S. 2 Ep. 7 – Is Your Website Building Authority?

Taylorr: Welcome to another episode of Technically Speaking. We’re your hosts, Taylorr and Austin and today we’re talking about websites. For those of you that have been listeners for a while, you’ll know that we talk about websites pretty frequently and the biggest reason for this is because we believe they should be one of your highest performing business systems. In essence, they should be generating you leads all the time with people that are interested in having conversations with you. And if it’s not, we need to fix that. We want to produce a lot of content in this area so that you know how to best position yourself on your website so that people can reach out. One of the most important areas or the things we need to consider about our website is how it’s positioning us as the authority, the person to have a conversation with. When your decision makers are comparing you with all of your competitors out there or different speakers, coaches, consultants, what are they seeing and how can you be perceived as the person to reach out to?

This all boils down to authority. The perfect person for this conversation is Jordan Howard. Jordan is a website design Xtrordinair and digital strategy expert. He’s been doing digital strategy and websites for over 12 years and has a speaker specific design agency for websites and build some of the most world-class speaker websites out there. He also believes that positioning yourself as an authority must be a foundational component to how we build a website so that when our decision makers are on our website, they’re inclined to reach out to us first. Let’s go ahead and dive into the episode as always stick around until the end for some awesome resources, and we hope you like this one. And we are live. Jordan, welcome to the show. This has been a long time in the making.

Jordan: Thank you so much. Thank you for having me.

Taylorr: Yeah, definitely.

Austin: I can’t help but notice you’re using Mmhmm for your video right now. What do you think of that?

Jordan: I am. I like Mmhmm, I don’t know., I don’t always use Mmhmm, but this is the view out my window and it’s a lot prettier than the white wall behind me, so I prefer to focus on what I’m seeing rather to see myself like I’m getting my driver’s license taken. Not so exciting…

Taylorr: Good look.

Jordan: But the view is nice. The view is.

Austin: Yeah.

Taylorr: Yeah.

Austin: Yeah, that’s a good video. Mmhmm the worst name ever because I can’t communicate it easily, but It’s a great product so good for them for that.

Taylorr: I feel like they were just being trolls in that branding, they’re just like, we’re going to make everybody stop and just like mmhmm, right in the middle of a sentence.

Jordan: It is a lot of fun, especially if you ever go to networking video chat, sometimes I’ve done that with some hop in meetings where I’ll go, and then as I network or talk to people I’ll just change and one minute I’ll be blue, and the next minute I’ll be pixelated or whatever. It’s a fun way to pass the time.

Taylorr: Yeah.

Austin: For sure.

Taylorr: It is. Well, Jordan, we’re really excited about this episode. We’re here to talk about websites and authority building and how we can combine those two things to hopefully make a lot more money and leads than we’re currently making. How did you get into this world of websites and branding and especially around speakers?

Jordan: I started making websites about 10 years ago. We’ve made websites for a bunch of international companies, breweries, operating, with clients on five or six continents and it’s been great. But then at some point, some years ago I sort of came in to focus more in on a niche and it just happened to be that my first two clients in the niche of keynote speaking were Waldo Waldman and Dianna Booher who are both hall of fame keynote speakers and I closed them both on the same day. We’re pretty good at what we do and it was great and they’ve been great clients. And then very soon thereafter, you know, word got around and then we started working with other speakers like Dan Thurman and Ben Nemtin and it just continues on and now we’re all speakers all the time and we really love it.

Austin: That’s so cool. The most common thing that we get told when we’re having conversations with people, as it relates to the speaking industry is always, I just sort of fell into it. It sounds like that’s kind of true for you too. 

Jordan: Very true. Very true.

Taylorr: This is a valuable episode too, like websites, it’s not even a conversation of if you need a website, more like you need a website if you’re going to be operating as a business in 2021. And there’s a lot of confusion about what websites are actually meant to be doing for you. I’m wondering before we segue into some more nitty-gritty type questions, can you just unpack for us that the 10,000 foot view, what is a website actually supposed to be doing for a speaker?

