Episode Transcript
Season 3 ep 2 transcript edit
Bridget Willard 00:00:03 Welcome to the Launch with Words podcast with your host Bridget Willard. We're gonna talk about all things, content, blogging, articles, videos, whatever has words and goes on your website.
Bridget Willard 00:00:21 Hey, hey, hey. It's your friend Bridget here, back with another episode of season three of the Launch with Words podcast, brought to you by me and my next guest, Matt Levin Hagen. Hey, Matt, thanks for being on my podcast.
Matt Levenhagen 00:00:35 Thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here.
Bridget Willard 00:00:37 Tell the folks listening who you are and how to contact you. Let's get that in the front of the show instead of buried at the end. <laugh>,
Matt Levenhagen 00:00:46 Yes, I, uh, I am all in on web design and development. I have an agency, uh, we've been doing this, we're in our completing our fifth year. Uh, so we've done, we've done a lot. We've figured out what we're doing by this point. And, uh, so yeah, we do a lot of, you know, 90% of what we do is probably WordPress. We do other stuff. Um, all kinds of different types of projects we do. You know, we specialize on custom WordPress and custom websites and maintenance is really our two big pillars.
Bridget Willard 00:01:18 So, so, uh, a lot of our small business owners, um, that listen to this podcast, maybe they have a window cleaning business or a floral shop. Like why custom WordPress? Like what's the, what's the advantage of going in with a custom WordPress website?
Matt Levenhagen 00:01:38 That's a great question, and there's a number of good reasons. Uh, number one, you know, well, for me, no. So I'm gonna look at it from, 'cause I'm a business owner too, right? Um, when I am gonna start a, a, I've started a few companies over the decades, but, um, the first thing I wanna do is I, I want to care about my brand and how I show up in the world, right? And, and, um, that I have a professional presence on the web. And, and also that I have kind of control of that. And one of, I'm, I'm not a control freaker or anything, but I don't like having my business on like a third party service, you know, <laugh>, like, whether it's Wix or anything out there, or even some people that might just have their whole business on Facebook for some reason. Um, not that there's anything wrong with that. Well,
Bridget Willard 00:02:28 There is <laugh>. I mean, you can, you can dance around that. I'm like, no, Facebook's like what you do after you build your website. Or you could do it, like, while your website's being built and to kind of get a feel of your audience. But you shouldn't put all of your marketing efforts on a third party platform. 'cause you could get kicked off, somebody could report you, it could shut down. Um, I've seen where, um, employees had admin access of company Facebook pages and then they were fired and bye-bye. Facebook page is gone.
Matt Levenhagen 00:03:03 Oh, yeah. That can happen. Yeah. You,
Bridget Willard 00:03:05 You just, you just, as a small business owner, you're giving your blood, your sweat, your tears, the second, uh, or the HELOC on your house. And <laugh>, you're, you are the one putting in all of your efforts. Yeah. So you should give it all of the chance it can get. And I really, really loved what you said, I want to care about my business and how I show up in the world. Yeah. Like what does that, how does that resonate? And in as the web, do you think, uh, people who are looking for florists and everything, do you think they really care if you have a website?
Matt Levenhagen 00:03:48 I think they do care. I think in, in whatever business you're in, um, that's kinda like the front of your store. That's the reason people were gonna walk into your, into your life, into your <laugh> to buy your stuff. Um, you know, I, I look at, even though you have all the satellite stuff you might do, you might be on Facebook or LinkedIn or wherever you are, you know, with, uh, whatever makes sense for your business. People want to be able to see that you also are established. And, um, a website, not only can a website, um, establish you as kind of, okay, this person is actually, they're legit. They have a, a real website and hopefully it's professional looking. And, uh, and you have all that. But, um, at the end of the day, it's like you also have, um, the capability to do so much more on there.
