How To Make Your Website Smarter Than You
There are a million reasons to have a website. One that nobody talks about is that a website can work harder than you can. It can work smarter than you can. It can work more hours than you can and never get tired. Also, it can talk to people all over the world while you sleep.
If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you might think I’ve lost the plot. Maybe I have. If you’re a new reader, then bear with me a little here.
I’m going to give you a handful of ways in which you can survive the automation apocalypse, build a business and use your website to do a ton of things which you can’t.
Lead Capture
Many freelancers and online entrepreneurs struggle with getting sales and leads.
In reality, you can send hundreds of emails cold to clients, but they’re never going to convert at the same rate as people seeking you out are.
Add to this, cold emailing is time intensive and psychologically pretty tough.
You should invest early in a good email marketing system. After your domain name and hosting, it’s probably the next thing you should spend money on. You’ll notice that my email list is not up-and-running, and that’s why I’m stupid and have a small brain.
When I had a simple opt-in, I didn’t offer anything other than my occasional added insight. No free ebooks (mistake,) no targeted information (mistake) and no discounts or product offers. Again, a mistake.
Even so, my little email widget and simple email marketing system built me a list of hundreds of addresses without my doing all that much. Yours can too.
With a good email capture software, you can split-test different opt-ins and have the software automatically sort out winners for you.
 Display
Let’s talk about two of the best plugins that you’re probably not using.
Thrive Headline Optimiser is without a doubt the best headline testing plugin on the market. You can do split-testing and better yet, you can automatically set winning parameters. Essentially, this means you can come up with a bunch of headlines and it’ll test them out and then after a set number of impressions or engagements, it’ll get rid of the ones that don’t work.
In other words, your website can display more relevant content than you can.
But headlines aren’t the only thing you can test. You want to test every element. This is a lot harder, and if anyone knows how to split-test page elements, let me know. I’m looking for something that’ll do this, and Thrive Content Builder doesn’t have this option, sadly.
That said, here’s the second plugin you’re probably not using: Thrive Clever Widgets (or for the guys here who use Studiopress or other themes, any plugin that changes your widgets based on the content.)
I’ve never really used this plugin, which once again confirms my brain as being the size of a pigeon’s. If you talk about more than one subject on your site, then you shouldn’t display the same offers and relevant content on every page, because it’s not relevant and thus the offers aren’t great.
Most WordPress pages are built of several elements: a sidebar, the content and footers, as well as the headline area and other hook points. Those are a lot of places to check if you can increase conversions (or even add something in.)
The reason I recommend Thrive Clever Widgets is because you can separate based on tagging posts, post categories and all kinds of other options. You don’t have to use any particular plugins, just understand that your website can display content that’s so relevant it can hijack your readers’ brains.
Funnels
I love building marketing and sales funnels. The reason I love them is because they take the weakest part of sales out of the equation. I am the weakest part.
It doesn’t matter whether your website is a straight sales pitch or a content maze of articles intended to teach your readers everything for free. Ultimately, you can build a web of pages, posts and properties that can send your reader on a journey anywhere and everywhere.
The human equivalent of this doesn’t really exist. Let’s say you want to sell a high-priced course on how to learn French.
A sales funnel starting with a blog post, including an e-report and a sequence of five emails before a pitch will take you ten hours to create (if you know what you’re doing.) This can be mailed to a million people with no real time input and hardly any cost (if you know what you’re doing.)
The simple act of selling as a human being to other human beings on that scale is simply impossible. You’d need an army of ten thousand sales people and it’d take years.
Final Thoughts
I talk somewhat seriously and somewhat in jest about the Automation Apocalypse. Whether I’m being serious or not is up for interpretation, but the fact is that technology is a tool you can exploit, use and improve your life and business with.
With a simple website and email list software, you can do all kinds of incredible things. Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, every week of the year.
You can get some super-advanced gadgets that will super-charge the whole thing, but at a base level, simple technology can do a ton of things you can’t possibly do without it.
And as far as the automation apocalypse goes, you either learn the tech or you get left behind. That’s your choice, but other people won’t… and the machines aren’t going to care when they learn how to build their own terminators either.