calls to action above the fold. So people can make an informed decision before they start to scroll. Uh, I tho those are amazing. Um, because although we don't do, we used to do design and stuff, we haven't done it in a while now. Um, I see those, those done improperly all the time.
I'd probably say one of the most impactful ones. And I'll just kind of speak from marketing standpoint. And, and like when, especially with app paid advertising is social proof and reviews on products, so crucial to conversion, but it feels what feels like it's what I see is most people don't pay a lot of attention to that. They don't have a process for getting a review use on products that people
purchase. And, and it's so true. Like if you went to, what did I just, oh, I just bought something on Amazon. I forget what it, I buy so much stuff on Amazon. I forget. I know man, every day it's Amazon, every delivery, literally every day to my office. It's same. It's so bad. Like I bought, like I bought something, I could've went to like the store to buy it. And it was probably like five bucks
more. I'm like, you know what, I'm just gonna get it in here because I'm not gonna go to the store in like the next three days, let just buy. It was like a squeegee for like a shower or something like that. Like an extra it's terrible. Terrible, man. It's so true. And, and when you see that there's 4,000 572, 4 and a half star reviews on a product, or you see a product that has zero reviews, you're gonna go with a product that has those reviews. Absolutely.
That I would say out of all of those, that's probably one of the largest like mistakes I see people make is not invest time or resource or build a plan for getting that those. Reviews. And it's also, you know, one, two it's it's low hanging fruit and it's a, um, it differentiates you from the competition. You know, one example with Google reviews, a lot of businesses don't use Google, Google review. So you could potentially get all your reviews funneled to a platform like Google
reviews. And now you're showing up in the top results. If there's five agencies, one has 10 reviews. One has 200, you're most likely gonna go with that one, even if it is a smaller agency. So again, man, just like you said, in that comparative sense, you're gonna go with the agency that has more reviews and more social proof, um, in that situation. Yeah. No, and that, that makes complete sense. And I think another, another thing that you said is,
is easy to find content. I mean, I can't tell how many times you're looking at a navigation bar and you can't get to where you want to go. Like in the e-commerce in the e-commerce space. Like if you're trying to, if you wanna showcase your collections, you don't wanna just have one general shop page and then have they have to dive through to find all the collections. You need to have those in a, in a, in a large nav that at least breaks down the different collections so people can
get there. Um, I think that's inconsistent copy too. Um, tons of inconsistency across the board. And I think that simplified messaging is simplified messaging, easy to find con you know, it's funny because like it's so basic and you know, you see this all the time, but like, I think so often in our business is when we're in it.
We don't think from that customer standpoint, you know, we don't think from the per I know what I mean by when I'm saying this, I know where these product collections are. I know that I have 10,000 sales on this product, but two reviews. Like I know that, but we have to remember it. I, I think that people forget and I'm guilty of this that nobody else knows and they don't give a, they don't give a crap unless they see it. . A hundred percent. Yeah. Cool. So, um, so I, I'm curious.
So if I'm looking and I love those so perfect elements, and this might be a little bit of an overlap, but those are elements everybody needs. And if you were to say, what would, and maybe improve out of those, like of those things, like what would improve actual, like relate to sales? What would you say? Like the top three were, if you just out of those. Four or five correlation to sales, like instantaneous, definitely social proof.
That's one, some type of reviews, testimonials, and then having a very like simplified form or call to action would probably be the top two. So for example, if it's a, um, like we're working on the client right now, they have a Chrome extension. So their highest form of conversion is someone clicking get started and downloading the extension. So making that process as easy as possible.
So essentially having a button that you click, it takes you straight to the extension to download that's the, the easiest process there. You could also have potentially a landing page that you're using for specific ads that go directly to the extension. But those two things, testimonials social proof and calls to action that are clear and concise would definitely be those
top. Okay. Direct sales. Okay. And, and like how much from an E if I have an e-commerce store and I have like a product page, I think that I would say 87% of product pages I ever look at are the product image, the added card in the headline, a little description, and then maybe reviews if they remember it. Um. Yeah. I, I think the, the perfect PDP, your product description page would be one at the top. You've got your bread, you've got the title. Right, right. Under that you have breadcrumbs.
