Show Notes
- CasJam.com – Brian Casel’s website
- Bootstrapped Web podcast
- Productize – a course on productizing your services
- Restaurant Engine
Transcript
[00:00] Mike: This is “Startups for the Rest of Us,” episode 208.
[00:02] Music
[00:10] Mike: Welcome to “Startups for the Rest of Us,” the podcast that helps developers, designers and entrepreneurs be awesome at launching software products, whether you’ve built your first product, or you’re just thinking about it. I’m Mike.
[00:17] Brian: And I’m Brian.
[00:18] Mike: And we’re here to share our experiences to help you avoid the same mistakes we’ve made.
[00:21] Well, Rob is still away on vacation, so I have the pleasure of having Brian Casel on. If you’re not familiar with who Brian is, he the founder of Restaurant Engine. He writes and teaches at casjam.com, and he’s the co-host of the “Bootstrapped Web” podcast.
How are you doing today, Brian?
[00:36] Brian: Doing great, Mike. Glad to be here. Thanks for having me on.
[00:39] Mike: The topic that you wanted to talk about was productized services, and this is a topic that Patrick McKenzie has brought up a couple of time at previous MicroConfs about how people can essentially move from more of a consulting model into a software model, where they’re selling software instead of selling just services. But, you know, there’s this gap there where you don’t necessarily have enough money to be able to just work full-time on the product, but you’re making so much money from the consulting, you can’t necessarily just drop everything and move over to product; because then you’ve got this mismatch between what your cash flow looks like and what your future revenue looks like. So, a productized service essentially kind of bridges the gap a little bit where you have this product that you’re selling, but it’s still a service on the back end.
[01:21] I wanted to have you on and discuss that quite a bit more, because I think it’s a very interesting way that people can essentially take their products that they’re working on, that is still essentially a more of a beta format, and not necessarily ready for the open market. Or, they haven’t quite figured out exactly how to address the marketing and use that as a mechanism for bringing in revenue while they’re still developing those products.
[01:43] Brian: Yeah, exactly. I mean that’s a perfect example of it. What’s really exciting to me about productized services is that there’re a number of different directions that you can take and kind of plug them into your business, whether you’re just starting out, or you’re in that transition, like you said, between consulting and moving into a products business; or, you know, what I’ve even seen as well is you already have a product – you know, some kind of software product, plugging in a productized service component to that – another trend that I’m seeing. I’ve been researching this quite a bit, writing about it, seeing it in my own business as well. So, really excited about talking about productized services.
[02:16] Mike: There’s two, different perspectives that I can see here. One of them is from your customer’s perspective, and then the other one is from the founder’s perspective, the person who’s actually putting together the service. So, why don’t you talk about those two, different things and kind of what some of the research you’ve done has come up with and what some of the different things you’ve done in these scenarios is.
[02:33] Brian: Yeah, exactly. And, you know, if you’re a freelancer and you’re used to billing by the hour, or working project to project, productized services work a little bit differently. So, from your customer’s perspective, a productized service offers a specialized, done-for-you solution with a compelling value proposition. And it’s packaged at a set price and scope, so there’s really no negotiation, or writing a long proposal, or going into these discovery meetings that often happen in consulting work. “This is the scope. This is the price. It offers this type of value. Buy now.” And then, you know, from the founder’s perspective, a productized service is one that runs systematically, and it continues to produce and grow with or without your direct involvement. And I highlight “with or without,” because there are so many different types of productized services. And we can kind of get into them in a minute, but whether you want to remain solo and do like a productized consulting, or actually grow it – grow your team and focus on systems, you could actually design your productized service to run without you.
[03:35] Mike: I think one of the most interesting pieces of this is – you know, from the customer’s perspective, they’re essentially paying you to do a particular job; but you are in some ways decoupling the hours worked from the service itself. So, you’re no longer billing by the hour; you’re billing for the project itself. And in many ways, you already have a good idea of what the billable hours would have looked like anyway, but you want to essentially decouple those things so your price is not tied directly to the number of hours that you’re working.
[04:04] Brian: Yeah, exactly. It kind of goes to that idea of value-based pricing – right? So, you come up with some compelling value proposition, a very specific service that really benefits one type of customer; and you price it accordingly, and you define the scope of that service accordingly.
[04:21] Mike: The other side’s interesting, too, because from the founder’s perspective, you can start plugging other people in and, as you said, you can essentially scale it. So, if you just want to be the person doing the work, then you can do it; but you can also substitute other people in. And there’s lots of people who are doing that successfully.
[04:35] So, let’s talk a little bit about some of the different scenarios where productizing a service might come into the picture? The two that you had talked about before the show were launching a new product and then if you’ve already launched a product. So, let’s talk about those a little bit.
[04:47] Brian: You know, productizing, again, it comes into play in so many different types of scenarios. But if you’re launching a new product, you’re transitioning from consulting into products, or transitioning from a full-time job into a product business. You may not have the time or the money to invest into building something really big like a SaaS app, like a complex mobile app or something. So, you need to launch to paying customers quickly, and a productized service is a great way to do that. You know, you can pretty much begin productizing a service that you’ve already been doing as a consultant, or something that you’ve done at your job; package it into, again, a value-added, productized service.
[05:26] If you have a product and maybe you’re struggling to gain that initial traction, or you just want to find ways to add value to what you’re doing – and this really comes from my own experience with Restaurant Engine. It originally launched almost three years ago as a SaaS, and technically it still operates as a SaaS, you know, from the monthly and annual billing standpoint. But over the last three years, it really has evolved into much more of a productized service as we began adding manual, done-for-you services at every level. So, we do web design for restaurants. My team manually on-boards every new client, and we manually set up their entire website, input all their content for them. We’ll even make ongoing monthly updates to their website for them. All this is done manually, but I’ve completely removed myself from the process, built loads of systems and processes. And I’ve delegated all these tasks so that I can remove myself. I can focus on the bigger picture, kind of focus on marketing and then even take a vacation once in a while.
[06:26] Mike: I think one of the best parts about that is you can take things that you’ve already been doing for your existing customers and essentially just repackage them.
[06:34] Brian: You know, what we’re just beginning to do now with Restaurant Engine is we’re beginning to add an option add-on service, which is we’ll actually manage their email newsletter for them. We’ll create the email newsletter and send it out on their behalf. And this is an optional, done-for-you service that we’re adding on top of it, and we’ve been offering that to our existing customers.
[06:53] Mike: So, essentially, all you’re doing is going back to your existing customer base and offering them either services that you’ve already been doing on kind of a prepackaged basis, or you’re coming up with new services that you’re offering to them on that packaged basis. And that way, you can substitute anyone in on the back end that you need to, based on whatever that service provides for them, or special customizations, or something like that that go a little bit beyond what the standard package offers. That gives you the flexibility to do that stuff.
[07:18] Brian: Yeah, exactly. I mean we’ve designed a service with certain limitations built in, but then there’s also some flexibility there. We have a platform and framework in place, and we’ve built in a lot of customization tools that make it fast and easy for us to set up a customer’s website. We also have the ability to customize to a certain extent, like we can add custom CSS to a site and make certain tweaks; but there are limits to that, and those limits are put there for a reason – because, again, this is a productized, focused service. This is not consulting, where we can literally just do anything and everything the client dreams of.
[07:54] Mike: So, I think that’s probably an important piece that we want to dig into a little bit – is what sort of edge cases do you need to identify as places where customers might try to take advantage of what the service is? And how do you essentially protect yourself from those types of things so that not a lot of back and forth? How do you go about identifying those types of things in your service offering, and how do you protect yourself?
[08:16] Brian: You know, you can just look at so many others who are doing this productized consulting, or productized service, to two that I’ll highlight here: Nick Desabato and Jarrod Drysdale. Nick Desabato launched Draft Revise, which is like a monthly A/B testing optimization service that will help you increase conversions on a monthly basis. And he very clearly spells out on the landing page for his service, Draft Revise, exactly what’s included; exactly what the client can expect; and the type of results that his other clients have seen. So, it’s really just laid out and setting those expectations right from the start. I mean before a customer even decides to purchase, or decides to get in contact with him, they’ve basically read through his landing page and seen all the terms.
[09:04] And then the same is true for Jarrod’s site, LandingPageinaDay. You know, again, the landing page does just a really great job of setting those expectations; and, of course, his service is what it sounds like. He’ll design and build a landing page for you in one day. Even in the title of the service, that basically defines the scope – right? Like, he’ll start in the morning, work on it throughout the day. He’ll write the copy for you, and by the end of the day, it will be launched. And I think it says somewhere on its site if you needed additional revisions, additional tweaks and things that go beyond that day, he’s available – clearly at an additional cost.
[09:40] Mike: I think those are very interesting examples, because they kind of highlight two, different sides of the spectrum. With Draft Revise, you’re essentially getting this monthly, ongoing service versus the Landing Page in a Day, which you’re essentially hiring somebody for one day of work. But in both cases, I think it’s very clear what you’re getting at the other end of it, so the value is very, very clearly defined.
[10:02] Brian: Draft Revise has been designed to offering recurring revenue, and that is a fantastic way of building a business, of course. You know, with productized services, you can go in so many different routes. You can go with, like, you know, a one-time purchase type of deal, or the recurring revenue route; and you can even do a combination of those. I think Nick, on his Draft Revise service, actually offers both. He now offers Revise Express, which is kind of like the one-time audit where he’ll give you a clearly defined list of recommendations, or tweaks, that he would recommend for you to increase conversions on your website; and then clients have the ability to upgrade to the monthly Draft Revise service. And I’ve seen that again and again in a lot of these productized consulting – what’s basically known as “the ladder,” where you offer a one-time service and then the option to upgrade to a recurring service.
[10:52] Mike: We’ve talked a little bit about exactly what a productized service is and the different places where you might use it, some examples of other people are using it and how they’re using it. What’s the first step to productizing a service?
[11:06] Brian: You know, it’s really all about focus. So, you want to focus on one service, and you want to focus on customer. That usually starts with the service. Ideally, you want to pick something that customers have paid you for, have paid you to do, if you’re coming from consulting. So, you could even look at the types of projects that you’re doing, or that you’ve been doing, and break those down into individual services. So, you know, for example, I come from a background as a freelance web designer, and I might – my background – you know, I – one component is setting up a WordPress site.
[11:38] Another component is designing mockups. The list goes on, but you can kind of pick one of those things to really focus on. And you also want to look for a service that somebody has actually paid you for, and that’s really important because that indicates that there is a real pain or problem to be solved. The other aspect of picking one service is you want to look for something that can really produce specific results that can then produce compelling case studies. So, you look at something like Nick Desabato’s Draft Revise, and his case studies show actual increase in conversions with hard numbers. You want to look for those things. And then you also want to focus on choosing one customer to sell your service to. Of course, you’ll have a couple variations of the types of clients that you’ll work with. You want to be as focused as possible, because that makes everything so much easier. You know exactly who your customer is, and you know how to tailor the service to meet their exact needs and help them be extremely successful.
[12:36] And as you go about narrowing down one customer to focus on, there’re a few things that you can look for. Number one, you should be looking for businesses with money to spend. From what I’ve found, all the productized services that I researched they all tend to be B-to-B services, working with businesses who have a monthly operating budget to spend. Niched verticals can be easier to reach. I’ve seen that in my business Restaurant Engine, so we’ve basically only worked with restaurants and food trucks, and that’s a very tightly niched vertical. That’s one avenue to explore. Or, whatever industry you’re in, maybe find ways to get more specific. And then you also want to consider the right audience for you. So, what type of people are do you like to associate yourself with? If you’re doing a lot of content marketing, or you plan to do content marketing, who could you actually content ? You don’t necessarily have to end up writing all the content yourself, but in the early days you probably will. So, you want to keep that in mind. Another thing that I like to think about is what kind of conferences can you see yourself attending. You know, would you go to a conference with this type of audience? So, keep these things in mind as you’re narrowing down on that one customer to focus on.
[13:46] Mike: I think one of the things that you said there that’s really important for people to understand is that you are looking to productize a service that you’ve already performed for people and that you’ve charged them for. And the reason that’s so important is you know that there’s already a business there. It’s not like you’re creating something out of thin air and you’re trying to sell it to people, and you don’t necessarily know if people are going to buy it. If you’ve already performed it for people and you know that they’re willing to pay you on an hourly basis, or a weekly basis for it, it makes it so much easier to essentially define the limits of what that service is going to entail, but also to understand and fully appreciate all of the different things that are going to go into it. So, if you’ve never worked with a customer before, and you go to try to sell them on a particular service, they may very well have questions for you that you have no idea how to answer, so you aren’t able to clearly talk about those different points inside of your service offering.
[14:39] But if you’ve done that before, you know the different edge cases that are going to come up. You know the different pain points that people are going to hit and how you’re going to deal with them, because you’ve done it before. And I think that being able to clearly and solidly answer all of those questions for people, even before they’ve asked those questions, is very key to being able to sell some of these productized services.
[14:58] Brian: Yeah, exactly. What I also like to look for are the types of questions that come up from whether they’re new prospects or existing clients. A lot of times, you’ll hear a lot of the same questions come up again and again, and those are really big indicators of a particular point in the service, or a type of service that’s kind of the deal breaker. Like, if that’s not included, then the project is not going to happen. For example, looking back when I was a freelance web designer, it got to the point around 2011, 2012 where almost every, single prospect that I spoke to asked about mobile websites. Will the site be mobile optimized? And that just became a deal breaker. So, if I were to productize that service, that would be something that I would think heavily about.
[15:42] Mike: So, let’s talk about scaling services like this. How would you go about scaling this? I think one of the big things that comes to mind is being able to clearly document not only the resources that you need to go into the project, but also what that output is going to look like.
[15:58] Brian: Yeah. I hear this question a lot: “Can a productized service actually scale?” We are talking heavily about manual processes, doing things manually, done-for-you services. So, how can that actually scale up? And looking back when I started Restaurant Engine, my dream was to build something that literally runs on its own. Over time, we’ve added more and more manual services, but at the same time, I’ve been able to remove myself. So, my answer to that question is, yes, you can scale up a productized service; and the key is to focus on systems and systemizing every process. What I’ve broken down here is a three-step process to systemizing so that you can get to that point where you can actually begin to hire and delegate those tasks and remove yourself from the business. And what this really is all about is working on your business and not in your business. So, if you’re used to kind of pushing pixels in PhotoShop or coding, you want to remove yourself and focus on higher-level systems and process.
[16:57] Here are the three steps to systemization. It starts with standardizing. So, you want to focus on one particular service, like I said before. And, really, you want to focus down on one method or way of doing things. Or, choose not to do everything. As a consultant, we often do everything, but in a productized service we want to standardize and focus in on one service. There are always multiple ways of achieving the same result. Right? But we want to focus in on one method and commit to one way of doing things, and that just makes things more standardized and predictable.