Matt Levenhagen 00:04:44 And you can do, um, you have more control over the layouts and what you offering your content. And, um, and believe it or not, you know, people that are looking for services, I know I do this, whether it's a plumber or whoever, um, I'm gonna do some Google searches and I'm gonna see, you know, are they, first of all, I wanna see they have a website, and then it's a professional website, and hopefully it, it sells well. Um, you can tell a lot about a company by that. Um, and they're gonna look around, they're gonna look at your other properties. Especially in my business. I mean, I, I am a web design, you know, web design agency. I know. 'cause I've had clients tell me that, oh, you know, you're everywhere. You're famous. I'm not really famous <laugh>, but I just am everywhere. I'm prolific, right?
Matt Levenhagen 00:05:34 I'm on Twitter, I'm on LinkedIn, I'm on Facebook. Yeah, I'm on Instagram, I'm, and, uh, but I also have that website and that, that establishes our brand and it's consistent. And, um, and I don't have to worry about it going away someday. Yep. I own it. Even if, you know, I'm, we're on a good host, but even if the hosting would disappear tomorrow, I have good maintenance practices and backups, and I can have that backup in an hour somewhere else. So, um, having that control and that ability to, you know, over your brand and also just, that's gonna make you look better. And people, you know, uh, people buy from people they trust. They can see that they're a professional. Um, and I really think at the center that, you know, I've been doing online stuff for 20 years, uh, in various forms, but, um, the center of that still to this day, even though there's all this other stuff out there, it's your website. Yeah.
Bridget Willard 00:06:34 I, I really liked how you said that, to see that you're established. 'cause in the advertising and sales industry, we're like discovering validation. Discovering validation. Like, if I'm gonna spend my hard earned dollars on your business, I don't want to spend it on somebody that's fly by night. You know, if I'm hiring a painter, I'm gonna hire you. Again. I, if I tell somebody, the worst thing is when you tell somebody, oh yeah, I used so and so. You go to their website or the business <inaudible>, it's dead. You know, it's already dead. But you're right about that. You put some, you know, something into the game, you know, you're invested in your own business and the website is a strong indicator that you're here to stay. And then mm-hmm. <affirmative> on the custom site where you touched on being able to, what we would call scale. So your website, you're doing this stuff, everything's great. People love your, your in, they wanna buy your swag after they left. Like maybe they saw your sweatshirts while they were there, but they really didn't buy it from you. But if you have a WordPress website, you can easily add e-commerce to it so that you can ex extend the ways you, your business generates revenue.
Matt Levenhagen 00:07:56 Oh, definitely. Yeah. And, and it, it gives you so much more flexibility. Now, again, on some of these other platforms, I mean, I don't know, you might send 'em to a PayPal link to buy something or <laugh> Yes.
Bridget Willard 00:08:05 You know,
Matt Levenhagen 00:08:06 Simple like that. I mean, just call us. We can do it manually over the phone. It happens if people are doing that. I know. Um, but yes, having a website, um, it establishes you, you got, you know, you can, uh, if, if you do it right, you have a professional help you especially, but yeah, maybe you got some skills. Get it established, get something out there, get something what we call in the programming world, minimal viable, right? Yeah. Something that at least have a homepage and, and a contact page and about page, uh, maybe something about your services or your products. And then, um, and you don't even have to, you can keep it real simple. You can have just PayPal links at first. Yeah. But once you have that website, especially on WordPress, the beautiful thing about it is it can grow with your business.
Matt Levenhagen 00:08:57 And where, where your business is today, you don't know where you're gonna be in three years. No. You know, if anyone tells you where they, they know where they're gonna business is gonna be in three years, they're lying <laugh>, they don't know. They might have a vision, they might have a plan and a strategy, but so much can happen in that three years. So, but, so in three years, if you have WordPress, because of the ecosystem and, and the flexibility of that system, you can build out new ways to sell. You know, you can build out that e-commerce store or build out a member's area or build out, uh, you know, uh, different types of content. And, um, there, there's so much flexibility in what you can do.
