Reason 1 – Saving Money on Your Monthly Online Budget

Now we’re down to the number 1 reason to manage your websites and blogs: money. It’s simply less expensive to learn how to handle most website and blog tasks than it is to pay someone to do them for you.

The most obvious cost to your business is any ongoing website or blog maintenance you’re paying to a web designer. I’ve heard from clients that they’ve spent anywhere from $75 to $600 a month on maintenance. The difference in pricing is related to the amount of work done in those contracts.

• A $75 a month charge included 1 major update a month, in this case, my speakers association chapter adding their monthly meeting to the site. 
• The $600/month charge was for website hosting, maintenance, and keyword optimization; that’s what my dentist pays to maintain his page 1 Google status in his geographic area.

I hope your webmaster costs are either zero or somewhere between those two numbers!

What other costs might there be? Well, you remember the true story of my client whose website was shut down by a disgruntled team member, yes? She directly lost revenue because her website wasn’t available. It would have been difficult on short notice for her to replace the site she had planned, but if she’d had control of her domain, she could have pointed it to an alternate site until things were resolved.

What about creating opportunities BECAUSE you have HTML and CSS skills? The Internet likes speed! Being able to come up with a custom page on your website or blog that specifically addresses a new opportunity provides a huge advantage over your competitors who can’t or don’t provide such targeted information.

In fact, imagine being able to send to a prospect in email the URL of a specially created web page on your website. Wouldn’t you sit up and take notice if I said I have a message just for you at  such-and-such a page? With a simple tool, I created custom pages with individual names on them  for the folks on my mailing list, using a simple HTML page and a tool that merges names into those web pages. Like so many other highly-targeted messages, custom web pages have a big impact. And this technique is easy and inexpensive to do. (sample here)

So with basic HTML and CSS skills, you can not only save maintenance costs, you can create opportunities for new business in targeted, memorable ways. I hope by now that you’re all out of excuses now for putting off  earning something that can make you money.

It’s time! The product is now available for purchase. There’s no time like the beginning of a new year to make a difference in your business by learning HTML and CSS. Head on over to http://www.ICanFixMyWebsite.com and
get all the details of this program. I look forward to working with you in our coaching sessions, and getting 2010 off to a great start.

The “I Can Fix My Website” program is up and running! Get your copy right now at http://www.ICanFixMyWebsite.com.

Toolie®

Reminder: Top 10 Things for 2010 Webinar is Tomorrow night! Click the red signup button…

Reason 2 – Saving Time on Quick and Easy Updates to Your Sites

One of the challenges entrepreneurs face when trying to grow their business is the point at which they begin to acquire helpers. Some use virtual assistants, some use their teenage or college-age children. Like any employment situation (virtual or contractual), the entrepreneur spends time managing the relationship as well as the work.

It’s no different when you’ve hired a web designer to maintain your website for you. It takes time to decide what you want, communicate your decisions, and manage the results. It’s a necessary part of delegating the work, and provided you have good communication, it doesn’t have to be time-consuming. I’ll leave you to imagine what it’s like when your web designer is NOT a good communicator. Perhaps you already know….

We’ve discussed how nice it is to have schedule independence from your web designer: that is, you being able to make changes to your site WHEN you want to, even if it’s after hours. Now we’re talking about how much TIME it takes to manage the relationship with your designer, and whether that time investment is appropriate for “the small stuff.”

I was on the board of my speakers association chapter for 3 years, and during that time I was directly involved with maintaining the website. We had a web designer who handled our maintenance for us for a reduced rate, and he was pretty good about handling the changes in a timely manner. But by “handling changes”, I mean we wrote everything out for him, and even formatted the text in Microsoft Word the way we wanted it to look on the site. We sent in a Word doc, and he reproduced the changes in HTML on the website based on the text we had sent him.

It took 2 hours to prepare that Word document, and it probably took him another 90 minutes to 2 hours to format the text in HTML and upload it to the site. So a total of 4 hours went into those web pages every month. If we’d had access to the site ourselves, we could have made the changes directly in HTML (in 2 hours), and had them visible to the public immediately instead of 4-24 hours later.

It was a better use of his time to work on tasks that we weren’t capable of doing, like the original design, or major updates to the look and feel of the site. The kind of work he was performing was simple edits that we were capable of handling. Consequently, our chapter switched to a membership site that better served our needs as an association, and one that we could manage ourselves.

Are you doing the same thing? Are sending your web designer text formatted in Word and then having them do it over again on your site? I can almost promise you that even if you’re exporting your text as HTML out of Microsoft Word, your designer is NOT using it directly. Word produces notoriously bloated HTML, so most designers ignore it or run it through a cleanup filter before posting the text on your website.