[17:31] Mike: I think that’s a very important point to make just because – you’re right – when you’re doing a consultant engagement, you get in there, and your job is to just get things done; because you don’t necessarily fall under the same constraints that everybody else does who works in an organization. But I think that when you’re doing a standardized service like this, it’s very important to not get involved in some of these quagmires; because there are some tasks that you can perform that are just going to be an absolute nightmare. There’s no way that you’re ever going to be able to come up with a one-size-fits-all thing for everybody – for example, reporting. Reporting is a big thing. Some people like to have lots of reports in all these different formats, and I think that if you standardize and just say, “Okay, all reports are going to be in Excel, and this is what you get, and if you want customization beyond that, we can talk about it; but what come with this particular offering is just” – you know, “These are the Excel reports, and these are the fields that you can expect to see,” I think that’s a much more appropriate way to handle something like that, because reporting could become just one of those huge quagmires.
[18:32] Brian: Yeah, that’s exactly right. Just coming up with that one, standard way of doing things – it really comes back to setting those expectations up front; and that begins with your website, your landing page, and then the way that you speak about the service. It has that predefined scope. That’s what it is.
[18:49] Mike: So, what’s the second step to systemizing?
[18:51] Brian: Once you’ve standardized and made things more predictable, the next step is to look for ways to streamline the processes and make them more efficient. So, that might mean, again, adding new limitations. For instance, I mentioned we’re adding email marketing to Restaurant Engine, where we’ll be managing email campaigns for our clients. One limitation that we’re adding to that is they have to be on MailChimp. Our clients – we want them to be using MailChimp, number one, because it’s cheap for a restaurant owner to get started on; and, number two, it makes it easy for us to set one process that my team can then follow. They don’t have to learn how to use AWeber and Constant Contact and iContact. We’re sticking only with MailChimp. So, we’re setting a limitation there.
[19:32] Another idea here is to use one, common framework, or template. I mentioned Jarrod Drysdale, his Landing Page in a Day. He’s a great example of someone who actually started with software and converted it into a productized service. A few months back, he created a design framework called Cascade.io, which is kind of a product in itself. But now he’s using that product to streamline his Landing Page in a Day service. So, essentially, he’s using his design framework to speed up his process of designing a landing page for clients.
[20:07] Mike: And I think that’s a great example of taking software that you are using and working on to be able to complement your productized service, especially to help that product make money in a way that may not necessarily be obvious. I think most people when they do that, their goal is to write a piece of software and then be able to sell it to everybody they possibly can. That’s the way that they’re going to scale it. But at the same time, when you first release your software, it’s not necessarily finished. It’s not in a format that is going to be easy for the mainstream masses to be able to use. So, if you convert that and say, “Okay. Well, I’m going to create this product. Maybe it’s not quite there, but I can live with the limitations, and I know what those limitations are, because I wrote the software,” then you can essentially use it in a services fashion to help complement your skills and the ability to get things done that, without that software, you wouldn’t be able to do anyway.
[20:58] Brian: Yeah, exactly. And having that software built in the first place, you can use that to your advantage when you’re performing that service. It just drastically speeds up the process and makes it more efficient. You know, I found that in my service as well. With Restaurant Engine in the very beginning, we built in all these fancy customization tools. We wanted it to be a do-it-yourself service. Any restaurant owner can come in and create their own website. But what ended up happening is today it’s a productized service. We’re using those same features, but we’re using them internally, and now we’re able to set up a new website in just a matter of one or two days.
[21:33] Mike: In some ways, this reminds me of the idea which was essentially concierge on-boarding, which is the idea that you are having people come and sign up for your product; but at the same time, you’re essentially hand-holding them. You’re doing things for them that you would like for them to do themselves so that you don’t have to do it, but at the same time, it’s more important to get them onto the software and using it than it is to make it easy for them to do it themselves. I mean that’s not necessarily your goal. Your goal is to make them a long-term customer, and if you have to do those things up front to help get them over the hurdle, then you will.
[22:06] Brian: That’s a great point. I know that there are a lot of people interested in doing SaaS products and SaaS owners out there today. So, in the beginning, it was a concierge service – right? We were kind of adding the done-for-you setup complementary – you know, just to get you onto the service. And that worked pretty well, but then we actually started charging for it, and today we actually require every customer to pay for the initial setup service. What we’ve found is that when we do that, yes, the rate of signups obviously goes down. You know, we’re asking for an up-front fee, and to your credit card and everything; but we’ve found that those customers who do that and go through our setup service they stay. The cancellation rate goes to near zero at that point. So, we’ve found that’s a good balance for us.
[22:51] Mike: Dharmesh Shah of HubSpot had talked about this at the Business of Software conference a few years ago, because their service has – there’s a couple of different tiers. I think their lowest tier is $200 a month, and then the next tier up is $800 a month, and then above that I think it’s $2,000 or $3,000 a month. At the lowest tier, even, you have to pay for what they call a training session. That’s $500. And the second tier is a $2,000 fee that you have to pay just to get set up. Some ways a consulting services engagement where they’re teaching you how to use their software. People get this idea, “Oh, well, I’ve already paid $2,000 to get set up on this. I really should be using it.” Because if they make that mental leap [and] say, “Okay. I’m going to plunk down $2,000 for my first month and then $800 a month after it,” you need to just move forward and do it.
[23:37] Brian: Yes, exactly. And we have seen that, and we see customers who have paid the setup fee are much more engaged. They’re invested in the process. They’re willing to go through the on-boarding steps, like providing their content, or doing whatever they need to to get going and start being successful on the service much faster.
[23:57] So, the third step as we get into systemizing our service is all about documentation. It’s really all about your documentation. Now, it is incredibly important to focus on standardizing and streamlining first, but then as you begin to prepare to potentially hire and delegate these tasks, you want to have your documentation in place. And what this really means is as the founder, you know, you’re still doing everything yourself in the early days; but you want to be spending and investing a lot of your time early on in writing out detailed, step-by-step procedures. And that can often mean spending up to three times longer on a particular task. So, what I see a lot of people running into who have trouble with delegating tasks to a team [is] they’d say, “I’d love to delegate this task to someone. But you know what? If I just do it myself, I can get it done so much quicker.” And you kind of have to break out of that way of thinking and work on your business and invest that time up front. Yes, you’re doing it yourself, but spend even more time writing out that detailed procedure so that, ultimately, you can delegate this and never have to touch that task again. Yes, it can be tedious, and it will take a lot of time; but you should just start simple. Start with just a really quick-and-dirty bullet list, step-by-step framework of what you’re working on, and then you can just continuously improve that over time.
[25:17] Mike: I think that’s a general-purpose skill that every entrepreneur needs to have – is to be able to document the processes and procedures and how the business is run, just purely from a logistics standpoint, to be able to step back from certain parts of the business, or to be able to hand them off. I’ve actually been in a position where there’re certain parts of the business where I’m handing off to other people and saying, “I need you to standard and streamline and document this entire process so that I don’t have to.”
[25:42] Brian: And that’s where it has come in my business as well. I mean literally just before we got on this call today, I wrote out a quick email to one of my teammates and said, “Can you turn this email into a procedure?” We actually have, like, a procedure for creating procedures. [Chuckles] You know, we have a standard template in Google Docs, and then they just kind of duplicate that. It has all the formatting and everything, and then he’ll just convert that into a procedure.
[26:05] And another thing that I see done quite often is doing a video screencast of a task and then handing that off to your virtual assistant or someone on your team. What I like to use video for is to document my process once, show that to my teammate and then ask them to convert that into a written procedure.
[26:21] Mike: What I’ve done is for documentation, I have a standard operating document in Google Docs. And whenever I bring on a new person to my team, I just share the entire folder with them so they have this whole folder structure of documents that they have access to. But inside of those, I will have one, main Google doc; and then it links off to all these other ones that are in the different sub-folders. For example, one of them is a procedure for dealing with Twitter. There’s specific documentation in there that’s written out about what to do at certain times and certain things that come up, but then I also have places where there’s a video that I just link to directly from there. And then I have the user name and password that’s stored directly in there, so I host everything out on screencast.com. And it just makes it easy, because if I ever need to change the password, I can just go into the Google doc, change it. If they need access to it, they just go in there, and it’s right there. And they can not only see the written documentation, but there are some places where it’s a lot easier to show somebody than it is to write it out. So, I use kind of a hybrid of that mechanism.
[27:24] Brian: Yeah, that’s a great point. I think I do a pretty similar thing. I give my team access to our folder in Google Docs. I do like to include both the visual and the written description. We also use a lot of screenshots, and we notate the screenshots. For that, I use Droplr. I’ll grab those screenshots, put the notations in, drop it into the Google Doc. In addition to that, I’ll actually describe the steps.
[27:46] Mike: Let’s move on a little bit to marketing a productized service. I know that there’s a huge amount of talk in terms of marketing a productized service. What are some of the things that you can think of that people might want to keep right at the edge of their mind when they’re looking to put together a productized service?
[28:03] Brian: For one, when you productize your service, you can begin to market it as if it’s a product just like any other product; and that’s kind of what’s so great about a productized service. You can really make use of all the other tactics that we’re constantly learning about. I think really the most important thing comes down to knowing your customer, really getting to know who that customer is. I spoke earlier about focusing in on one customer, one particular person. Since your productized service is focused on serving that one type of customer, you’re able to really research and learn everything that you can about them; because your goal is just to get lots and lots of any and every type of customer. Your goal is to find that one, focused customer and find more of that person. When you really understand who they are, or what they do, what their primary pain and challenge is, what are the hurdles that they’re trying to get past, you begin to see these patterns as you’re interviewing customers, talking to them on a daily basis, emailing with them. And when you really get to know them, everything else becomes easier – you know, writing landing pages, communicating your service, coming up with the perfect pricing or the perfect pitch, the value proposition, even designing the scope of your service: what’s included, what’s not included, how can we provide the most benefit possible.
[29:21] Mike: Yeah, I think knowing your customer, obviously, is a very important piece of this. It helps you to communicate your message to the customer and make sure that everyone’s on the same page. It also helps you if you want to do, like, SEO, or keyword optimization, or anything like that; because if you’re speaking the same language as them, in many ways that productized service is not really much different than an actual product. By clearly defining that, again, it’s just no different than selling an actual product versus selling a service. It’s just you’ve got everything prepackaged.
[29:51] Brian: It also goes back to speaking with your customers and listening to what they’re telling you, whether it’s your prospects that you’ve been speaking to as a consultant or your current and past clients. What are the things that they’re asking you? How do they describe their pain point? How do they describe the service or the product? And then you can use their language, literally take it out of their mouths and put it onto your landing page. When you truly understand what their core pain is through those constant discussions with that one type of customer, you know exactly what to lead with when it comes to your top headline, or the way that you describe the benefits that your service can offer.
[30:31] Mike: Brian, if people want to find you and learn more about the productizing services crash course that you’re offering, where can they find you?
[30:36] Brian: Yeah, so right on my site, casjen.com. On the home page, you’ll find a free crash course on how to productize your service. And then I also have the advanced training course called “Productize,” and that is at casjam.com/productize. I’m also “Casjam” on Twitter. [I’d] love to connect there. You can always reach me Brian@casjam.com.
[30:56] Mike: Well, Brian, thanks for coming on the show.
[30:58] Brian: Thanks for having me, Mike. It was fun.
[31:00] Mike: If you have a question for us, you can call it in to our voicemail number at 1.888.801.9690, or email it to us at questions@startupsfortherestofus.com. Our theme music is an excerpt from “We’re Outta Control” by MoOt, used under Creative Commons. Subscribe to us on iTunes by searching for “startups” and visit startupsfortherestofus.com for a full transcript of each episode. Thanks for listening.
Episode 207 | SEO tips with Dave Collins
Show Notes
- Software Promotions
- Dave Collins on Twitter
- WebsiteTearDown.com
- – or – https://www.softwarepromotions.com/forms/website-teardown/
- Moz
- Dave’s direct email address: Dave@SoftwarePromotions.com
Transcript
[00:00]Mike: This is Start Ups for the Rest of Us, Episode 207.
[00:03] Music
[00:10] Mike: Welcome to Start Ups for the Rest of Us, the podcast that helps developers, designers, and entrepreneurs be awesome at launching software products. Whether you’ve built your first product or you’re just thinking about it. I’m Mike.
[00:18] Dave: I’m Dave.
[00:19] Mike: And we’re here to share our experiences to help you avoid the same mistakes that we’ve made. Well, this week Rob is Thailand so what I’ve done is I’ve decided to invite Dave Collins from Software Promotions onto the show. So why don’t you just introduce yourself a little bit, talk about who you are, what it is that you do, how long you’ve been doing it, kind of what the relevance to our audience is.
[00:38] Dave: Well I’m Dave Collins, I’ve been working in let’s say online software and marketing types of things since 1997 somehow. And over the years, the work that I’ve been doing has evolved quite a lot but it’s mainly concerned with Google side of things so we were doing SEO actually before most people knew what Google was – actually we were doing SEO before most people knew what SEO was. These were the days of AltaVista, HotBot, LiveCast, InfoSeek, so a lot’s changed but a surprising amount has actually stayed more or less the same in the core principles of SEO. As AdWords kind of became the big thing we started doing more and more of it and here I am today.
[01:23] Mike: Cool. So one of the reasons I wanted to have you on was because a few weeks ago I had mentioned one of the talks at Business of Software that was from Rand Fishkin and he was talking a little bit about what Google’s doing, why they’re doing it, and what other people should be paying attention to and what lies ahead for Google and for how the rest of online marketers should pay attention to what they’re doing and how they should be reacting to it. So since you’re firmly entrenched in this space I wanted to bring you in and talk a little bit about what Google’s goals are, why they’re doing the types of things that they are, and what the rest of us can do to respond to those things. Because, obviously, they issue an update, your search engine rankings can go up or down – for most of us I think those rankings tend to go down based on whatever it is that they’re doing, because something that was perfectly okay to do yesterday is now no longer okay so now the rest of us have to do a lot more work in order to keep up with Google. So why don’t you talk a little bit about what Google’s main direction is right now and why they’re doing it.
[02:19] Dave: Okay, so there’s been an awful lot going on in the last few years, I’d say the last two or three years or so have seen more by the way of dramatic change than all the other years I’ve worked in SEO put together. What it’s all about, people often get hung up on the different names of the updates and the algorithms and the filters – like Panda, Penguin, Hummingbird – if you sort of take a step back it’s actually pretty simple. It’s all about Google trying to get rid of what they refer to as “search engine spam,” and what they mean by that are basically garbage, low quality sites that show up in the search results. Google ultimately wants to provide people with what they’re looking for as quickly and efficiently as possible so what they’re trying to do is get rid of all of these – you know all the sites that you carry out a search and the first, second, third, and fourth aren’t so good and they’re not relevant, and some of them are junk, and some of them sell things totally unrelated to what you’re searching for? So that’s it, just about clearing up the mess, really.
