Transcript00:00:05 Joanna Lindenbaum
I’m Joanna Lindenbaum, a coach ritualist and all around transformation nerd who is obsessed with helping clients go deep to create more change and results with their clients. I created the coaching.00:00:20 Joanna Lindenbaum
Revolution podcast to share with you coaching skills, tips and advice as well as a deeper understanding of human behavior and.00:00:29 Joanna Lindenbaum
Of yourself so that you can do even better client work and group work. Grow your business organically.00:00:37 Joanna Lindenbaum
And know that you’re making a real difference in the world. This is about creating a revolution in the transformational industry so that more practitioners feel amazing.00:00:40Ohh.00:00:49 Joanna Lindenbaum
About what they do and so that more of our clients experience life changing shifts, let’s get started.00:01:03 Joanna Lindenbaum
Welcome back to the Coaching Revolution podcast. Today’s episode comes with exciting news. The episode is all about lessons from my new website, and you may not have even known that I have a new website because I haven’t really promoted it far and wide. It was something we’ve been doing.00:01:24 Joanna Lindenbaum
Behind the scenes, but it has been live for the last few weeks. I’m really excited.00:01:31 Joanna Lindenbaum
About it, I’d love for you to check it out. By the way, if you go to applieddepthinstitute.com, you’ll see it.00:01:41 Joanna Lindenbaum
And please let me know what you think, especially if you like it, because we worked really hard on it, so it would be great to to get that feedback and that reflection I wanted to do today’s episode on the new website because.00:01:58 Joanna Lindenbaum
As there are some lessons that I learned as we were moving through and doing the website and I wanted to share those and also I realized I’ve never shared some of the wisdom that I share with my clients on website.00:02:18 Joanna Lindenbaum
Pieces components of websites, different little tricks, some of.00:02:24 Joanna Lindenbaum
Them I’ve known forever. Some are newer to me. Over the last year and so I thought this would be a great opportunity, even though I’m not a website expert per say, I do have a lot of experience and have amassed.00:02:42 Joanna Lindenbaum
Quite a bit of knowledge over the years and.00:02:45 Joanna Lindenbaum
I thought you know what? Let me.00:02:48 Joanna Lindenbaum
Do an episode where I share a little.00:02:52 Joanna Lindenbaum
That about websites and also kind of tell you about the saga of this new website of mine. And so I’m going to start there and this is kind of the first lesson of that I want to share on the podcast today expect.00:03:12 Joanna Lindenbaum
If you’re going to create a new website, or even just do a refresh like I did, the lesson first lesson, expect it to not be smooth.00:03:24 Joanna Lindenbaum
So.00:03:24 Joanna Lindenbaum
So I will tell you behind the scenes on this new website project, it has not all been pretty or rainbows or unicorns. It has been quite the saga I thought it was going to be easy breezy, just kind of like a facelift.00:03:45 Joanna Lindenbaum
For the website, I thought it would maybe take six weeks.00:03:51 Joanna Lindenbaum
Instead, it took months and months and months in earnest. We started working on this in September, maybe October, and the website went live a month ago. So I’m recording this.00:04:10 Joanna Lindenbaum
Podcast episode, July 11th it went live middle of June. Right? So from October to middle of June.00:04:20 Joanna Lindenbaum
And I will tell you, even since it went live four or five weeks ago, we have still had so many issues that finally almost all of the issues are worked out, but.00:04:39 Joanna Lindenbaum
It’s been checkout pages randomly not working, just deciding not to work in the middle of launches. Many of you wrote in about that with the unshaken launch the fear of rejection workshop. One day the checkout page was working one day it wasn’t.00:05:00 Joanna Lindenbaum
We have had pop up boxes on pages that have all of a sudden become pesky and dysfunctional. We’ve had weird design elements that have decided to go haywire and it’s been kind of a little bit of a whack A mole game where.00:05:19 Joanna Lindenbaum
The designer would fix one element and then it would throw everything else on the site out of whack.00:05:27 Joanna Lindenbaum
And even now, where I feel proud to finally share the website, I feel like we’ve ironed out most of the kinks. There’s still some things that are acting up the blog. Mostly we’re working on it, but my point is that.00:05:46 Joanna Lindenbaum
Even with the best of intentions, and even with planning and clear contracts in place.00:05:56 Joanna Lindenbaum
A lot can go wrong when you’re moving to new technology, which we did move to one of the we had a couple of reasons for wanting to do this new website and one of the biggies was that our old software that we had been using just wasn’t working.00:06:18 Joanna Lindenbaum
For the team anymore.00:06:19 Joanna Lindenbaum
It was first of all, it was very expensive. Second of all, we were using 3 or 4 different programs for different things. Some of the stuff the team could do in house, but we also had to often use outside contractors because the technology was kind of above us.00:06:39 Joanna Lindenbaum
