How To Get More Customers Through Your Website

This is the six figure home studio podcast, episode 80

Welcome to the sixth figure home studio podcast, the number one resource for running a profitable home recording studio. Now your hosts Brian Hood and Chris Graham. Welcome back to another episode,

the six figure home studio podcast. I am your host Brian Hood, the hostess with the most fucking cut that out. You have to leave that in. Oh man, that took me back. The hostess with the most and I'm here with my favorite and only cohost Chris Graham. Chris, how you doing today, man? Dude, I'm so good and I'm going to ask you how you are because I often forget to do that because I'm a selfish piece of crap. Yep. But I'm still good cause this vegetarian kick I'm on. Oh Gosh. Have you lost weight? I have lost so much weight. How much weight have you lost? I can tell in your, you got your jaw line back nicely. It's true. It's true. I've probably lost like seven or eight pounds. Nice. Here's the thing, it's been effortless. I'm not using any discipline and I'm losing weight like crazy.

That's just your body hemorrhaging, the proteins, all of your muscle mass is leaving your body cause you don't have enough protein. Not at all. I'm way stronger now. I got an unlimited pass at a yoga gym by my house. Oh yeah, that'll kick your ass. Oh, it's been kicking the crap out of me. But each class I go to, I'm always like, Whoa, I could never do this before. And it's been great. So it's really helped with overall attitude. I feel fantastic. My wife is pumped. She's looking soups hot too. Yoga and vegetarianism. Let's go full hippie guys. Come with me. Let's do it. All right, Chris, knock, knock. Who's there? Brian interrupting. Podcast host, interrupting. Pod. You forgot to ask me how I'm doing Chris. I wasn't there yet. How are you Brian? How are you? Everything's fine. I don't want to talk about it. Today's episode. I would. Oh Lord. No, no, this is great. This is actually, uh, my wife is sick now, so this is our first post-marriage sickness. So I'm trying my best to be supportive, but also like, there's only so much I can do when she's sick. Other than just being supported. So have you been kissing her on the mouth, Brian, or have you gone to the Germaphobic cheek kiss? Cause she said I don't kiss my wife. I don't know what you're talking about.

That's disgusting. Oh my lower half. All right. So let's, let's move on. Let's move on cause we, you know, banter, banter, banter, banter, all fun. So today's episode we're going to talk about an issue that I've seen in a ton of my students and Chris has seen in more and more of his coaching students he has worked with. And that is really answering the question, why doesn't my website convert? What is wrong with my website? Why doesn't it work? Why am I not getting people to actually do something on my site? What am I getting paid work? There's a lot that goes into this question and there's a lot of different ways to ask this question, but the end of the day, how do you fix it? Ineffective website.

Well, that's been one of the things that I've been working with people the most on honestly there we could go on and on for like five episodes on this, but typically what I'll do when I'm sitting down with somebody, whether that's a friend of mine here locally in Westerville or whether that's somebody I'm doing the coaching stuff with, looking at their website is an important step and figuring out why their business isn't performing the way they want it to. There's so many things that can go wrong. There's so many problems that you can run into that keeps the website from converting and it's the phrases bottleneck. You can have everything running right on your website and have one issue that is restricting your ability to make a living doing what you're doing.

And this is very similar to episode 38 where we talk about 10 x in your business by identifying and eliminating your single point of failure. For a lot of our listeners and a lot of your coaching students and a lot of my core students, the single point of failure is the website. Yeah. And our goal with this episode is to help you identify where you went wrong and hopefully walk you through steps to maybe fix some of the issues on your site.

Well, and here's the caveat to this is I think there's sort of like two things people are interested in. One, how do I get more people to be interested in working with me? How do I get more traffic to my website? And two, why aren't enough of them hiring me? And here's the thing. If you're running paid ads and you know you're spending, you know, whether it's a hundred or a thousand or $5,000 a month on ads, I don't recommend that you do that quickly. We've talked about that in the past. Yeah, don't. But if you're spending any amount of money, if your website doesn't convert, you have to spend more money than you would if your website converted better. One of the things I've talked about on the podcast, and I talk about this constantly when I'm on a coaching call with somebody, is the idea of momentum versus friction.

When you've got a website that you're trying to sell your services or product or whatever on, you've got these two ideas of momentum and friction. Momentum is when someone comes to a website and it's just super jacked. They really want the thing that you're selling. There's a lot of momentum there. Friction is when you go to a website and it asks a hundred questions. Not all the links work. Maybe there's like a weird picture that gives me the Heebie jeebies. These things slow down momentum. If you have enough momentum to overcome the friction of your website, you're going to make a lot of money. If you don't have enough momentum to overcome the friction, you won't make almost any. If you have no friction, you don't need that much momentum to build a profitable website. So a good example could be, let's say, Brian, you and I wake up tomorrow and we see an article in our news feed on our phone and it says, you know, the back to the future.

Hoverboard is real. You can buy a real back to the future hoverboard for $300 it does not matter how crappy that website is. I am going to find a way to give them $300 for a real hoverboard because the momentum it's been building for years, if like, oh my gosh, if only those were real. Oh, Michael J. Fox. Oh, he looked so cool. And when those things, uh, uh, you know, like there's a lot of momentum for someone. They could sell a real hoverboard that could float six inches off the ground. It doesn't matter how bad their website is, but if it's a product that you and I have never heard of in real life, I know that sounds kind of cool. And again, the website, and there's just weird stuff. Or like there's a guy here in Columbus, Ohio who runs these commercials. He's a lawyer named Kevin Churches and Kevin Courage.

This is terrifying in this commercials. Like there's always a moving camera and the camera's always pulling back. And Kevin Curtis is chasing the camera. He's like walking towards it the whole time. He's like, my name's Kevin Carter and I'm a lawyer. I'm gonna make them pay and order la La. It's really is terrifying. So Kevin Curtis has a lot of friction and a lot of like weird issues or like you heard of Kevin Curtis like, Oh, I'm injured, maybe I should hire a lawyer. But then you start to interact with his website or his properties are his advertisements. All of a sudden you're like, I don't know if I ever want to meet him in real life. I'm out. And this sort of friction can cause a lot of trouble. So we're going to talk about the different types of friction that you could have on your website. We're going to go ahead and assume that you have some momentum, that you have some sort of reputation that you have some sort of ad that's working or some sort of way that's getting people to your website.