Jordan: When someone opens up a website, they’re not going to you just because you’re a speaker and you’re wonderful and whatever, they’re going to you because they have a problem. And they’re also going to check and see, well, does this person understand my problem? Are they speaking to my problem? And do they have the authority to solve that problem? Are they trustworthy? I’ve heard about them, but no one’s going to give you a $25,000 to go talk for an hour without looking you up. And the more that you can very, very quickly and very concisely convey the authority that you can solve their problem, you understand their problem, and that others trust you to do this on a regular basis, the more business you’re going to close, the more effective everything else you’re going to do will be.

Because it’s one of those gateways, someone open up 20 tabs as they’re looking to solve the problem. I’m looking for a speaker on diversity and inclusion. You know what I mean? They might open up 20 diversity and inclusion speaker sites, and they’re going to probably shortlist three or five and you just want to make sure that your site conveys that authority and conveys that understanding of what that decision maker is looking for. It’s not the individual. I know you guys have talked about that a lot about how you’re not selling necessarily to the audience, you’re really selling to the decision maker, and that’s who it needs to speak to as it conveys all this stuff.

Taylorr: Yeah. That makes perfect sense. I love how that you’ve focused really on the problem and the authority. You have to build the trust really early on to just get someone to take the next step. It kind of feels like sometimes in conversations, when we’re talking with speakers, they almost expect somebody on the website and then they’re just going to take the next action. They’re thinking of like the book now button and it’s like, oh, there’s so much that has to happen before they’re even going to be ready to click on that button. They’ve got to feel confident, they’ve got to see that you’ve had a good successful client list, they’ve got to feel like you’re trustworthy and all of those things, I feel like often just get implemented without much strategy behind them. Do you see the same thing?

Jordan: Oh, I definitely see the same thing. I see that. All the time before I work with any client, I’ll go and I will record a video where I just sort of go over their site and tell them what I think about it. That’s basically how I get all my businesses. It’s the big secret, but I just talk about their websites and in it,  I very rarely go to a site where someone is not missing a very key… I could go to a site, be on it for five, 10 minutes, way longer than the majority of people are going to be on your site. People don’t spend a lot of time, if you go and you track this stuff, you see that people are not really spending 10 minutes on your site. You’re lucky you’re going to be averaging like 30 seconds, someone who’s interested might be two to five minutes. 

It’s not a long time. I can be on a site for 10 minutes and then I might find out, oh, wait, you’ve got this best-selling book and somehow it’s like way in the back. Or you’ve been featured in all of these great publications, but it’s over on this other page no one ever sees. That to me is what I think that a lot of people miss is they fail to do an effective inventory on their points of credibility that is what they need to do to make sure that they are putting it in there so that that person who is flashing up those 20 pages, you’ve got five, 10 seconds to say, is this screen, screen, screen, as you scroll down. If you don’t haven’t made that pitch effectively and those screens, and it’s not going to be through writing, it needs to be through headlines, logos, and images that convey authority.

Those are images on aspirational stages, there are things to do for people that don’t have aspirational stages, but they should, camera looking up at you, there are a lot of things that you can do, but it needs to be aspirational and people need to be leveraging their best stuff.  feel like sometimes people feel like just because you were featured in the Wall Street Journal in 2007, doesn’t mean that you weren’t featured in the Wall Street Journal. It doesn’t mean that we can’t leverage it like it happened yesterday. Let’s do that so that we remind people that you are that person using these common points of credibility. Because maybe a lot of people know who you are, but not nearly as many people know who you are as they know the Wall Street Journal, and if the Wall Street Journal trusts you, then maybe we should too. 

And it just takes you further down that road of authority. And it reinforces all of the other work that you’ve been doing as you’ve been reaching out, connecting, being recommended, all of these things that can happen. But, but, but you need to know that when someone finally goes to check you out and say, am I going to take the next step and start a conversation? Can I trust this person? As you said.

Austin: That makes total sense. And here’s the benefit of working with somebody like you, you’ve got the eye for it. You can easily just see some of that low hanging fruit that might be just going right over the person’s head that has the website. What other common mistakes, I guess, would you be looking for when you’re reviewing somebody’s website?

Jordan: Okay, let’s just start with the top and tell me if I get too abstract in this, but just from the top. The top image should either be a clear aspiration. If you have a great picture of yourself, that’s medium, closeup, ideally on a big stage, that would be ideal because that sort of conveys that presence. That would be most ideal as an image, barring that I would cut the person out with an aspirational photo of you and something that conveys authority where you show confidence, because it’s really important that you show confidence. And then you need a headline that very clearly pushes to the problem. It shouldn’t be your name, talks about subject. I don’t think that that is nearly as effective as a clear line of copy that says, I understand your problem, ideally in the kind of language that would appeal to your decision-making audience.