Do it right the first time; as an entrepreneur you don’t have TIME to do it OVER again! Learn HTML and CSS, and handle these simple updates yourself! With a combination of how-to videos, demos, website layouts, one-on-one coaching, and the support forum, the “I Can Fix My Website” program has what you need to learn these skills quickly and easily. You’ll save time by handling website and blog updates yourself, and leave your web designer (if you have one) free to concentrate on the big stuff they really enjoy.

Tomorrow: Reason 1 – Saving Money on Your Monthly Online Budget

Toolie®

Reason 3 – Controlling and Protecting Your Business Sites

“The story we’re about to tell you is true. The names were changed to protect the innocent.” 
(from the TV show “Dragnet”)

I wish I were kidding about that. What I’m going to tell you IS true; I’m just glad it doesn’t happen very often.

I got a call last week from a client; I worked on her website last fall. She is an author whose book wasn’t yet available at that time, but she was doing a number of things to prepare for the book launch. My client had a social media site created by one of her team members. After we handled a few updates to the site I had worked on previously, she shared with me the debacle that accompanied the release of her book.

After weeks of work on the social media site, the site was launched. A few weeks later, my client and her team member had a misunderstanding. This woman did not take the situation well, and in retaliation, shut down the site for 8 days right at the time the book arrived in stores. My client did not have the username and password to the site because it was hosted with other sites owned by other people, and controlled by the team member. She had no way of replacing the site in time for her book launch.

A third party intervened in the situation and got the site back up, but by then the damage was done. Fortunately my client has a loyal following, and she didn’t lose much revenue, but it was emotionally devastating. After all her diligence and hard work, losing control of her site when she needed it most was a situation she resolved to never allow again.

In the “I Can Fix My Website” product, one of the first things we talk about is the importance of having the domain registered in your name, with your contact information, and for you to have control of the domain account’s username and password. The same is true of the hosting account; it needs to be YOUR credit card and contact information on file so that you can change it if (God forbid) your web designer turns on you. (Some of my students have told me that I become somewhat animated when discussing this, but it is for good reason.)

In the Action Guide that accompanies the product, I have space for you to write down your usernames and passwords for all of your domain registrations and web hosting accounts. You can also note whether your domains are privately registered (where your personal details are omitted so that you’re less of a target for spammers) and which email address you used with the registration. I have had to help reclaim domain registrations for some clients because the domain renewal email went to an account that no longer existed.

I understand the importance of keeping good records for your domain registrations so that you don’t lose them! With these simple precautions (and some other advice I have for you), there’s no reason
why you can’t take control of your sites and protect your valuable online business assets.

I want to see YOU confidently switching to the Code view in your web editor and saying “Bring it on! I know how to use HTML…!” I look forward to working with you on these and other important items during our coaching sessions together in the “I Can Fix My Website” program.

Tomorrow: Reason 2 – Saving Time on Quick and Easy Updates to Your Sites

Toolie®

P.S. Remember to sign up for Thursday’s webinar (click the red button at right).

Reason 4 – Making Changes to Your Site on YOUR Schedule

I’ll tell you a secret about web designers: they like to design, not to maintain.

Design is fun. It’s creative. It’s self-expressive.

Maintenance is detail-oriented. It’s dull. It’s repetitive. But it’s also necessary.

If a web designer enjoys managing details, then carrying maintenance contracts is a good source of ongoing revenue and most web designers will offer to maintain your site for you. Regardless of what you spend on a webmaster though, the rub comes when you need something changed NOW. Right now. Not 2 days from now, not tomorrow, NOW. Scheduling, turnaround times, and your webmaster’s workload all come into play. Once the initial design is done, webmasters are usually not very interested in doing updates to their already-perfect creation.

You must think I hate web designers — I don’t, not at all! After all, technically, I AM a web designer. I do a limited number of site projects for clients who are in a hurry and who are happy to pay for me to do the work. But I don’t do maintenance for them. Any project I take on involves training package for them so that my clients do the maintenance.

It’s not that I don’t like maintenance; I too could make money as a webmaster. But I have a business of my own to run, just like you do. And I have found that my clients are happiest when they really own and run their own sites. (That’s also why my product includes 3 hours of one-on-one coaching time to get you up and running.)

In a previous installment of this series, we talked about making your website or blog a cash-producing machine. How are you going to do that if you can’t make updates quickly? With a site designed for easy maintenance, you can be in charge of those updates yourself and take care of them any time of the day or night. In the “I Can Fix My Website” course, I teach you what is “a site designed for easy maintenance,” so that you can create or refurbish yours with that goal in mind.