We moved to WordPress and divvy so that now we can basically do almost everything in House but.00:06:51 Joanna Lindenbaum
Anyway, even with the best of intentions and planning and and contract and and, you know, timelines and all of the things things can go wrong in a project like this and what I have learned a little bit the hard way, if I’m going to be honest.00:07:11 Joanna Lindenbaum
Is that the more you prepare yourself mentally and emotionally, that things could get messy and that there may be some delays because of glitches or human error because there’s a lot of details, right. But the more that you can really mentally.00:07:32 Joanna Lindenbaum
Emotionally, spiritually, prepare yourself. The more grounded and seen you are going to be as the inevitable issues in a launching a new website can come up.00:07:51 Joanna Lindenbaum
And I’ll tell you, there were a couple of times over these last months that.00:08:01 Joanna Lindenbaum
I just thought Oh my God, let’s just shut this down. It’s just not working. I can’t take another issue and.00:08:13 Joanna Lindenbaum
I’ve had to really, you know, bring myself back to regulation. What I have found to be helpful when things go wrong, when things have gone wrong, is to remind myself.00:08:30 Joanna Lindenbaum
That technology. Oh my gosh, how amazing and miraculous is technology. Right. Even though we’re working out the kit.00:08:40 Joanna Lindenbaum
Thinks even though things are still, you know might go wrong here. Might go wrong there. Wow. It’s amazing what we can really do with the technology. So anyway, that’s lesson #1. I just really wanted to normalize.00:08:55 Joanna Lindenbaum
Normalize the experience for you, because I think sometimes it’s so easy to look on social media and see leaders doing big Web website projects or whatever doing whatever and they’re only sharing the pretty. They’re only sharing the finished product.00:09:11 Joanna Lindenbaum
They’re not sharing all of the messiness behind the scenes, and I want to normalize that for you so that when you go to do your big website project or whatever big project, you don’t get upset with yourself if it’s messy.00:09:32 Joanna Lindenbaum
Alright, so from there.00:09:34 Joanna Lindenbaum
Here, let me share with you some pieces about websites. Some reasons, other reasons why we shifted my website, what we did different on this website from the old website because I think.00:09:53 Joanna Lindenbaum
It will give you a lot of.00:09:54 Joanna Lindenbaum
Insight for yourself now my website refresh. I want to be.00:10:00 Joanna Lindenbaum
Clear on this.00:10:02 Joanna Lindenbaum
Was not inspired in any way because I didn’t totally and absolutely love my old website design.00:10:15 Joanna Lindenbaum
I loved my old website design so much it was so pretty. It was so different. It was so unique. We got over the years. So many compliments on it.00:10:32 Joanna Lindenbaum
But that being said.00:10:35 Joanna Lindenbaum
The gorgeous design was actually getting in the way of my website doing some of the most important things that it needed to.00:10:45 Joanna Lindenbaum
Do.00:10:46 Joanna Lindenbaum
Because at the end of the day, a pretty website is not what you want.00:10:55 Joanna Lindenbaum
And of course, looks matter. Branding matters. You want to convey.00:11:00 Joanna Lindenbaum
A certain feeling through the design of your website, right? You want to convey your energy and the energy of your business and what people are going to feel like inside of your programs. Yes, for sure in that way is, you know, the design matters in those ways.00:11:22 Joanna Lindenbaum
But that being said, you don’t want the design to get in the way of function.00:11:31 Joanna Lindenbaum
And in fact, you want your design to really support the function of your website. And truth be told, and my old website, it wasn’t doing it nearly as well as it could be. So let me let me share with you some of the.00:11:51 Joanna Lindenbaum
The function pieces that the new website now supports. So first of all one of the and this is a question, by the way. I really want you when you think about your website, I want you to think about.00:12:05So.00:12:06 Joanna Lindenbaum
What is the function of my website? What is the purpose of my website? What do I want and need my website to do right when you can really name what it is you want and need.00:12:26 Joanna Lindenbaum
Your website to do beyond the obvious of you know to to be able to share about who you are and your programming right, we’re going to take that as a given.00:12:41 Joanna Lindenbaum
But.00:12:42 Joanna Lindenbaum
When you can get clear on what is it, what are the things that I actually want my website to do? It will help you figure out what to do on your website, what pages to have, what the pages should look like, what to include.00:13:00 Joanna Lindenbaum
So again, as a given, my website has always.00:13:07 Joanna Lindenbaum
Done a good job of sharing who I am, what I’m about, what my work is about, what I help people with, and also my values and the values of the business.00:13:23 Joanna Lindenbaum
But beyond that, I wanted my website to start to do some more for me. So #1.00:13:34 Joanna Lindenbaum
I wanted my website to better and more effectively activate visitors to opt in to my newsletter community so the old website did an OK job of this. It always had a free gift.00:13:55 Joanna Lindenbaum