It's called top of funnel. You need some sort of awareness of your studio. And so if you don't have anyone coming to your site or any way for people to find your site, that's where you should start. It's probably not this episode, but there's a double edged sword here. Yeah, right. If you're thinking will, it'll have a lot of traffic yet, but if your website sucks, there's no reason to send traffic to your website. This is true. Perfect example, when I first started doing paid advertising, this is years and years ago, 10 years ago or so, it would cost me $25 in advertising to get one person to send me a mastering sample. That's not even a paid project. Just the free sample. You were paying 25 bucks to master a song for free. Exactly, but enough of those people would end up hiring me. Then I made money doing that.

As I got better and I got my website with less friction, what ended up happening is all the sudden I was like, okay, now it's only $14 Oh, it's now it's only $10 Oh, that's only $5 oh my gosh. Now it's only a dollar depending on where you're advertising. If you are able to optimize the friction, the technical term here, the entrepreneurial thing here is conversion optimization. If you're able to do this, all the sudden paid advertising's way, way less expensive, and it can start to drop below this magical threshold where it might actually make sense for you to spend money on advertising. A lot of people that are like, hey, you should never do paid advertising and be like, well, if your website doesn't convert there, right, but I do want to mention this isn't all about paid ads. Like it's not at all no matter what. If you're just advertising to cold traffic, that's the worst converting traffic you could ever hope to have. Yeah, so if you can, honestly, if you can convert cold traffic on your site through paid advertising, then you're just making it that more effective for

the warm traffic and referrals. And when people say, Hey, oh, Chris Graham's mastering.com that dude is awesome at mastering. You should go check out his work. Now you've made it that much more powerful when someone goes to your site with actual momentum and they're actually interested in working with you. Now the experience is frictionless and you're going to lose a lot less projects to people who just couldn't figure your side out where your site was too slow or just didn't work or it didn't give them what they were looking for. So Chris, what's the first thing and what's one of the most common things you see people do wrong when it comes to their websites? Well, I would say the first thing that I see is that people aren't tracking anything. They don't have Google analytics installed. And I would say, you know, this is an advice buffet.

If you are trying to make money on a website and you don't have Google analytics installed, I'm concerned for you. Yeah, you're doing it wrong. Yes, it's free. It's so amazing. It's so incredible. And if you install Google analytics today, every day for the rest of your life, that that website's up your tracking data. And as a result of that, you can see the changes. And just a side note, it's so easy to set up Google analytics if you feel like you're not a technical person, just do this for me. Do this. How to install Google analytics on blank, whether it's wix or Squarespace or wordpress, there is a video on youtube that walks you through step by step on how to do that. So you would literally have zero excuses for not having Google analytics on your site. So now let's move forward. Chris, assume that everyone that doesn't have Google analytics, just pause the podcast.

They just installed Google analytics on their site or even better they've had on their site for years. Now, what do they need to actually start tracking within Google analytics? Well, the most important thing to track I think is visits per month. Or in my case I like to do rolling metrics visits per 30 day period. So just to clarify, you're not just saying number of visitors I got in January or February, you're just saying today in the last 30 days, what's my website visitors and then tomorrow that's going to change. But overall I want that number to maintain a baseline. Yeah. And not be dropping over time. If anything, it should be raising over time. Yeah. So a lot of people, they build a website and the car, I've got a business, cool, I landed some projects and then they only focus on working with those clients.

They neglect working on their business in order to spend more time working for their business. And what happens is one of these KPIs, one of these metrics we're getting ready to talk about has changed. There is a meter buried within Google analytics or somewhere else on your website that's basically telling you whereas we're dying [inaudible] like it's an altitude meters so to speak on like a plane and you know like hey, if, if we're continuing to go down and down and down and down and down and evidently you're going to meet the ground headfirst. So this is really a big mistake. I see a lot of people, they wait until their income drops to address any problems. Yes, that's it. Yeah. Your website is a key point in the process of people hiring you and a leading indicator, something that's going to tell you what your future income is.

A leading indicator is your website's traffic, or maybe you get all your work through Instagram than it's your amount of profile views, your gun, your Instagram, or wherever your studio's main hub is. I really encourage you to be your website for a multitude of reasons. We're not going to get into today, but we're going to talk about websites today, but your website's traffic is a leading indicator, meaning the website traffic you get today is your future's income, whereas your income today is just a result of what you've done in the past. So it's really hard to run your business off of what your income is doing. If you are running your business off of what your website's visitors are doing, Aka your leading indicators, it is a lot easier to keep it steady and not have these unexpected surprises come up in your income. And that's why you see so many people, they feel like the studio world is just not consistent enough, but they don't understand this leading versus lagging indicators.

Yeah, and so we're going to talk about a lot of ways you could measure your business growth or death as it were. So it's not just going to be, if you're not closing a lot of sales in your website, if you're doing more like Instagram direct messages or whatever happens to be, we're going to cover that. So stay tuned for that. But I heard one time that the job of a CEO is to predict a businesses future. It's that simple. Ooh, you're supposed to know what it's gonna look like in the future. If you have no idea what next month will look like, it's because you're not tracking this stuff. One of the things that's amazing about this is, at least with my business and my business is a little unique because I work with a lot of people, so I've got a lot of small projects, so a lot of statistical significance when I'm making decisions. I can tell you months in advance if a bad month is coming.

Really. Actually, we never talked about this before, but that makes total sense because you're such a metrics maniac.

Yeah. We have not talked about that, but yeah, sometimes I love it when this happens, but I'll walk upstairs and be like, honey, next month is going to be awesome. I've seen it in the numbers. I've seen the growth, I've seen, you know, these different things and I'm tracking change and as a result I know, okay, next month it's going to be awesome. Cool. This is working. Here's the thing, my mastering business isn't even very compatible with this sort of stuff because the sales process takes a long time. There are certain people that can run a test and know immediately for their, you know, if they're selling plugins, it's a much more of a compatible business. With this, they, they can predict the future a lot better than I even I can. So let's talk about some things that you should and could be tracking. I mentioned before Instagram, some of the guys I've been working with and talking to, they get a lot of their clients who will reach out to them over Instagram and then that ends up maturing into a relationship. They becomes a paid project. One of the things you could do if that's what's working for you is you could track the number of messages that you get each month or over a 30 day period on Instagram. If you know, hey, on average I'm going to make just really round numbers to make this easy on us.