Maybe it’s just because I’m a night-person, but I get my greatest ideas in the evening. The phones settle down, we’ve had dinner, I kick off my shoes, and suddenly in the evening, my head is buzzing with ideas. I do most of my writing then, and I want to be able to set up new pages as soon as the writing is finished. If I had to wait until the next day for a web designer to install my updates, I’d go crazy. Being able to create and install new pages, new features, new opt-ins when I need them is the best of possible worlds for me, as business owner of cash-producing websites.

Even if you are not the one who creates your site, it still belongs to you. It’s your business at stake, so it pays to know how to operate it inside and out, even if you ultimately delegate some of the work to others. When it’s 7 pm on a Sunday night and you want to add something to your site before Monday morning, I can almost guarantee that neither your virtual assistant nor your web designer will be picking up the phone when you call them for help.

The Internet loves speed. Those are customers whizzing past your site. Get them to stop by and view your latest creations: products, writing, services, all described and made available on YOUR schedule, because you know how to wrangle your site yourself. My website training product plus coaching program will teach you how.

Tomorrow: Reason 3 – Controlling and Protecting Your Business Sites

Toolie®

Reason 8: Branding, Creativity, and Freedom to Fly

I get asked a lot about how I can possibly make a living teaching website and blog skills when there are so many free website templates and site-builders out there already. My answer is simple: people come to me when they’re tired of bumping into the limitations that both website templates and site-builders have. They’re ready to make their sites work for them, instead of the other way around.

I remember when I learned to ride a two-wheeled bicycle. My Dad bought a bike with smaller wheels, and put training wheels on it. (This was before we knew we should wear helmets, but thankfully all I ever got were skinned knees.) I rode up and down the sidewalk, back and forth, back and forth. After a while I thought I was ready to have the training wheels taken off. Dad ran alongside me and steadied me while I got that wobbly front wheel under control. After a few sideways landings (thank goodness for lawns!) I took off and pedaled as fast as I could until Dad called me back. It was incredible! I felt like I was flying.

Pretty soon I was doing circles and figure-eights in the street, going fast, going slow, even racing with the other kids in the neighborhood. It’s a good thing I liked riding my bike because I rode it to piano lessons, to my first job at the grocery store, and even to driver’s education classes during the summer after my sophomore year in high school. I rode it to go shopping as a teenager, and many years later, I rode it for recreation and fitness. (McAlister and I even rode bikes on our first few dates.)

The point is, once I got the hang of riding with training wheels, I insisted on having them taken off so I could ride my bike without them. I wanted to feel grown up and free. As silly as the comparison may seem, being able to maneuver your own websites and blogs gives you that same sense of freedom and control. And the people who come to me are usually the ones who want a sense of empowerment, freedom, and control. They understand the importance of standing out, of being unique among the millions of websites already online.

There’s another really, really important aspect to consider about your sites, and that is your brand. Usually by the time entrepreneurs, virtual assistants, and small business owners come to work with me, they’ve got a logo and color scheme that they want applied to their sites. That’s the difference between having a site that looks like the other 662 sites using your website template, and having a site that is truly unique and reflects your brand choices. Plus with a site you’ve built or had built, you have the flexibility to do creative things with it, such as audio, video, and other interactive features.

A site with a good design gives you so many opportunities to attract visitors by continually expanding and enhancing it with good content. In my website/blog training program, we’ll talk about both design and content to produce sites that really work for your business.

Tomorrow: Reason 7 – Behind-the-Scenes Knowledge to Really Enhance Your Site

Toolie®

It exciting to watch: entrepreneurs with important things to share with the world are getting ready to make it happen through new or redesigned websites and blogs.

• A professional with valuable but highly specialized skills is going to be able to communicate her solutions with distressed parents in a meaningful way through her new website.
• An entrepreneur who knows about an IRS-approved, low-cost health insurance plan will be able to help small businesses take care of their employees through his expanded website.
• An entrepreneur who has unique merchandise will be able to expand both her market and her product line with her new website and blog, and she can add new information to both whenever she wants.

Being able to empower other people with new skills that help them support themselves is what gets me out of bed in the morning! To use a “vehicle” metaphor, it’s the difference between hitchhiking to get to client meetings and having your own car that gets you wherever you want to go. With the latter approach, you’re not always dependent on someone else.

There’s still time to book an appointment and talk to me about your website or blog project AND take advantage of 30% discount on coaching sessions. Visit http://www.ToolieCoaching.com to get all the details and click on the Live Chat icon to tell me about your project.

Toolie

It’s easy to get caught up in the details of creating a website or blog: wrangling the menu, changing page width, tweaking a template, you name it. What needs to happen before you ever put mouse to editor is a website plan that will ultimately save you time. Toolie explains some first steps in the following podcast. (2:28)

Bring some of your planning ideas to the Free Preview Webinar on Monday, February 16th. Click here to register.