A lead magnet that was promoted on most pages or some pages of the website. I always understood that it was important for the website to be a place to catch often INS to the community.00:14:13 Joanna Lindenbaum
And for those of you that don’t know the reason why this is important is because someone can visit your website, they can think you’re awesome. They can think your stuff looks great, but they might not be ready to get in touch with you right away, or to buy one of your programs right away, or sign up for one of your events right away.00:14:33 Joanna Lindenbaum
And if you don’t catch them while they’re visiting your website, if you don’t have a way of collecting their name and their e-mail, and optionally also their phone number.00:14:47 Joanna Lindenbaum
They’re likely to click off your website and never go back to it, right? But if you can collect their e-mail address now, their part of your newsletter community you can write to them, you can. You can mark it to them. You can deepen the relationship with them.00:15:08 Joanna Lindenbaum
Which is at the heart of what all marketing really is. It’s about creating relationships and deepening relationships. So anyway.00:15:20 Joanna Lindenbaum
In the new website and you’ll see when you.00:15:23 Joanna Lindenbaum
Go to it.00:15:24 Joanna Lindenbaum
There are many options, sometimes multiple options on pages. I’m not just sharing one free gift, but various free gifts throughout the entire website and at the.00:15:45 Joanna Lindenbaum
Footer or the very very bottom of every single page is also embedded in there an opportunity to opt in.00:15:54 Joanna Lindenbaum
So now we have a ton of variety. It’s throughout the pages, and we also even have a free resource page on the website that has like 5 of my different free gifts on it.00:16:11 Joanna Lindenbaum
So that was one reason why we wanted to shift the web.00:16:16 Joanna Lindenbaum
Site.00:16:18 Joanna Lindenbaum
Another reason or function piece I should say for the new website is that I wanted to make the website so irresistible.00:16:35 Joanna Lindenbaum
That visitors would get engrossed in my free content. I wanted people to step into the website.00:16:46 Joanna Lindenbaum
And just become part of my world. And for those of you that know me, you know, I share so much free content. Some of it I ask for an e-mail address in exchange, but some of it I just give away for free. My blog is extensive.00:17:08 Joanna Lindenbaum
With tons of articles that have so much value over the last 15 months, we’ve also added the podcast which you know has over at this point 50 episodes with so much.00:17:25 Joanna Lindenbaum
Such incredible free content, and I know I know this from experience, that if someone who is new to my world.00:17:38 Joanna Lindenbaum
Starts to read through and listen and get involved in my free content.00:17:47 Joanna Lindenbaum
They are so impressed because what I’m sharing is such high value. It’s so generous and it’s so helpful that they are more likely than to want to sign up for one of my programs to want.00:18:05 Joanna Lindenbaum
To work with.00:18:07 Joanna Lindenbaum
The old website wasn’t designed for people to get engrossed in the free content. Yes, I had a blog, but even the blog was not set up well for someone to be able to go from article and then to click the next article and to click the next article.00:18:29 Joanna Lindenbaum
To really kind of get engrossed in it, if you take a look at the new website.00:18:37 Joanna Lindenbaum
We’ve got lots of features in there so that you kind of don’t want to leave so.00:18:46 Joanna Lindenbaum
As an example, every blog post leads to other blog posts. Every podcast episode leads to other podcast episodes or other blog posts, so there is it’s kind of like a whole universe inside of there.00:19:06 Joanna Lindenbaum
Or it directs you to events that are going to be happening, et cetera.00:19:13 Joanna Lindenbaum
Another little bonus tip on this one to get people engrossed in your content in your world and who you are. Don’t ever let any page on your website be a dead end. This is something that I learned in the last months in in the in this process.00:19:32 Joanna Lindenbaum
With the new website I had a lot of pages on my website that never linked to another page. On the website. They were dead ends. It was like you got to the end of the page.00:19:46 Joanna Lindenbaum
And that’s it. There is nowhere to go. It wasn’t obvious that there was a next step and a next step and a next step to keep on drawing people in on the website.00:19:58 Joanna Lindenbaum
So on every single page of your website, let there let it be clickable, let there be buttons that go to other pages on the website, direct people through your copy to keep on going right to not.00:20:18 Joanna Lindenbaum
Leave.00:20:21 Joanna Lindenbaum
This is true for any page on your website, unless it’s a sales page. If it’s a sales page, then you want to keep people on that sales page and not anywhere else.00:20:34 Joanna Lindenbaum
OK. One other function piece that I want to mention that your.00:20:43 Joanna Lindenbaum
That your design should work around.00:20:48 Joanna Lindenbaum
Is.00:20:50 Joanna Lindenbaum