[03:22] Mike: I assume that you’re talking in some cases, I’ll call them “farms” of websites and I’ll throw eHow and About.com into this bunch because I know that I’ve gone to those sites and they happen to have ranked very highly for something and you go there and it’s completely not relevant. One of the things that Google is doing is that they’re moving these things around a lot; those types of sites are simply not relevant. Why is it that Google is so bent on making sure that people are getting the search engine results that they’re looking for?
[03:50] Dave: Well, there are a few things to take into account here. The number one factor by far is that in a sense, Google is literally fighting for their survival. What I mean by that is that Google depends almost exclusively on their income from advertising; some of it from their partner sites, from the display of content network and a lot of it comes from the actual ads that Google themselves show. When you go to Google, the ads that show on the right hand side and usually two or three about the organic searches, that’s where the money comes from. So what’s happening here is Google is very aware that if they don’t start clearing up the quality of their organic content – the normal listings – after a while, people like you and I, if there are people like you and I and everyone out there, eventually we’re just simply going to get frustrated by the really poor results we get, by the number of awful quality sites that we have to wade through to find what we’re looking for.
[04:49] If that happens, the disaster scenario for Google is that people like ourselves think, “Maybe there’s something better out there. Maybe I should try Bing, maybe I should try Yahoo!” DuckDuckGo. When enough of us start doing that, the revenue that Google is going to get from their ads is going to fall at a pretty alarming rate – alarming for Google, anyway. It’s Google peering into what might be in the future, and I think it’s a really important point that a lot of people don’t quite get is that although Google don’t actually make money from the organic results – in other words, from the non-ads – although that they don’t make money from it directly, this is the base upon which everything else is built. This is why we go to Google to search. That’s what they’re defending here.
[05:40] Mike: So essentially what we’re looking at is Google is trying to pump up the number of searches that people are doing on a monthly, weekly, or even a daily basis, and they want those search results to be relevant because they’re afraid that people will leave, and if they leave that ad revenue goes down. And obviously, the difference between five billion and four and a half billion searches per day is a fairly large chunk of their revenue. And I think that is there’s something to do with the sticky factor as well – I’ve been using Google for probably at least ten years now, and the fact is, I don’t go anywhere else right now because Google provides results that are good enough for me. But I do see your point where if it got to a point where I would do a search, and then do a search, and then do another search, if I’m still not finding the things that I need, I might very well go elsewhere. But I haven’t really felt the need to do that because they are providing me good enough search results at this point.
[06:31] Dave: Exactly, that’s exactly the point. You actually more or less took the words out of my mouth. What I remember is back in the day when I first started SEO, there was a scenario where you had a number of big, main search engines like AltaVista, like HotBot, you had these various options to choose from and ultimately what it boiled down to is over time the more you used them you kind of knew that AltaVista, for instance, was quite good to find articles. You knew that InfoSeek was quite good when it came to finding things that you wanted to buy online – online shopping. And Google, I suspect, absolutely dread that scenario reoccurring. They don’t want Google to be an option, they don’t want people like you and I and everyone else to have links on their browser to Yahoo!, Google, Bing, whoever. They don’t want all these options, they want “this is the source of everything,” which is why they’ve added so many things to their search platform over the years; they want this to be a one-stop-shop, if you like, for everything.
[07:32] Mike: Yeah I remember at one point my favorite search engine was actually MetaCrawler because it would aggregate the top results from places like Google, and Yahoo!, and Bing, and Ask.com and About.com and all these other ones and I didn’t have to go to multiple search engines. I just went there and because it was aggregated from all the top results I didn’t really have to worry about it as much. And I don’t even remember what the trigger was for me to move over to Google, but eventually I just did full time and I haven’t really looked back.
[08:00] One of the things that I see Google doing, especially in the search results, is that there’s little icons that show up next to some of the different content results and I know that’s related to authorship. Why don’t we talk a little bit about some of the authorship because those things in the Google search results I think are going to be relevant to people who are putting new content out there, because just having the little icons of who wrote it or the company where that content came from, it draws your eye I’ll say. But I want to drill in a little bit and talk a little about that.
[08:31] Dave: Okay, so what authorship is about, ultimately, is Google is, if you like, joining the dots, connecting content that people wrote with the actual people themselves – authors with their actual content. So the idea is I write a certain blog post on something amazing that’s going on in the SEO world and when that shows up when you carry out a search in Google, instead of it just being the regular format, you’d see a tiny little photograph of me, which is quite eye-catching to have a photograph next to the listing and it makes it stand out. Now, what happened then in a way that was quite predictable, it’s almost like it’s an ongoing game of cat and mouse between Google and the people trying to squeeze Google for whatever they can, even trying to trick Google, just trying to work Google to their own needs, it’s this constant cat and mouse game. So the idea of authorship was, I think a very nice one, I’m sure it was in no small part, rather, down to Google very much wanting to push people onto Google Plus because that’s a really nice and easy way to do that and to push a platform.
[09:36] So what happened was, searches started to show up with the little pictures, obviously that catches your eye – which in an SEO world is magic, that’s what you want, you want people to look at your content – so what then happened was, all the other SEOs started going “That’s a great thing that we can do, look how this one stands out. What we should do for our content and our clients’ content is we should also start putting up pictures.” So everyone started doing it and for whatever reason Google then pulled the plug on it. Now, Google’s line is that ultimately it just wasn’t worth their while, in a sense; there was little to gain and nothing to show for it. What struck me about the whole thing is that for some reason a lot of people made a big deal out of Google pulling the plug on authorship; this is what they do the whole time, they try different ideas, they try different platforms and either they say “This works, let’s make it, let’s write it in stone, let’s adapt it as a norm” or they just discard it. And in this case it was just discarded and it’s a shame. We’re talk about SEO, but for all intents and purposes we’re taught by Google’s optimization, they call the shots, they decide what they’re going to pull the plug on and all we can do is follow.
[10:52] Mike: Well, one of the reasons that they initially gave for using authorship is to identify the original – I call it the source of authority – for a particular article. And I always felt like that was a great way to help keep people from scraping content from other people’s websites and then putting it on their own as if they were the original author. Is there still a way to do that and flag some content as “We wrote this original content so nobody else should be claiming it and posting it all over the place or syndicating it. I still should be getting the credit for this original piece”?
[11:24] Dave: You’ve touched on a really important topic which is that Google hates other website regurgitating content. So you mentioned eHow, for instance, there’s nothing original there, they just scrape other content, put it on their own site, draw in traffic, and what we do is, we search for something and we find ourselves in this situation where we might click the first five sites as they show up in the results and three or four of them or even five of them could actually have identical content. I agree that was definitely a factor. In answer to your question, bizarrely, there isn’t an easy way of you basically registering your content and saying, “This is mine. Hey Google, if you see it elsewhere, know that they’re copying us. We’re the original.” [12:10] There is, however, a kind of basic hack, if you like, on what we do with content like that when we really want Google to understand it’s ours and we created it. As soon as it goes live, we always have a Rel= canonical tag that points to the URL, but as soon as it goes live in the Google webmaster tools account, we simply submit the page – not the whole website but just that content – to Google and in a way we hoping that we’re saying to Google, “The first time you read this was here, we submitted it, we drew your attention to it, your robots crawled across it, it showed up in your index so you should know that when other versions of it pop up that we were the original.”
[12:53] Mike: Do you think that one of the other reasons why Google might have gotten away from identifying the original author is so that they themselves can scrape some of that information and post it up on the top of their search results? If you just go to Google right now and you just type in “weather,” for example, it will show you information for weather on where you’re currently located, but they basically scraped that from weather.com and you could type in “Boston” you’ll get information about Boston. But that stuff is obviously scraped from other places. I mean, could one of the reasons they got rid of authorship is so that they can scrape information themselves and not look bad?
[13:27] Dave: There’s a certain irony here that Google, in a sense, is cracking down hard – really stamping down – on websites that don’t have original content. But in a way, the website that’s now being the mother of all scrapers, if you like, is Google because, like you said, I typed it, I knew what I’d see, obviously, but as you say, I typed in “weather” and there’s information that I can see for where I live in the UK and it’s attributed, so they’ve got a little note underneath saying that it’s taken from the Weather Channel, but the fact is, as you said, it’s not their content. And if you think about it, when you have this content that shows up in Google’s results, a scrape of the content instead of a link, this is a nightmare, this is beyond a nightmare. Because we create great content, ultimately, to entice people to our websites, to demonstrate to them that we are genuinely experts in these areas – this is what a lot of online marketing is about, it’s demonstration of knowledge, entice people in and show them how good we are.
[14:30] And Google in a sense, they are sort of planting a very large bomb underneath that whole idea and they’re saying for certain types of information you don’t need to go to the website anymore, you can just come to us. Why go click on the link when they’re going to display that information right up there for you. So in a way they’ve gone from being a portal, if you like – you go, you search, you click, and you get taken – and they’re starting slowly to move over to the different model which is you go to Google and you find what you’re looking for and that’s it, job done.
[15:03] Mike: Yeah, I remember there were a couple of tweets back when Matt Cutts from Google announced that they had this new tool that would allow you to submit information to Google about when you found scraped content that was out on the internet and you could report it to Google. And I distinctly remember that there was a tweet saying “Found one” and it showed a picture of the Google search engine outranking somebody whose original content was there and obviously Google had scraped the content and put it up there as if it was their own. The pain point there for those people who have that original website is that they are no longer getting that search engine traffic which, quite frankly, kind of sucks for them because Google is taking essentially their search engine content and placing it up there on Google’s website so that you no longer have to go to that website to get the information which is essentially taking website visits away from them, which may very well funnel them into different marketing campaigns. So they’re no longer getting that traffic at all, so there’s no more of these entry points that people might be going through. In a way, I guess, you could say Google is essentially stealing revenue from these companies.
[16:11] Dave: Yeah, very much so. It sounds almost overly dramatic and everyone likes to hate the big company so Google gets a lot of flak. A lot of businesses and companies are doing – if you take for instance any tourist-based website, let’s say you sell burgers say somewhere nice like SoHo in London, that’s your thing you sell handmade, beautiful burgers that don’t give you food poisoning, that’s what you want to be known for. So what you’re likely to do in days gone by is that you put up knowledge that would be useful to people who might be interested in what you sell, so you might put travel information, you might put useful addresses, you might put train times and all that sort of thing. All those things were quite legitimate and there all based on this idea that people who come to SoHo will want to know this information.
[16:59] We’ll give it to them and while they’re here, they’ll know a really good place to get burgers that won’t give them food poisoning. Now in a sense, those things are working less and less, more or less on an ongoing on a daily basis even, because that information is just going to be there without having to click on the link and it’s a really huge, huge difference. And ultimately, what can you do about it? You can’t fight Google.
[17:23] Mike: I think we’ve talked quite a bit about some of the bad things that Google is doing, why don’t we focus a little bit more on some of the things that people can do to increase their search engine rankings. What things are important, what things are not, and where should we really be spending our time. We need search engine rankings, we need to be able to get people to click through those search engine results and onto our website, but even before that, you need to be able to rank up in the search engine rankings. So let’s talk about some of the techniques that people can be using. What sorts of things should we be doing?
[17:54] Dave: The single biggest threat to SEO for normal business is paralysis by analysis. It’s that we know that SEO really should be on our to-do list, in fact most of us probably have SEO on our to-do list and it’s been there for so many months if not years. And we’re in this strange position that, first of all, we’re not sure what to do and there’s also a great deal a fear that we all hear about the algorithm updates. The horror stories where people get banned or people’s traffic falling to minuscule proportions. And we even hear of people being punished for something they didn’t even know wasn’t allowed. There’s very much a temptation to stay parked and do nothing, and I think that’s a really dangerous thing to do because the whole ecosystem, if you like, of SEO is changing so much on an ongoing basis.
[18:50] People are now being penalized for things that, in the past, were absolutely 100% fine. In terms of practical things that normal businesses can do with limited time and resources – the first thing is simply do something. I always fall back on my, if you like, golden rule of SEO which is: if you create good quality and original, unique content that’s relevant to your target audience, you can’t go wrong. It’s so simple, don’t write, don’t create pages of content for Google and their spiders, but create pages of content that people are actually going to find useful. And obviously the people you’re aiming that at is the people who you actually want to come explore whatever it is you’re selling on your website. And it sounds so simple, it sounds too good to be true, and the “But I don’t know where to start” type of answer that I’ve heard many variations of, I think in terms of answering that issue, the biggest mistake that I see people make is they think of creating related content.
[19:58] So, for instance, let’s say that you sell ecommerce services, so you have something that people can simply drop on their website and start selling whatever it is they sell online more or less immediately. The mistake is to say, “What I’m going to do is write lots of articles and create lots of content about ecommerce services” because that’s actually not of interest to people who might be interested in signing up with you – they’re not interested in articles about your service. What they are likely to be interested in is “How do I sell my products online? What’s the quickest and easiest way that I can accept credit cards without setting up a merchant account? How do I accept PayPal transactions without a PayPal account?”
[20:39] Content like this is what people are going to be looking for and actually Google gives us a great tool, Google’s Keyword Planner, so the way that works, without getting into the depths of it, is that you put your keywords into it and it spits back a load of relevant and associated phrases – a lot of which will be wrong, and the numbers are certainly very wrong – but these are keywords that Google consider relevant to your actual search and that’s a really good starting point. Again, the golden rule is: good content, original content, and it’s got to, got to be of interest to the people who you want to reach.
[21:15] Mike: So essentially you can create articles that are directly related to your products but those are only going to be of interest to people who are already on your website and trying to find out information about it. Instead what people should be doing is “genericizing” it a little bit and saying, “Ok, well this is what our product is, but in general, how would you solve this problem if you weren’t using our product? What are the different options? What are the different things that you can do – for an ecommerce provider – how would you sell your products online?” Instead of talking about your products, you talk about – in general – what are the steps that you need to go through to put your product online and sell it. And those are the things that will show up in Google’s search results, correct?
[21:53] Dave: Exactly. I’m a big believer that most searches, ultimately people go there because they have a problem; they have something that needs fixing, something that’s broken, something that’s causing them pain. “Where can I find the cheapest X?” But people ultimately go because they have a pain point or a problem, and that’s the answer, that’s what you need to be providing the answers for very much: “How do I? How can I?” These sorts of queries.
[22:20] Mike: Now what about educational content like, for example, Rob has DRIP and one of the sales pitches for it is that you can essentially send out emails to people with an educational email campaign. Would it be advisable to not only use the content for those emails in the email campaign, but to also put the content of those emails on a blog, for example, or some other place where you’re posting content regularly to essentially walk people through? Because it seems like if you’re only putting it in that email sequence, then only the people who sign up for it are going to get it. But however, you could also leverage that as content on your blog or various other places in your website where you’re also going to rank for as a search engine. What are your thoughts on that?