So if you are in, let's say women's tops that breadcrumb would look like t-shirts women tops. So that way you can kind of go back through those need to, to find other products. So having that be prominent under that, on your left hand side, vivid image, usually a square image. Uh, usually it's going to be like just a t-shirt then a of that. You've got a brief description, maybe some, uh, some, some social proof like images or, or, or, or, um, I'm sorry,
or badges. And then under that you wanna have add to cart, but then you also wanna have buy-in now, too, because sometimes people are coming in, they get one product, they click buy it. Now it'll take them straight to checkout. Um, instead of just adding that to the cart under that you wanna have a more detailed description for SEO purposes, um, or you wanna,
and you wanna have testimonials. So testimonials on that page, essentially, I'd probably put that above the fold, just because it it'll show before you start to scroll and that'll pretty much take oh, and then of course, like related products, right under that. So that's kind of the architecture of, of the perfect like product description page that would help in regards to conversions. Is there like a set amount, if you, if you were to put like a range from like a, an imagery standpoint, like
the, how many images? Cause, cause some people just have one product image and, or maybe just two, but like what's a good range to shoot for as far as how many product images to have. Have. I don't, I don't have any data on that, but I would recommend between three to five, depending on the product type. Right. I mean, if it's a t-shirt, there's only so many ways you can show a t-shirt. Yeah. But I think showing what that shirt looks like without any background.
So like a P and G transparent background, a lifestyle photo of someone wearing it and then potentially maybe a, a close up photo. Maybe if it's like a tri blend material or something, you wanna see something like that. I love that. I love that. Um, yeah, that's fantastic, man. Uh, so these,
these are all things guys. You need, you need to pay attention to I, the bread crumbs, uh, make sure you invest in your product pages, especially if you're running paid ads or, but before we continue you, I want to invite anybody who is listening to this. If you're an eCommerce business owner and you want to grow your business and you want to have accountability, you want to have a live streams, uh, every single week and you wanna get access to exclusive content that nobody else gets access to.
Then I highly recommend you join the eCommerce alley Facebook group. It's completely free, no cost to you. All you need to do is go to Ali podcast.com/group. And that will take you, uh, to the page you need in order to sign up, you'll get access to live streams. And again, a ton of things that will help you grow your revenue and build a business that really matters. Cool,
cool cools. So, so we're, we're, we're, we, we've kind of covered a few things to in improve the different sales, improve our websites and what we're doing. I'm curious though, is there something that people do on a website that makes you just like cringe inside? Cuz this happens to me all the time. Like I see marketing stuff and I'm just like, oh, why would you do that? And from marketing standpoint, no. Absolutely. There's there's a few men. One is like unclear messaging.
So if I come to your website and I, I have to read like one tagline, two paragraphs to understand what you do. That's, that's a huge red flag, you know, red flag, I'd say small text, like text, that's difficult to read, especially for folks that, you know, need bigger text can be a problem. Also like those cheesy kind of Photoshop picks of the guy with his thumbs up with the clear background, like those picks, oh man, I'm cringing. I'm cringing right now for them. Okay.
And then, uh, the last thing would be like make, when it's difficult to find what I'm looking for. Like there's so many opportunities to provide, you know, you got the foot menu, you got a main navigation, you have the page to provide your clientele with an easy way to get to where they need to go. If it's hard to find what I'm looking for. That's usually a turnoff also.
Yeah. Wow. Yeah. I, and I think another thing too is like the cheesy guy, or even like just stock photos that like a lot of people do drop shipping or they'll do print on demand or whatever that is. And even in those business models, like order the shirt, have them. Shirt into your own shoe. Yeah. Ship them. And do your own shoe. Like it's the bare minimum you could do.
Like if you're gonna drop ship or you're gonna do print on demand or whatever that might be, or maybe someone does fulfillment and you don't house anything at the bare minimum, do some kind of a lifestyle shoot. Yeah. Or, or if you're like, listen, you know, this is I'm, I'm trying this shop. I'm trying to keep my budget low. You can use a website, like place it.net place. It actually the, the, the photos look great. The designs look awesome.
And that could be another alternative for people that maybe can't do a photo shoot, but I always recommend doing a shoot when you can, because then you can cultivate the images and you can create the style that you want based on your ideal clientele. Yeah. Yeah. No, that, that's fantastic. I've never actually heard of that website either. So yeah. Yeah. Check it out. You can impose your design on t-shirts and it adds like the wrinkles and everything it's really well done, man.
I usually first store that I built that I, that I sold was, which was a travel brand, um, called love travel, but that's what we did. We used those, those images, but check out place it.net man, really great tool. And it works really well. That's awesome. That's pretty crazy how well it works. Well, I'll, I'll include a link in the show us to that. That's that's fantastic.