I don’t use overly complex language in the bolded headline. I typically under that will put a singular line that says, you know, full name of speaker, his authority point, authority, a point, authority point, is I am an astronaut and, a fighter pilot and this and that an humanitarian or whatever, and then it sort of goes into a very simple sentence. It says what they do in two sentences and beneath that I would push to the reel because you obviously want to push to the reel. Under that, I would always include your best credibility indicators. If you have it, good media trumps clients, if you don’t have good media, then you use clients. Most people either have clients or media, it just depends.

The order of the clients and the type of clients and the order and the type of media matters, these are things that I’m not going to totally get into, but know your eyes move from left to right, and the nature and the size of the logos and how you do it will really depend on who you are. I generally use logos in a singular colour because I want them to be supporting, but not distracting from the image of you. I would love it if they look at the image of you, then into the headline, into the credibility and then back to that line that sort of says exactly who you are and who you serve, and then click on the button for your reel. You scroll down from there, I almost always double down on the same promise that was said and the first bolded sentence.

It’s like another bolded sentence that probably is like…if someone just skims down on your page, you really want to make it so they could skim down and read all of the bolded content and then get an idea of what you do. That’s super important. We double down on that first headline in the header, and then beneath that you generally put a paragraph beneath that, it’s really important to put a paragraph there because it’s good for SEO. I don’t necessarily believe in keyword stuffing, it’s definitely important to be aware of including keywords, but this is really more about making your elevator pitch. Your five to seven sentence, I understand your problem. And that’s really what this is, this sort of thing. This is when you might use language that an organization might say, oh wow, they really get us because we are dealing with this problem in marketing and we understand this, or in customer experience, and we understand this and you get a little bit deeper into jargon, but not too much, it’s a little bit, and from there, I probably go to a call to action. Beneath that area, we could either go into segmentation where with each segmentation point, we are pushing to a problem. So…

Austin: Jordan, just for our listeners that may not understand what do you mean by segmentation point?

Jordan: Just imagine, we have a header at the top, and then we go to a paragraph underneath that, the header has the logos, it has the picture of, you always have to do it and you might do a video background too, that’s fine. Then the paragraph, and then beneath that, you’re probably going have three boxes and each of those boxes can have a certain amount of information on them, but it shouldn’t be that I offer speaking , consulting and whatever else. Because again, this is you thinking about you and this site is not about you, this is about you solving someone’s problem and you understanding their problem. Don’t waste your time talking about what you do, there’s plenty of time for that conversation. This is an opportunity for you to express that you understand what the client is going for, what they’re going through.

And again, I wouldn’t even put in the names, you can use the name of the keynote in smaller texts, but really in big texts, probably three to five words, you should be talking about the kind of problems you’re solving, that’s what you want to do. I f you’re going to say, okay, I deal with big organizations that deal with this, you know, and you might write in very small print at the top, work with Fortune 500s. Then beneath it, it says in larger print, it might have a shorter mention of the problem, five words that says that I understand the problem. And then beneath that, you might put in another smaller print on the bottom of this little box, it might have the title of your keynote, but the title of your keynote doesn’t really matter.

Everyone thinks about branding and all of this other stuff, and yes, it matters. If you’re sort of known for a thing and you get to a certain size, there’s certain ways that we want to incorporate branding. But for a lot of people, I really think hone in on the problem first, and then the branding will organically fit into how this all works together, because you really want them as they go through those three screens, the name of your keynote is not going to sell them. What’s going to sell them is how effectively these three screens convey your understanding of the problem and convey the fact that others have trusted you to solve that problem in the past.

Taylorr: Yeah, that’s a perfect breakdown. I love it. It sounds really like authority boils down to not only what you’re saying as a credibility point, like your media and your clients, but it’s also authority gets built more quickly, it sounds like if you really have a deep understanding of their problem and then really narrow that in further, like here are the sub three problems of that, that we can go down. Is there anything else outside of your credibility points and then showcasing that you solve the problem itself that help build your authority when someone’s on your website?

