Is Your Website or Blog Optimized? Here Are 5 Questions You Can Ask

Key Takeaways

hey everybody this is Pat Flynn from the smart passive income blog right now I'm working with my graphic designer on some design changes for the blog and I thought it might be nice to kind of give you an Insider overthe shoulder view of exactly what my thought process is this way you can maybe take some of those ideas and Implement them for yourself too so so the way this is going to work is I'm going to ask five questions that you can ask yourself at the end of this too uh which will help you figure out what you need to do for your website so the first thing I want to ask is what's the first thing you notice now it might be hard for you to figure this out for yourself so it's probably better to ask someone else and I've done this already you can ask them what's the first thing you notice when you come to my website now it might be interesting to see what they find out you know if what they notice is some little red icon here some nasty advertisement here on the bottom then you might want to change things because you want to direct where your people are seeing you know if if that ad is the most important thing then that's fine but for me the most important things are right here in the middle this featured area and what I'm about here on the right hand side and those are the two things that people have told me they noticed first which is good so that's not going to change the second thing is if someone new came to your website would they be able to figure out what the site is about right away now this is super important especially nowadays because you know the average time someone spends on a website is 10 seconds or less actually so you basically have 10 seconds to tell new visitors what your website's about or else they're going to leave you know they might be the perfect customer but they're going to leave because you haven't told them who you are what you're about you know it's very easy to do um you know don't rely on that person clicking to your about area you know about 99% of the time they're not going to do that you know people are lazy and if you don't tell them right away they're just going to leave and click through and find the information they need somewhere else so for me this has worked beautifully this hello my name is area and I've actually taken it out before in a previous redesign and I put it back back in because I got so many complaints um and people were like dude that's a big mistake that's exactly how people know who you are you know those people were absolutely right so I'm not taking that out and actually I'm going to make it a lot better um I'm going to keep it the way it is but I'm going to add a video here instead of just a still picture so the video will actually have a still picture but it'll say maybe like click here or press play or something and then it'll be me talking about who I a little bit more about what the website's about who I am so it's just another way for me to connect with people um and another way for me to tell them right away exactly who I am so you know you can't rely on a video though so that's you know that's why I have this area here and it says my name is Pat no I'm not making millions but I am living off of passive income made online I'm here to show you what I've learned I think from that you can just get an idea right away about what my website's about so go back to website go to it as if you were a brand new person and try and see if you could figure out what the website's about right away in 10 seconds or less all right and the third question I want to ask you is is there any wasted space now especially above the fold because above the fold you know stuff people see without having to scroll down is super important Prime real estate you know you don't want to waste that space and I can already tell you right now that there's a lot of wasted space here on my website like right here that padding or margin or whatever isn't needed you know I can move stuff up and show a little bit more of these ads down here for example um you know there's some waste of space here and you know yes sometimes less is more but when it's for no absolutely no reason being there then that's wasted space and as I said before the space on your on your homepage above the fold is super important so make sure you're making great use of it there's a lot of things you can put in there now the fourth thing I want to ask you is is anything too crowded for me I can tell you right away and people people have told me this before the space here on the left hand side is super ridiculously crowded and you know people read from left to right so when they read my website first they're going to see these first which is which is which was my goal which is why I put them there but you know people are seeing this and seeing how crowded everything is and some I bet some people are just leaving because there's a lot of stuff going on here and you know there's a lot to read a lot of little text to read right away um so I'm probably going to be taking this area out I'm going to be expanding the text area here so that pictures could be bit bigger inside the blog post and there'll be more text I mean just look at how crowded that looks cuz it's in such a tiny little space so go to website see if anything's too crowded you know I'm probably going to be moving these over here to a tabbed area and I'm sure you've seen these before you know it's like different tabs and then whichever one you click on you know there's different material down here that's probably what I'm going to do now the uh Fifth and last last thing I want to ask you is are you capturing email addresses now the reason why you want to capture email address is is because it's super important to stay connected with people so if your website goes down or your businesses go out if you have their email addresses you could still get a hold of those people you could still start a new business really easily if you have those email addresses if you don't have those you're screwed so if my blog went down today there wouldd be no way I could contact people you know I do have my Twitter account but that could go down to your email address is a great way to stay connected with people um and a great way to stay connected with them on a personal level because you're sending the message directly to their email box so when you do this and what I'm going to do is actually I'm going to create a space right here for an optin area and I'm probably going to offer something like a newsletter or a free report or something like that in exchange for their email address you know you can't just ask for their email address straight away they're not going to give it to you so you have to have something of value for them so look out for those things in the future those are things that I'm going to have on my website I hope you enjoyed that again the five questions that you you'll want to go and ask yourself are for your website is one what's the first thing you notice two if someone new came to your website would they be able to figure out what's about right away three is there any wasted space four is anything too crowded and five are you capturing email addresses so work on those things I'm I'm working on those right now so look for Improvement on the smart passive income blog within the next hopefully within the next two or 3 weeks um as my graphic designer works on those changes right now and I hope you enjoy that thank you so much and uh if you haven't already please subscribe to the YouTube channel at youtube.com/ smartp passiveincome or if you're watching this on YouTube right now you can click on over to the Subscribe button up here on the upper right hand side so thank you so much I appreciate your attention today and uh here to your success thanks and have a good one bye