PoP 122 | Website Roundtable, Website Goals with Joe Sanok, Perry Rosenbloom, and Aaron Carpenter

Share this content
WEBSITE ROUNDTABLE SOCIAL MEDIA

Welcome to Day 2 Website Goals

Welcome to Chapter 2 of the Website Roundtable. Hope you guys dove into some of those vocabulary earlier and you’re not too overwhelmed. If you’re back, way to power through it, way to come and not be overwhelmed!

Well, what do you want to get out of your website project?

That’s the leading question in today’s website roundtable podcast.

Don’t forget, you can hear all five days and download the whole book, transcripts, and walk through over at www.WebsiteRoundtable.com

Website Roundtable Bios

Joseph R. Sanok

consultant headshot JoeJoe is a private practice consultant and the owner of Mental Wellness Counseling in Traverse City, MI. He has had terrible website and great websites!

Aaron Carpenter

aaron-carpenter-traverse-cityAaron Carpenter owns Legendary Lion Web Design. They’re based out of Traverse City, Michigan and  do custom web development.  They try to give people the most value for their coin on making custom website applications. 

Perry Rosenbloom

perry-rosenbloomPerry Rosenbloom is the founder of Brighter Vision. Brighter Vision is an all-in-one website solution for therapists so they build therapists’ websites that look like they’ve spent a few thousand dollars but in fact only cost them $59 a month. They do a fully custom website for you, with support and all of your SEO, for just a low monthly cost.

If you want the full transcripts, screenshots, and checklists to help you start building your counseling website, click the image below and we’ll email you the 50 page e-book for free!

Scroll Below for Today’s How to Start a Website Transcript

DAY 2

Welcome to Chapter 2 of the Website Roundtable. Hope you guys dove into some of those vocabulary earlier and you’re not too overwhelmed. If you’re back, way to power through it, way to come and not be overwhelmed!

Well, what do you want to get out of your website project?

That’s the leading question in this chapter.

The Brighter Vision Approach

So at Brighter Vision, we have a unique approach to website design. With Aaron, he has a great way of getting you a fully custom website. With Brighter Vision, we sort of take your vision and take the idea of a custom website and apply it to one of our themes and customize that theme for you.

Takes out 20-30 minutes to do basic information about you like who you are, who your target clientele are, what presences you had, do you have online like a Psychology Today or a GoodTherapy.org profile.

Identify Target Clientele: Knowing who your target clientele are will allow you build a website that elicits a certain emotion from your target clientele.

Use certain colors that might resonate well with your ideal client.

Use images and certain quotes that will inspire certain feeling to get clients to contact you. 

Clients will assume, if you’re a specialist you’re probably good at other things, too.

The more you know who your audience is, it allows you to elicit a certain response and an emotion from your website to target that target audience and it allows you to go out and market your practice so go out and connect with doctors and connect with referral sources who might be able to refer those types of clients to you.

The Legendary Lion Approach

So because we do a lot of custom projects what I took from that to try to help for this bootstrapping process, this sort of like guide to get it set up is there are three primary questions I think that are going to be really helpful for you.

What’s the first thing that you’d like a user to do when they onto your website? And that’s kind of a daunting question sometimes if you don’t already have the answer so I’ve rephrased it for you. What’s the best way you found to start or kick off that interaction with your potential client? How does that normally work well? Is it a phone call? Is it an email? Whatever the answer to the question is, is definitely something that you should focus on and it should be one of the primary things that you start introducing on your web project. You want to let them know that you want to talk to them by phone or by email or something to get started. That helps you sort of direct your project already insofar as directing attention to what’s a called a call to action, which is a literal question. Don’t be afraid to ask people that join your site or that come visit your site what you’d like them to do to get started.

How can you establish your credibility? What organizations do you belong to? What is your approach to therapy that shows you have a clear direction on how you approach certain clients? How can you show them that you have your hours in and that you are the right fit for them? They’re going to be looking for that and they’re going to be comparing you against other solutions and the better you can make the case for how credible you are, the more authoritative you appear, the more likely you are to have someone start interacting with you over a competitor.

What would you like the website to do? What are things that you find yourself dealing repetitively that you don’t need to? There are a lot of great tools for online scheduling with Google calendar, for instance, where you can just make your calendar available and allow clients to schedule in. There are a lot of applications for that. There are great applications for paid content, if you want to make premium content. Just different things that you might want to make your website do for you and through your audience and it’s worth putting those down. Just put them all down and then decide what those mean for you and what you can accomplish as you start to bootstrap this project.