If you are like me and events based business and what I mean by that if, like me, you offer a lot of different events, a lot of different, not only programs paid programs, but free workshop or low cost workshop, etcetera.00:21:10 Joanna Lindenbaum
Etc.00:21:12 Joanna Lindenbaum
Then you want to make sure that you are featuring on your website your upcoming events. So my business almost monthly has new events or programs beginning and in my old website design.00:21:31 Joanna Lindenbaum
Especially because as a team we couldn’t change.00:21:37 Joanna Lindenbaum
The old website easily ourselves, we always had to kind of go out of house to add new things. We weren’t regularly adding to the main website about our upcoming events and that was losing me.00:21:56 Joanna Lindenbaum
Business, you know quite frankly, because we had all of this amazing stuff that people could only find about out about if they were on my newsletter list already or they heard about it on social media.00:22:11 Joanna Lindenbaum
Or through an ad. But if they just went to the website itself, they wouldn’t have necessarily seen all of the events. Or if they did see some of the events, it wasn’t apparent.00:22:27 Joanna Lindenbaum
Now.00:22:29 Joanna Lindenbaum
My new, first of all, my new homepage features upcoming events, so every time we have new events that’s going to change on the homepage with a button to the event.00:22:41 Joanna Lindenbaum
And we also added a separate page in the website that’s an upcoming events page and really excited about all of this.00:22:54 Joanna Lindenbaum
All right. A couple other things I wanted to share for today. We could go on and on for hours about websites and what to do, but 2, two more things I wanted to share about my journey with this new website. One is one of the hardest things for me.00:23:15 Joanna Lindenbaum
But it was a big goal for this website was to cut down on copy and this is something I recommend. Try to write less instead of more. And of course it’s hysterical that I.00:23:35 Joanna Lindenbaum
I’m sharing this wisdom and I share it over and over with clients because if you know me, you know I love my words, I am a talker, I am a writer. I like to use a lot of words.00:23:49 Joanna Lindenbaum
But that being said, too many words is overwhelming to people and.00:23:59 Joanna Lindenbaum
So when you go to the new website, even though there’s more words on it than many other websites, I am telling you, I swear to you, what you see is the net result of me editing down and editing down and editing down and really trying to get to the core of my message.00:24:19 Joanna Lindenbaum
Over and over.00:24:20 Joanna Lindenbaum
And what I wanted to say, so if you know you’ve got a lot, a lot of words on your website or your sales pages, it is worthwhile to edit.00:24:33 Joanna Lindenbaum
Finally, last little tip for today.00:24:40 Joanna Lindenbaum
My new website has way more pictures of me.00:24:49 Joanna Lindenbaum
Then I feel comfortable.00:24:51 Joanna Lindenbaum
Yeah, so my old website, I don’t know, maybe had like 2 pictures total of me on the whole thing.00:25:01 Joanna Lindenbaum
The new website has at least one picture of me on, I think almost every single page and on some of the pages it has multiple pictures of me and truly I I this has was a stretch.00:25:20 Joanna Lindenbaum
For me, #1 because I’m not a huge fan of pictures of myself. I’m just being honest.00:25:27 Joanna Lindenbaum
And also because I never wanted my website to be about me, even the name of my business applied depth Institute versus having the name of my business be my name. I want it to be about the learning. I want it to be about the training. I don’t want it to be about me.00:25:47 Joanna Lindenbaum
The truth is that at the end of the day.00:25:51 Joanna Lindenbaum
One of the many reasons that people purchase my programs is because they feel connected to me, whether they’ve met me or not, whether we’ve had a conversation together or not.00:26:04 Joanna Lindenbaum
They need to feel connected to me, and if they don’t have too many visuals of me in mind then it’s harder for them to feel connected. It’s harder for them to really feel my energy, my personality.00:26:19 Joanna Lindenbaum
My values all of the things, so if you are like me and you’re like, oh, no, I don’t love pictures of myself, I get it. And I really want to encourage you to put a couple more pictures of yourself on your website. And actually, my plan had been to.00:26:40 Joanna Lindenbaum
To get completely new photos because I don’t like photo shoots so much that my my photos are about 5 years old and so I figured website refresh, it’s a good time to get new photos. I never quite ended up getting around to that.00:26:57 Joanna Lindenbaum
That just because of my personal life, my mother passing away all at the same time, all of that. But I do hope over the next year to even get brand new photos of me.00:27:12 Joanna Lindenbaum
OK, so I’m going to leave it at this for now. I hope that some of these tips were helpful. I hope that they are inspiring you to think about your website in some different ways.00:27:29 Joanna Lindenbaum
Is, as always. Let me know if you liked this episode. Let me know what was helpful. Let me know what you think of the new website. Let me know if you’re working on your website and I hope that we connect again soon.