Well, it's something, I think his profile views, you can actually see profiles in Instagram so that that should be the top of funnel, not messages. We'll get into what messages represent in a second.

Ah, yeah, Brian, I love that. So if you are looking at profile like my Instagram account is, I really don't pay too much attention to it. It's Chris Underscore Graham. If you guys can follow me, please don't make me feel so much better. Please like me. For someone whose entire business runs on Instagram, you should know like, oh, I've had a thousand profile views and I think Instagram does a rolling metric so I can look at it. I'm going to do it right now. I think they do weekly on theirs and I have over 10,000 followers. So it gave me like the big boy account. So now I have all sorts of insights and metrics that the average person doesn't have, which is fun to brag about and also completely pointless to brag because I don't use Instagram for my business at all. Well, this is actually a good example of what I would call a rolling metrics.

So if you pull your Instagram account out and you have yourself set up as a business, it's very easy to do Google it if you don't know how to do it at the very top of your page, if you click the little picture of you in the right hand side and your phone, mine says 76 profile visits in the last 70 days. That's very, very low because I don't really do a whole lot of Instagram stuff yet. Maybe never. But we'll see. But if you are trying to run your whole business off of your Instagram account, you should see a higher number than that. So let's say you were aiming at a thousand profile visits per seven day period, you could open up Instagram and immediately you have an indicator of, oh shoot, there's only 900 in the last seven days. And then a week later, oh shoot, there's only 800 crap.

You have a top of funnel problem and you need to go fix it. Yep. So for those of you that are confused as to why we're talking about Instagram and we were talking about how to fix your broken website, yeah, there's a point to this. The point is we need you to start tracking these metrics because if you're not tracking it, you can't improve it. If it can't be measured, it can't be managed. So you first have to measure all of these numbers or some of these numbers, just put Google analytics on your website. Or if you're on Instagram, pay attention to the insights on Instagram that they give you. And from that point we can start to really measure the effectiveness of your website. So let's go back to the website to right now. What are some things that you see that are common problems in a website now that you are tracking things you have Google analytics installed, what are some common things you see people doing wrong on their websites that are really hurting them in a negative way?

Well, one of the biggest things is a lack of understanding that human beings, especially musicians, are very, very, very fickle and I would encourage you to watch this as you're thinking about buying something off a webpage. You go on that webpage and you are filled with skepticism that this might be a scam. This is how we all work in really, I don't know if this could be a scam. I Dunno, looks a little scammy, I dunno. And all of a sudden you're like, f this, I'm out of here. And then you leave immediately and there's almost no like internal dialogue going on. This is your lizard brain. It's the fast part of your mind that works basically on instinct. It's the same part of your brain that manages emotion and breathing and your fight or flight response. It goes on a website and it makes a decision very quickly, within less than a couple seconds and decides whether going to stay or not. Most people's website that don't do this for a living or haven't done it for a long time are ugly and they're scary and when a customer comes on, this customer makes a snap judgment and does what I call, I'm stealing this from Donald Miller, the caveman test. I mean probably stolen from somebody else too. When you go on a website, you should be able to glance at it and in a caveman voice, say

this website make mastering it makes song sound better. Once it mastered you sounded Russian. I just want to point that out. It's like a Russian caveman. There were a lot of cases, man. I'd also heard this called the blink test. Most people go around five or so seconds between blinks. I don't actually know if that's a fact. If you're Steven slate, you go months between blinks, but I'm leaving that joke and I don't care. But if we've got that out, James, you know what? Fuck it. No, keep it in because I know he knows this. We respect you Steven slate. Yeah, we respect you but you don't blink. So all this to say five seconds. If people can't tell what your site does in five seconds, you've probably lost the battle before it even began. And the reason is just to kind of go into this, it's not always because your website's ugly or scammy looking.

At the end of the day, people come to your site with a specific purpose in mind and they're trying to figure out as soon as they go to your site, am I at the right place or not? Can this person do what I need them to do or not? And if you have a really ugly lay out that just overwhelms them and they just like have paralysis by analysis and they just can't determine, I don't think he's the site for me. I'm getting out of here. This is too early. I don't feel like figuring out what all these navigation bars and all these buttons and all these things on the page and all these blocks of texts that I have to now read through. I don't want to do any of that. I'm going to go to this other studios website that's beautifully laid out and really scannable and has literally one big button that tells me what to do right there. I'm going to go to that site and I'm going to do that.

I'm going to press that button. Well, let me ask you a question, Brian. Let's say you were thinking about buying something or hiring somebody and you went to their website, you click the link. Maybe you found it in a Google search and maybe you saw an ad and you clicked it and one second past and the website hadn't loaded yet. Then two seconds passed.

You lost me at two seconds. You lost me too. Exactly.

When a website takes too long to load that since an indicator to the customer that you are not high quality, that you are not trustworthy and that you skimped in some way, shape or form and that long load time causes a moment of doubt and many, many, many people will click the back Arrow if your website has not loaded in under two seconds.

That's a huge part of this and we haven't even gotten to the actual website stuff yet. Really like this is like before we even really have a chance to dig into someone's site. You've already lost people because your website is just instantly atrocious or it takes too long to load or it's not clear that you are going to do the thing that they need you to do. And so like at the end of the day, Chris, I think it comes down to one thing, put yourself in the shoes of the and create an experience that is going to hold their hand through everything. I can't pretend that I've done this myself. I can't even pretend that you've done this yourself, Chris. No one's nailed this perfectly, but I think if you can at least have empathy and put yourself in the shoes of the other person, that's gonna eliminate a lot of these mistakes.

