Give me 11 minutes and I’ll make your website 70% better

Give me your next minutes and I'm going to make your website 70% better by sharing these six rules. Now, these six rules separate amateur websites from professional money-making machines. And most of these things I'm going to mention won't cost you any money to fix, and you'll be able to get started with it today, right now, as you watch this video. But I'm afraid I can only promise you a 70% improvement to your website. I'm not an egoomaniac or anything.

I'm just very good at my job. I'm also very humble. The biggest lie that you've been told about your website is that all you have to do is throw it online and you're done. Job finished. Tick the box.

That is to be honest. It's just bollocks, mate. What he said. As of right now today, everything is probably wrong with your website and the words are probably confusing customers. Your photos look fake as and the design is probably driving users away.

And here's the kicker. Whoops. Chatg GPT warning. You've probably spent damn good money on this disaster of a website. So whether you've built your website yourself, you've hired some cowboy developer, or you're the marketing manager stuck fixing somebody else's mess, we today together are going to sort this out right now.

These six rules I'm going to share now will stop visitors from running away from your website and start turning them into customers. Rule number one, pub talk. on your website, you need to talk to your customers like you're having a pint with them, a bit like we're doing now. And you don't want to talk to them like a doctor delivering some particularly bad news. I see this everywhere on every website.

We leverage innovative solutions to optimize your business objectives through scalable methodologies. What the does that even mean? Seriously, what does that actually mean? Instead, it should say something like, "We'll help you make more money." The difference is obvious. One of them sounds like a robot has swallowed a thesaurus and the other one actually sounds like a human and humans read websites and we want to appeal to humans.

Obviously, at least still now, we want to appeal to humans before AI robots take over. Here's how you're going to go fix this. Your customers have problems that keep them up at night. And your job is dead simple really. You just need to understand their problem.

Tell them that you understand their problem and explain exactly how you are going to fix that problem. Just like you're giving advice to a mate over a pint in the pub. No corporate gobbledegook speak, just straight words. If your grand wouldn't understand what you've written on your website, you probably need to rewrite it. And this thing alone here, talking like pub talk on your website, will probably put you ahead of about 80% of your competitors who sound like they've swallowed a business dictionary on their website.

Rule number two, nobody cares. It is brutal, but it's true. Nobody gives a toss about you or your business. See, rule one, they're looking to solve their problem. So, all you need to do is stop talking about your awards.

Stop bragging about the marathons that you ran last week. Stop showing photos of your ping pong table and your amazing company culture. And for the love of all that's holy, stop putting photos of your office dog on your website. Unless, of course, you run a dog grooming business. keep the dog off the website.

Here's the harsh reality of this that your ego really doesn't want to hear, though. Your customers don't care about how long you've been in business, how much money you donate to charity, that you've got free snacks in your office, and what awards you won in 1997. They only care about one thing. Rule one, can you solve their problem? Go look at your homepage on your website right now.

Count how many times you say we, us, or our company or I. Now count how many times you say you your problem your results. How many times are you actually talking to a customer? If the first number is bigger than the second number, you're doing your website content completely wrong. If anything on your website right now is not directly helping your customer, it is hurting you.

Delete it. I don't care if your CEO's wife loves that paragraph about your company history. You need to bin it. Delete it off your website right now. Rule three, hide the pain.

Harold. You know that bloke, you know, hide the pain Harold. He started as a stock photo model and then he became an internet celebrity because he was featured in so many stock photos and also he looks like he's dying inside when he tries to smile. That is the risk you run every single time you use a stock photo on your website. You risk putting a stock photo of a guy who is a meme.

You know exactly the photos. I mean the fake handshakes, the people pointing at laptops looking way too excited to be looking at spreadsheets. those diverse groups of impossibly happy people in gigantic, clean, sterile meeting rooms. Everyone knows they're fake. Everyone has seen them a thousand times and they make your business look like every single other business.

Boring. Just plain straight boring. Everybody knows they're fake and everybody knows that they're on every other website. This is how Hide the Pain Harold built his career. He was featured on so many websites.

Look out for him on dentist websites, by the way. He's huge in there. and he became a meme. And now when you use that photo of him, it looks ridiculous. You need to begin to delete all of the stock photos off your website, all of them, right now as much as you can, and replace them with real photos of you and your team actually doing your job.

