The Startup Platform Website Bootcamp
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This document provides an overview and agenda for a website bootcamp on building a better WordPress website and copy in 1 hour. It covers planning content and choosing a platform, with a deep dive on content questions and layout. It recommends WordPress for its ease of use and features. The document discusses aligning copy, design, and development, defining the target customer, prioritizing content, and incorporating keywords. It provides tips on writing headlines and how much copy is too much. It also discusses choosing themes, testing and iterating content, and creating a content calendar for continuous learning and improvement.
The Startup Platform Website Bootcamp
- 1. Website Bootcamp: Build a Better Wordpress Website & Copy in 1 Hour Presenters: Matt Medeiros, Kristin Dziadul
- 2. A little about us... Matt Medeiros Kristin Dziadul
- 3. Agenda ● What you’ll learn o Planning: Content & Platform o Deep Dive: Content o Why Wordpress (& How)
- 4. Step 1: Plan, Plan, Plan!
- 5. Content questions you should be asking: o When should I start planning out my copy? o How do I align my content with design and development?
- 6. Planning for Website Copy ● Start ASAP! ● Develop a team consensus on: o Core company & product messages o What is the story o Target audience & their language o Features vs. benefits
- 7. Simple Content Layout Home About Services Products Features Contact Services 1 Services 2
- 9. Align Copy, Design, Development Content and layout first! Help out your designers and developers!
- 11. Your target customer Demographics ● Name ● Type ● Gender ● Age ● Profession ● Income Back story (Problems) ● What challenges are they having? Their Needs ● What do they need to solve this? How to exceed their needs? ● What do we need to do?
- 12. Prioritizing E-mail lead Capture Product sales Content consumption Learn about… Read about processes 1 1 3 5 7
- 13. WordPress Where to start, how to do it
- 14. Why WordPress? Pros ● Easy ● Inexpensive ● Content ● Mobile ● SEO ● Community ● Learning curve ● A lot of “noise” ● Still requires some custom work ● Security ● Updating Cons
- 15. Platform opportunity ● Content marketing o Blogging, social, e-mail ● E-commerce o Digital sales, product ● Membership o Paywall, premium content
- 16. Iterate & phases
- 17. How to Approach Copy
- 18. How to make your copy ROCK o What makes a great headline? o How do I incorporate keywords? o How much copy is too much?
- 19. Writing Awesome Headlines Specific, well-defined benefit -- not feature! This: NOT this: The 5-Minute Improvement that Brings in 500 More Customers. The Top Customer Acquisition Tool
- 23. Recipe for a Great Headline ● Lead with the most important word(s), i.e. benefits ● Avoid being clever when you can be clear o Stay away from typical, overused words like “Save time”, “save money”, etc. ● Keep it short without leaving out the meat Spend more time writing your headline than writing the rest of the page!
- 25. The fold is dead source: http://imagebox.com/blog/industry/the-fold-is-dead-2/
- 26. Where do keywords fit in? Don’t mess with the flow Speak your customer’s language
- 27. Identifying Keywords Google Analytics Social Media
- 28. Look to trends
- 29. How Much Copy is Too Much? Don’t offend your awesome headlines KISS framework for copy
- 30. Take Dropbox for example...
- 31. How do you make it look professional? Design
- 32. Themeforest
- 33. Slocum Themes
- 34. Pros v cons ● Affordable ● Fast ● Determined layout ● Attractive ● Do it yourself ● Doesn’t fit brand ● Not for every use case ● Determined layout ● Not content ready
- 36. Pros v cons ● Fits the brand ● Made for the content ● Unique experience ● Scalable ● Aligned w/ marketing ● Time ● Budget
- 37. Designer questions Are you competing in a competitive space? What are your conversions worth? Do you have too little or too much content? How does this transcend into mobile vs desktop experiences? (see planning phase)
- 38. Iterate & phases
- 39. Testing, Validating, Learning How to do it
- 40. Iterate, Iterate, Iterate! ● But, what do I iterate?! o Short answer: Everything! o Specifically: Headlines Calls to action Layout of content
- 43. Tools & tech for testing (Outside of WP) ● Unbounce ● Google Analytics ● Google Webmasters ● Crazyegg ● Zopim
- 44. Learn & Improve ● What headlines worked (and didn’t work) ● What CTAs converted the best (and worst) ● Which layout converted the most users?
- 45. Creating a content calendar ● EditFlow ● CoSchedue
- 46. Schedule a review ● Use your calendar ● Shared Google spreadsheet ● (see brian casels doc) ● Automate Google Analytic reports
- 47. Taming Metrics - casjam.com/taming-metrics/
- 48. Key Takeaway: Always be Testing, Learning, Improving
- 49. Q & A’s what’s on your mind??
Editor's Notes
- #2: Speaker: matt Welcome Overall goal of webinar Who we are: brief intro Intro into agenda
- #3: Speaker(s): Kristin & Matt
- #4: Speaker(s): Kristin
- #5: Speaker(s): Kristin There are a million different directions you can take a content discussion but we’re going to focus it in on how to plan your copy for a new website or website revamp. first up, let’s go over how you should be thinking and planning for website content...
