STOP Making These Mistakes on Your Website | How to Create Real Value

Hi, I'm Evan Carmichael. Welcome to another edition of Ask Evan. Today I'm going to be reviewing a website from one of my YouTube viewers. Love you guys. So the question was, can you review this website, mothersforum.org? So I loaded it up here, and this is the home page, and my first thought was The logo is a little bit hard to read and understand what it's all about. So the first thing I look for when I hit a webpage is what's the value proposition. So is this for me? Do I understand what they do? And do I want to stick around on this website or not? Am I going to get value from it? So I want to understand in one sentence what it is that you do. Here it's mothersforum.org. Hard to read what that says below. It kind of stretches the eyes. It says a social platform for men's better halves. Doesn't really say too much about what you do. I don't see how it's a social platform necessarily. When I look at this, it looks like a news website or a magazine. I would also try to put something in there that talks more about the value. Half of your text here is talking about being men's better halves. That's great. That's implied by the fact that it's for mothers. I try to share a little bit more about the value that I'm going to get by being a part of this website. But that first part is a little bit confusing. I try to invest maybe a little bit of energy or money into making the logo better. You can even look at something like 99designs just to get some more ideas and make that a little more professional. So it looks like a lot of articles here divided into different categories. I'm still not seeing how it's a social site necessarily, but looks like there's some decent content here from others. I loaded up an article here. So this was off the homepage. So here, sex after having a baby. So this is the article. Sex After Having a Baby. It's got a few social shares, which is good. Again, it just looks like an article. It has some valuable information for people who are asking this question. One thing that strikes me is there's a lot of ads. We have an ad here, an ad here, an ad here, an ad here, and an ad here. It looks like you're just trying to monetize people who are, you know, first-time visitors come to the site, there's not a lot of encouragement for people to stick around. And I think, you know, that's definitely one way to go, but it doesn't create a really good user experience. And this is something that I've transitioned my own website to be. You can have— you can offer a lot more value, you can get repeat visitors a lot more easily if you create a better user experience. And instead of just trying to sell them ads where a lot of it may not be related, you know, like jobs for moms and mothers. This is a huge, you know, wide field, and how related is this going to be? Do people want to be an enterprise rent-a-car work-from-home job? You know, maybe, but a lot of that's probably going to be not, not related, especially if you're talking about something like, you know, postpartum sex. You probably have a lot better success by building a more loyal community. Having a call to action as being sign up for our newsletter or create a profile and then trying to find a way to ongoing provide awesome value for them and then sell them your own products or services because you built up that kind of connection with them. In general, advertising works for people who are first-time visitors. For regular repeat visitors, they know where the ads are, they're not going to click on it. So it only works for first-time visitors and then you've lost them because they're going to go off to other websites. Where if you're trying to build a model around having super valuable content and having people become repeat visitors, then the model becomes getting them to sign up for your newsletter so you can create an ongoing discussion with them. It's not just giving them advertising and I don't wanna see you again. It's trying to build value, get known as the expert, be a trusted resource for them. And then when you can provide some kind of product or service, they're going to go with you and buy from you because they like you, know you, trust you, have enjoyed all the content that you've given them. So that'd be my preferred model to go. It creates a much better user experience and you'll probably have a lot more fun doing it than just trying to hawk advertisements. Looks like there's some kind of coding error too on your website here. So just looking on the side, it says Parenting Tips and you're showing, you know, caption ID, you're showing some HTML code that's showing up here. So you may want to quickly get that fixed. A little bit more about the About. So I clicked on the About page here. Again, the focus seems to be really on that advertising. You have a Register here to join the community, so interested in learning a little bit more about that. We'll check that in a second. This is the Store at the top, so you're basically just showing ads for Amazon. So I was a little bit excited by the store, thought you might have your own products, services and you can gear people towards that. I'd be surprised if you're making much off of your Amazon store right now, mostly because you haven't built a relationship with your readers here, right? They're coming to the page, they see a ton of advertisements, they're probably not going to stick around unless they can't find the content somewhere else. But there's a ton of mothers' websites and having so many advertisements really cheapens the quality perception of the content and so people aren't likely to stick around. I looked at the sign-in, so you have a forum's information here, you talk about it, register here. So looking at the forum to sign in, a couple thoughts come to mind on this page. So again, we're being blasted with advertisements, and the idea here is you are trying to get them to become a part of your community, and if they feel they're just going to be hammered with advertisements all day long, they're not going to join. And so I would take this off and really focus on one call to action, which is sign up. For our forums. I'd also improve your value proposition here. So it's welcome mothers. This is discussion forum for all mothers, whether you are tiger mom or Western moms. Members can ask any questions on mother's issues from parenting to entertainment. You can post answers to help others enjoy. So the value proposition is not coming out strongly enough. So basically, what value do I get by being a member of your community? What's so unique about yours versus all the other mommy groups out there? I'd also work on the, just fix up the grammatical error here. So whether you are Tiger Mom or Western Moms, you know, this is singular, it's plural. Western needs to be capitalized. I don't think that even makes a difference if you're a Tiger Mom, whatever that means. I'm assuming, I guess, an Eastern mom or Western mom. Focusing too much time on something like this where people likely won't care, you know, they may be coming to a mother's site you know, you don't— speaking from a father's point of view, I don't go to a father's website looking for advice for a Western dad versus an Eastern dad. I'm assuming the information is relevant because it's for dads. So you're using a lot of real estate here at the top talking about something just similar to what you're doing with your section here, talking about men's better halves. It doesn't add value, it takes up real estate. So try to condense your message a little bit more to show the value that you get in joining and and take off all of these ads. I click, quickly click on activity to see what the most recent activity was. And it's basically a bunch of spam. Visit my website, visit my page, surf my website, look at my homepage, review my blog, my website. So anybody seeing this is not going to want to join in this discussion. And so I'd really try to look it up in the quality of discussion, quality of content that you have. The article looks pretty good. I didn't fully read through this, but it looks, It looks decent, it looks like it's thought out. I don't know who Olivia Malloy is, promoting her website, that's fine. So it's a guest author, so it looks like there's some quality content on here. I just try to switch them all around to building a relationship with your users, getting them to stay longer, getting them to sign up for your newsletter, buy your products or services. If you're going to keep with the forums, take off some of the ads, especially when people are— you're asking them to sign up. And you have to really moderate the spam because people aren't going to want to be a part of this community if that's all they see. But otherwise, you know, it's definitely a good start. You definitely have a lot of content and a lot to work with, so for you to turn things around and start driving some traffic should be an easy enough job. So hopefully you can get some value from that. For those of you watching, if you like the video, please give it a thumbs up below. Makes me want to do more of these videos for you, and I'd love to hear what you have to think about this website. Or if you have a question about your own business, feel free to leave in the comments below. I always read those. I love seeing them come in. So thank you, and I'll see you on the next episode.