Jordan: Oh, a hundred percent. Going down, it just depends like someone might have a best-selling book. Number one, New York times bestseller, number one Amazon, best seller. There’s a lot of different things that you can do depending on your order, the order of what you’re doing will really depend. If you’re getting a lot of media for a book, you might put the book in before you go into segmentation. If you’ve written the book a while ago, the media is sort of like died out, then maybe you’ll put it a little bit further down. A book is a great thing to highlight. You definitely want to highlight any accolades that you can do. I feel like a lot of people are afraid or are not aware of the points of authority that they already have, because they’re focused on what they did yesterday and what we’re really trying to do is repackage your experience, your entire career so that all of these many years that you spent getting to this place are coming together.

Not just, I had a rough year in COVID, but this happened so I’m going to put this up first. This is my last keynote, and it’s not a great photo, but I’m going to use it. Those things, I think are big mistakes that I find a lot of people making, because they just feel like, well, I have to do it because you don’t have to do anything and I’m going to judge you by your worst photo, not your best. You can have a best photo. And then you have a weak bio photo that doesn’t look necessarily aspirational or professional and sometimes you don’t have to use it. You don’t have to use everything, it’s a picking and choosing. But as far as authority, testimonials are great. When I use testimonials, I definitely look to use testimonials so that they are short and sweet. This is a huge thing, and I’m sorry, I almost missed this, but your testimonials should be like, one sentence. Could be three words, could be changed my life. 

Taylorr: Not like 14 paragraphs about how awesome you are. 

Jordan: Yes. No one is reading those paragraphs and all of this goes back to sort of how people are processing these pages. They’re coming to you because they have a problem, they are very busy and you just need to put it together so it’s really easy for them to say, this person is an authority, I can trust them and they understand and can solve my problem. How you do that? You can go further in, once someone clicks on one of those segmentation buttons, you can talk about it. They click on your speaking page, you can talk about it, but on this home page, it’s really all about understanding the problem and conveying that authority all the way through, and then those testimonials go through. Also, when you use a testimonial, a lot of times, it’s just two quick things that people can do. You don’t have to put, if it’s someone’s secretary that works at a big company, put it in the logo and put in their name, don’t tell them what the title is.

I’m not saying that… most of my clients have CEOs that are saying great things about them, but I’m just talking about for everyone that might not and sometimes it’s, you know, the VP of some department you’ve never heard of, and it might’ve been a huge show with10,000 people, but that doesn’t matter put in the name company logo, because that that logo itself, it takes a quarter of a second to recognize a logo, it takes many seconds for someone to read a sentence. Just think about the combined value of these various logos of your clients are super valuable and you should use them wherever you can. it’s really important that when you do have a logo or a point of authority, that it is adjacent to a call to action.

You don’t always have to do it, but wherever there is a call to action that should have some sort of point of authority either above or below or beside it, because that will give them more confidence. I know it sounds really small, but you looking at this website a lot of times, they’re looking at IT for 30 seconds and this little thing that says, she rocks the room that, and it says, big company, Google, Capital One, whatever, And then next is, let’s talk and that’s the button well that makes it really easy for me to go to let’s talk in the next section.

Austin: I love how simple that is. Something that I’ve just really enjoyed about this conversation so far is that you’re great at taking what feels so abstract to people and just making it practical, so thank you for that. I’m sure our listeners quite happy about it. I want to double back just a little bit though. One of the things that you were mentioning earlier is having the best photo in the world may not even be the most important thing. You said it more eloquently than I just did, but a lot of our clients will put this idea that, oh, I need to build a website eventually, and they put it off into the future because they feel like they’re missing some core foundational things that are going to make that website way more successful than it would be otherwise. 

Things like a brand new demo video and brand new pictures [cross-talk 21:49] and , new product launch, one sheet, yeah. [Cross-talk 21:53]. For you, if you had a client coming to you saying, hey, I want a new website, you’re the person to help me do it. What do you need for me in order to make that happen? What are some of those core things that you have to have in order to build a great website?

