Yesterday I finished up responding to emails for a few gigs and I made the stupid decision to change up my website (you’ll see why it was stupid in a second).
Why?
Because I felt like it. Leave me alone. But what did I do that was stupid?
Something was bothering me about the header on my site. Here’s what it looked like:
Not bad, it just looked plain.
How would you change it? What would you do to make it look better?
If you’re promoting yourself, everything counts. Details count. So you should always get better. And let me tell you what I did next.
I went into the backend of the website…or at least I tried. Something wasn’t working; I couldn’t login. So I go to the backend of the web-hosting and I start looking around. For what? I don’t know…I’m not a computer guy so I don’t know what I was thinking (don’t judge me).
Then like a dummy, I see files from old versions of my website.
And what do I do?
“Hmm…I don’t need this stuff anymore.”
DELETE!!!
Yup, I deleted some old files. And do you know what happened?
My website went back to an older version…
My response…
Good job Benji. Change your website when you don’t know that much about FTPs, etc and worse of all, change it at night when there’s nobody to call. Good job genius.
I won’t bore you with the details of how I got my site back, but lets just say that I still have a stroke of genius in me after all.
Phew!
But lets get back to the small change I wanted to make on the site.
Here’s the original image:
And after changing the image a little, I used this for the header:
But like I said earlier, something was off. I felt like it didn’t provide the social proof I wanted.
The second someone hits your site, they should immediately see/feel the social proof. And I felt like the header image could be a little better.
So how did I change it?
I went into my phone app (Enlight) and started playing around with the color. So I got it to look like this:
I liked it more because the purple is brighter than the previous one. And as a psychological thingy, people pay more attention to bright colors than dark ones. The vibe is just different. But…
Something was missing.
So I added in testimonials and the image looked like this:
Oh yea…
MUCH BETTER.
Do you see why it’s better?
The testimonials immediately demonstrate social proof. So when someone comes to the site and sees the header with the Aflac & Remax quote, they immediately know they’re in the right place.
And I thought that was it…until I started to post to Instagram.
And I’ll be darned…Instagram had a filter that made the image pop more. The purple was a little better and it looked like this:
Well ain’t that a dandy.
Do you see how small changes can make a huge difference?
The original version was ok. But the final version is better.
With your speaking business, you’re always going to be improving. That’s how this whole thing works. It’s a never-ending cycle.
(btw…I know that the quote in the Aflac version is messed up a little and uses an apostrophe instead of a quote at the beginning. But how do you know I didn’t do that on purpose so I can improve it later on? It could have been a typo…but I’m not admitting to it)
If you’re not constantly learning to get better, if you’re not constantly improving your marketing materials (website, etc), if you’re not constantly improving your systems (getting gigs, etc) then you’re always going to struggle.
Keep improving. Find ways to get better no matter how great you are.