[23:03] Dave: In days gone by, a good and effective approach would be to write content – it doesn’t matter whether it’s for a website or an email, whatever – create content, pay someone, some company twenty to thirty dollars and they then send it out to hundreds, or even thousands – even tens of thousands – of websites that would in inverted commerce syndicate the content. In other words, copy it. And that actually worked very well. Nowadays we’ve actually gone a full 180 degrees and the fact that you and I had this conversation just a few minutes ago of “How do I make sure people don’t copy my content?” that’s symptomatic of this complete reversal so now we want to have this content and we don’t want it to be seen as duplicate because even having a network of your own websites and having duplicates of the content is potentially very dangerous. The good news is, though, there are very, very easy ways to do it. So if you’ve got – in the example that you came out with, let’s say you’ve got your content that’s going to go out in an email newsletter like DRIP – you’re quite right, it’s a shame if Google ongoing spot this and it’s a shame if people who aren’t signed up for your content don’t spot this and if you think about it, this content is hidden away, it’s literally in its own little protective bubble and the only way to get into that protective bubble is to subscribe so Googleare not going to see that content at all.
[24:27] So I would advocate using that content somewhere on your website where you can put it to best use, but I very much like this idea of if you create some really great content, use it wherever you can, use it to the best possible use. Let’s say I write a very fascinating article, some of the finer intricacies of search engine optimization 2014, but I could also think it’s going to be quite good on this website, and then this website, and that’s where you have to be careful. If I’m going to put the content in two different places that Google are going to find it, the bottom line is that it’s fine to do that – it really is fine – but you’ve got to make sure that, in effect, you’re waving a flag to Google and saying “This content exists somewhere else and it’s here” and it’s using that tag that I mentioned before, the REL = Canonical. If you look that up on Google, it’s very, very basic and this kind of defines the source, the original version.
[25:28]So if you’ve got site1.com and site2.com and you have the same article on both, the correct way of doing it is to put your article on site1, put it on site2.com and assuming that site1 is the stronger, have the canonical tag on the site2 content pointing to the site1 version of it. So in a sense you’re saying to Google, “It’s ok, we’re not trying to trick you, we’re not trying to copy, we’re not trying to deceive you, this is a copy and this is where we got it from.”
[25:57] Mike: That seems like one of those details that you would know if you were kind of entrenched in this space but it doesn’t sound to me like it’s something that I would have ever searched for. Like, the average person listening to this is going to say, “That’s very interesting, it’s awesome that I could re-use content in such a way on the internet that I’m not going to be penalized by Google for it because I’m basically following their rules with this” but at the same time, how would I even know that? It sounds like one of those obscure details that, unless I’m entrenched in this industry and I’m spending lots and lots of time here, I just wouldn’t know that and I wouldn’t think to search for that. How would I even stay informed about these types of things?
[26:37] Dave: This is a very real problem. Five years ago, especially ten years ago, it didn’t matter, you didn’t have to worry about these things, you didn’t have to worry about doing something that you thought was legitimate and then paying for the consequences a year or so later when you get really hit by Google or InfoSeek or anyone. Today, as you’ve said, it’s a very, very real problem, and there are a lot of businesses out there using perfectly legitimate techniques and – I have to stress, this isn’t a moral issue. The whole white hat SEO that’s the type of SEO that if you like, doesn’t “trick” Google in any way it follows the rules and black hat SEO, that’s all about tricking and hacking. This isn’t a moral question; there are no rights or wrongs. Google seems to have somehow almost persuaded a lot of people out there that these rules are more or less moral or legal issues and there’s nothing illegal or immoral about breaking these rules.
[27:39] However, it’s a really good idea to know what these rules are because, unlike five or ten years ago, they can really, really hurt you. And just like in legal situations, ignorance is no excuse for breaking the law. And it’s a very big problem and, unfortunately, it’s a part of doing business online today that you do need to tune in to what’s out there. The easiest way is to follow some good authorities in the search engine world. So, for instance, if you go to Moz.com you’ll find a blog with some very, very good content talking about signal to noise ratio. There’s so much noise, there are so many people who don’t understand the whole cause-correlation-effect type thing at all. So you see people who stop advertising on Google AdWords and watch their rankings fall in the organic listings and immediately say, “Hey, there’s a link. If you don’t pay enough Google will pull the carpet out from under your feet on the organic listings.” It’s a really good idea to find the good voices that are out there: Moz.com is a really good starting point, as I’ve mentioned. If you search for names like “Search Engine Land,” Barry Schwartz, Danny Sullivan, these are people who really, really know what they’re talking about. You’ve got to find the right people to follow and listen to what they say.
[28:59] Mike: It seems like there’s multiple levels of knowledge that you have to have. Obviously there’s the broad knowledge that you want to have about the different ways to rank your website but it just feels like when you’re not focused on trying to increase your search engine rankings or increase website traffic, I feel like you miss a lot of things that are going on. A lot of the suggestions you just gave are really good. The other question I have, though, is how much time does it take for the average person to stay on top of the SEO that’s going on for their website. Is there a minimum amount of time that you should be spending on it?
[29:35] Dave: The answer depends on your website, your situation and your history, level of competition, what you’ve done so far, but my simple rule of thumb is anything is better than nothing. So if you pencil into your calendar thirty minutes every Tuesday morning and all you’re going to do during that time is log into your analytics account, set up a segment – so you’re only looking at the organic traffic – open up the date range to the last year, and just have a look what’s happening. Straight away, that whole thing will take you a minute, two minutes at the most, and straight away you’re going to see if there’s a problem.
[30:09] Is your organic traffic drying up? So that’s a pretty simple indicator. Google Webmaster Tools – I’m always amazed how many people haven’t set up Google Webmaster Tools accounts. If you haven’t, just go to Google, search for Google Webmaster Tools, it’s so straightforward to set up the account. The beauty is, there’s nothing to install on your website, you don’t need to put code on all your webpages – it’s not like analytics – and there’s some incredibly useful information in there, some very clear pointers from Google about “this is a problem, this may be an issue” and they will let you know in no uncertain terms if you’re being hit by a penalty or even if there’s a general big, serious technical problem. Putting those two together – analytics and Webmaster Tools – you can spend five minutes a week and you’ve got those two things covered. Now, that’s not doing SEO but what you’re doing is you’re at least aware if there’s a problem.
[31:03] I’d say for a small business – I mean, we’re a tiny business, our company we only have two full-time people – we have the same problem that any other small business has which is that we don’t have enough time to do it. So if you can be spending an hour a week, just an hour a week on creating new content, spend five minutes making sure everything is ok, the other fifty, fifty-five minutes purely on creating this good, really good content for Google, but primarily for your site visitors, that’s huge. That means at the end of the month, realistically, you’ll have two or three brand new pieces of content and that’s really, really important. You’ll make significant progress with that one hour investment per week. Also one other thing: bearing in mind, I’d say about sixty to seventy percent of the companies that come to us to handle their SEO come to us because there’s a problem, the other thirty forty percent basically want more targeted traffic from Google.
[32:01] Sixty to seventy percent some to us because there’s a problem, they’re checking their analytics at some point and they suddenly say, “That’s why we’re not getting as many sales. Our traffic from Google literally dropped to a tenth of the level that we used to get and that was two or three months ago” so a very panicky email, and very panicky phone call basically saying, “Please fix this quickly!” Another good, simple rule of thumb is proactive is very much the way to go. If you can keep an eye on these things, even on a really, really busy week, I guarantee you have five minutes to check your analytics and webmaster tools.
[32:39] You have, let’s say, another five minutes to just keep an eye on what’s happening on some of these blogs like on Moz, like Danny Sullivan, like Barry Schwartz. That ten minute investment could make the most enormous, enormous difference so you hear that there’s something out there: someone from Google, Matt Cutts from Google mentions there’s an issue, that this is something to be aware of. Every time he opens his mouth, more or less, it’s like holding up a sign saying, “This will become official Google policy within the next year or so.” And just monitor these things because being aware and taking steps to prevent getting in trouble is a whole lot more effective than trying to fix it once it’s broken.
[33:21] Mike: You mentioned that it only takes five minutes or so each week and I think that’s just one of those tasks that just kind of falls between the cracks and they just never seem to get to it and then you go a couple of weeks, then you go a couple of months, and then you just start never checking it. We’ve talked in the past at MicroConf before about the idea of having a Marketing Monday where you just spend all of your activities that one day a week concentrated on your SEO, making sure that you’re putting out good content, managing and building different marketing campaigns for your website, reaching out to people – whether it’s email newsletters, things like that. One of the things that I’ve started to find really helpful lately is to take those things and say, “Okay, this is what I’m going to do for task X.” So one of the things that I’ve started getting into is doing webinars, and there’s a lot of things that go into that so you have to create it in Go2Webinar, you have to advertise for it a little bit, you have to set up the landing page, there’s all these different steps that go into.
[34:18] For something like managing your SEO or just kind of double checking to make sure that things aren’t going wrong, take those steps and put them onto what I’m calling action plans. And, essentially, an action plan is a list of to-dos that you need to accomplish in order to feel good that you have finished whatever this particular task is. So, for example, reviewing your website stuff, those are the two things: go into Google Analytics, and go into the Google Webmaster Tools. Those two things and then just, say, check these five settings. That’s it. That’s all you need to do, but unless you write those things down and actually put them on a list that you’re supposed to go through that to-do list, it seems to me like those things just completely slip through the cracks at some point and then you just never get around to them.
[35:02] Dave: Yep, I couldn’t agree more. I think it’s fascinating what you said because I hear this the whole time of people who say, “It’s only five minutes,” so because it’s only five minutes and this particular Monday or Tuesday is so packed and hectic – and I’ve got the meeting, and I’ve got the phone call, and I’ve got the content – because of this it’s so easy to just brush it aside. I think a good way to look at it is, look at it as brushing your teeth, it doesn’t matter how tired you are, it doesn’t matter what time you get in at night – or, for that matter, how late you oversleep in the morning – you never think, “Yeah, you know what? I’m not going to brush my teeth, I’m going to save that three minutes or four minutes and I’m going to get that extra three or four minutes sleep.” It’s a similar logic it’s just like you said, this process list is invaluable so if you have your three or four points, do you have a checklist, for instance, for any process that I can put into a list, it makes the whole lot easier. So, until SEO becomes burned into your brain, it’s a good idea to have “Tuesday 10:15, check the twelve – thirteen month overview in Analytics, check the Google Webmaster Tools, check some of the blogs that I look at, and start sketching out the next piece of content. And you hit that 30 minute point or the 45 minute point, whatever you’ve scheduled, but then it’s done. If you do get hit, the results of a so-called “Google slap” can be catastrophic.
[36:28] Mike: I think the other distinct advantage of putting them together in a checklist like that is that you can take that checklist and you can outsource it to somebody and document exactly what needs to be done and, that way, you are no longer doing it. I’ve been viewing my job as the entrepreneur to be putting together those checklists and saying, “These are the things that need to be done. I don’t necessarily need to do them but I need to figure out what needs to be done so that I can either outsource that or not forget the critical steps along that path.” Because, as you said, if you start forgetting those things, bad things will eventually happen.
[37:00] Dave: I remember one of your MicroConf talks that I think handled this exact podcast that we’re recording right now, if I remember rightly, there’s a step-by-step process that you and Rob go through and, if I remember rightly, other than the actual recording, everything else was outsourced. And I remember frantically writing this down or typing it into my Evernote and I just thought that was just fantastic.
[37:24] Mike: Well I think that’s a great place to wrap things up. Why don’t you tell us where people can find you if they’re interested in either having a website reviewed or talking to you a little more about SEO or just where they can find you.
[37:35] Dave: Ok, I’ll never miss an opportunity to plug myself so our website is SoftwarePromotions.com, you can find me on Twitter. I’m @TheDaveCollins – in other words, someone else got Dave Collins so I’m @TheDaveCollins for Twitter. Any questions about SEO, genuinely, depressingly I actually do enjoy, even love talking about it so Dave@SoftwarePromotions.com.
[38:01] Mike: There’s a website that you have called WebsiteTeardown.com, and if you’ve never had your website torn down before and are interested in having somebody who’s very, very good at it, go there, sign up, you can click on there and it’ll take you through to the Software Promotions website and you can sign up to have essentially have a website teardown done for you that will look at your website – Dave or Dave’s partner will take a look at it. It’s fascinating the types of things that you’ll learn from someone who’s looking at your website with a fresh set of eyes who also has that SEO background to it. They can tell you the things that you’re doing right, the things that you’re doing wrong, and where you can improve those things. And Dave’s done a number of them at MicroConf, he’s very, very good at them. He did some recently at the Business of Software as well. I would highly, highly recommend it if you’re having problems getting conversions on your website or driving people through to a sales funnel.
[38:54] So Dave, thanks so much for coming onto the show, we really appreciate it. If you have a question for us or you can call it into our voicemail number at 1-888-801-9690 or you can email it to us at Questions@StartupsfortheRestofUS.com. Our theme music is an excerpt from “We’re Out of Control” by MoOt used under Creative Commons. Subscribe to us on iTunes by searching for Startups and visit StartupsfortheRestofUs.com for a full transcript of each episode. Thanks for listening and we’ll see you next time.
Episode 206 | Drip, AuditShark, Enterprise Sales and Podcasts
Show Notes
- Drip
- HitTail
- AuditShark
- Zapier
- New Relic
- How to Build a Rocketship podcast
- Bootstapped Web podcast
- Big Snow Tiny Conf
- The Linchpin podcast
- The History of Rome
- Hardcore History
- Daily Tech News Show with Tom Merritt
Transcript
[00:00] Rob: In this episode of “Startups for the Rest of Us,” Mike and I update you on Drip, AuditShark and other things that have been on our mind. This is “Startups for the Rest of Us,” episode 206.
[00:09] Music
[00:17] Rob: Welcome to “Startups for the Rest of Us,” the podcast that helps developers, designers and entrepreneurs be awesome at launching software products, whether you’ve built your first product, or you’re just thinking about it. I’m Rob.
[00:25] Mike: And I’m Mike.
[00:29] Rob: And we’re here to share our experiences to help you avoid the same mistakes we’ve made. So, what’s the word this week, sir?
[00:31] Mike: Well, I’ve been actively firing myself from virtually every job I have. [Laugh]
[00:34] Rob: That’s a good way to do it.
[00:36] Mike: Well, I’ve been bringing on a couple of developers, and I brought on somebody to kind of do, like, DevOps stuff for me. And I handed of the build server stuff to him. I had somebody reach out to me on Twitter, asking me some questions about it probably a month or two ago. And he actually offered to do some stuff with me, but I’ve already got somebody who could do that kind of stuff. The question was, “Would you be willing to pay for it?” And it’s like, “Well, yes, I would; but I also have somebody in-house who can do that kind of stuff.”
[01:02] Rob: Right.