Because I've see time after time after time when I'm analyzing websites, I don't see though page load speed as much because most studio sites are not really bogged down with a ton of different things like you might see on like a huge blog or something. But the mistakes I see are more around the line of that blink test. You don't really get your point across. You're not saying what you are or what you do and why I should stay on your site immediately. The headlines not there. And I think if you look at all of the businesses in the world nowadays, they all have the same style of landing page, big headline, small sub headline, and then one or two buttons that either give you the next steps like contact us or buy our thing or whatever. And then there's a secondary call to action that is, if you're not ready to do that, maybe you want to do this next thing, maybe you want to read more about our past work or listen to our portfolio. But I think there's really two things that people come to your site to do. It's either contact you and hire you immediately or to take the next step of, is this person right for me? And I think you need to really appeal to both types of people in this scenario. Yeah.

Well you brought up a good point there. One of the things people are trying to decide when they land on your website, the, let's say it's been under two seconds, the person didn't click the back Arrow, they stayed around there on your website. They're asking themselves a couple of questions. One, is this person good at what they do? Oh yeah, seriously too. Can I trust this person? Three, can I afford this person? And I think four is, do other people think this person is good at what they do? These are a couple of questions floating around in their mind and for some people they might not have a portfolio on their website.

Oh, that's like the biggest mistake I've ever seen. If you don't have a portfolio on your website, how can you ever expect someone to hire you? I don't understand what the thought process behind people that don't have a website portfolio. That's the first thing I go to when I'm going to any website for a studio. I'm like, is this person good?

Well, and you hit something a little bit earlier that I want to address. I think the secret to doing this well is this empathy thing. It's the golden rule. Do unto others as you have others do unto you. If you can put yourself in the shoes of a potential customer and that potential customer comes to your website and you can imagine what it feels like to be them, you're going to have a pretty easy time making a great website if you can't do that, which let's be honest here guys, that's the biggest issue that I see. Absolutely. The biggest issue that I see in our community is that people cannot put themselves in the shoes of a potential customer and all they're doing is playing the hero game and being like, look how awesome I am with my website. There's much more to it than that.

You have to be and understand what it feels like to be a potential customer or you'll never convince them to hire you. Here's a new thing, Brian. What's that? We've talked about website traffic. You have to have enough people coming to your website and you have to monitor that to know if your business is healthy or not because like you so elegantly put, it's a leading indicator. You can begin to predict the future. If you track your website traffic or your Instagram profile views or whatever that key metric is for you, that number that indicates future success could be next month. It could be the month after. That could be next week could be tomorrow. You have to watch these numbers to know what's going on. The next thing you need to do is you need to make sure that your website doesn't turn people off before you've even communicated anything to anyone, so it has to load quickly enough and again, the goal you're looking for there, according to most people online is two seconds or less.

Your websites should loan in less than two seconds. There's plenty of tools. Google has a page speed indicator tests. pingdom.com has another one, but if you just Google site speed test, there's tons of tools out there where you can double check that, hey, this is working. This isn't something that's crushing me because you can't get any information from these people if they're hitting the back Arrow before they even land on your webpage. It's pretty important. One of the next things that you can pay attention to are these two stats that I think are really important. They are time on site and bounce rate. If you're trying to run a business on a website, Google analytics will tell you this stuff really, really easily and you're looking for two numbers that less than 50% of people bounce when they hit your webpage. And what does a balance, by the way, just so people understand, you go to the website, you look at it and you click on nothing and you just hit the back Arrow.

Nope, not for me. You've expressed no interest, no curiosity to learn more. And that's a pretty good indication that there's some problems on your website or that there's some problems with this type of traffic that you're getting. It might be that you are advertising and completely the wrong neighborhoods and people are clicking on an ad and being like, wait a minute, this isn't, I'm not down with this. Um, I used to have issues with this back in the day when I would do a lot of paid advertising. I noticed that I was accidentally getting a lot of ads in front of people who had searched on Google for a book called mastering the art of French cooking. Oh, Julia Child, Julia Child. Oh my God, Brian, I love you. So that's amazing. So I had some ads that were showing up in front of the wrong people because my keywords weren't set up perfectly and as a result, the wrong type of people were coming to my website that mess with my bounce rate because those people would land on the website and be like, what the heck is this?

I'm out. So there's a lot to that. The other issue is time onsite. A good leading indicator that you're getting quality traffic is that people are staying on your website for over two minutes. That's sort of the generally accepted like ideal timeframe. And again, Google analytics will show you this. It's right on the top right on the opening dashboard of Google analytics. So these two things can be really important as you're trying to get a feel for, is my website doing a good job? But this is complicated because it goes back into your traffic. If you're doing a particular marketing campaign or if you just had like something that you did went sort of viral, the traffic changes over time. You might have the best traffic ever one month because you did a blog post that blew up a little bit. Or You were commenting a lot in a community that was building up your reputation and people were interested.

Now all the sudden you've get, you know, 20% bounce rate and four minutes on average on webpage. So these are really good things. But then if you change what you're doing from a marketing perspective, those things might change pretty dramatically the next month. So you've got to watch these things. Kind of like if you go to the doctor, they're gonna want to know how much you weigh. They're going to know how high your blood pressure is. They're gonna want to know like, I don't know, all kinds of weird stuff like your white blood cell count and stuff like that.

Yeah. Cause if your website is sick, we're trying to diagnose what the issue is here. So bounce rate is basically a symptom. These are symptoms of why your website is bad or we're trying to dig into the deeper issue here because the bounce rate is not the problem. The bad site is the reason your site bounce rate is so high. So we've got to really dig in once we figure out what the issue is. If people aren't bouncing at a high rate, so you've got a 20% bounce rate, which is great, but the time on page is like 25 seconds. There's probably a bigger issue there. So it's one of those things where we've got to find out first what the problem is and then we can kind of dig into what the potential solutions are. I do want to say I just tested my site on pingdom.com my studio's website page speed is 1.65 seconds load speed.

Oh girl,

that's good. So there's a lot of things we could go on and on and on about that. There's a lot of things you can do to improve your page loading time. Once you're below a two seconds, don't worry about getting it any faster than that. It gets a lot harder the faster it gets. One of the things you can do is make sure that she's in a good host. Don't use like freaking what does it hostgator or go daddy or at least these crappy like $1 per month. Spend a little bit of money on a decent host. Brian and I both use wordpress, so we like to use wordpress specific hosts. I used WPX. Thank you. Use, no, no, I use WP engine. You Use WPX? I used WPX hosting for the blog. A, yeah. Yeah, so having a host that's set up to host the type of webpage you do can really help a lot. If you're using like one of these, like we host everything on our webpages and we do nothing. Well it's an itching issue. Your website's going to load slow.