We did this on Rrookger's website recently when we relaunched it. All of the photos on there, especially on the homepage, are photos of the actual people who work at the business. So when you actually get in touch with them, you're talking to those people in the pictures on the website. And when it comes to these photos, I don't care if you've taken them on your phone. I don't care if the lighting's rubbish.

I don't care if Dave from accounting looks a bit awkward on them because authentic photos beat polished corporate fake stock photos every single day of the week, even if they are objectively less quality. It's true. Your potential customers want to see the real people that they're going to be working with when they look on your website. They want to see your actual office, your actual team, you actually doing what you say you do for a job in the words in photos. And don't give me the pathetic excuse of, well, what if we have team members leave and then we have to update the photos.

You know what you do in that instance? You update the photos on your website. You take them again, replace them, and put them on again. And then if it happens again, you do the same process again. If you update your website more than once every 5 years, it isn't an issue.

Revolutionary concept, I know. Rule number four, nobody will read it. This rule will change everything about how you create content on your website because most people are spending 3 to 5 seconds deciding whether they want to stay on your website when they first land on it. They're not reading your carefully crafted paragraphs. They're scanning for what they need to find.

Here's what actually happens when somebody comes to your website. They land on your page. They scan the headlines. They look for something relevant to their problem. And if they don't find it immediately within 3 to 5 seconds, they're gone and they never return.

So, when you're writing anything on your website, and I do mean anything, remember this rule. Nobody will read it. And when you have this rule in your head, it forces you to think about writing shorter sentences, using bullet points instead of long paragraphs, making your headlines damn obvious about what problem they solve, put important stuff first at the top of the website instead of buried in lots of content, and using diagrams or infographics instead of writing essays or nollas. If something is important, make it impossible to miss on your website because they're going to scan it. Big text, bold headlines, clear headings.

Start writing headlines that solve problems. Your job isn't to impress your old English teacher. Your job is to convert the visitors, the people who land on your website, into paying customers in the first few seconds of landing on your website. Because that's all you have, 3 to 5 seconds. Rule number five, design is last.

Now, this is going to piss off every graphic designer I know, but it is true. Everybody obsesses over making their website look pretty while their competitors with ugly websites steal all of their customers. I've seen businesses spend £20,000 on a gorgeous website that then led to converting zero clients. And I've seen ugly websites that look like they were built in 2005 that make millions. Think about Amazon's website or eBay's website.

Design in their world matters the least. At least making it look pretty. What matters is somebody landing on the Amazon website or is somebody that lands on the eBay website purchasing? That's all that they care about. So, what you need to do is sort everything else first.

Fix your messaging, your words with the pub talk rule. Stop bragging with the nobody cares rule. Use real photos and not stock photos and make everything on your website nice and easy to scan so they don't need to read everything. Then you can come back to making it look pretty. Design should be last.

Rule number six, done for now. If you've applied these first five rules, your website is good enough to launch if it isn't already online. You've got to think of your website like a house. When you move into a house, it's never finished. Sometimes you need to fix the heating.

Sometimes you might fancy a new kitchen or sometimes you just want to paint a wall in a room because you're bored. But here's the thing with that. Even though you're renovating your house, you are still living in it. It has been launched, so to speak. Your website is exactly the same thing.

Your website doesn't need to be perfect. It just needs to be livable and online. It just needs to work and it just needs to stop embarrassing you really. And more important than any of that, it needs to start making you money. I see far too many businesses spending months and years perfecting their beautiful website while their competitors are just out there making sales with an imperfect but functional website.

Launch the website now. See if it works. Fix what doesn't and improve it over time. Remember, perfect is the enemy of good. I'm sure Winston Churchill said that or something.

Your website is done for now until you get a leak in the bathroom or whatever that weird metaphor was about houses and websites. So, here's what you're going to do next. Now, you've done all those things. You're going to go back to your website with these six rules in mind. Are you talking like a human or a robot?

Are you bragging about yourself or are you solving people's problems? Are you using fake stock photography or real people? Is your content scannable or is it an essay? Is your design clean or is it distracting? And is your website good enough to launch today or do you find yourself stuck in perfectionist hell?

Fix what's broken on it and launch it today, tomorrow, soon? Stop procrastinating on it. And remember, your competitors are counting on you doing nothing with the information I've just given you. Don't let those bastards win. And in this video, we didn't even begin to talk about putting your prices on your website and why if you don't put your prices on your website, that makes you look sneaky.

Go watch this video next about that exact thing. Go on. Go on. Can't smile for this long.