Bridget Willard 00:09:37 Yeah. Like, um, it's just really amazing to me. There's a local theater group, Broadway around America or something like that. They're coming to Corpus Christi. We were really excited about my friend and I, and we were gonna sign up, but you had to go on their website and get a paper form as a P D F. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>. Then you print the P d F on the printer. I don't have a printer. Do you have a printer? I don't, I don't have a printer. I literally had to email my friend to print my application for my Texas license. Okay. I don't have a printer. I haven't used a printer in years. And I've like, when I have to go, I do it at Office Depot, but Sarah just said send it to her. And then you print this format. Okay. <laugh>, these are for kind of expensive seats for a ticketed event. Right. You, they want you to buy the season pass, then you fill it out with your credit card information on a piece of paper. Now, are you willing, Matt Levin Hagen to write your credit card number on a piece of paper that you're gonna randomly give to, to someone at this open house?
Matt Levenhagen 00:10:45 No. That’s really insecure. Yeah. Yeah.
Bridget Willard 00:10:47 It's, so it's not what we don't do that would call in the web agents in the world web world as P C I compliant. So it's not cons, it's not protecting your personal consumer information. And so <laugh> like, so that, and then, but if this, if this program, if this nonprofit had a custom WordPress website, and more importantly a maintenance contract with someone like you, they could have said, Hey Matt, we have this form. And you could have been like, that's really cute. Let's get some Gravity Forms and, and whatever WooCommerce involved <laugh>. Like,
Matt Levenhagen 00:11:24 That's right. That's
Bridget Willard 00:11:26 Right. So we could, we could pick your seats on a paper if you want to. Yeah. But like the credit card information is gonna go through a legitimate payment processor, which PayPal is, to be fair. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>. Um, but like, to me, this is like the biggest reason to have a maintenance is so that you don't have to keep finding some web developer every time you need to make a change in addition to all the other features. How do you tell your small business owners why maintenance for your website is so important and a must have?
Matt Levenhagen 00:12:02 Alright. Yeah. So the way we approach maintenance is we have a couple different, um, basically two different avenues. Uh, one is, um, let's keep your website up and secure <laugh> <laugh> and up to up to date.
Bridget Willard 00:12:17 That's kind of important. <laugh>,
Matt Levenhagen 00:12:18 That's the, the real just tech, right? Just somebody's going in, they're, they're giving you your website love every month, right? And they're, they're checking things out. They're, now, we don't, you know, we don't use, we don't automate updates and all that stuff. We, everything's manual. We actually have a QA process, a dedicated QA person that checks it out and all that. But you don't have to go that far. But to have somebody that is, um, uh, that least can go in and keep the website up to date and make sure it's not broken and have a good process, uh, to test those things. And, uh, so if it does break, you can recover. But, um, uh, it's, it's that. But then also we have this, you know, we like have a maintenance. It's a little more robust. It, it's kind of, I call it the all-inclusive, uh, where you can, in, in both these plans, there's built in hours, but, um, but for a certain number of hours per month, uh, you have that same maintenance, the tech, but then you have things like, we need help.
Matt Levenhagen 00:13:21 And this happens. We've been working with clients for years, especially e-commerce stores that are growing or busy or huge. Um, or if you're scaling, um, you are gonna decide that you want things over time, right? And a lot of these things are technical or, or there's a team out there somewhere that said, yes, we, we want to add this review widget to your website or this review section. And it's, it's a feed and it's, but it involves integration and, and them touching the code. Now you have that external team touching that code. Instead, you would have, you know, having somebody that's actually in charge of your website to work with that other team. 'cause they have the technical, not, we have the technical knowledge to understand what they need and how to implement it and oversee it so nothing gets, you know, messed up. Um, there's all that types of integrations over time.
Matt Levenhagen 00:14:15 Um, you gotta plugin. You want to test, is this plugin gonna conflict with something else, or is it going to, you know, is there a better option out there? You have somebody to advise you too. Uh, 'cause you, I need this type of plugin, or I need this, uh, you have an advisor on hand that's, uh, that's lives and breathes this stuff. 'cause you don't, right. You're out. You should be out building your business, marketing, doing what, you know, what you, what's in your wheelhouse. Um, and selling and creating products, whatever you're doing. But they have a technical team or a person there to, uh, guide you and, and help out with those things. And again, if there's also this, you know, so I work with a lot of different clients and sometimes it's figuring out how to adapt. Like, if you're an existing business, I'll give you an example. So we have, um, a manufacturer we're working with that have been around for like a hundred years. Okay. And they do a lot of things manually.
