Evan Carmichael reviews wedosh.com, a solo entrepreneur's site, and identifies 18 problems: unclear value proposition, pixelated logo, broken social links, dubious social proof (2,000 Facebook likes, zero tweets), and too many affiliate offers cluttering the homepage. He recommends stripping away noise, clarifying the core offer, and spending less time building and more time on marketing.
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Hi, I'm Evan Carmichael. Welcome to another edition of Ask Evan. Today I'm answering a question from one of our readers named Luke who has a website called wedosh.com and wanted some feedback and advice on what to do next. He said he's working 15+ hours a day developing, managing, maintaining it. I'm in great need of any help, so I wanted my feedback. So thanks, Luke, we'll check it out. I know it can be tough running a business by yourself, and it is a lot of hard work and effort. Hopefully we can give you a little bit of feedback here on how to make this website better. So here we are, wedosh.com. Welcome guest. So right away, I don't know what you do, and most people are going to bounce. So if you look at your stats, you're probably going to see that most people are not hanging around your website very long, and they bounce right away. So the first thing you want to do is hit people with what is your value proposition. What is this website all about? What do you do? If I don't understand that quickly, I'm going to leave. Unless somebody said, "You really, really, really have to check out this website. It's awesome." But that's probably not going to happen if they can't quickly explain what it is that you do too. So, you know, you have WeDosh, "filling in the missing pieces." No idea what that means. Logo doesn't really make sense. You know, maybe it means something, but to me, checking out the site, I don't really understand what it's all about. The logo is also a little pixelated here, so it wouldn't take much to make that look nicer, a little more professional, even just in Photoshop. You use a lot of real estate at the top. Everything above the fold, right, this is what somebody's gonna look at quickly when they first land on your page. You use a lot with this huge graphic that doesn't really mean anything. I don't know what your logo means, I don't know what all this is all about. You know, the name is there, that's great. Tagline doesn't make sense. I would shrink this and again offer immediate value to people who are landing on this website. You may have done a lot of work here putting this together, but half of it is also marketing. You got to position it in a way so when people land on it, it makes sense and people want to kind of take that next step with you. Something is a little off here where you have the tweets, likes, and Google+. You know, they have 2,000 Facebook likes and no tweets. This is kind of raising the BS meter a little here. Maybe you bought these likes on Fiverr or something. It doesn't look good to have all these, you know, likes and no tweets. It's also kind of skeptical that you have 18,000 members and 17,000 premium members. I don't know what the difference is, but This seems really high for a website that doesn't really make too much sense and has no tweets attached to it. So for somebody who's coming to the site, it screams warning signs. So you want to position yourself to make yourself look good and put in the best possible light, but people have a pretty good BS detector as well, and if you're massively inflating your numbers, people will tell, and they're not going to want to do business with you. So, you know, obviously you want to put yourself in the best light possible, but I wouldn't be inflating those numbers if you want people to sign up and take you seriously. Let's see what we have below. So, members earn and benefit your earnings in many ways. Affiliates multiply and maximize your earnings. Advertisers boost sales and increase website traffic. Okay. You know, still not 100% what this is all about. Latest job opportunities, work from no home. It's a whole bunch of different affiliate programs. You're trying to get me to sign up for these affiliate programs? Is this something I'm going to be promoting? Um, a lot of people run away as soon as they see a lot of affiliate offers. So again, you may have done a lot of work programming this, but, uh, it doesn't make sense for somebody visiting the site. The good news is if you can modify it to change your message and clearly explain what it is that you do, if there is real value there, then it will be easier to get people to sign up and take whatever next step you want them to take. You've got a bunch of social media links, so let's see what you have on Google+. So that just loads a picture. If I click on it— okay, so you don't actually have these accounts, it's just loading pictures. Okay, so, you know, again, that's not going to look good if I want to follow you on Facebook or Google+ or YouTube, and these are just links to pictures but doesn't actually show your accounts. Again, it doesn't look good. So it, you know, it just damages the credibility. If I come to this page and I've been referred or got a link somehow and I see that you have links to social media accounts that don't work and you've got, you know, all these members, which looks a little sketchy, and you know, no tweets and 2,000 likes. Again, it looks very sketchy. I don't understand what this website does. People are gonna leave right away. So if you can fix that up, again, you know, right here on the homepage, you clearly explain what it is that you do. You take away this, you know, all this affiliate stuff here, which I'm not sure if you're trying to sell me or what the whole point of these are. But if you clean up your marketing message, make it make sense, take away the stuff that would alert people negatively, like this 0 tweet and 2,000 likes, and make your social media accounts here either work or just take them off. I'd probably also get rid of this advertising, especially on your homepage. Well, it doesn't look that great. If you can clean all that up and explain your offer, I think you'll have a much greater chance of getting people to take whatever next step you're doing. You know, you're working 15 hours a day plus, Welcome to the club. That's part of entrepreneurship for most people who are starting up. You want to make sure you're spending that time wisely, and maybe you spent most of it on the programming and the backend stuff, but now it's time to figure out the marketing and the positioning and the messaging so that people quickly understand the value that you can bring and want to sign up with you and go to that next step. So hopefully that helped. For those of you guys watching, if you like the video, please give it a thumbs up below, and I'd also love to hear what you have to think about this website, or if you have a question about your own business, I'd love to hopefully answer it for you in one of these future videos. So thank you, and we'll see you on the next episode.
