In part one of the Effective Website Goals series, I talked about how the first goal of an effective website is to help increase your profits. Today let’s talk about how your website should help give you more free time.
Sure making money is great. But as they say, what good is the money if you don’t have any time to enjoy it?
An effective website should give you more free time that you can either use to enjoy yourself of to spend it on creating new and exciting projects.
Ways to get more free time
- Automate tasks
- Scheduling / Batching / Time Shifting
- Answer commonly asked questions
- Re-use content
- Provide support/training
Website Automation
Your website shouldn’t create more busy work for you. You didn’t go into business because you love busy work.
So, be sure that your website is full of “parts” that will run on autopilot once set up. Stuff that you’ll be confident is working without your input. Just check in on it once a month and make any tweaks if needed.
A good example of this is your email list. Yes, every business should have an email list!
When your business sets up the email list, it’ll probably take about an hour to get it set up right. Then, all of the tedious tasks of adding new members, unsubscribing people, checking for bad email addresses, dealing with SPAM compliance, and scheduling emails will be automated. It all happens without your involvement.
Spend an hour upfront and you’ll have a worry free system that’ll run for year. Now that’s automation.
Scheduling / Time-Shifting
Even things that cannot be completely automated can usually be scheduled or time-shifted.
Let’s say you want to write and publish 3 articles on your site per week (Every Monday, Wednesday and Friday). Time shifting gives you the option of writing all three articles on Sunday night then scheduling them so they magically appear on your site in the future.
There’s no reason why you couldn’t write a whole month’s worth of articles and one day, schedule them in advance, then fly off to Paris for the rest of the month.
When writing articles in advance, just make sure that you’re not writing about something time sensitive. For instance, don’t write about “recent” stock market trends and schedule it to appear a month later. The trends you wrote about might not be relevant a month down the road.
Answer Common Questions
If your business deals with customers on the phone or via email, you more than likely get asked the same 10 questions over and over again.
- What time to you close?
- Can I get directions to your store?
- Is your refrigerator running?
Having these answers on your website won’t cut out all of these questions, but it will certainly reduce them. Plus, including a map and driving instructions on your site will be much more beneficial to your customers/prospects that trying to give verbal directions over the phone.
Re-Use Content
This is similar to the whole automation and commonly asked questions section, but I think it deserves a separate spot to its own.
Let’s use a hardware store as an example… Spring rolls around and people start moving their gas grills from the garage to their deck. So, Handy Hardware Store creates a quick video on how to clean a gas grill and puts it on their site.
Cool. They took a few hours and created great content for their website. Here comes the fun part… They can now reuse this video to market their website and business. They can use a free service like TubeMogul and quickly upload the video to a bunch of popular video sites (YouTube, for instance).
And, with a little research, Handy Hardware Store can probably find local video sites to upload their video to. Check your local television stations, newspapers, magazines, etc. Chances are one or more of them will have a user/community section where you can upload video.
When adding your video to other sites, be sure to include your business and website in the video so people can find you.
Fast forward a year… Spring once again rolls around, so Handy Hardware Store includes a link to the grill cleaning video in their print and email newsletters.
Provide Support / Training / Demonstration
Let’s use the hardware store as an example again but this time the customer has a problem with their toilet. The “guts” in the back tank aren’t working so the toilet doesn’t stop running.
Mal-Wart sells repair Kit A for $10 and Handy Hardware sells repair Kit B for $12. But, Handy Hardware is able to tell their customers that their website has a step-by-step video demonstration on how to install Kit B. Most customers will pay the extra $2 for the peace of mind knowing they won’t get stuck half way through the project.
Again, this step-by-step video demonstration can be reused. Not only can it be uploaded to a bunch of video sharing sites, it could also be combined with other Handy Hardware demonstrations to create a DVD. The DVD could either be sold at a discounted price or given away to anyone who buys a $50 gift card. The options are really endless.
Conclusion
The second goal of an effective website is to help save you time and energy. Every business has many tedioius and repetitive tasks that need to be done on a regular basis. Your website shouldn’t add to this list.
Computers love to do tedious work. Well, maybe they are indifferent to any type of work, but they excel at tedious and repetitive task. So make sure that you’re website will run on autopilot and handle all of these tasks for you.
Please leave any comments, questioins, or thoughts below.