Bridget Willard 00:15:17 Well, yeah.
Matt Levenhagen 00:15:18 And <laugh>, they take orders manually. They've never had an online store. They've never had, they've never done any, they just have content on a website. And this is who we are, what we do. And it's a nice site, but it's, they're not selling anything there. And they wanted to finally get into the, you know, 21st century. I think we're in
Bridget Willard 00:15:39 <laugh>
Matt Levenhagen 00:15:42 And actually start offering based stuff. I'm sorry,
Bridget Willard 00:15:45 I'm just stuck on manual orders.
Matt Levenhagen 00:15:47 <laugh> call us and we'll type it. Yeah. Write it all up for you. Um, and, but there's companies out there like this know, especially larger
Bridget Willard 00:15:55 Companies like that. I know, I've, I mean, it reminds me of roofing when they, they called in with a leak request. Okay. We got this form like, you know, this like five part N C R form and everybody gets a different color. <laugh>, what year is this? This is 2023. Not 1993 people. That's right.
Matt Levenhagen 00:16:13 Sorry. But it's, it's hard though. It's hard. I know, I know. For especially a company like that, that's well established. Yep. They have their way been doing things forever. So, but having somebody like, um, a maintenance team or, or a company to contract with, um, that can create a custom plan for them to get from point A to point B. Yes. Because it's not just, oh, we're gonna put up a eCommerce store now and we're just gonna start selling everything online. And that doesn't work. Right. Especially in this particular case I'm talking about. But it's creating a plan that gets 'em a little closer. Yes. So now, like we just helped them build out their first store. Yay. And they're taking yay <laugh>. And we, they have their products on there and, but it's still manual. They just get a notification now through their website. Okay. And they'll still process it manually. They can, there's, there's now a checkout button though. They can pay for it, you know, with the credit card.
Bridget Willard 00:17:10 Now, that's the most important part, is getting the money faster. <laugh>,
Matt Levenhagen 00:17:13 That's, well, that's right. It makes it, it's more secure. Secure, secure. It's more, that's
Bridget Willard 00:17:17 Accounts receivable problems. You don't have to take people's small claims when the button and it takes the money and you got the money in three days. Right. Yeah. <laugh>. 'cause the banks have to hold onto it for some reason. Yeah. That's another point. Yeah.
Matt Levenhagen 00:17:30 There's a lot, there's a lot of reason. But now they have that, that set up. And so there'll be probably a second phase at some point. Okay. Or there'll be about five. Or they, they're also just Right. And then they're also just figuring out, are people gonna use the store? You know? Right. So let's, let's get here first. Let's see if people actually use the store and then so on and so forth. So, so, but yeah, that's why, that's why WordPress is so beautiful too. Is is be it's, I work in other platforms, even like Shopify and stuff. It's really hard really to do some things.
Bridget Willard 00:18:03 Everybody says Shopify is so easy. So that's just marketing bss, huh?
Matt Levenhagen 00:18:08 Well, I mean, it's, it's not bad. It just depends what you wanna do. Right? There's,
Bridget Willard 00:18:12 Well, so that's the, that's the whole thing, right? And it's, it's, you are confounded by the limitations of the platform. You know, Apple's having their big thing today, they're gonna have 10 million phones. People either love Apple or they hate it. Now I like it 'cause I just like what I'm doing. But I've had a lot of trouble originally with some of their things. And you can only do what they let you do because they've already decided the best way to do something. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>, if you wanna do things other ways, you've gotta leave the platform. Right. So in a lot of ways that's the, the proprietary Apple way or the open source Google Way. Yes. Which is WordPress word. I mean, Google isn't WordPress, but that concept of you have something that other people can build onto easily, which means that is a great framework for you to expand your offerings on the internet.
