Website Strategies

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TRANSCRIPT:
Avish: Alright Fred, in this day and age you pretty much you have to have a website for your event, correct?

Fred: Absolutely.

Avish: Alright. So I’d like to talk to you then about what are the, what makes a good website? What are the elements that you must have on your website? So let’s start with accepting online registration. You have to do that and if so how does one do that?

Fred: Yeah, people pretty much expect it at this point. It used to be you have a website and you’d get people to call or fax you. But now, you know, everybody’s got a shopping cart, a merchant processor, and all these kinds of things. And so even somebody’s just starting out can put up a website and even if they don’t have all that, they can use PayPal as a processor. And the answer is a definitive yes. You need to able to allow people to register for your event online.

Avish: Okay. What about selling products on your seminar web page or website?

Fred: Well, I think it’s probably, again remember that, my famous line that I use repeatedly, “that a confused mind always says no.” One of the things that want to do, is make sure that if you’re trying to sell your seminar or event on that website, that you don’t get distracted with trying to sell products there as well. However, if somebody comes to your website and decides not to buy, one of the things that you can structure in your site itself, is for people, when people do not click on the buy button, or if they click on the buy button and then abandon the order. You can have some kind of a pop-up or something come up that basically says “hey, you didn’t register attend the event and pay, so I assume though that you’re still interested in the topic, here’s an offering for you that is a recording of the past event or you’re going to get a recording of this event when it’s finished.” So you should make that available, but don’t make it the primary focus of the website because it distracts people from your primary mission which is to get them sign up for the event.

Avish: Okay. As far as the pop-up goes, that’s a technical thing that people can look up how to do or just tell the web master to figure out?

Fred: Yeah, if you’re having problems trying to figure this out, again talk to someone like Dave Hamilton the web marketing magician, who can help you with all the technical elements of putting up a site. He’s put up numerous sites for me and I highly recommend him to do this kind of stuff because he knows about it. It won’t be difficult for him to figure out exactly what you need.

Avish: Now what about, let’s say I already have a business with a website and I want to do a seminar now. Should I just put up a page under like, avishparashar.com/seminar or is it necessary to get a brand new URL?

Fred: Well, again if your following serve my philosophy. One of the things I would do is I would have a separate URL for every product, service, event, or anything that you sell. Now, this is going to end up being a lot of different URLs, a lot of different domain names but I encourage that.

So first thing is you want to go to coolhostingtool.com that’s C-O-O-L hosting tool T-O-O-L dot com and sign up for an account there, where you can get unlimited hosting for one flat fee. Then, you want to go to ultracheapdomains.com, that’s ultracheapdomains plural, and sign up there to get all your URLs. Now if you anticipate doing more 50 of them, you may want to go to selldomainsforprofit.com, sell domains F-O-R profit, and then you can then set up your own retail store, like I’ve done with ultra cheap domains, which allows you to reserve domain names.

So the answer is you should have a separate URL for every product or service. You should be using Ultra Cheap Domains or Cool Hosting Tool both to host and reserve those domain names. And you’re probably going to be using WordPress, as we talked about previously I think that you’re going to be probably want to get some dollars at WordPress and how to use it. Or you’re going to want to talk to someone like Dave Hamilton to set it up for you.

Avish: Okay. Well that makes sense. So if that’s the website, we’re going to accept registrations on there. We made you a pop-up if people leave. Should the website be like a single page website with like one long sales copy page for your seminar? Should it be more of a full website with a lot of information? What’s your kind of best bet for a seminar web page or website?

Fred: Well the best bet is to take a look at the Fred Info Boot Camp Site and Fred Info Boot Camp or publishingabook.com or paidpublicspeaker.com, in which you know, those paid public speaker and publishing a book or trying to sell a coaching program. But I like the use of video and I do that on the Fred Info Boot Camp site as well. So there’s a combination when you set up your website of both video or you’re speaking with a camera and trying to get people to know what is it all about and why they should come. And there should also be copy, because I think you can’t put up either just a copy or just a video. It’s probably a good idea to put up both in order to be able to attract the greatest number of people.

Avish: Okay. But those sites—because I’ve seen them—are more single page websites. Is that your recommendation for a seminar site?

Fred: Yeah. Just because if you’re trying again to get people to make a decision to come to your event, I don’t think we need to distract them with having a click around or click off the page to go somewhere else. I think you make your strongest pitch as hard as you can right on a single page and have everything there. So all they need to do is scroll and not click and go somewhere else.

Avish: Okay. So in this program when we talked about direct mail, we talked about the elements if you’re going to do direct mail piece. Are those same elements needs to be on your website?

Fred: You know what, they pretty much do. If you look at the elements either in the direct mail section, they are similar. But again, for people listening in this program should just go to fredinfobootcamp.com and you use that as their template for setting up their seminar site. That pretty much will give you everything that you need in order to make sure you haven’t left anything out.

Avish: Okay, anything else on creating a website?

Fred: Yeah, there’s probably a lot of things we can talk about because once you have a website obviously you want to drive traffic to it. But I think that’s a course again for another day.

Avish: Okay, sounds great.