[01:03] Mike: So, I handed it off to him. And he’s done a good job with it. He set up the build server. He did a bunch in conversions. He’s upgrading the software. The admin password on our server expired. It’s like, “Okay. Well, that’s something we should clearly probably be doing ourselves”; because, you know, it’s kind of a best practice for security purposes anyway. So, he wrote up a process on how to do it and then changed the password and, you know, we’re setting up a system so that it’ll start reminding us to go in and change those passwords on a regular basis. And it’s nice to be able to have those people on your team that kind of understand that the processes are really what help drive the business and create value behind the company.
[01:39] Rob: Right, right. And if you’re listening to this and you don’t know what “DevOps” means, it’s essentially keeping your developers productive, and it’s often doing stuff like performance testing and maybe performance tuning. It’s helping with keeping the servers running and patched and all that type of infrastructure stuff. It’s stuff that, if you’re not a developer, you typically think developers do; but, frankly, developers should be creating things and building and writing new code; and they shouldn’t be worried about the underlying plumbing. And so when you hit any type of scale, even if you get maybe two or three developers cranking pretty hard, one of them needs to be a part-time DevOps person. Or, you need to find one; because enough stuff starts to crop up with scaling and performance and all that, that somebody typically needs to take care of it.
[02:21] Mike: When I was on my personal retreat last month, one of the conclusions that I came to was that, as kind of the founder of the business, my job isn’t necessarily to do any specific thing – other than to identify the things that are most important and figure out how to do them and put a process in place so that I can essentially backfill it when I’m done figuring it out.
[02:40] Rob: Exactly.
[02:41] Mike: And that’s kind of what I’ve been focusing a lot of my efforts on over the past month or so, and so far it’s been working out really well. So, I hired a couple of new developers. I’ve got somebody whose sole job is to make updates to the website. I’ve got two people whose sole job is to work on AuditShark, and I’ve got one guy whose sole job at the moment is to basically just do the DevOps stuff. And then my sole job at the moment is just to do sales and marketing, and I’m trying to figure out how to fire myself from that as well at some point in the future – or, at least put processes in place for certain pieces of it. So, for example, like scheduling webinars and setting things up and then delivering the webinars. Once I’ve got the process down for how to do that and how to make it effective, then I can document the process, hand it off to somebody and do everything else –
[03:25] Rob: Exactly.
[03:25] Mike: – and move on to the next problem.
[03:27] Rob: Exactly. The key thing you said there is until it’s effective, because anything before that is premature optimization – right – and you’re trying to create a process around something that doesn’t work yet. I always plan when I’m doing things that I need to get it to effectiveness. And if it never gets to effectiveness, then I scrap it. But once you get to effectiveness, then you’re right. You have to find someone else to do that because, as the founder, your time is more valuable.
[03:46]I am almost wrapped up with a two-hour audio documentary of the process of building and launching Drip, and it was essentially culled from nine hours of audio. It was the conversations that Derrick and I had over the course of about nine months. And every week, essentially we recorded a podcast; and some episodes are, like, eight minutes; and some were up to 30 minutes. So, it’s a total of nine hours. Trying to get it to around two hours, and it really tells the story from just after inception until we launched last November. It was a trip to hear all the things that are really boring about it. Like, if I released the whole nine hours, there are just entire things we talk about that are really important at the time, but are completely boring to listen to. And then, frankly, it’s agonizing to listen to some parts; and those are the best parts. Those are the most interesting parts, where we hit these huge roadblocks, and you hear myself or Derrick just talking about how hard it is and how much of a struggle it is and how bad we’re feeling about it.
[04:44] Mike: If there was no conflict, then there’d be no story. [Laughs]
[04:47] Rob: Right, right. But the victories are also pretty cool, too – you know, getting through the struggles and then finally getting people in. And you can feel the excitement in our voices, and you can just feel the momentum build over time. And so it’s cool. It’s nice because it’s longitudinal – right? It’s, like, nine months; and it just flips. You know, five minutes, and then there’s a little musical interlude. And then – boom – we’re week later. And so you can instantly hear. You can binge-watch it. You know, it’s more like watching “House of Cards” rather than watching a season of “Breaking Bad,” where you have to sit there and wait for the next episode to come out. So, hopefully, I’ll have that out sometime in early November.
[05:21] Mike: Cool. Well, I started on a new section of the website that I’m kind of designing how I want it to go, but it’s essentially going to be a series of videos demonstrating how to use AuditShark to solve a variety of different IT-related problems. It was contacted by somebody who had had an employee quit. That employee was in the IT department, and they said, “Well, we need to know where this person had access to stuff.” You know, somebody leaves the organization, and you need to know what sorts of access rights they had on different machines around the company. So, at that point, it almost takes a security review to say, “Okay. Well,” you know, “where did they have access?” What sorts of sensitive information were they privy to? Do they still have access to that?” because that’s a really big one. Just disabling somebody’s account and active directory is not the cure-all that some people think it is. You know, there may be a VPN account that’s disconnected from that, and you might not know about it. Or, there’s local accounts on different machines that you can then use to escalate privileges, and there’s all kinds of different ways around it. But unless you have the ability to go out and look at your network and pull this information in, then you don’t know really what to do.
[06:25]So, the point is that I’m going to put together a series of videos on how to use AuditShark to solve a variety of security issues in the IT department. There’s a couple different reasons for that. One is kind of educational material so that people can understand how to use the product. So, if they come to the website, [and] they see this section of videos, they can take a look at them and see not only how the product works, but what types of problems it can solve. And then the second piece is that, if I’m able to do it right, then I could also leverage those pages for SEO; because the videos are going to show up a little bit higher in Google for ranking for different key terms. So, I’m going to try to experiment with those and try to figure out how to put that out there and achieve both of those goals at the same time.
[07:06] Rob: Right. Very nice. Yeah, you do need a video site map in order for Google to detect those. I like the idea.
[07:12]With Drip, I have the same thing at kb.getdrip.com, our knowledge base. And it’s just a simple knowledge base, and I have a section called “Rule Blueprints,” and it’s basically blueprints for different ways that people are using Drip. So, one is SaaS, registration and onboarding without trial. And you could, like, a four-minute walk-through of how I have all that set up and then send educational emails based on in-app? actions – right? And there’s a short video to show how someone could do that. So, it’s the same type of stuff. You’re trying to get scenarios into people’s head of how you can actually attack those and accomplish them with your app.
[07:49] Mike: They’re not interested in buying your app. They’re interested in buying a solution to a problem. And if you lay out those problems, that’s what they’re interested in. If you can map those problems on your website to the problems that they’re having and clearly demonstrate that you’re able to solve them in a way that’s acceptable to them, [that] builds trust; but it also builds confidence in your abilities to deliver something that’s going to solve their problem.
[08:10] Rob: Right. And you know what I want? For these videos to be able to be turned into almost a step-by-step thing with a few screen shots. And I would definitely pay money for that, because I have a bunch of screen casts in the kb that are really good, but I’m already starting to get requests – and I knew that I would. People want a full, text version of it, because they’re at the airport; or, they’re on a modem, or whatever, and they can’t get access to the video. Or, they don’t want to watch the video, or whatever. The thing is recording a video is five times faster than actually typing out a to-do and putting the screen shots and all that stuff in. I’ve timed it as I’ve checked it. And so for now, I’m more focused on improving the product than improving the docs. But if someone could save me the time, and I can put out screencasts and then have them magically turn into a well-written – not just a transcript, but a well-written, step-by-step thing, that’s worth some money to me, for sure.
[09:02] Mike: Well, funny you should mention that, but if you go to cascadecontent.com, you will find exactly that.
[09:08] Rob: Wow. Look at this! Drip is on the move. It feels good to get to this point, but it’s finally growing. It’s starting to grow at the rate that I want it to be. And, you know, if you remember my MicroConf talk from a couple years ago, I talked about building early on. There’s building, there’s learning and then scaling. And the building part is only minorly agonizing, because you’re impatient and want to get to where you can scale. The learning part is terrible, because the whole time, everything’s up in the air. You’re trying to figure out, “What are we building?” “Why are building this?” “Should we build this feature?” Who are we building it for?” “Who are our customers?” and every criticism that comes through, you’re really sensitive to; because you just don’t have a lot of feedback yet on your app, and you’re trying to get to scaling. And then once you start to scale up and you start the growth and you figure out some repeatable stuff and you’ve actually build some features people want – that’s really when things start to get fun, in my opinion.
[10:00]It’s a bit of a false dichotomy, because it’s not like, “Oh, we’re not learning anymore.” We’re definitely still learning and still adding features quickly, but we’ve built something that enough people want now that there’s been a noticeable drop in churn. It’s actually the lowest churn that I’ve ever had on any of my apps. And with growth picking up at the same time, it’s just noticeable. You know, it’s really time for me – I’ve started scaling up marketing, but the more people that I can get even to the home page, or just get interested in Drip, the faster the growth will happen. It’s got a bit of a vanity metric, because you can measure different months; but over the past 13 months, it’s averaged 19 percent growth month over month. But early on, like 11 to 12 months ago, the revenue was so small, that that number is kind of – you know, it’s like a triple-digit growth that month. So, if you go back six months, I think it’s like – I don’t know – 17 percent. So, that’s a little more realistic.
[10:50]So, it really is getting to a place where things are starting to pick up, and it finally feels good. It’s like things are paying off.
[10:57] Mike: Yeah, I think one of the reasons you find that your churn is so low is it’s difficult to move off of Drip. It would be a huge amount of work to take all of your marketing stuff out of Drip and put it into some other marketing platform. It’s a huge barrier to leave.
[11:13] Rob: It’s not actually that big, if you think about it. In fact, we make it as easy to leave as MailChimp or Aweber does, you know? It’s the same type of thing. You just need to copy and paste some emails and export subscribers.
[11:24] Mike: Sure, but mentally it’s a huge roadblock.
[11:25] Rob: Yes, that’s right. That’s right. It is. There was one customer who wanted to leave, and we helped him move his stuff over. It’s not an issue. But we have definitely helped more – several dozen people, frankly, move over from other services.
[11:37]The churn rate being low is a combination because, depending on your business, typically, your first 60 days, maybe 90 days of churn is pretty high if you ask for a credit card up front; because some people will stick around just because they don’t want to cancel and they kind of think they’re going to use it. And then once people are onboarded and they’re using it actively, then that’s your real churn rate. That’s what I consider your actual churn rate. But before that, you might have a 30 percent churn rate in your first 60 days, and then you might have a 3 percent churn rate per month after that. So, when I say that I’ve had the lowest churn rate I’ve ever had, I actually mean both – that initial 60-day period and ongoing after that. So, I think it’s a combination of getting more people onboarded and getting value out of the app. And I think that goes to all the time we spent on our onboarding process. I also think it’s that people are getting a lot of value out of the app.
[12:29] Mike: You know, part of that’s going to be the types of customers that you’re targeting, because obviously you don’t want to target customers who are not going to be a good fit, which means that they would leave earlier than they might otherwise. So, it’s kind of like people are investing in the platform because they think that it’s going to work out and help their marketing efforts. And if the churn rate is low, then clearly that is probably the case.
[12:51]Well, I’ve started using Zapier a lot more for automating various tasks, and if you’re not familiar with Zapier, it’s essentially a service that you can subscribe to that will leverage the APIs and the hooks between different applications. So, there’s [sic] things for Basecamp and Gmail. And I think there’re some things in there for Drip as well –
[13:08] Rob: Yeah.
[13:09] Mike: – but Google Docs. I mean they have a laundry list of – I think it’s over 100 different applications that they hook into, and you can send data back and forth between them using these things called “Zaps.” I’ve started using it to essentially start doing things that are I’ll say more tedious than anything else. So, for example, my bookkeeper – there was a bill that was actually missed the other day. I happened to catch it in time, but it was only because I happened to be logged into American Express at the time, so I made the payment. It wasn’t a big deal. What I did was I went in and set up a Zap so that on the 15th of the month, it would just go in and create tasks automatically so that when she’s done with each of them, she just checks them off. So, that way, one of them doesn’t get missed.
[13:49]So, I’ve started using that for weekly and monthly tasks that people need to be doing and then using it to kind of move data back and forth to help with automation of various things that a lot of times they’ll just get done when I get to them as opposed to just having them happen on a scheduled basis.
[14:09] Rob: Yeah, that’s a nice way to go. Anytime you can take advantage of that, automation’s a big win. I’m a big fan of Zapier, and you know what I found out? I talked to Wade, who’s the founder, and he said they pronounce it as “Zap-ear.” I think they have more than 250 apps now integrated, and you’re right. Drip is one of them, and it’s crazy that stuff that you can do without writing any code if you know how to utilize Zapier. The documentation page for Drip, actually – you know, we have our REST API, our Java Script API. We have API wrappers, and then one of them is Zero Code API. And I say use Zapier to connect Drip to hundreds of web services without writing code and just link over to the Zap on there for Drip. But that was per their suggestion. I actually think it’s kind of a clever thing, because if you’re a non-developer and you want to tie into our API, Zapier really is the easiest way to do that.
[15:02]So, scaling issues – they’re tough. It seems like every two months, we run into something that takes one of us out of pocket for a couple days. But I ran a big import last week that choked things for a few hours and, frankly, it was painful. And Derrick went and rewrote some code, and then we upgraded the servers the next day, and now we have – I think we’re up to eight production servers, maybe nine, because we have a bunch of job servers in a database in the front end and all this stuff. But it’s the real-time analytics, the real-time reporting stuff that kills you. And we’ve had to scale up faster than I thought we would and, luckily, we’ve been preemptive about it. We’ve had very few issues – no issues in months that have really affected any customers, but it’s about every two to three months [that] we’re seeing something crop up where we notice things are slowing down, and we have to implement caching, and we have to add a server to this, and we have to rewrite and optimize this thing.
[15:51]And this is actually where that DevOps thing comes in. The reason I’m also thinking about it is I have a DBA who is someone who optimizes apps. And I mentioned him a couple episodes ago. He’s at rubytreesoftware.com. His name is Creston. He, I think, is going to be helping us by looking through; doing stuff that, frankly, my developers aren’t that interested in doing; and I’m not in doing it either – which is finding those performance issues and either making recommendations for how to fix them, or actually going in and refactoring code to make things faster; because to date, I’ve been throwing money a the problem – right – just throwing more processing power: bigger servers, more servers, scaling up and out. And at this point, I think we need to find that 5X win, and I only think that’s going to happen by actually getting in there and rubbing elbows with the code.
[16:38] Mike: I know what you mean about having people go in and do things that’ll help make it more scalable. I mentioned in the past that I brought on somebody whose sole job is to write unit tests. And over the past five weeks or so – four or five weeks – he’s added, like, 200 unit tests to the system. It’s been really nice to see all those tests go in. The fact that the vast majority of them are still passing – there’re certain ones that are not passing just because I don’t have the back-end infrastructure to actually run the tests properly. But the rest of them, he’s finding things that probably shouldn’t fail, or wouldn’t be an issue in the production code, but they probably need to be fixed. And it’s nice to see that there’s that reliability that is being baked directly into the product. And infrastructure really isn’t any different. I mean if you have a DevOps guy who can go in there and really take a look at that real-time analytics and say, “Oh, well, did you know that at 3:45 a.m. yesterday, there was a spike, and the spike lasted for five minutes? We need to figure out what that was.” If you’re not actively monitoring all that stuff, you can run into those bigger issues down the road.