I think most people though, I rarely see an issue with that. I think most people use, like they've gone to my website creation course of their on Wix, my studio sites wicks and as loading plenty fast and I think most Squarespace sites are going to load under two seconds. WordPress's where you start getting a little tricky because that's where you pick your own host and when you choose your own hosts you have the potential of choosing a terrible host. Ah Yes. Yeah and so that's where you can really really off the rails there. But I think when we start talking about bounce

rate, that's kind of what the load speed we'll do because the higher load speed, the higher your bounce rates going to be cause this is going to be loading. So Google analytics loads up, it counts as a page view, but if they bounce, if they hit the back button before they actually load the page, that will count as a bounce. If your bounce rates high, first thing to look at is going to be your website's page load speed. Yeah. Well let me transition us a little bit here. I ran track and cross country in high school and it was pretty much the only good thing I did until you know, maybe like my junior year, like there weren't a whole lot of positive influences in my life. Track and cross country was awesome because it was objective whether I was improving or not. I could look at my time and say, oh sweet, I just broke 18 minutes in a five k I'm getting better.

Oh sweet. I just broke 1730 I'm getting better. And you know, for me I was an 800 guy. It's two laps around the track and that was my favorite event and I loved it because I knew after that first lap that my split that first time or on that first lap should be around 62 seconds. And when I was in high school that was like what I was aiming for. If I came around at 64 seconds, I knew that I had a lot of work to do on that second lap to catch up. If I was at like 59 seconds and I was like, oh crap. The second lap is going to hurt and I'm going to like almost die on the home stretch here. So these metrics are important because they can help you track your progress that can lead to success over the long run. And one of the things that I think is the most important thing you can possibly track is the number of quote requests or the number of leads. This idea of like how many potential projects do I have. And I think you should have a really round goal. I think for most people it should be like, you know, one per day or one per week or something like that.

I think it should be a percentage of website visitors because in your business we've talked about our differences in business plenty of times in the podcast you get a lot of inquiries and work with a lot of projects. I work with a few inquiries with a few projects, but at higher rate than you because I'm doing a much more high touch service. So I think as far as tracking metrics on your site, it shouldn't be just raw numbers, it should be percentages. So you're only raw number, I think worth tracking is website visitors. And then what percentage of those take the next step on your site?

Yeah, I hear you there. You know, definitely you should be tracking your percentages. You know, if a hundred people come to your website and five people hire you, you should know, okay, 5% but it can also be helpful to look at that in different ways and to say, look, in order for me to make a living, I need 10 projects a month. I can work backwards from that 10 projects a month to say, well, in order to get 10 projects, I need 30 leads. So my goal is 30 leads a month, which is one lead a day. And for me, the whole point of my track story when I was running track, I could look at those times, I can look at those splits, I could look at my improvement and know whether to be proud or whether I needed to get back to out a little bit differently.

And I think the tracking thing is so important for people because you want to make it easy and automatic where you can say, I should pat myself on the back. I should brag a little bit to my mom or something like that and know, okay I have moved the needle and I'm going to be successful. So I think you should be looking at both of these. I think you should have this idea of well one lead a day of which is just the simplest one ever and you should also know, well my conversion rate's 5% or something like that. I think you need to look at it from a bunch of different ways and I think when we have discussions like this is healthy Brian because business is a lot like music. There's no one person that's like, Whoa, this song should be in the key of g major. That's the best key for this song period. Well maybe, but there's a lot of conversation and back and forth that's healthy because that's where real creativity happens and that's where all the best business ideas come from is this sort of back and forth and let's discuss what are the possible ways that we could do this to improve our business. There's a lot of different angles.

Sorry. I think one really important part though is of this entire conversation is not necessarily things to track. I think at the end of the day people have two issues. They have a traffic problem which is outside of the scope of this episode. We have plenty of conversations we have on the podcast go look at our episode backlog. We have 80 something, 80 79 episodes before this of things that are going to help you with the traffic problem. Not all of them will, but a lot of them will, but the second problem is, all right, I have website traffic. People are coming to my website. No one is taking an action. They're not filling out a form or they're not requesting a free sample. I think most people listening probably have a quote request system cause that's what I've really, really heavily preached on here and on the community and all my courses.

So let's just pretend that the action taken on the site is a quote request or a form has been filled out to take a next step. If no one is doing that. Let's talk about some things that could be stopping that. We talked about your website being ugly and people bouncing off for that. We've talked about several things here. Um, I do want to mention one of the most common problems I see is people having a high friction for them on their site. That's one of the biggest mistakes I see is people get good website traffic, they have a great portfolio, but they have a really, really complex form that asks for a lot of questions because they see someone like me who does that or they see someone like our podcast guest, Mark Ecker, who has the Mark Eckert said he had really high friction form called the fuck boy, 5,000 d fuckboy 5,008 d fuck boy, don't correct.

My cuts were. So yeah, so you see people like me and like mark who have these really complex forms. Our goal is to actually weed people out because otherwise we would have a lot of inquiries that would require additional followup. It would be a huge time suck. We don't need additional leads. We need to make our leads more efficient. But the people who have the problem with no one filling out their forms, they don't need to worry about getting all the information up front. They need to worry about getting any to just get the email address of the person who is interested in contacting them. So for most people, if you're wondering why your website doesn't convert, then by default you're form should ask for three things tops. It should ask for name and email address and the message. That's it. Maybe even just to maybe just email address in message and that's it. It blows my mind how many people I see with a high friction form that are in no way at the point where they need a high friction form. Do you have anything to add to that, Chris?

Well man, I would say this is something I think we're a little unique on. You know, the other day I was talking to a buddy and he was like, Oh man, you guys, you got to see this guy's website. And there was another mastering engineer and he pointed it out and I went to the website and you know, his form was really complex and it was really well thought out, but I explained to this buddy of mine, I was like, this actually is a terrible form because nobody will fill this out. There's like 35 different options on this form and he doesn't have their contact information when they begin to fill this form out. So what happens is somebody shows up. Yeah, Sigh. That gets like halfway through and it's like, dude, this sucks. I'm out of here and now this person doesn't have the ability to follow up with that individual and say, hey, just wanted to see it.