Um, so I'm, I'm curious with whenever we're creating ad campaigns, like one thing I always say is don't re reinvent the wheel model, the big dogs model, the people that have one already, or the people that are where you want to be model after them. So from like a design standpoint, anytime you're doing design, like, do you model after other P people, do you get, like, we get ad inspiration, we'll go to the ads, library and Facebook, and we gather inspiration. Like, what does that look like from
a design standpoint? Yeah. So what we do, so as you know, 'em about process. So when we're doing our web design process, course we'll usually have a brand discovery with the client. Usually that's around a 60 to 90 minute session where we ask questions like, Hey, what are your main value? What's your mission? What, how what's your team member? Who are your primary competitors in the space that are doing really well and what are they doing well and what are they not doing so well?
And so we list that out and then we'll run a competitive analysis. And so we'll create a, a design art board. And essentially we use Figma, which is, uh, you know, a prototyping platform where we'll add screen shots of websites that perform specific tasks really well. And then we'll add comments and notes as a team on components that could work well for our buildout mm-hmm . And so we share that with the client, we let them know like, Hey, this competitor is doing this really
well. I think we can emulate this and it, and it goes back to what you said. You don't have to reinvent the wheel. There's literally a ton of data out there that you can leverage from, from your competitors to, to improve your product. It's really coming down to, okay. What makes my product unique from this competitor and leveraging that to really increase sales and create a website
that works works really well. So again, you don't have to reinvent the wheel, but introducing a unique selling proposition to an existing marketplace can really help your business improve. Do you now, do you have like a, a, like how many, uh, do you go look at like five different sites and gather like element like elements of inspiration. Like, oh, I really like this to review use section. I really like this above
the fold section. Like, do you like kind of slice and dice things you like, or do you just go off like one website? Exactly. So we'll do we'll do man. We had one site that we just finished. We had like 26 or 27 screens that we had pulled. Wow. Yeah. And we, and we look at different components and pieces that would work in the design for the client. And we use that to build out the, um, the low fidelity wire frame, which essentially looks like the website blueprint.
So it looks like the website it's laid out, it's structured. It just doesn't have images, color, you know, some of the copy, but it has the overall structure of the site and what it's going to look like.
And it's really helpful, especially in this space because we'll look at competitors in this space that work really well for the example, a SaaS product like Stripe, we'll look at the Stripe website and see the performance that in FinTech we'll look at the different subpages that they have their knowledge base and really, um, be able to take ideas and
components from what they're doing. You. Know, it's funny cuz like I, um, Gary V will say this and Gary's a great guy, but I hear a lot of people there's like this whole, I don't know, you know how there's sometimes like one liners and sticks and people that people will say and do. Uh, just because it sounds cool. Like one of the things that, um, that I hear people say all the time is like, well, I'm not worried about my competition. I'm not, I'm worried about me.
I'm gonna do me. I'm gonna do my business. And to me I'm just like, that's so dumb. Like why would you, why would you not at least to take like one hour, one hour of your time to go say, okay, what, how can I research? How can I study do some R and D and figure out what are the other guys doing? Because if, for example, like in the ad world, like I can go to Facebook ads library, and I can look at five competitors, see the ads are running and I'll
scroll to the bottom. I'll say, okay, this one has been running since like April 13th of like 2019, this is probably a profitable ad. Or they would not have been running it this long. So I should probably consider something like this. Yeah. It's it's it's true, man. It's and yeah. You know, I got my mixed feelings with Gary man. Sometimes he's great.
Sometimes he's just, uh, kind of annoying, but my, my thing with my thing with that is it's, it's, it's one of those things where I feel like in regards to your competition, don't get caught up with what they're doing. Mm-hmm like you said, but be able to leverage what's going on in the marketplace. So you wanna be able to know what's going on, know what trends are popular, know what businesses are performing well, because ultimately in our industry you can get left behind quick. Yeah.
You know what I mean? Facebook makes one algorithm change. Boom. Now you're like, okay, what do I do with this? And web design? There's a new platform or CMS that folks are using, or maybe there's a new interactive, you know, something with web 3.0, so there's so many different components and things going on. It's not necessarily like looking at your competitors and, and you know, losing sleep over what they're doing.
But being able to look at the space and leverage that in, in the projects and things that you're working on to grow and, and develop, you know, that's why I'm always reading books. I'm always taking courses. Cause I wanna make sure that I'm staying ahead of the curve so that we can provide a stellar product for our clients, you know, the paying a premium. So we wanna make sure that they're, they're provided Yeah. So I think you have a good refined statement is study trends, study.
What's working, know what people are dealing, but don't be so consumed by it that you feel that imposter, like you can't beat it or you don't focus on yourself. Exactly. I, I, I think that's wonderful, man. So like when you go to do this research and you kind of gather inspiration, like, are there any, do you just like start Googling stuff or are there like websites that you gather this from? Like where do you start? Yeah.
