Most Common Web Design Mistakes Founders Make | With Syed Balkhi

So you look at several websites, you run multiple, you probably see the data across all your people using your plugins. What are some common mistakes you see founders or webmasters making on their websites or Can you share some areas of quick optimization wins that maybe some of our listeners can try out?

Absolutely. So the biggest thing that I see is that people are not measuring everything. Um, yeah. So if you have Google Analytics running, you, you might just drop a simple Google Analytics script and that's all, right? You really have to take it a little bit beyond that and enable events tracking. And it's not really hard to do if you use— like I built a tool for this, Monster Insights. Um, that just does this because I was tired of doing it over and over and over again using this custom solution. And I'm like, why can't we just make it one click? And we did. Um, but then being able to see, okay, which buttons are people clicking on your site? Um, where are people going away from your site? If they're clicking on an outbound link or an affiliate link, which ones are most popular among your audience? How's your forms performing? How's your cards performing? So just measuring those things in a detailed way with events tracking is an easy way to unlock quick wins. I believe it's easy to double your traffic and sales if you know how people find and use your site, right?

Yeah.

You cannot improve what you cannot measure. So you have to do that. The other quick opportunities that I see people miss out on is multiple touchpoint opportunities, right? So if somebody's on your site and they're leaving, like, you know, 80%, more than 80% of people that are leaving your website are not gonna come back. You can look at your new versus returning visitors chart and you know that's the case. So what are you doing? Most people will just say, oh, I'm going to do retargeting ads and I'm going to pay Facebook and Google to bring them back. Well, why? Why not do exit intent pop-up? Give yourself an onsite retargeting opportunity. Why not use a push notification solution to do website abandonment and browse abandonment? And those kind of things are super easy wins that you can turn on without very— like a lot of technical knowledge. So that's another mistake or missed opportunity, I should say. So yeah, so those are from a growth side. I see a lot of people doing a lot of silly things on websites, like not having a backup solution. You know, you should always have a backup solution. Don't rely on your hosting company's backups. That's one of the big mistakes that new webmasters and new entrepreneurs make. Have backups, turn on Cloudflare, it will save you from attacks and so on.

Sure, sure. Oh, those are awesome, awesome tips, guys. Obviously go ahead and try it and see how it works for you. Um, and then, you know, fast forward to today, or, you know, in the last couple of years, you, you kind of brought up the conception and creation of your business, which is Awesome Motive, which I think is— is that the holding company of your ventures?

It's a— the best way to think about it is a management company for all the ventures.

Okay.

Okay.

And then what was kind of the idea of, you know, what was the vision at that point when you said, okay, look, I'm ready to launch a management company and what was that different from, you know, individual plugins or businesses you've built in the past?

Yeah, so I created Osmotive in 2011 and the goal was to consolidate the management of the various businesses that I had at that time, primarily because we were running separate payrolls and separate, you know, P&Ls. We still have separate P&Ls right now just for the, you know, because of our model. But we just had— we couldn't negotiate benefits properly. We couldn't do any of those things at scale. So I said, it would be really easy if— or it would make our life a lot easier if we could just do a consolidation management. So this is our shared services company in a way when you think about it. All of our individual brands have a separate P&L and so on, separate teams. But this, this kind of is the umbrella that, that makes our life easy. Uh, and back then, you know, I had a brand like List25, which I exited. It was a popular YouTube channel, you know, 2.5 million subscribers, half a billion video views, right? So I had many other ventures like that in the affiliate space and advertising space that were kind of all just consolidated under Awesome Motive just for easy management. Today, we've mostly gotten out of those media businesses, like exited List25, exited several others, shut down some of the other ones, and really doubling down on software over the last, you know, 7, 8 years. You know, we now have over 200 team members across our various companies. And, you know, so my biggest focus, you know, is just to make sure that the culture stays like it was when we were just 5 people.

Sure. Yeah. That's a big challenge when you get to that point. So you decided to focus, got rid of all the media, understand the affiliate sites, the content sites, the ad sites. And then I know a couple of years ago, I don't know when this was exactly, I remember looking at one of the businesses you put up for sale, reviewed it. I thought it was an awesome business. I think you had multiple bidders on it at the time. What was the strategy behind selling those companies and then focus on your growth tools?

Yeah. So the 2 businesses you're talking about, like, you know, Soliloquy, which was a slider, really hard to remember name for a slider software. And it was a package deal with our other software Envira Gallery, and it was a photography suite.

Yeah.

So sliders back in the day were hot. Everybody wanted it. It was a design trend you wanted, but then it kind of phased out. You know, people were like, sliders are bad for SEO, sliders slow down your site, and sliders are a terrible user experience. And, you know, That kind of drove the demand down and it became a commodity, right? Every single WordPress theme just started building their own and putting it in. So the demand of it was going down. So that business was relatively flat-ish, right? It was growing, but very slow growth. Now, on the other hand, we had Envira Gallery, which was growing at a good pace, you know, very healthy growth. Gallery software targeting the photography industry. It wasn't the biggest in the WordPress market, but it was the fastest growing in the WordPress market at the time because the legacy players were just clunky, bloated, and slow. The challenge with this business was that the AOV was a lot lower, right? The average order value was a lot lower because we were targeting the photography industry. Photographers doesn't always want to spend a lot of money for these tools. So we had that as a challenge, but It was a very good business from a profitability standpoint, but we couldn't cross-sell to the customers. Anybody who was coming in, a photographer, they weren't going to go and pony up the money to buy OptinMonster or any one of our other tools. We also saw some headwinds in the WordPress, in the direction that WordPress was going with a new block editor, which is also known as Gutenberg, that would've required us to refactor the software. Not hard, but again, it was going to take our attention away from our much faster growing businesses at the time with OptinMonster and WPForms and MonsterInsights and so on. So we tried to first just exit out Soliloquy, the slider business, and people weren't so excited about sliders given the market trend. So what we did, we decided to bundle. We said, okay, we have this super attractive business and this sort of attractive business. And that ended up getting a lot of interest because Envira, you know, had we kept it, we would've been way better off, you know, knowing what I know today, we would've been way better off from a financial point of view. We could have also just done like a typical private equity play and kept the business and just let it die slowly, right? Some PE firms do that.

True.

And cash-on-cash return-wise, you couldn't have beaten that because the business was extremely profitable. But, you know, like, that's not the reputation I want to have, right? I want to, I want to do right by the users. Our users really trust us. Um, so I'm not going to be the one who's going to buy a business just to let it slowly die, right?

Yeah.

And I don't want to have that reputation. So we ended up selling it.