So it's all, you started to fill this out. Do you have any questions? Would you like to schedule a phone call with me? That sort of thing. Our job is not to be as efficient as possible. Once you have a problem, which is you have too many customers, then you can start to introduce friction so that you don't have so many people filling it out and that the people that do fill it out are more highly qualified as leads. Meaning that if you have a 10 minute phone call conversation with them, you're almost certainly going to close the sale. But if you're having a hundred phone calls, you know, a month or video chats or email threads or whatever and only like a few people are closing, it's because you have too many unqualified leads. In that case, you need more friction. Yes, but until you get there, the first step you need to do is you need to get as many people to contact you and identify themselves as possible.

And I think that's really the entire goal of this episode is to help you keep from disqualifying yourself before you even get the lead. Because at the end of the day, if you don't have their email address, it's really hard to follow up. You can do retargeting advertising, which we've talked about on the podcast in the past. I don't want to get into it right now because this outside of the scope of this episode, but the point is you need to capture an email address, do whatever you can to optimize your site to get them to contact you. And I think if no one is filling out your form on your site and you're getting website traffic, the first thing I would look at as your contact form. Yeah, totally. Is it asking for too much information? Is it asking for people to jump through too many hoops? And unless you are a big name, a heavy hitter in your industry, you probably aren't at the point yet where you can do that.

So yeah, I'm 100% with you on that, Brian. One of the things that I've done with my website recently is I'm in the process of switching around the way I do my forms. When you go on my website now, it basically says, hey, let's start a conversation. Enter your name and email and then you hit the button to submit,

which I forgot about that. I should have mentioned that because that's genius. You're not even asking for a message. You're just like, let's have a chat and you were just instantly capturing the lead. The first thing you do is instantly trying to capture the lead.

Totally. The next thing that takes you to a pretty complex form, but the form has logic so you can't see all the questions that you don't need to answer. Some questions we'll show up depending on what you answer next. This is kind of complex to pull off, but there's only one question when you submit your information on the next form in that question is do you want to schedule a phone call to talk about your project? That's the thing I'm the most concerned about because most people aren't thinking, Oh man, if I'm going to partner with somebody on my art, I want to know them. I want to have a conversation with them and the most important thing for me is like, well, let's get a phone call. I can't pick up the phone most of the time cause I'm mastering something like I'm using my ears but I can schedule time and I use acuity.

It's like a scheduling software. We've talked about counseling in the past, similar to basically do you want to schedule a phone call with me as the first question? There's more questions after that and then eventually after they filled all that out it shows them my calendar and let them pick a time to schedule a call with me. That has been huge for me to use something like acuity because now it's really easy to form a real relationship with somebody who wants to work with me. Piece of cake and my conversion rate has gone through the roof and my satisfaction has gone through the roof as well too. Just as far as like my satisfaction and what it's like to work for a living as a mastering engineer is I get to make friends with people and have conversations about their art and about what they're trying to do and so I really think it is important to have the minimal amount on your contact form.

Name, email, maybe message if you're not going to go like super advanced like I have like so for me its name and email. You submit that and now if you don't finish the form I'm gonna email you. You've captured the lead. Yeah. Hey is there anything you wanted to talk about? Do you want to schedule a phone call? I'd love to hear more about your music. I can follow up because they've submitted their information and now we can have a conversation. Even if they flake out and they're like, well I don't feel like doing this right now. I can still get their attention by following up with email or you know one of the things you could do is you could ask for their phone number and then call them if they don't finish the form. For me with the number of customers I'm working with, that would be very challenging to do. I'm super swamped all the time. So the scheduling, a phone call think tends to work. I think what a lot of people do wrong, just kind of get us back on topic here is they try to put distance between themselves and their potential customers with these forms.

Yeah. They hear about all of this like automation we talk about and how to make things more efficient. There is a time and place for efficiency

and if you're early in your career and you're not swamped with work already, this is not the time or the place. Efficiency isn't the problem. Yeah. That's not the problem here. I want to touch on some other

things. We've briefly touched on some of these things in this conversation so far, but I want to get your input on something that I'm really, really adamant about that you don't seem as adamant about and I think it's worth arguing with each other about this. I go to Chris Graham, mastering.com and I don't like what I see. Ooh, yeah, and let me tell you why I started to say this earlier, but I got sidetracked. Every site these days and especially in the software world, I mean he's the software world as an example, only because the software world is one of the most datadriven industries that you'll ever find. There are blogs and podcasts and books and so many things written about conversion optimization about the numbers behind. They're really, really, really datadriven. We don't ever see this in the audio world. Me and Chris are about the closest you'll see in this, in the audio world and so I really like to look to other industries like the software world when it comes to best practices for a high converting website and so when you start looking in the software world and you look at pretty much any site, every single site has the same basic layout and if you go to stripe.com which is a huge payment processor, or you even just go to wordpress.com or you go to wix.com or you go to squarespace.com or you go to mailchimp.com literally any site, you should list more websites.

I like to make James' work in the show notes. He's going to have to have all of these listed in the show notes. If you go to any of these sites, they're all going to have the same basic layout is going to be big bold headline. Most of them are going to have a smaller subhead line with more words on it and they're going to see a couple of buttons. There. One's going to be the main call to action, which is usually like buy or sign up. The second one would be like a secondary call to action, so like contact us or ask a question or look at our features or look at our pricing page or whatever it is. It's always a secondary, less important call to action. The reason every site looks the same is because this is the template that is proven to convert because this is the template that everyone sees and so if you go to four, five, six recordings.com my site, it's a very similar setup.