Bridget Willard 00:19:10 You know, like even somebody saying, just add a button. I'll never forget. Just add a button to do what? Well, to subscribe. To subscribe to what? Well, to our email. Well, which one do you wanna do? You mean I gotta pay for MailChimp? I mean, you have to sign up for something. You can't just put a button. You can't just put a button on the website. <laugh>. I mean, you could, but it's not gonna work. What do you want the button to do? This is what pe these are real conversations, you know, and we're gonna go a little bit over because I still wanna have this conversation with you. Like how, but I want to ask you this. How do you overcome the objection to the cost?
Matt Levenhagen 00:19:47 Uh, the cost.
Bridget Willard 00:19:49 Well, what is your magic trick for explaining to people that they should be spending 15% of their revenue on marketing that includes their website, so they have the money, don't go to Paris this year, pay attention to your business. How do you explain like that to them?
Matt Levenhagen 00:20:06 Well, a lot of times, I don't always have to explain it. Some businesses, you know, they, they get it out of the gates, right? Oh, okay. I think, I think, I think it's, um, like when, again, looking at me like I, you know, I have my own business. Um, I want to grow. I want to, um, I want to, uh, be able to sustain what I have. And, uh, I wanna not have to worry about my website. And I want a nice website. Um, because I wanna establish myself as an authority. I wanna establish my, you know, I'm gonna be professional and be out there. Um, but I went into business assuming that I would invest a certain amount of money into resources and marketing. Okay. I mean, that's should I just think, I just think a business that's not thinking about, you know, uh, allotting a portion of their revenue.
Matt Levenhagen 00:21:00 It's got, it's similar to, I follow this program called Profit First. Right? And it's similar to that. You pay yourself first, right? Mm-hmm. <affirmative>. Um, and then that's, that's the idea. Um, and then that what you have left is what you make the decision about what you're investing in otherwise, yes. But you can take that, if you can take that a little bit further and say, okay, well I paid myself and now I'm going to pay the marketing department and my, and take care of my website and, uh, maybe an ss e o or a, you know, some, you know, somebody to help me with that side of the business. Um, somebody to create my content or, you know, to invest that time and money I have. That's next. And then the rest of it, right? I mean, yeah, for me it's like I, I like to lead with the marketing.
Matt Levenhagen 00:21:48 I like, that's the first thing I built was my website when I started Unified web design, my design agency. That's the first thing I built. That's, I didn't even think about it. And, um, but you, and also when I had, I didn't do it right away in the first year or two, I was pretty solo building my own business. Right. Um, but I, as soon as I got a chance, I hired a, you know, and this is a same thing. I hired a VA to help me do content and marketing. Yeah. Distribute my content. And, and, uh, and then I have, I allot a certain amount of time, uh, for my web developers to actually work on our own sites. Yes. We're actually doing a little bit on our homepage right now on, um, I just talked to my designer about that. So we reinvest not only just the monetarily, we, we actually have the nice advantage of having some of that in-house.
Matt Levenhagen 00:22:42 So just take a few more hours from them and put that in. But for me, I don't see it as a choice. Yeah. I think if you, if you wanna stay, like I, I think, like I know that I could stop marketing today and just put up a basic website and be fine. Right? I get referrals, people like me, we got good business, we got good established clients and all that. But that's not what, that's not my long-term vision. My long-term vision is to grow and to improve and to get better and better clients and leverage what I've already done. And, uh, and you can do that. Like, you know, my own website, unified web design, we are continuously a couple times a year. I'm going in there. What can we add? What can we leverage? Yeah. Oh, we started working with this client. We we're gonna actually start surprisingly, 'cause we do a lot white label, so it didn't really matter. Surprisingly, we're actually gonna announce to start putting, um, case studies on there Nice. About clients we work with and stuff. That didn't happen right away, but it's something that we're doing now, uh, because we have goals and we wanna do that. But it's, it's continually iterating on that. But that is going to set us up. So now we close more sales, we go, yep.