Jordan: In general, at least from my team, we’re lucky that we can pick and choose our clients and we only really try to work with people who have something. Luckily there are a bunch of great speakers out there that have a lot of stuff, some of them don’t even see it. Let’s just assume that you’re a speaker and you know you’re a $10,000 speaker and you know that you should be a 15, $20,000 speaker, Then that is sort of the time when everyone is saying, I’m just waiting for this big stage. I’m just waiting for this video. I’m just waiting for this, like you say the one sheet or the whatever else or this other thing to work. I think that really all that we need, for us, we just look at what you have. For some clients that they don’t have anything or anything new that’s really relevant, we will get them to do a photo shoot, doesn’t have to be at an event and we can guide, we have our whole SOP for their photographer. 

We always talk to the photographers, I have a video videographer going out for someone that needs more footage. But again, we are not going to make this video, we have an opinion on everything because it all comes together. I talk about websites, but with all my clients and the reason why I made websites for all of these clients that I’ve been talking about, and I still talk to them every week, it’s because we are interested in our clients winning. We are vested in it, it goes way beyond the website. What do you need? I think that you just need to take stock of what you have and then to start to just leverage. It’s like, okay, I don’t have any media, but I’ve got great clients.

Let’s start featuring those great clients with a client block on your homepage, that is like at the top of the screen and then maybe again, further the bottom before the final CTA. Then you can see that you’ve worked with these different companies. And it’s also important to do a variety because while you want to be showing mostly aspirational stuff, if half your business, if you’ve done a bunch of big companies, you don’t want to neglect a couple smaller or midsize companies just so that they don’t get intimidated so that they don’t want to talk to you. Obviously you want to lean it toward the ones that are most famous, but you also want to include some of those smaller guys because a lot of the smaller guys pay the same and you don’t want to throw away business.

Austin: That’s a good point. I don’t think that most people even think about that. I know we’ve talked to a bunch of people that are like, oh yeah, well, I don’t have IBM and Google on my list of clients and that might actually not be a bad thing. You kind of just reframe that idea for me. You need to be approachable as well as authoritative, both of those things have to happen at the same time.

Jordan: Sure, all of that comes together and then also talking about industry. We haven’t even gotten into industry. Some people you need to have a mix of if I’m doing some pharmaceutical, some of this or some of that, all of this stuff, it just depends on who you’re getting your work. You definitely want to double down on what’s working and then put a little bit into where you think you have more opportunities. So I mean, if you are doing all pharmaceuticals then do it with pharmaceuticals. They probably do some have different sizes, and then if you’re doing a little bit of technology, then that’s great too. But how you mix these up really, really depends.

I feel like the thing that most people miss is how they leverage their existing clients, how they leverage their testimonials again, like you said before, the long testimonials where they say something amazing, you changed my life and yet I never read it because it’s at the bottom of the ninth paragraph, so yeah, I just think that they need to take stock of what they have and that’s something that we can do really quickly. I think that the biggest thing with everything, I guess, is that taking action, and this is so weird, because we’re talking… the truth is, I do marketing and I talked to my marketing friends to help my marketing all the time in the same way, I talked to very motivational people all the time and yet sometimes they need the push to go and take action.

And to me, it comes down to just saying, okay, I’m not going to wait till this perfect moment that will probably never come. I’m just going to take action and know that what I do today will make me better than I was yesterday and the compounding effects of that six months from now will be greater, the compounding affects 12 months from now will be even greater and so on and so forth. But waiting for that thing is the biggest thing that I think holds back the speakers that really do well. There is a big commonality in my speakers all of them do well, some of them do amazingly well and the ones that do amazingly well, all are very quick to focus in and to take action and just to say, okay, here’s the plan, let’s just move. 

And this doesn’t mean throwing money into the wall or in the air or anything like that. It’s just focus, make a plan, take action. The same thing that they tell people every day, those that do it do better and those that are a little bit more reluctant do it, but they just do it more slowly. And there’s nothing wrong with either approach but I just think that there’s a great irony and I don’t think that it has to do with speakers in particular, it’s just like it’s human nature that we sometimes need to take our own advice, myself included.

Taylorr: Yeah. We hear that. Yeah. The, what does it say? Cobbler sons, is that how that goes, that story?

Jordan: Yeah, exactly.

Taylorr: Something that’s been lingering in my mind, it’s too bad, I feel like we talked about websites forever. I have two things, hopefully it will be two quick bullets. But I think for a long time, people have thought that if they just had a website up, it would be good enough, but there are now so many websites out there, so many really elevated presence, design is a really big factor, I believe in showing your authority. It’s like your perception of how put together you might be. Are you finding the same thing? Websites that aren’t designed as well, even if the copy is strong, might still be hindering over well-designed websites. Do you find that design really does elevate perception and authority? And where’s the balance between that and the physical copy that’s on that site?