So a few ways, one, we'll take the competitive list from clients and start to look at the websites that they recommended. We'll also do our own research know just through Google search and find similar websites. Then we'll use, uh, a couple websites like LAA ninja, and one page love where these websites you can visit. Right? And it's basically an aggregate of a whole bunch of different websites and you can actually organize by
categories. So if I'm like, okay, I wanna look at SaaS product websites and to have the, a blue color palette, I can click it. And then it'll show me all those websites. Now the biggest difference between that and what a normal designer will tell you is, oh, I just go on dribble to find inspiration. And dribble is awesome. Mm-hmm you have beautiful designers that are making that are creating stellar work. The only issue with that a lot of time,
that's just rooted in design. It's not rooted in, in Google analytics. It's not rooted in research. It's just like, Hey, I made this website. Cause it looks awesome, but it's not really rooted in, okay, what's the user experience going to be? Is this interface what people are looking for? And so by looking at websites like one page love and mm-hmm , um, and lap of ninja, you're looking at real live sites that are out there pulling that data and actually functioning in a live environment.
That I actually LAA ninja sounded really interesting. So I just searched this um, and lap it's lapa.ninja is the website. And I just literally went in and I looked at designs and I just selected e-commerce and there are the best 586 X e-commerce landing page examples. So simple, like that's what a, what a great hack. I, I think we'll probably bookmark this so we could send this to people. Uh, because again, it's great.
It took me like John telling me where to go and it took me 30 seconds to find, okay, here are 586 examples. I can come in here and I could say, okay, what is re relevant to my brand? What could maybe I IP or what kind of element could I snag for my product display page or my homepage? That's that's awesome. Exactly. Awesome. So, um, what I wanna do, what I would love to close with and John, thank you so much for hanging out here, Matt. Of course, of course. Thank you course.
What I wanna do is if there was one piece of advice you could just kind of impart bestow upon everybody listening, what would that be? For me, it would be provide content selflessly and consistency consistently. Let me start that over.
provide content selflessly and consistently main reason being is I feel like one of the biggest pieces of our success as an agency is just being transparent with people, showing them our process, showing them, Hey, this is how we got from a to Z with this project, being able to take our operating procedures and share them with businesses, other agency owners and other entrepreneurs. I think what's that what that's done is it's instilled us as a thought leader in
the space. So when people are looking for web design and looking for branding, we come up, okay, we gotta work with five, four digital with John and his team, because I feel like that's one of the most important aspects of building the business and driving lead for though. And a lot of folks will look at me and be like, oh, you know, you're providing too much content for free. It takes too much time to create it, but man, it compounds over time.
And the more consistently you're creating that free content for your audience, the more brand ambassadors you're creating and people that are talking about you in rooms that you're not
even in. So that's probably you know, provide content and don't always look for like that quick get back or, or, or what am I getting out of it, think of I'm providing value to my audience and you know, it'll be reciprocated one day, but I, I wanna make sure that I'm getting all this outta my head and onto paper so people can, you know, save time. I, I love that, man. I think, I think that's so important.
And one thing I do know, actually the reason I know that you're so good in design is because you do show your work and you do that all the time. So if nobody follows you on, on, on Instagram, you have to go follow him, um, on Instagram, as John D. Saunders on Instagram. But, um, he does like show, show your work. And so you can see all the designs that John does and then also he, you post so and so much valuable stuff. You're talking tips,
you're talking tools. You're, there's just so much an abundance of content that you do that I get ideas and I get our team ideas and I'll like, oh, that's awesome. Our, our whole, uh, company and our whole team are on an Instagram group. And so I will just DM ideas from you and from other things I see. But you're one of those resources when I think of design, I think like John Saunders and so, um, wow. Wow. That's awesome then. Wow. I, I, I love it, man.
Like you're definitely building something meaningful and I think you're right. Like if you want to, uh, really build a brand that is worth building and that is sustainable, you have to provide that content. You have to be selfless and you have to be consistent in that. Um, I couldn't agree more with that. So, well, we're gonna do, is everybody listening? We are going to have the show notes for this episode on Ali podcast.com.
You can connect with John on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter at John D. Saunders, Instagram, like I said, is my favorite. Um, you can follow him on YouTube, but that is the five, four digital. And you can also learn about more about him in the portfolio of brands that he owns by going to John D saunder.co. You have been listening to the e-commerce Ali podcast. You can find shows, show notes on this Ali podcast.com and please subscribe via email to get exclusive of access to our weekly
live sessions. Tons of great content. So on behalf of the entire team ATY media, and on behalf of John, we wanna say, thank you for listening and for making the world a better place with your products. We will see you soon.