[17:43] Rob: Yep, totally agree. I have become a big fan of New Relic. Finally installed it on our servers, and there’s both, like, a Ruby gem that goes in the app itself and can report on some stuff, and then you install it on the server. And the server stuff is amazing. I mean it just gives you – all the reporting that you would normally get by defaulting graphs and stuff from a Windows server, like with PerfMon; but it gives it to you for all the LINUX servers, and then it’ll alert you if things go over 90 percent CPU usage, or running out of disk space, or all this stuff. And with eight or nine servers now running, plus however many – I think we’re running three for HitTail – it’s enough that you just can’t manage that all on your own, you know? And so having the alerts, even though some of them are false alarms, is really helpful. And so there’s a pretty beefy free tier with New Relic. And if you’re on LINUX servers and you’re not using it, I would recommend that you give it a shot; because it gives us a lot of data that we’ve used to troubleshoot things and to see, like you said, spikes. There’re CPU spikes. There’s RAM spikes. There’s all types of stuff that we just weren’t picking up on before we had it installed.
[18:48] Mike: Yeah, I think it’s things like the RAM and CPU spikes that are not inherently visible to most people. I mean I have New Relic installed on my Windows server. It’s interesting the sheer amount of data that you can get out of it and the granularity that you can get out of it as well, just being able to drill in there and see all that information. And it can give you insights that you wouldn’t necessarily have otherwise without that monitoring software. I mean without it, you’re really blind. You have no idea what’s going on. And the only time you do know when something is wrong is if a customer calls and says, “Hey, I can’t get to my data,” or, “The site’s down.” Your default assumption or belief is that the application and server are up and running, and sometimes they’re not.
[19:26]So, hey, I think you mentioned a couple of weeks ago that you still maintain Inbox Zero on a regular basis?
[19:31] Rob: I do. Well, I come close to it most days, yes.
[19:34] Mike: I’ve been failing more and more regularly to come anywhere close to Inbox Zero.
[19:39] Rob: [Crosstalk] – right? What’s the cause of that?
[19:40] Mike: I think it’s because I’m neglecting my email. The fact of the matter is there’ll be email that’ll sit there, and I just haven’t really decided what to do with it. Or, it’s stuff that I know that I need to come back to later on, so I’m like, “Oh, I’ll put this on my task list”; but I don’t necessarily take it out of my inbox, because it’s something that I need to – like, I need the information in there, as opposed to just the high-level task, to go do it. Know what I mean?
[20:02] Rob: Right.Yeah, that’s a bummer. You know, the way that I’ve handled that is, if you go into that email and you hit “Forward” and then forward it to your Trello board, it’ll take the body of it and forward it into the Trello issue. And so then you have all the information. And even if for some reason it gets truncated, at least you have the subject line, and you can always go search for it in Gmail. So, that’s what I’ve done, because I can’t stand having clutter in my inbox if I’m trying to get to Inbox Zero.
[20:25] Mike: I just need to figure out how to get some of those things out of there. Some of them are just bugs [and/in?] cases from from Fogbugz that people have done, and I just need to go back and review it to make sure that everything is functioning the way that it’s supposed to. Or, I need to go do a code review, or something like that. And it’s like, “Oh, well, I need to know where that email is.” And I suppose I could probably say, “Okay. Well, here’s the case number,” or whatever and just link to it –
[20:45] Rob: Right.
[20:45] Mike: – but it just sits in my inbox to let me know that I have to do it.
[20:48] Rob: To be honest, that’s been one of the biggest for me, too – is exactly that. It’s Fogbugz issues that I need to QA, or I need to get back to someone on. Those are the ones that I struggle with the most, because if I get five or six of them, do I really want to create five or six new Trello things and then reorder everything? Or, do I just want to crank through them in one batch at some point in the future?
[21:04] Mike: Yeah, that’s exactly the same issue with me. It’s easier to just leave them in my inbox and then come back and deal with five or six of them, or ten of them at a time than it is to create the five, or six, or ten different things in Trello.
[21:15] Rob: So, I have a few favorite, new podcasts I wanted to mention. Some of them are in the tech space, but of the handful that I’ve really enjoyed over the past several months, the first is “How to Build a Rocket Ship.” And this is by MicroConf attendees Matt and Joelle. And then they have another guy who works with them, named Michael. It’s 20-minute interviews with startup founders, and it’s really well down. It’s nice that it’s short, and it’s nice that it tends to cover one topic, and you don’t hear the same stuff that you’ve heard from people like Hiten Shah or Ruben, or me, who’ve been on other podcasts. They pick a topic, and they dive into it. “How to Build a Rocket Ship” is one of my new faves. Have you been listening to it?
[21:52] Mike: I have, yeah. Actually, I heard your interview with them a couple of weeks ago. I heard Hiten Shah’s as well.
[21:57] Rob: Yeah, it’s good stuff. The next one I like is “Bootstrapped Web,” and this is Brian Casel. And he’s switched formats, and he now has a co-host named Jordan, and they’re talking about their businesses, and they’re giving tips. I mean it’s a similar format to “Startups for the Rest of Us,” where they give their own story, but they also share tips. And so far, I think it’s a big improvement over where they were at, and so I’ve been listening to that.
[22:18] Mike: Yeah. I haven’t listened to that one, but Brian is putting on a – it’s called “Big Snow, Tiny Conf” up in Vermont. And that’s in January. And I think last year they did it, and they only had – it was, like, five people. But it’s basically like a ski or snowboarding vacation for a couple of days, and you just go up there and talk about business. And in some ways, it’s kind of like a mini mastermind group, but it’s a very compressed schedule from, like, a Monday to a Thursday. And then they do attendee talks and stuff like that. But it’s limited to, I think, eight or ten. He also puts it on with another guy named Brad, who is also at MicroConf, but we can link that up in the show notes.
[22:55] Rob: A couple more that I’ve been listening to. One is “The Linchpin” podcast, and that’s from Damian Thompson over at linchpin.net. And he also changed format from interview to he and a co-host discussing stuff. And then the last two are pretty nerdy. One is called “The History of Rome.” It is really the history of Rome, and it’s a dude who’s obviously a Ph.D. It’s ten- to 15-minute episodes. It’s really cool. What I like about it [is] it’s just really palatable. You know? It’s a little bit like Dan Carlin’s “Hardcore History,” if you’re ever listened to that, except it’s super short. It’s, like, ten- to 12-minute episodes. There’s 176 of them, and it’s done. Like, he did the history of Rome. There’s no more to be done, so he ended it. I’m like maybe 60 episodes in, and at times it’s a bit dry because it’s the history of a civilization; but fascinating just to hear the rise and the impending fall of this – and to understand it at a deeper level than I ever have, because I never really cared about this stuff in the past. So, it’s [as] good as, or better than, any audio book I could get on the subject, I’m sure.
[23:51]And then my last one is “Daily Tech News Show.” It’s with Tom Merritt. I’ve been a fan of Tom Merritt for years. It’s my favorite daily tech news show, and it helps me keep up-to-date with stuff that’s going on. It doesn’t help me in my work at all, but it is that thing that helps relax me on my drive into work or on my drive home. So, I just wanted to mention those in case folks are looking for new listens.
[24:12] Mike: Well, I think the only other thing that I have is that I’ve been a lot of personalized and one-on-one discussions for AuditShark. And I found that those seemed like the best way to close sales. I think there’s [sic] a couple different reasons for that. One is you get somebody on the phone, and if they clearly know what they’re talking about and, you know, it’s easy to talk to them about the different problems that you’re having, and they can walk you through how they can solve those problems, then it’s easier to buy into what the solution is. And the other thing is that getting to the point where you’ve got that one-on-one discussion with somebody, you’re getting a lot more – the focus of their time. If you send them an email, they might look at it for, like, a minute or two. But if you have an hour-long discussion with somebody, you’re getting a lot of in-depth information not only to them, but from them. And that’s been kind of the basis for a lot of the changes that we’ve been making internally within the products to make it do different things. And it’s not necessarily somebody says, “Hey, could you do this?” It’s more like, “Well, I like the product, but these are the types of things that I’m doing,” and you have to read between the lines a little bit to figure out what it is that they’re actually trying to do versus what they’re telling you they want to do; because sometimes what they are doing and what is the right solution for them are not the same thing.
[25:21] Rob: Right. And often they will state a solution that is very limiting. They’ll request a feature that only they would ever use. But if you’re thinking from a higher-level perspective of “how could everyone use this?” you can often make it more configurable. Or, you can build a feature in a different way that’s more flexible and that can fix their issue, but also perhaps implement another feature that you’ve already had requested. So, there’s definitely an art to this, to trying to interpret what users are asking for and figuring out if you should build it and how to build it.
[25:51] Mike: Yeah. The other thing I’ve noticed is that the sales cycle for this is probably a lot longer than I’d like it to be. It’s several months long. So, I’d really like to try to start identifying ways to bring that down. I feel like part of it’s features, and as much as I hate to say that – but in some cases, there really are. There’s [sic] certain things that people have said, “Yeah, this is great, but we really need it to do this in order to move forward.”
[26:13]The other thing that I’ve found is that people need customization, which is a kind of interesting piece of it; because in some cases, that can just be services. So, doing services engagement where, if they buy the software and they buy these services to go with it, we’ll build a bunch of stuff for them in the policies itself; because it’s different than writing code for the products; because the policies are more applicable to their environment, but the product is built to have these policies, that you create them and then plug them in through the engine, and then it pulls back the information that you’re requesting. So, that’s more of a customization piece, but it’s custom for their environment. And it’s been an interesting to position that as sort of an upsell opportunity as well.
[26:51] Rob: Yeah, I was going to say that. I mean I think that could be a great way, especially early on, to make a good chunk of money and try to fund it – maybe not something that’s scalable, but maybe it is. I mean you’ve heard the term “consultingware,” which is where you have the big, $300,000 enterprise product. And then you sell – or, maybe it’s a $100,000 enterprise product, and then you sell $900,000 of consulting services on it, you know, to make it this seven-figure deal. And while you don’t have to get ridiculous like that, starting off with a $5,000 product, you know, with $10,000 or $15,000 of customization is an interesting way to increase the initial sticker price there.
[27:25]The thing you said about sales cycles being long – that’s not surprising to me, because it’s enterprise sales. Right? I mean you’re essentially selling into companies that are going to be moving slow. So, two to three months doesn’t even feel that long to me.
[27:36] Mike: Yeah, most of it’s about just kind of getting their attention and getting on their schedule, because they have to get it on their schedule and say, “Okay. Well, why should I even pay attention to you?” because these tend to be the upper-level people that I’m talking to in companies, and I’ve found that a lot of the companies that I’m talking to are under 500 employees. I just need to find ways to reduce that time period, because if I can’t reduce that time period, then it’s hard to scale up revenue without just stuffing the funnel with tons of people and running around like a chicken with my head cut off, trying to follow up on everybody.
[28:07] Rob: Well, that’s what I was going to say. I think that’s what most enterprise sales people do is they stuff the funnel and run around like a chicken with no head. I don’t know how you’re going to reduce that sales cycle. I mean those companies are just slower movers than we are. And I would think it’d be more like six months if it’s truly an enterprise that has to get budget approval and get their IT department to prioritize it and that kind of stuff.
[28:28] Mike: The enterprise ones I would expect no less than six or eight months; but, like, that’s why I’m trying to target a lot more of the smaller companies, because they tend to have smaller budgets, for sure; but they also have a lower number of resources. So, any tool that you can bring into the environment which allows them to automate some of the things that they’re doing and make it less tedious or expensive for them to do it in terms of resources and time – that’s kind of a no-brainer for them. So, those are the places where I’m seeing a lot of traction and a lot of success. They take one look at it, and if they have a need for it, it’s a no-brainer. They know exactly what they want, what they’re looking for; and they kind of have an idea of what the next steps are, but even in those cases, a lot of what I find is they’re just so busy doing their existing work, that they don’t have a lot of time to dedicate to actually doing the evaluation. They love the idea. They like it, and they want to move forward; but finding time for them to actually commit to looking at and moving forward – that’s where the challenge is. I can certainly schedule webinars and things like that and go over things with people one on one, but that doesn’t necessarily free up their time commitments for all the other IT-related stuff that they’re doing.
[29:36] Rob: Right, yeah. And that’s a struggle of one-on-one sales – right – of enterprise sales. And that’s what the good salesmen that I’ve known – I mean like Steli I’m sure if you talked to him about it, he would have a number of thoughts about how to get around that. Actually, Damian Thompson, from linchpin.net, he’s a very good sales guy. And he – we should have him on the show at some point to talk about this, because I think what you’re asking is a common question. And having never done a lot of enterprise one-on-one sales, I don’t necessarily have the answers; but I do know that these are the ways that good salespeople are different. It’s funny, because we can identify good developers, and I know a good developer, and I know the difference between a good developer and a bad developer. It’s harder with salespeople aside from bottom line. “Well, how much did they sell?” But I think there’s some subtle things, and they kind of get this intuitive sense of how to do exactly what you’re saying. Like, they find ways to get past those roadblocks, and there’s a certain amount of natural ability in doing that; but I also think that there’s definitely a lot that can be taught.
[30:33] Mike: If you have a question or a comment for us, you can call it in to our voicemail number at 1.888.801.9690. Or, email it to us at questions@startupsfortherestofus.com. Our theme music is an excerpt from “We’re Outta Control,” by MoOt, used under Creative Commons. Subscribe to us on iTunes by searching for “startups,” and visit startupsfortherestofus.com for a full transcript of each episode. Thanks for listening, and we’ll see you next time.
Episode 205 | Trust Signals for Your Website
Show Notes
- Inspired by Moz.com post from Cam Secore called A Comprehensive Guide to Building Trust Online
- Don’t Make Me Think by Steve Krug
- The Non-Designer’s Design Book
- StackOverflow.com
Transcript
[00:00] Mike: In this episode of “Startups for the Rest of Us,” Rob and I are going to be talking about trust signals for your website. This is “Startups for the Rest of Us,” episode 205.
[00:07] Music
[00:14] Mike: Welcome to “Startups for the Rest of Us.” It’s the podcast that helps developers, designers and entrepreneurs be awesome at launching software products, whether you’ve built your first product, or you’re just thinking about it. I’m Mike.
[00:22] Rob: And I’m Rob.
[00:23] Mike: And we’re here to share experiences to help you avoid the same mistakes we’ve made. What’s the word this week, Rob?