- #6: Speaker(s): Kristin To best plan for a website launch, you need to think about copy the right way. Especially for startups, it’s a natural instinct to just jump in and begin writing, trust me i’ve been there, but save you and your team time in the long run by taking some time to frame your content strategy, even if it’s a brief plan. It is also, seriously critical, to understand how content fits in with design and development processes, as Matt will explain in a bit
- #7: Speaker(s): Kristin Content & messaging planning come first -- always. And getting on the same page as soon as possible with your entire team on messaging, targeting, benefits and the overall story must be done before copy is written. Without it, everyone comes into a copy review after you’ve spent hours upon hours on the copy, with their own opinions and it will get torn apart. Seriously, i’ve seen it happen. So if you’re responsible for copy, it’s your responsibility to get all decision makers in a room and decided upon the direction of the copy and messaging so you can kick it off on the right foot.
- #8: Speaker(s): Matt
- #9: Speaker(s): Matt
- #10: Speaker(s): Kristin It can’t be emphasized enough how important it is to come up with the content strategy ASAP – its initial development should be underway before design & development begins. Matt will chime in on why this is so helpful from the design & dev perspective
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- #16: Speaker(s): Matt
- #18: Speaker(s): Kristin So once the planning has been done, the dirty work begins. After you’ve set the stage for your content direction, you need to now execute on it -- and im’ going to show you how
- #19: Speaker(s): Kristin First of all, who doesn’t want their copy to rock? But its easier said than done. 3 really important things to pay most attention to as you dive into content creation. I’ll be explaining what makes for a great headline, how to appropriately incorporate the right amount of keywords, and how to determine the right amount of copy
- #20: Speaker(s): Kristin Your headline is the first, and maybe only, impression you make on a website visitor. Without a compelling promise that turns a visitor into a customer, the rest of your words may as well not even exist. Remember that every element of compelling copy has just one purpose — to get the next sentence read. And then the sentence after that, and so on, all the way down to your call to action. So it’s fairly obvious that if people stop at the headline, you’ve already lost them. There is an entire separate webinar that can be made on headlines alone. But if I were to choose the #1 thing to focus on for headlines, it’s to focus it on a specific, well-defined benefit -- not a feature!
- #24: Speaker(s): Kristin You should keep these quick tips in mind when writing each and every headline And Matt’s going to dive into where, specifically, headlines fit into your page layout and what matters
- #25: Speaker(s): Kristin
- #26: Speaker(s): Matt
- #27: Speaker(s): Kristin Don’t jam pack your pages with keywords and phrases just because you think that will get you found. As quickly as it’ll get you found, you’ll then lose them. I value white space and brief, impactful copy instead. If you want to emphasize an important keyword or phrase, find a good way to point to those words you want them to notice. That could be done by inserting it into a headline, making that word larger on the page or the focus of a video, image or infographic that demonstrates it too. If you really hone in on the most important keywords, don’t be afraid to repeat them in a way that still flows well, to truly emphasize it.
- #28: Speaker(s): Kristin Do you research. Understand, through tools such as Google Analytics, what keywords and phrases people are coming to your site from. Note those down. Also take note of how people talk about you on the web (by searching for media coverage, customer writeups, organic tweets, etc. and even from customer emails) and note those keywords. See where the strongest overlaps are and where the most successes came from (i.e. did the most conversions come from the keyword “keyword checklist”)
- #30: Speaker(s): Kristin Remember: headlines come first. Make those awesome. Then focus on your supporting copy. Make that rock solid. Then your CTA -- that needs to convert While you want to keep your copy succinct and to the point, don’t take that as you need to limit yourself to X number of words. Figure out what the right amount of words are based on what you need to say, and how succinctly you can say. Always start with more and remove from there -- but never remove the most important parts just to shorten text. You can’t sell everything at once. Take copy section by section, page by page and focus in on exactly what a visitor needs to read just at that moment, not everything about you all at once And as Matt mentioned earlier about “above the fold”, it’s not really important to cram everything above the fold, because as he explained, the fold is sort of...dead
- #31: Speaker(s): Kristin They’ve replaced long words with short ones Keep it targeted -- match your supporting copy w/headlines and CTAs so it all ties together and remains specific. Do not go off on a tangent They also group & chunk text -- no big paragraphs!
- #32: Speaker(s): Matt
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- #40: Speaker(s): Kristin
- #41: Speaker(s): Kristin I’m a big fan of testing. i’m never convinced that even if my team and I completely love a headline, layout or CTA, that it’s right. So that means you can test essentially everything!
- #44: Speaker(s): Matt
- #45: Speaker(s): Kristin Running tests is not enough. You need to not only check out the results (often) but you need to also learn from it. Did a headline really suck? Find out why. Did one far outperform another? Find out why. Your metrics will tell you if you dig in enough. Learn which color buttons work best. Learn what words on your CTA buttons converted the most. Understand your user flow. Do they want to get right to the point and just click through rather than scrolling down? Or do they want to learn a lot first (such as if it’s an expensive enterprise grade product) and want a long landing page with all the info they need before even daring to click a CTA button Test all of these, all the time, and always learn from it. Once you learn one thing, make the appropriate changes and then run another test! Marketers should never be satisfied, I see that as a failure on our part.
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