Website Review - The Marketing Agents

Hi, I'm Evan Carmichael. Welcome to another edition of Ask Evan. Today I'm answering a question from one of my readers, Rich, who wrote in asking about feedback for his website. So I just launched something new, hoping to get some feedback on it. You got the time, it's at themarketingagents.com. I have a side project that's about helping businesses and organizations reach more of their ideal customers through search, social, and mobile marketing. Open to any criticisms you may have. I've got a thick skin and my therapist is on retainer. Alright, so let's check out the site and see what kind of feedback we can give. Now I'm a little bit delayed in responding, so my apologies there, Rich. At first glance, I like the site. It's got a great theme to it. Reach more of your ideal customers. I guess the call to action here is to get people to sign up for this newsletter here, but it looks professionally done. I like the logo. Marketing agents with Rich Brooks. And let's scroll down, see what else we have here. We got a white paper, great. Easy to get people on your, your list. Future dispatches. Search social mobile. Great. Well, I like the homepage a lot. It's good. My only thoughts here, maybe improvements, is you're trying to get people onto this newsletter list and If they haven't heard of you before or haven't heard of the marketing agency before, then people might be a little skeptical. So I know you've done a lot of work in the past with your writing, and so include that you've been on Fast Company, that you've been interviewed in various publications, you've written various publications. Have some kind of social proof. If you have a lot of likes or plus ones on this page, that might help. A lot of people tweeting about it, or some testimonials. The Marketing Agents newsletter was the best thing I ever read. Something like that might add a little bit to it because a lot— there's so many companies out here that are trying to target entrepreneurs and say they can help them with search and social and mobile, and so it can be hard to stand out. They've got a really professional and catchy-looking website, which is awesome, but having a little bit more proof to show that, you know, there's people behind this who have actually done a lot of work and have a lot of experience and that they get results could really entice people to want to sign up instead of just bouncing. So, you know, take a look at your bounce rate and see how many people aren't you converting. And adding some of those things like logos of media you've been in or testimonials or having some kind of social proof could really help improve your signup rate. So that's my only thought, but otherwise this page is looking pretty good. Let's go check out the blog and see what else we can find here. So, 6 Facebook book myths worth debunking. Let's load it up, see what we got. This is great, a lot of great social proof here. It's been tweeted, LinkedIn shared, Facebook liked. It's great. I know Rich has awesome content, so this is probably really good. Without actually going through the content itself, we got, you know, good lengthy content, good pictures, subdivided well, easy to read, easy to scan. Bold, you know, titles in between, looking good. We got some comments, that's great. I like that there's a call to action at the end, so if somebody just finds this from a Google search, they'll be able to sign up again here at the end with your name and email. This might be a little stronger if you're not— if you're still not subscribed, I've got a signup box right here to make your life easier. No spam, just free quality updates to help you reach more ideal customers. That might be a little more— it might be a bit stronger with the focus on the value that you provide. And maybe even put a testimonial about how great the dispatches are. So if somebody has just landed on this page, it's the first article they've read and they loved it, and they see this call to action, it's really compelling and they want to sign up. But again, great content, good comments, good shares. That would probably be my only suggestion is making that a little bit stronger. What else do we have? Let's check out the about page. About the marketing agents. So a little bit more information about you guys. All about helping you find and engage your audience with social, search, and mobile marketing. Great. I like the picture. I'd probably make it a little more close-up. It's a funky picture. Some lobster company there in the background. Interesting. But people do like to buy from people, so the more personal you can make it, the better. And it's kind of hard to see your face in this picture. I know you use your face a lot more with your Twitter account, so that may be something worth considering. Just zooming in a little bit so we can see you and make it a little bit easier to relate to you. Again, we've got this. There's no— I'm not sure there's a call to action here. You just have the name and email, so that might be that might kind of stand out as a little bit of a question mark, like what's going on here if someone just lands on this page. More information about you, that's great. You know, there's a lot of text on here and people may just kind of skim it and not really get to read all of it, so I'd probably add a little bit more of some pictures in here. So you can have another picture of yourself doing something else, maybe you're speaking at a conference or whatever it is, you're meeting somebody, some kind of action shot. It's nice to have a headshot like this, you kind of pose formal official shot, and then seeing something of you in action at a meeting or conference or book signing or whatever it is that you're doing. And then maybe for some of the— this is great, you've been on Inc., CNN, Huffington Post— put the logos on here. That stands out a lot easier to read, and I'd put that on your homepage as well, or in your header. Is your header consistent across? Yeah, I mean, "As seen in Inc. Magazine, Huffington Post, CNN." I put that all across the top somewhere here just so that when people land on any of your pages, they'll see that the people behind this website know what they're talking about and have some experience. I'd proudly promote that and make that front and center. Otherwise, the bio looks good. I'd just add more pictures and break it up and put some logos in there. You know, if you've been a tech expert on here, maybe there's a screenshot that you can show of you being on TV, or just show, you know, the NBC logo or these logos. Otherwise, it looks good. You got the call to action at the bottom again, that's great. You got some social channels. Let's see what you're doing on Twitter and Google+ as a quick example. So here you are. Now this is great, you know, you got a great close-up shot. You've got an action shot. I'd put both of these on your About page there. You're very active, it's great. You've got a lot of tweets, and you're very active on it, which is great. Responding to people, checking out the Google+ page. This is more branded for Marketing Agents, where this seems to be more personally branded. So I don't know if you're on Google+ or what the strategy was there. From a branding point of view, you might want to try to keep that consistent. Either have it go to a marketing agent's Twitter channel or a Rich Brooks Google+ channel. This doesn't seem that updated. So we are sitting here right now, it's March 27th, and the last post on your Google+ channel was February 27th, which probably doesn't look that great, you know, especially if you're somebody who's focusing on how good you are at social media. I know you do a lot on Twitter, so that's awesome, but you might want to keep this channel a little more updated. Or if it's not part of your plan, then shut down the channel and don't include it on your website. Because especially for somebody who's in the business, you want to make sure that you are posting fairly regularly across the social channels that you promote. But otherwise, it looks good. Congrats on the new business. I hope it's going well. I hope you're adding a lot of value. And I look forward to seeing the success as this thing grows. So for those of you watching, if you like this video, please give it a thumbs up. I'd love to hear what you have to think about this website in the comments. I always read those and try to respond to everybody as soon as I can. And if you have a question about your own business or website that you want checked out, feel free to leave in the comments below. I always read those and I'll try to make a video response for you guys as well. So thank you and I'll see you on the next episode. [MUSIC] [MUSIC]