[00:27] Rob: We have some new iTunes reviews, a couple of five stars, and then we have a comment from a Trevor 1 in the U.S. He says, “Top-shelf knowledge on b-to-b apps. Rob and Mike are very knowledgeable in SaaS in the b-to-b app world. I learn something new from them every episode. Really like the acquisition stuff lately. Great job, fellas – and keep it up.”
[00:43] So, if you haven’t left us a five-star review in iTunes, you don’t even have to leave a comment, you can just click in there and click on the five star. We’d really appreciate it.
[00:52] Mike: I’ve finished the rest of the designs for the upcoming version of AuditShark, and I think that it’s going to resolve most of the issues that people have been complaining about. So, there’re some performance issues with the product if you have a lot of machines that you’re going after or trying to gather information from. I don’t have a good handle on exactly what the underlying issue is. I have some theories about it, but I’m hoping that some of the changes that we’re making are going to solve those performance problems and then add the additional functionality, like the reporting, a better scheduler and things like that that people have been asking for.
[01:21] Rob: And you said the designs for the upcoming version. This is the desktop version. Is that correct?
[01:26] Mike: Yes.
[01:27] Rob: Okay. And so what are the design? Is it like code? It’s, like, mock-ups?
[01:30] Mike: It’s like a functional spec, more or less.
[01:32] Rob: Got it. Okay.
[01:33] Mike: So, say this is the subsystem that needs to be implemented. This is how it’s got to be done. These are the things that you should do, and these are the things to be careful of, and this is how it’s going to interoperate with the rest of the application.
[01:42] Rob: Got it. And these were requested by early-access customers or folks who’ve used the product?
[01:47] Mike: Yeah, people who were using the products and saying, “Hey, how do I do this?” or, “How do I do that?” And it’s like, “Oh, well, that’s coming,” because I’m getting to the point where there’re certain things that are going into the next release that I know are going in there, because we had a release two or three weeks ago, and we’ve got another one slated for the end of September/early October. And there’s stuff that I know is a problem; but, it’s like, okay, I can’t push them off anymore. We’ve got to do this.
[02:11] Rob: You know, I remember several years ago Joel Spolsky had a post, and he said that when customers request features, that they wouldn’t write them down internally because they found that the features that people really wanted were requested so much, that you just remembered them. And I’ve always been kind of fascinated with that. I wouldn’t say I’d take that approach directly. We actually do track everything everybody requests, but then certain ones, it just becomes painfully obvious that the product is not going to serve people’s needs without, you know, this fundamental feature. And so when you hear it over and over and over, that’s when – we have some features that I haven’t wanted to build; and we’ve, you know, finally capitulated when we get a lot of folks who are really into using that.
[02:52] Mike: Yeah, and I think that’s the interesting thing, because you have this vision of what your product is supposed to be, and then there’s reality, what the customers actually want. You have to kind of balance between those two things.
[03:00] Rob: That’s what it is. It’s balance. And, you know, for every feature that we implement, we probably get ten feature requests; and we don’t build a lot of them, because people will see your product in relation to other things, maybe, that they’ve used in the past. But you may not want to build that. You may not want to add a shopping cart to your auditing software. You know? Or, want to add landing page functionality to your email marketing app, which people have requested; and you just have to decide what are we really building. But then hold that loosely enough that you are willing to respond. If you get people who are paying you money, and if you know enough about them, and you know enough about their experience to know that their needs will probably be shared along a large group of people – that’s the root thing you’re looking for. Right? You’re trying to figure out which of these needs are really for this one person – because a lot of feature requests you get, people are just asking for something that no one else will ever use, and that’s where that judgment call comes in really handy to be able to differentiate, “All right. Will a lot of people need this? Or, is this really just a unique snowflake scenario?” I call them “snowflake features” – right? It’s ones that no one else is going to use, and you’re basically going to spend a lot of time – and complicate your UI. It’s not even development time anymore, but it’s like I don’t want to bloat this app with these random features that are not going to be used by at least 20 percent of the users of my app.
[04:16] Mike: The other thing you have to keep in mind is that you have to implement certain things that seem on the surface to be things that would not be used very often, and those are the types of things that are barriers to entry. So, if it’s painful for somebody to get up and running with your application, and that’s why they’re not using it, and that’s why they’re not paying for it, then those are the things that you have to implement, even though they’re only going to probably ever use it once. So, those are the types of things that we’ve been looking at as well. So, part of the application – we implemented like a ping sweep functionality initially just so you could say, “Okay. Let’s scan the network [and] see what’s out there.” And the next level was essentially going directly against active directory and showing them what’s there so that they can drag that into their collections and say, “Okay. Now I’m going to go after all of these machines that active director knows about.” There’s two, different sides of it. There’s what you know about, which is in active director; and then what you don’t know, which is available through ping sweeps and S and P and things like that. It’s taken time to get to that point, but that’s a barrier to entry for some people, because they’re like, “I need to audit everything in active directory. How do I do that?”
[05:16] Rob: Right.
[05:17] Mike: And they haven’t been able to until now.
[05:17] Rob: Right. I think it’s about finding that minimum path to awesome. It’s basically about how we heavily, heavily scripted the onboarding process and how someone getting set up with DRIP is heavily orchestrated; and we spent a lot of time on it. We spent a week or two on it the first time around, and then we redid it when we moved into automation; but it gets our onboarding percentages really high. And it sounds like you’re in the process of that, too. And that’s what you’ve got to figure out – is what’s that first moment where a customer says, “Wow. This is awesome”? They get payback for it. And how can you get them there as quickly as possible?
[05:52] Mike: So, today we’re going to be talking about trust signals for your website. And the idea behind this is that people don’t buy things from websites they don’t trust, and they don’t give information to websites that they don’t trust. When you’re browsing around on the Internet, the “BACK” button is very easy to use, and so many people use it, that even Google measures when somebody clicks on a site and then uses the “BACK” button to go click on another site. And they use that. In analytics, it shows up as your bounce rate, but they look at that and say, “Okay. Well, how useful is this page?” And it’s not necessarily about just how useful it is, but how sketchy the page looks as well.
[06:24] So, this was inspired by a moz.com post from Cam Secore and the idea behind this is you have to establish trust on your website, and there’s a lot of different ways that you can go about it. So, the first question is really, “What does trust mean?” And trust is essentially a state of being where someone exposes some form of vulnerability, or accepts some risk based on their positive expectation of the attentions or behavior of another person. So, if somebody comes to your website, and they trust that you’re not going to spam them, then they might be willing to give you their email address. So, behind this, trust is really grounded in the evaluation of two, different things. The first one is ability, and the second one is your integrity. So, ability is your demonstrated skill, or competence, or knowledge around a particular topic. The second piece is integrity. Do you adhere to your principles, and are those principles known?
[07:15] And a trust violation occurs when either of these things proves to be false. So, if you’re going out, and you are billing yourself as some great conversion expert, and you go in, and you do some work for somebody, or you offer them free advice, and it turns out that they can pretty clearly see that you have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about, then that’s considered a trust violation. Another thing is if you are gathering email addresses on your website, and suddenly they start getting spam. Then their trust has been violated, so they’re not going to trust you as much in the future. So, you really want to be careful about those types of things. But we’re going to be looking today about some of the different, major trust signals for websites and how you can go about addressing them.
[07:56] Rob: Yeah. And I think trust probably falls into two categories, even. There’s instant trust. It’s like I come to a brand new website that I don’t know, and it’s basically a cold look at this website. What are the factors that are going to help me trust or not trust it? And then there’s that long-term trust – right? Once you get to know a company, or a person, or a service, trust builds over time. And then there are thing, like you said, where if they get hacked, or if suddenly they send you spam or whatever, then you get a ding. You get a withdrawal from that trust bank. And, typically, you can withstand a couple of those before people start bailing on you. So, I think there’s really two things. I think we’re going to be talking about that initial impression and building trust quickly when someone comes to your website.
[08:41] Mike: Now, before we get into these things, there are some things that you should keep in mind, which are essentially heuristics about how we recognize and establish or associate trust with people. And there’s a few different mental shortcuts that people take in order to figure out whether or not you’re trustworthy. So, the first one is an authority. If an expert believes in something, then it’s probably what you should believe as well. So, if there’s a Ph.D. from MIT who comes out – he’s a physics expert – and he tells you something that’s related to how the starts are aligned in the galaxy, chances are really good you’re probably going to believe him; because he comes from MIT. He’s got a Ph.D. in physics. He’s an authority on the topic. And if he tells something to someone else, and they tell it to you, the source of the information is that authority, so it becomes more trustworthy just because of that.
[09:27] And the second thing is social proof. If other people like me are doing something, then I should probably do it, too. So, anything on Twitter, Facebook. But at the same time, having some of that social proof behind it is one of the ways that we essentially shortcut some of these things.
[09:43] Rob: Right, and a big way to do that, typically, on a website is to have testimonials, or to have logos of big-name customers that someone might recognize.
[09:51] Mike: Right. And another heuristic that people will use is familiarity with something. So, if you’ve done something before, then chances are that you’re familiar with how to do it, and you’re going to go through the same process again. And people tends to gravitate towards things they are familiar with. So, if somebody comes out and says, “Oh, well, this is the way you should do X, Y and Z,” and you’ve done that before, you are going to inherently trust other things that they tell you because they have proven that they think in the same way that you do; so, [they are] thereby more trustworthy.
[10:21] And then some other ones: things like length. If you write a report, or a white paper, or something like that, if it’s longer, then it has a higher impact on it; because it took a lot more effort to create that. Things that are much shorter tend to have a lot less credibility or a lot less trust associated with them when there’s no external, influencing factors.
[10:41] And then the last one is more of an opposite effect. If other people are publicly bashing something or saying, “Hey, this is a very bad idea,” you essentially get that opposite effect. And, again, that’s just a mental shortcut that a lot of people can take.
[10:54] So, now let’s get into the different trust signals. The first one that I want to talk about is a visual design. So, when you’re looking at a website, the design itself tends to strongly influence what you feel about that website and how trustworthy it is. If it’s a very well-designed website – you know, it uses good color schemes, has a visually appealing layout to it – that’s the type of website that you’re going to gravitate toward and say that it’s more trustworthy. And there’s different security studies out there that have shown that people will inherently trust a website more if it looks nice versus things that, for lack of a better example, look like Craigslist. Wikipedia is another prime example that is more of an exception than anything else, because their designs are not that great. It’s very text-heavy. It doesn’t have a lot of design around it, but you know what you’re getting when you go there, and you expect that because it’s been there for so long. But if you go to, like, a corporate website for, let’s say, Exxon Mobil, and if it looked like something like Wikipedia, you probably wouldn’t trust it nearly as much – except for the fact that it says “Exxon Mobil” on it.
[11:56] Rob: You can overcome the lack of trust that you get if you have a crappy design or kind of just a template design. You can overcome it with the other things we’re going to talk about today, like the social proof and having good content and good architecture and all that stuff. But if you’re at the point where you can get a good theme, or you can hire a designer, you’ll notice that people will trust you more when you come out with something that looks really sharp. I notice this from the old HitTail design. That was in 2011. And then when I relaunched it in 2012 with a new design from Ryan Scherf, that you’ll see today at hittail.com, it is noticeably more trustworthy. It has a higher conversion rate and instantly had a lower bounce rate, because it went from looking like something that was built in the late ’90s, early 2000s to something that was built in this decade. And it’s some anecdotal evidence with a little bit of data, but over and over, I see this happening. And I see it in myself, too. If I landed a blog and it looks really nice, and it’s obviously professional, I instantly will at least give the content a shot. Right? I’ll at least give it a shot. I’ll at least consider subscribing to the email. But if it looks like crap, it’s going to take a lot for me not to just click the “BACK” button.
[13:07] Mike: If it was recommended to you by somebody, or if the reason you ended up there was because you were hearing a podcast talk about it, or if you had received a white paper or something like that that had recommended that site to you, you’d think differently of it than if you randomly landed on it because you clicked on a headline.
[13:23] Rob: Yeah, that’s right. If someone recommended it to you, it’s a piece of social proof. Right? I’m definitely going to give something more benefit of the doubt if someone had told me about it. Or, let’s say I was reading your blog, and you linked over to it and said, “Hey, this is something you should check out.” So, maybe you didn’t tell me directly, but it was just a blog post from someone I trusted, or a tweet, or something like that. You’re instinctively going to work through it a little more, but if you get the combination – you know, the way to really blow it out of the water is to get the social proof and the recommendation and have a good design and have good content – right? Then that’s when you’re going to really maximize the number of people that stick around and start to become engaged with what you’re doing.
[14:03] Mike: So, in addition to the visual design itself, there’s a lot of different aspects of visual design. So, things like making sure that there’s not a lot of white space, or clutter in the design. You have to be consistent among different sections of the website, so between your navigation – like, you don’t want your navigation to change from one page to the next. It just looks terrible; and it doesn’t put a lot of credibility on you to be able to build, for example, a web app or a piece of software, if you can’t even do the basic things required to make your website look consistent from one page to the next.
[14:33] Rob: Yeah. These are kind of fundamental aspects of design and a web design. There’s a couple of books. If you haven’t read these, [they’re] definitely worth it. They’re not too long. One is called “Don’t Make Me Think,” by Steve Krug, and that’s a little bit more about app design, but there’s also some good stuff in there about just architect and websites. The other one is called “The Non-Designer’s Design Book.” While it talks a lot about print, layout and fonts and that kind of stuff, it applies both to web and print design. I found it super helpful, because I never had a design education. When I see something, I can say, “Wow. That looks really good,” or, “That looks crappy”; but I often don’t know why, and I often don’t know how to make it look better. And both of those skills are things that are worth learning, and that’s where a book like “The Non-Designer’s Design Book” can come into play.
[15:16] Mike: [A] couple other things that kind of fall under the idea of visual design are things like ads and stock images. So, if you have a corporate website, and you’re serving up ads on it, ads, I think, are generally expected on news websites; but not on a corporate website. I wouldn’t expect to go to Exxon Mobil’s website, or to the NASDAQ website and see advertisements all over the place. And then in terms of stock images, you really want to be careful about using stock images in place of people who you might actually have pictures of. One of the examples that’s given is the idea of plumbers. And if you have a stock image of, like, a cartoon plumber versus an actual picture of people who are on the team of a plumbing company, the plumbing company that’s using a real photograph of the employees is going to do better than the one that’s using stock photography.
[16:05] Rob: Yeah, absolutely. There’s an example in this article – and they’re right next to each other and you totally get more confidence in the folks when you actually – it says, “The Team,” and it shows everybody there. And it’s like, “Oh, these are real people” – right? It just gives you confidence that they’re not kind of hiding behind this stock cartoon image. This is one of the reasons I think that “About” pages are hit a lot more. If you go look at your Google Analytics and see how many times your “About” page gets hit – and this is one of the reasons that I include head shots of everybody, and on the Drip “About” page, specifically. It’s just one more way to build confidence that there’re real people behind your app.
