When you last wanted to launch a new product or service, were you just overwhelmed by the mere thought of how to get everything online?
Maybe you wanted to start selling an online course. Which service do you choose? Kajabi? Thinkific? Something else?
Or say you want to build up your email list. Do you want to use Mailchim’s landing pages or a funnel system like Leadpages to do that?
Or promoting a new service. How do you add pages to your website? Or do you just build a “quick” sales page in Leadpages?
There are literally thousands of third-party tools that you can use to build and market your business. As you pick a new option for different aspects of your business, you can be left with a dozen different logins and different platforms for different needs.
What if I told you that you could kiss that tech overwhelm goodbye and simplify yours and your clients’ experience?
Use Your Website for Your Tech
While most marketing influencers and professionals out there are trying to tell you about the latest tech offering that can “simplify” your life, they’re not telling you the truth. For every product you use, the more complicated your marketing strategy. And if it’s complicated – you and your customer – are going to get frustrated.
Not only that, your costs increase with every monthly subscription and you have to learn something new every time you want to do something new.
But did you know that if you have a WordPress website, you can actually do a lot of the same automation tasks with your website itself?
Using your website for most of your marketing technology needs simplifies the platforms you have to manage and send customers to, it keeps everything on one domain (which is far easier for everyone to remember), and typically lowers your overall subscription costs.
Want to know how you can do all this with your website? Let’s take a look at a few examples.
Building an Email List
You’ve probably signed up for a freebie before when you’ve gone through a few different pages to get get what you handed over your email address for. You may have even tried to build a couple of landing pages yourself to build your own email list.
While yes, you need to have an Email Service Provider like Mailchimp or ConvertKit, you don’t need fancy systems to capture those email addresses.
I actually covered this in greater depth before, but you can easily collect email addresses on your website. Using a plugin like Gravity Forms or even just your email service provider’s tools, you can embed an easy contact form in a page in your website.
The value in this is that your customers are coming to your website to get those freebies. That brings you valuable traffic, shows search engines that searchers are finding what they need on the website, and it simplifies the entire process.
Replacing Linktree
If you use Instagram or TikTok for your marketing, you know the frustration of being able to only have one link in your bio (and no links in posts). Enter services like LinkTree, that allows business owners to be able to have a landing page with a bunch of links to their most valuable pages, YouTube channel, freebies, booking page, and top products.
It’s a great idea right? Except, you don’t need to pay for another service to have a links landing page. Not only is that money kind of down the drain, but it’s another URL you’ve got to remember and try to brand for what you’re doing.
Instead, use a page on your website as your Linktree. The point of Linktree and other services is to let you organize an easy list of links your customers might want most from you. But chances are, a lot of those links are going to go straight back to your website; making someone click a few times to get to the page/website they want is a bit frustrating.
If you use a page on your website, you can easily link to multiple things on your website and you’re getting that good traffic off of your social media channels. Plus, you’re bringing them to your website, so even if they don’t click one of those links they can get to your main menu and navigate to what they want from there, too.
Creating Landing Pages
Ah the sales page. This may be one of my least favorite trends in the last few years. Inexplicably, it became a thing to run these complex funnels for different promotions and offers, and it all starts with an overly long sales page.
Does that sales page exist on the company’s main website?
No! It lives on a place like ClickFunnels.com. Why, why, are business owners spending thousands and millions of dollars and digital ads and giving clickfunnels.com all of that high-quality website traffic? It also costs a ridiculous amount of money to have these complex systems.
Let’s look at this logically – you’re paying ad revenue to say Facebook or Google, to drive traffic to a domain you do not own, giving your audience another domain to remember that isn’t yours, and paying $600 for 6 months for the privilege.
Instead of all that mess and confusion, you can house your landing pages on your actual website. Not only will it save you money, it’ll simplify your experience and your customers’.
With WordPress, you can even use a service like LeadPages to build out the snazzy pages just like you like them and still have them “inside” your domain and your WordPress site. Or you could hire a web developer to create a landing page template for you to use over and over in your website. When it’s a custom solution like that, it may cost more upfront, but it’ll be 100% branded to your business and be a seamless, cohesive experience.
Adding Online Courses
If 2020 taught us anything, it taught us that we can and do like to learn online. Not everyone’s business is going to be ready for online courses, but there are a lot of coaches and business owners who can simplify and diversify by creating an online course.
How then do you deliver all of that content?
There are a ton of third party options and while they might be an OK solution, the best is to actually deliver your online course through your own website.
When you use your own website for online courses, it reduces your costs (LearnDash is only $199/year vs Kajabi’s $149/month price tag) and it keeps your audience on your actual website.
Why is this important?
Think of the SEO boost! Part of your SEO factors in the time and actions your users are taking on your website. If they’re spending 2-3 hours to go through learning materials, that signals to Google that your website has some valuable content. Granted, Google won’t index the content in a paid-for, private learning program, but you get the idea.
It also makes it a much easier experience on your audience. They can just head to your website to log in instead of having to try to remember the Kajabi or Thinkific URL you’re using.
Of all the things we’ve talked about today, this is perhaps the most complex and highest upfront cost to add to your website, and yet it has an incredible ROI and benefits.
Simplify Your Tech Life
If you’re wanting to simplify your tech life, better understand where your overhead costs are, and just cut down on all the tools for your business, the best way to do it is to use your website to its fullest potential.
Frankly, if you have a website built on WordPress it’s highly likely that you already have many of the tools you need to do a lot of what’s on this list.
Looking to make it even easier? Have a handy web developer help you! I can help get you set up, teach you how to manage it, and then you just need to keep the train running.
It’s a whole lot simpler than remember which online software you were using for that one thing.
Send me a message and let’s talk about how we can simplify your tech life.