Identify Your Goals

For most counseling websites the goal isn’t to get them to read 50 blog posts. Blog posts just support your credibility. That the main thing isn’t to jump on an email list.

“Usually, the main goal of a counseling website is to have the client pick up the phone or email to schedule an intake.” Joe Sanok

So few people will have even their phone number in the header of their website that it’s just shocking. That’s why most people go to a counseling website!

So when you’re first starting out, put your phone number at the top. Just put your phone number up there. That right there will set apart of half the people in your community!

Saying, “contact me” that works, but if you give someone a more vibrant call to action such as, “call me today to save your marriage” or “to work on your marriage” or something of that nature or get help today, with actual words that inspire people to click beyond just you know, contact me.

You’re really going to see a dramatic improvement there.

And so as you’re building your website, as you’re bootstrapping your site think about that. Think about what might resonate with a potential and use that kind of language because ultimately, you want to help people. And the best way that you’re going to be able to help people is by getting them to contact you:

Think of how you can work that and get more people to actually contact you as you’re bootstrapping your website.

Think about language.

Spend maybe an hour reading about copywriting and words the elicit emotion and figure out what kind of words you can use on your website to get those call to actions working beyond just contact me.

Get you phone number, get a way for people to contact you so when they get on your website they actually do call or do fill out your contact form or email you.

Project Objectives

It seems like a lot of times people when they’re thinking about their project objectives, they don’t really think about:

“What do I want the result of counseling to be?”

People will say, “Well, I help people that are depressed” so I show pictures of people that are depressed all over my website and say, “Well, people probably already know they are depressed that’s why they’re contacting you. Maybe show them some hopeful pictures and so for me, like I encourage people to find pictures that really show the results of counseling. Are there other things that are maybe pitfalls when people are the very beginning that are like, “Here’s my project objective” and you’re like, “Whoa.” Like let’s back up the train a little bit there.

Pitfalls on New Websites

A phrase I love to use and our developers use very often is, “Don’t put the cart in front of the horse.”

Get it up: If you’re bootstrapping your website, get it up. Just get something up there. You can say, “Oh, I want to be able to offer workshops and products and allow people to buy things on my site and register for a workshop right away and be able to have this all automated and that’s all great and you definitely should strive for that but to start off with, “Get a website up and running. It doesn’t have to be perfect. It doesn’t have to be if you’re bootstrapping it it’s not going to be perfect. Just get something up there that represents you and represents your practice.” And then over time you can add on other things. You can hire a professional to get an event registration page setup. You can consult with your fellow therapists online about what they use, what kinds of tools they use to sell products through their website. So that will my one quick thought on that that I’m fairly passionate about.

Don’t worry so much: When you’re bootstrapping a project if you’re trying to put this together for yourself, the best thing I could say that you could do yourself as a project objective doesn’t need to be defined. It just needs to be considered throughout your process and that’s, how can you show your audience that you’re considering them?

Define your ideal client: By just defining who they are, and who you want to work with, when you write things, you’re writing to them specifically and they don’t feel like you’re just sort of writing to people who will listen but that you’re writing directly to them. You’re considering what their life is like and what it’s like to be in their shoes specifically them. Super important.

Use or don’t use stock images: This was a point of discussion where we had different points of view: We often recommend not really using a whole lot of images, if you can help it at all, from like iStock. They’re very sort of staged photos and stuff. Get stuff like even if it’s just from your cell phone. Get some shots of like your office or like the outside of your building, yourself, your staff if you have staff. Put that up there because it’s you and it might not be the most glorious picture. It might not be professional photographer but it’s still so much better than fake stuff.  Definitely be as authentic as possible but one point I do want to clarify and sort of share a different opinion on is while I certainly agree that those sort of stage stock photos kind of look a little cheesy, we try and steer clients away from them but there are a lot of great stock photos that can work on your website and will look a little more professional than some of the photos you might have personally. Some of my favorite photos are more of the symbolic photos. There are really creative hand-holding photos online on stock photo websites that are staged in a way that elicit emotion. And that’s something that we really focus on here is what kind of emotion do we want to elicit from your website? And that’s how we base everything, the colors, the images, the text overlays that we choose to use for clients.

In the next chapter, we’re going to be going even more in-depth into platforms specifically WordPress, Wix, Squarespace, themes things like that.

That was just a quick kind of project objectives discussion today. But we’ve got three more chapters coming your way and by Chapter  5, we’re going to have a full walkthrough start to finish of your website. How do you do it start to finish when you’re bootstrapping?