Jordan: Design is super important. It’s also important to bear in mind who your target audience is. Depending on who you’re appealing to, if you’re appealing to middle America in certain industries that are less modern. Imagine you’re dealing with agriculture or something like that, you just don’t want to be looking like you’re a tech website if you’re going to agriculture, and there’s just a modern corporate look that you might be going for, that might not look like tomorrow. You bring up a really good point as to how the design should look, but I don’t think people are looking for someone to solve their problem that resonates with what they’re expecting to see in the same way.

I don’t want to be making this sort of abstract futuristic website, it could look really cool, but people are going to balance. If they’re coming thinking, I want a pragmatic speaker, who’s going to deal with this and it looks similar to my other websites that I normally visit and this is the avatar of the person you’re selling to. Well, you need to make sure that you’re going, you’re going to look good and modern, but you’re going to go and look good in modern, within the realm of what that person is looking for and used to. You don’t want to make a luxury site for a plain spoken, audience that is going to be looking for something different. And that doesn’t mean you have to make something that looks like the Drudge Report, but it does mean that you don’t want to be making something that is super flashy and crazy.

That being said, some other people might want something that’s a bit more modern and we certainly always take inspiration and align with clients on the type of sites that they want, then we also have opinions, we agree on sort of like who the avatars are and then we think about the type of design of sites that would appeal to that avatar, and we go in that direction. But it basically just means if you’re dealing with a more government style thing, then maybe we’ll do a slightly more modern, but more government looking thing. And again, you can look at our sites and they are varying, but there’s some that are focused on like military type stuff and they might be a little bit more corporate.

And then you’re looking at some others that are sort of young and influencer type stuff. They might look a bit more like the influencer, but we’re still going to be using all of these elements together as we make it look more modern or look maybe more corporate. It’s striking that balance, but the big thing is you don’t want to be having something where it’s a big picture of your face and think, wow, it looks amazing. I look really cool, but it doesn’t solve the problem, that’s not the answer. To me, content is still king, a problem is still it, and that is why we use a format. We don’t use it because we can’t do other designs, we use a format because it works.

Taylorr: Yeah, I love the common trend throughout this entire conversation. It really sounds like you’re meeting your customers where they’re at. You’re not trying to push yourself onto them, you’re trying to solve their problems, put you in the context of them, put the design in the context of them. It really is about them and not so much about us and I really feel like if there’s one key takeaway, the fastest way to build authority is painting that picture for your clients. Jordan, thank you so much for coming onto the show today. As you know, we’re all about creating value for our audience, so if someone wants to get in touch with you, learn how you can help, what’s the best way for them to get in touch with you?

Jordan: You can visit my website, digitalonda.com. That’s digital O N D A. If anybody listening to this wants me to do a quick review of your site, a lot of times I’ll do a five minute screen recording and I’ll just go through it and just tell you what I think it’s just something that I do because I love talking about websites. Same way I love talking about marketing with you guys, I love talking about websites and how people can improve and things that they can change. If they just send me an email [email protected], I’ll record you a quick screen recording and then maybe you can go from there and that’ll give you some things to think about as you change with your team, And if you want to talk more, then that’s cool, too

Taylorr: Awesome. We will make sure all those links and email address is in the show notes so everyone listening, go check those out. Jordan, you’ll probably be hit up forever so enjoy that. And hey, if you liked this episode, don’t forget to rate it, like it subscribe to  it and if you want more awesome resources like this, go to speakerflow.com/resources. Thank you so much for chiming in. I just wanted to take a second to thank our sponsor Auxbus. Auxbus is the all in one suite of tools you need to run your podcast and it’s actually what we run here at Speaker Flow for Technically Speaking, it makes planning, podcasts simple, it makes recording podcasts simple, it even makes publishing podcasts to the masses simple and quite honestly, Technically Speaking wouldn’t be up as soon as it is without Auxbus. Thank you so much Auxbus. And if you are interested in checking Auxbus out, whether you’re starting a podcast or you have one currently get our special offer auxbus.com/speaker flow, or click the link below in our show notes.