[16:40] Mike: It’s funny you mentioned that, because I was surprised at that as well – that the “About” pages tend to get a fair amount of traffic, more than I would’ve reasonably expected them to get.
[16:49] So, beyond the visual design, what other sorts of things can affect how people view the website and whether or not they’re going to trust it? Well, the next one is website architecture. So, how easy is it to use the website? How easy is it to get around? How quickly can you find the information that you’re looking for or that you need? And this isn’t necessarily about doing great SEO. It’s about organizing it in a way that, from any page, it only takes a couple of clicks to get to any other page. You know, you go to these massive websites like IBM, and it is impossible to find anything that you’re looking for. And most people try to avoid going to those websites if they can, because they just can’t find anything. And then when you do find the page that you’re looking for, it generally doesn’t tell you what you actually want to know anyway. You have to call somebody and talk to them on the phone. So, from an ease-of-use perspective, those websites just completely fall flat on their face. The only reason that they have trust is because they’re such large companies, and people tend to work with their sales reps. That’s why people go to their websites, is to try to find more information. And then when they can’t find it – maybe that’s a sales strategy that they have. You know, they make their websites intentionally terrible so you have to call them.
[17:55] Rob: I think it’s so easy to make bad websites. It’s so easy to let things get complicated, because if you take an app, for example, if you take every user’s feature request and you build it, your app will suck. You have to be that gatekeeper, and you have to only build certain things that fit your vision. And the same thing happens with a marketing website. You’ll find people saying, “Hey, I couldn’t find your FAQ,” even though you have a link in the footer, and so you move it up into the top navigation. And then someone says, “Oh, well, you know, the about page gets a lot of visits. Let’s move that up into the top navigation.” And then on and on and on, and pretty soon, you have 50 links in your top navigation. Just because someone made a case for it at some point, or some user complained they couldn’t find it, you’ve tried to remedy everything. And that just builds kind of a kluge.
[18:37] And so if you look at a lot of sites that are easiest to navigate, they edit like samurai warriors, basically. They really have a strong sense of what they are, and they’re opinionated about where things go. But, I have my own opinions about, on a SaaS marketing website, what I think should be in the top nav and what I think should be in the footer and what I think should be in a site map somewhere and doesn’t even belong in the footer – you know, that’s kind of buried even beyond that. And, yes, every once in a while, you’ll find someone who can’t find things, but for the most part, the other 99 percent of people who are using it are going to get more benefit out of your site if you choose the things that are important, you put them in the top nav; and then you move everything else down below the fold, into the footer and into other pages.
[19:19] I think the other thing you touched on is page load times, and it’s a big one – not just for SEO, but there’ve been tons of studies that find that people will bail on websites. Subconsciously, they will bail on websites that are taking more than a second for pages to load, because they just feel like it’s too much effort, and their subconscious just kind of takes them out of it really quickly. And so getting your page load times down is super important. It’s something that I don’t know that people spend enough time on. It’s something I always respected about Jeff Atwood with Stack Overflow when they were building it. They spent a ton of time optimizing it, and it really shows. When you use Stack Overflow, you never once think about how slow the pages are. And, in fact, I think that’s an interesting thing. If you’re using a website, you never think, “Wow. Look how fast this is loading.” You never think that. But you will think, “Wow. Look how slow this is loading.”
[20:07] Mike: Yeah, I read something that essentially had Google quantifying how much money they would lose if they were to increase the page loads by, like, half a second. They actually tested it. They could prove kind of beyond a shadow of a doubt they were losing money, and they could quantify exactly how much money they were losing based on how much they increased the load time for different pages. It was kind of crazy to see that kind of detail.
[20:29] If there’s broken links on your website, those are killer. If there’s internal pages where you’ve got crosslinks and stuff – and, sure, it’s easy to screw some of them up, but there’s tools out there you can use to essentially crawl your website and look for those broken links. Those are the ones that you[‘ve] got to find. And if you haven’t put together, like, a custom 404 page – I actually heard the other day that using your 404 page as essentially a landing page: “Oh, we’re sorry. We screwed up; but, hey, here’s a free giveaway” – that’s an option. I haven’t actually pursued that, but I thought it was an interesting idea to use a custom 404 page as something of a landing page as well. But I think, in most cases, you could also use a 404 page to log that information back someplace. On my websites, there’s a log-in mechanism that, if you ever try to go to a page that doesn’t exist, there’s a log-in mechanism that logs that stuff to a database and says, “This is the page that somebody was trying to go to. This is where it was referred to.” And that way, you can hopefully cut down on those. So, if there’s other people linking to material of yours that is – you’ve moved it, or it doesn’t exist anymore, you can redirect them under the covers so that the end user doesn’t have to see that experience of clicking on a link, and they end up at a 404 page.
[21:39] Rob: Yeah, that’s a big one. Everything that you just mentioned, I think, is something people should do. The reporting of the 404’s is important as well, because even if you crawl your site internally and you take out all the 404 links, and you fix everything, people can still be finding you through Google at old pages. And you want a notification when someone hits that page so that you’re able to either get a redirect or get the page back there, because you don’t want to lose that Google traffic that you’ve worked so hard to get.
[22:04] Mike: And just because you go onto Google and you search for a specific page and you don’t see it, it doesn’t mean that one of Google’s other data centers doesn’t have a link to that page. So, that’s the one thing that you kind of have to keep in mind, because different Google data centers have different data about your site. And it’s kind of screwy that you have to even deal with it, but having a mechanism in place that can log any sort of 404 pages is really critical when you’re trying to eliminate those types of errors.
[22:29] I think one of the other things that, whenever I got to a website that just kills me is if you go there and there’s popups that try to get you to give them information right away; or, if you try to scroll up and down, and they just throw something up in your face and say, “Hey, would you like to subscribe to this?” And it’s like, “Yeah, I was already leaving because I wasn’t interested in what you have. You’re not going to get me with an email popup at this point.” And then there’s those websites where you go to them, and they just automatically start playing music or videos in the background. Sometimes, it’s even hard to find where to turn them off because there’s so much stuff all over on the page.
[23:05] Rob: I’ve never been a fan of either of those. The popovers over and over – people say they get more email sign-ups, but I’ve never been a fan, and I’ve never used one myself. But that’s one of the reasons we developed the DRIP Toaster widget that’s down in the lower right, and it’s just much less intrusive. I also am not a fan of the exit intent stuff, you know, when your mouse moves up to hit the back button, or to close the tab, or whatever, that it jumps out and tries to get you to subscribe. I’ve never once – I’m not saying they don’t work, because I know they do. But I’ve never once entered my email after that. It’s almost a principle thing at that point.
[23:41] Mike: So, let’s move on to the next section and discuss the written content itself. One thing I see: using ambiguous messaging in terms of trying to get your customers to work their way through your website. If you’re not direct about what it is that you’re trying to get them to do, or why they should stick around, people are going to leave. They’re not going to stick around and try to figure out what it is that you’re trying to say. And that’s one of those big things where you come to a website, and there’s this wall of text – neglecting blog posts, because I think those are in a different category. But if you’re going to a product website and you look at the website and you’re really not sure what it’s even for, that messaging really needs to be tightened up. You can figure that out. You can figure out whether your website is having issues there if you show it to some random person that you meet at a conference and say, “Hey, can you take a look at my website?” Don’t even explain to them what you do. Just have them look at your website and see if they can figure it out. And if they can’t figure it out from the home page, then chances are you’ve got to rework that home page a little bit.
[24:38] Rob: Yeah, you have to think about all your content as if new visitors – first-time visitors – are looking at it, because I see some sites that cater more towards their return visitors, and they do it on the home page. And, typically, you have an enormously higher ratio of new visitors hitting a lot of your pages than you do returning. And so one home page that I saw, the headline was “V3.4 Now Released.” And it’s funny, because if you just arrive at that as a brand new user, you have no idea what you’re talking about. “V3.4 of what? And what does it do? And why do I care?” and all that stuff. Now, V3.4 release could be a subject line sent in an email out to your existing customers, because then they’ll have some idea of your app and what it does. They have some indication. But doing that on your home page is a big mistake, and I think it’s not only ambiguous, but you’re leaving a lot of potential on the floor when you’re doing that.
[25:29] The other thing that you should think about is you should have a lot of you’s and your’s in your web page – right? So, you don’t want to say, “We are this,” “We are that,” “Our app does this.” You want to show the person who’s there that you understand them. And so if you go to getdrip.com and you look at the first five paragraphs, almost all of it talks about “you,” “you” and “you.” And you’ll see it, and it’s me being in the head of people who potentially want to use DRIP, and it’s me understanding them and showing that I understand them. You know, it’s an age-old copywriting technique, and then they’re just more likely to follow your logic and listen to you as you continue to talk. But if you start off with “we,” “we,” “we” and “I” and “me” and “my product and this and that, it’s not that it never works; but it works much less often.
[26:17] Mike: And that kind of leads into the language and the claims that you’re making about the product as well and about the problem space itself. And if you say, “You can save a lot of money,” or, “This is trusted by thousands of customers,” it doesn’t necessarily break trust; but if you make very specific claims, those things are a lot more compelling than when you’re more generic about what it is that you’re claiming.
[26:38] Rob: I agree. if it said, “Our average customer saved $3,420 last month,” or, “Our average customer saved 8.2 hours of time for every dollar they spent,” or something like that, it really has a lot more impact than just throwing out platitudes and clichés that a lot of people – “We are the best email marketing software on the market.” It’s just a such a big difference.
[27:03] Mike: Yeah. And along those lines, the specifics of it are really what get people. So, if you say “under ten hours” versus “8.2 hours,” 8.2 is almost certainly not made up. I mean nobody’s going to say “8.2.” But if you say “under 10,” it’s not to say that it’s a deal breaker; but if you just say “under 10,” it seems, “Well, okay. Somebody just kind of estimated.” But 8.2 seems like a real number that somebody had to measure. I think you also have to be careful about typos and grammatical errors and things like that, because if you have grammatical errors or spelling errors, any sort of careless typo – especially when you are tasked with building software that addresses critical data or sensitive data – then if you’re not careful about the copy that’s on your website, it kind of invokes a little bit less trust in your products; because if you can’t keep spelling errors out of your website, how are you going to keep bugs out of the product? How are you going to keep that data secure? How can they trust you to do a good job with the software itself if you can’t even write good copy for your website?
[28:04] Rob: Yeah, and it sounds petty, but I do think it’s a subconscious thing. I think that if I see typos, instantly there’s a little ding. It’s not that I’m going to bail on it, but there’s a little ding to their credibility. And the more that I see, the more of an issue it becomes. And I’ve, frankly, had a couple typos pointed out. There’s one in the FAQ of DRIP, and I fixed them right away. Now, if there are typos on my blog, and it’s more of personal brand stuff, I don’t mind that as much. It’s me writing on my blog. It’s a little more casual. But in corporate stuff, where you’re trying to sell software, trying to sell an app, I do think that it’s worth the effort to make sure that your grammar and your spelling are really in line.
[28:45] Mike: I think the last two categories are essentially independent verification and then self-verification. So, in terms of self-verification, talking about the type of audience that you serve, or the experience that you have, any sort of guarantees or commitments that you have to people. Those are the types of things that are essentially the self- or first-party verification type. You know, you can tell people about what it is that you do, how many people you’ve helped – those types of things. And then in terms of third-part verification, you can think of things like reviews, testimonials, comparisons between you and other competitors, where you’ve been seen, any sort of affiliations you have.
[29:22] Security seals. For example, one of the things that a lot of people will do is they’ll put Visa, or Master Card, or American Express logos on their websites and say, “Hey, we accept these credit cards.” But in addition to just letting people know that you are accepting those credit cards, you’re also essentially borrowing trust from those symbols; because Visa and Master Card and Discover have presumably given you permission to accept their cards, so clearly you must’ve gone through some sort of approval process to be able to do it. And that’s a way that you can essentially borrow trust from those organizations to help boost your own.
[29:54] So, when you’re looking at a website and trying to figure out whether or not it’s going to be trustworthy, especially when you’re trying to evaluate your own website, you need to look at it through the eyes of the customer. And the first thing that you look at is the core tenets of trust. The first one is, are you credible? Is there any sort of social proof? Can you prove that the information that is out there is up-to-date? So, for example, if your copyright at the bottom says “2010,” and it’s 2014, that’s probably going to be a problem to people, because they’re just going to say, “Well, this information is old and outdated.” Are you transparent? Are you showing contact information for your company, ways to get in touch with you, any sort of disclosures or privacy policies? Are you telling them flat out, “Hey, we will not spam you. We do not share your email address” – those types of things? Are you talking to the customer and letting them know how they should expect to be treated?
[30:42] And then the third thing is, is your site easy to use? Does it load fast? Is it easy to navigate? Does the user have a clear set of expectations on any given page where they should go next?
[30:54] So, those are the things that you need to keep in mind when you’re looking at a website and trying to evaluate whether or not it’s trustworthy. And those are the types of things that we’re trying to really harp on for this particular episode so that people look at their websites with a little bit more of a critical eye.
[31:09] Rob: And, realistically, you only have a couple of seconds before people make that snap judgment, and I think visual design is a big part of that. And then I think that the tone of your written content, which we touched on a little bit – that’s one of the other, biggest stumbling blocks I see; because it’s so easy to write generic, crap, marketing speak that you kind of feel like you should write, and that’s very safe to write.
[31:31] And, typically, if it feels very safe to write, it’s junk. And trying to break out of that mindset and write something that’s really risky, that feels risky, tends to be what’s successful. And I would challenge you, if you’re going to sit down to try to write copy for your website, that you don’t start thinking about what your product is and what it does; but that you start by thinking about who your prospect is and who the person is that’s going to buy your software. Try to get into their mindset and then talk directly to them.
[31:56] I would also say go look at some websites that you feel like have done an exceptional job of communicating their value proposition. So, look at copyhackers.com, and you can go and read the tips in the blog and everything; but look at the home page. Do you feel like a person wrote that and you get a pretty quick feel for who that person is and what her voice is? And the answer is probably you do. You know, there’s personality there. And there’s a number of other examples, but go to, you know, a Patio11. Go to his home page of his blog. It’s not a blog post, but right away you feel like there’s a person there writing behind it. You can use that same tactic to write a marketing website – and I’ve done this with my own apps as well – to where it doesn’t feel like someone recycling the same, old, marketing jargon and platitudes and clichés; because none of that works. And you may as well not be doing it. Trying to find our own voice and writing like you speak and trying to identify with people as another person, instead of as a corporation, I think, is a really big step towards making this all work.
[32:57] If you have a question for us, call our voicemail number at 888.801.9690, or email us at questios@startupsfortherestofus.com. Our theme music is an excerpt from “We’re Outta Control.” by MoOt, used under Creative Commons. Subscribe to us on iTunes by searching for “Startups,” and visit Startupsfortherestofus.com for a full transcript of each episode. Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time.