If you go to file pass.com extend extremely similar setup because this a software company, but Chris Graham, mastering.com in no way follows this and the reason I asked you this is because when you have a completely different layout that people have to figure out, I feel like that adds an additional layer of friction that is unnecessary and I'm curious your thoughts on going this traditional route or trying something completely off the wall in new and not ever testing anything different. Excellent question. Here's my thoughts on this and let me first preface this and that I consider myself a student when it comes to website stuff because really what we're talking about is behavioral economics, behavioral psychology. Why do humans

do what humans do? And my gosh, I might be 1% of the way to understanding all of this. I would say that when you're working with musicians, did a couple things come into play more so than they would with somebody who's thinking about buying a subscription to a software company or something like that. When a musician comes on a website for musicians services, which is to broadly classify every single person listening to this podcast, you probably offer some sort of musician services website is that musicians think a little differently than a normal consumer does. A musician is seeking to self actualize. If you've heard about Maslow's hierarchy of needs, this idea that you know, humans try to satisfy certain needs first and other needs. Second, the last thing they tried to do is accomplish self actualization. As a result, musicians tend to be the most attached to the decisions that they make when they're considering how do I self actualize in a bigger way.

Because if you do self actualize in a really big way as a musician, the potential rewards are beyond imagination. You know, it's this idea of like, especially if like let's say you're a single 25 year old and you make this amazing song, you could marry a supermodel next year. You've got a yacht you could fill in the blank. This makes our customers a little tricky to deal with. And first of all, I think you have to balance what works well to convert on a website and what grabs their attention, what is just unique enough to get them to stop and pause and say, hmm, this is something new and interesting and I'm going to hang around. And I think what my website, I don't want to say does well. I think one of the reasons it's worked over the years is because it's just a little weird that before and after player grabs your attention and you want to play with it.

I designed it in a way that you want to play with that knob and you want to hit the before and after button and as a result you get stuck in the website. Is that you start playing a game with, you're like, oh cool. Yeah, I see what he does. Oh, this is awesome. This is a cool website. I've had so many people share that website with their friends just because they thought it was a cool website. It's the same in music. If you want to have a hit song, you cannot follow the formula. You have to have something where someone says, Ooh, what was that? And you know, you take someone like Kacey Musgraves, her album that one country have them in the year. Golden hour is a profoundly strange country record. And in lies it's success. So you have to balance what works with what also grabs attention and what gets someone to hang out on your website and develop an attraction to you.

So man, we could have a whole podcast just based on me trying to understand this stuff. Case in point, Megan, you're wife is awesome. That's my wife. Yeah. And she is a very unique person and when you meet her you can tell that she's not a basic B, you know, she's not this like oh my gosh, I liked pledged the sorority and then I went to target and I bought some soap and stuff. That's not Megan. She's clearly unique and it was because that she broke the mold that she grabbed your attention. And so you have to like obviously Megan needed to do stuff like wash her feet and like not have tee shirts with, I don't know, weird logos and stuff that said crazy stuff. She had to at least follow some of the rules in order to catch your attention in a massive way, but she also had to break just enough of them to really intrigue you. That's the word I'm looking for. It intrigue you when you guys first met. So I would say on my website I'm trying to have a high converting website, but I'm also trying to intrigue people at the same time.

I get it. I'm not going to argue too hard on that because it's working. But just playing devil's advocate here because since we're talking about websites converting and stuff, is there something that we don't, we haven't really talked about much on the podcast and it's something that I really believe heavily in and I think I've gotten Chris into this a little bit more now and it's about testing. Here's the thing, gut feelings are probably a good place to start. They're not a good place to live. And anytime there is what we consider a best practice in that conflicts with what is in your gut. My philosophy continues to be to test it and let the numbers speak for themselves and so I can't help but wonder Chris, what would happen if you revamped your website to be more alike stripe.com but still maybe below the fold, maybe on the side of the page, maybe in a different format, in a different way. Your before and after player was still there. It just wasn't the main focus at the top of the page and I would just be really curious what would happen if that were the case.

There are a few things I would rather do than hang out with you and make adjustments to my website and then split test the results. I am really down with that. I will say I use wordpress. I thought you said there were a few things I'd rather do before I started there. There. Okay. There's like, oh, that just sounds so dreamy to me and I've,

I thought you were that kind of person. You're the nerd that would love to actually,

Oh yes. Well yeah, I'm really into testing and when I, let's save a 2011 2012 when I was really kind of getting my business tuned in, I tested so much and this was before good testing tools. You recently turned me on to a plugin called thrive architect, which is wordpress only if you're in wordpress, great plugin, unbelievable plugin and what thrive architect can do is you can multiple lead forms like signup forms, you could test, well what if I have name, email message, what percentage of people will fill that out versus name, email, phone number, favorite band, and favorite ice cream flavor.

That's like a small split test I love and it's super powerful that you're always constantly testing things. I like doing it a little more dramatic. I like to just have two wildly different landing pages, different headlines or different designs overall with the same headline. What I'll end up finding is I'll have a baseline number like this is converts at 15% 20% and if I do a wildly different page, I'm either going to get half of that or I'm going to get double that. Yup. I don't really care about the small little like nickel and dime. I increased my landing page from 15% to 17% so I really think like just throwing everything you've done away respectfully and starting from scratch on like a revamped site and just seeing how that does. I'd be interested to see how that performs.

I have been trying to find a way to ask you to do this with me and I had been building up to the point where I could, I as of two days ago am completely thrive based. Well, I'm almost completely thrive based. Yeah. So now if you want to go in and mess with my website is, here's the thing, if you say to me, Chris, I have an idea that I think will convert better than what you're currently doing. I'd be like, dude, here's my login man to make a version and let's split test that.

Yeah, and this is a good point to talk about Ab testing. I think it's probably a good place to kind of end on here and that is first you have to know that split testing is a thing. It's called Ab testing. There's a lot of tools out there for it. Depending on what your website builder is, no matter what, even Google has one Google optimize or something, it's like a free tool they'll use and they'll do all in all for you. May Not a huge fan. I think they're constantly working on it. When's the last time you tried at Chris? By five years ago. Okay. That's, they've really revamped it. So I think it's worth testing now at the end of the day, do something to test. And so our encouragement for you is anyone who is hesitant or who doesn't think they can improve or hear this episode and says, Oh, my site's already converting.

Well I don't care. At the end of the day, you can always improve and improving. It is always the goal. And I feel like a split test is the best way to do it because instead of the fluctuations in the quality of traffic you get it. Cause sometimes like, like Chris said, sometimes you have a blog post that goes viral or sometimes you are on a podcast and get interviewed and you get a lot of traffic that way and sometimes the traffic's qualified, sometimes it's not. And so if you just go month to month and with completely different sites, it's hard to really track the metrics to know what's converting better. But if you split the traffic from site a to site B, it's just the same. It's the same month. Every other person sees a different version of your site at the end of the month or the end of the testing period. It's a lot easier to make a decision on which one is converting better and you'll have something called statistical significance and you'll

have a random dataset for each a and a B. One of the things to keep in mind though is back to what we mentioned at the beginning of this episode is if you have traffic, if you have momentum in your website, this episode is going to be a little more valuable to you than someone who's just beginning out. If you're only getting like 30 people a month and your website split testing might be a little premature because it's going to take a very long time for you to have enough traffic where the math actually can be sure that one decisions better than another. So case in point, I have been goofing around with the way I do my sign up form on the website. Massive changes in the past couple weeks for me and I had been split testing the call to action button. So basically you put your email and you put your name in and there's a button that you click and that button could say any much of a different things.

Let's imagine that if the button said, poop poop, Fart, fart. No one's going to click that button, right? Like, no, no, I might. You might. You are. You're probably the only person that would, that's probably not gonna have a good conversion rate. Well, until you test it, you'll never know Chris. Well this is true, but if I had another version of that website exactly the same, but the button said, you know, sign up, then the conversion rate between those two will be very different. I've been experimented a lot with that over the years and we talked about this last week, one of the strengths things, I've been goofing around with this at just for fun. I was like, what if I might button said let's go exclamation point. And it just ran that out there and ran it against like, you know, everything else I had been trying and it was converting to like 85% better than everything else.

And it was, it was confusing because here's the thing, nobody knows how huge groups of humans will behave anywhere, let alone a website. And when you split test, it's a way to democratically figure out people like this more than they like that. And it really helps you to be more empathetic, to get an idea of how other people see you or how other people see this website that you've presented to the world. And so the story I want to tell her just really, really briefly about this is when Barack Obama ran for president the first time, he hired a guy to help him do split testing, and this is 2008 so this was really cutting edge technology at the time. They came up with 26 different versions of his donation website and ran them all live to see which one got the most donations and the version that got the most donations was not what anybody had thought would win this contest, especially Barack Obama.

Nobody came anywhere close to guessing the right version of the website, but the right version of the website was a $65 million improvement over the course of the rest of the campaign compared to the rate at the original website had been converting. That. Just kind of case in point here of why, how important this was. Mccain who ran against Obama in 2008 only had $65 million total to spend on his campaign. So just based on running some split tests on a website, Obama arguably won the presidency because he made so much more money than McCain did. So you could say that Obama was president because of split testing. Yeah, you could, which honestly was a good executive decision on his part, no matter what you think of them. That was real smart. Yeah, that he did that and the Republicans didn't yet at the time. So all that

to say, if you are struggling with your website, just to kind of recap page load speeds by default, you have to get that down overall website look, if it's not converting, consider going with a standardized view. The reason Chris keeps the way his is is because it is working. So if his wasn't working, I would absolutely 100% make you take that player off the top of your page and revamp it all. But it's still working. So I can't argue with results. But from that point, if you're just having a moderate success, you're looking to improve it more and more. Split testing is the way to go. Split testing all the way, find a tool that works for you and start playing around with it because you may not make a $65 million difference in your business, but you might make a $6,500 difference this year. Yeah, and it could eventually change the $65,000 difference because that one client you got this year that you wouldn't have otherwise gotten ends up blowing up and dragging you along with them on their massive career trajectory.

Well, I mean this is good stuff. There's a lot to think about here. This has been one of the heavier episodes. There's a lot of context to each piece of advice we're putting here. But I would say, yeah, I mean definitely you have to be tracking this stuff because you have to know whether you're growing, you have to know whether you're growing or dying. You have to be watching this stuff to see whether you're improving and if you do track this stuff, and this is something I've been kind of working up to. I'm the type of person where if I track it, I will stay motivated like crazy. I will definitely move the needle if, if the needle has a number on it. If you're that type of person, you might find that your sort of like,

I'm really excited about my website today. I'm going to work on my business,

Udl feel like working on my web. So today I'm going to, I'm going to build this business. Literally I a few. Like if you're on this roller coaster of like you're only relying on your own motivation to grow your business, having some stuff that you're tracking that you can look at and say, yes, that's objective. Lee Better, I've improved and I are can rightfully feel proud of myself. That psychological change aside from all the other like nitty gritty, this will grow your revenue or this'll give you the opportunity to raise your price or what all this stuff can be really secondary to the psychological benefit of tracking your success

[inaudible]

so that is it for this episode of the six figure home studio podcast. Hopefully there are some take homes for you from this episode. If you have some actionables actually take action. Don't forget that part. That's a really important part of this podcast. If you constantly consumed from this podcast never to take action, then you are not to get anything out of this. Nice to know. Information is not at all helpful when you have those Aha moments you need to take action. So do not forget that last week you mentioned helping people find mastermind groups. Still trying to figure out what we're going to do with that, but we had enough people that applied to that that it makes sense for us to move forward with doing something. Some of you who are really early to the form, you might've noticed that the form is no longer accepting submissions.

That was actually a mistake. That was my bad. I, uh, I messed up the format. So if that was you and you want to apply to be part of a mastermind group, we're going to figure some way to pair mastermind groups up. If that is you go to the six figure home studio.com/mastermind and there's a really short form there. She's asking me your name, your email address, and you choosing whether you want to be a mastermind group leader or you just want to be a more normal mastermind group member. All that means is do you want to be the person that's taking part in choosing your team or do you just want to be one of those people that has chosen to be part of a mastermind group? We're going to work with the team leaders to help put together the groups. That's all I have so far with that.

Um, if you're not sure what the heck I'm talking about, just go back to listen to last week's episode where we talked about blind spots in the power of mastermind groups and surrounding yourself with people who are better than you. If you go back and listen to that, then you'll understand what I'm talking about here. So again, go to the six figure home, studio.com/mastermind felt that form, and we'll try to get you into a group whenever we can. Anyways, thanks so much for listening to this episode. All the way to the very, very end means a lot to me. Until next time, have an awesome week and happy [inaudible].