Matt Levenhagen 00:24:02 It’s Growth. It's, it's, it's invest. Even though, like I said, we could stop, I, I had kind of established a baseline in my own business. We're gonna do a baseline of content every day. We're gonna do a baseline of this, that, and the other thing. Every year, a couple times, we're looking at each website we have. So I think that it's not, I don't think it's a choice. I I, yeah, I think you can, people are not gonna do it. But, um, you know, we can't, uh, you know, make people do anything. But, uh,
Bridget Willard 00:24:36 That's, I mean, yeah, that's, I think that's just
Matt Levenhagen 00:24:37 Smart, smart. The smart move.
Bridget Willard 00:24:39 I think there's a lot of businesses that start up during Covid. They're like, okay, well I lost my job or whatever, and now I'm gonna do this whatchamacallit thing. And then they, they didn't come in with that mentality, right? They didn't come in with, well, I'm gonna be in it to win it kind of thing. You know? Um, and you've touched on a bunch of other like subjects, but going to, uh, revisiting your goals and your big picture, like to me, I think you build a business, you shouldn't build a business to be fine. Like, you shouldn't buy a piece of jewelry. That's okay. You shouldn't buy a pair of a dress. That's okay. You should buy something you love. You should buy something that fits. You should buy something that's comfortable. You should buy a piece of jewelry that makes you happy and your face lights up.
Bridget Willard 00:25:25 You know, you should do something that goes to your why. And even if your long-term, why isn't, you know, like a lot of people wanna build, uh, hand their business down to their kids, right? That's normal. And other people want to build a business to sell it. And if you don't have a website, you don't have that part of the business assets to sell. You know, like that is a big, big thing for selling. 'cause you have the users, you have the subscribers, and then you have actual business assets to sell other than what the lease up for your shop. I don't, you know what I mean? So like, if you had, uh, two minutes <laugh>, gimme four things. Rapid fire. How about five? I like five. The number five. Feeling lucky with number five. Five things. Business owners need to know that you come across a lot that drives you Banana pants? <laugh> Rapid fire. Like, okay,
Matt Levenhagen 00:26:27 Alright. Okay. Rapid fire. Okay, first of all, no warrior stuff is, uh, I run into a, a number of even large companies that have no idea where their hosting lives, their domain, what their domain even is. Why, who has it? That probably employee that left last month, uh, took all that stuff with 'em. <laugh> having control. Again, be not a control freak. Just know where your stuff is. Okay? That's number one. Number two is, let's see, number two could be, uh, keep your websites up to date. And again, doesn't matter size of the business, who we, some people just don't make that a priority. They're just focused on the marketing, marketing, marketing, doing their day-to-day stuff and building pro all that. But they, they let their tech, um, it is just bad, it's bad shape. That's, I mean, that's what we get paid for. We like that.
Matt Levenhagen 00:27:18 But, you know, uh, three, let's see. Um, care about your speed, uh, and performance of a website. I think that's, 'cause in this day and age, it's super important for your mobile speed and all that stuff. If you care about search engines, uh, you care about, uh, people staying around, uh, your website, <laugh>. And so I think performance is a big thing there. Um, gosh. Oh, two more. Um, let's see. Uh, yeah, well, um, have, I don't know, have a good team to help you find, find a good, um, developer, even if you don't hire 'em full-time or whatever, or have 'em on contract or anything like that. No. Get referrals. Whoever you can talk to, have that person on, on hand and, and, um, and give them some projects here and there, you know, to test them or whatever you have to do. But have somebody that you can, can advise you and help you with the tech side. 'cause you probably don't know what you need to know. So having somebody around is good. What's, what else? What else? Bridget?
Bridget Willard 00:28:26 Oh my gosh. Stop using PDFs on social media. Stop using PDFs ever on the web. And my next guess is gonna be all about accessibility. But like, there's like te but on websites, test your website on your mobile device, not on wifi. As a guest, you know, ask your grandma, like, one of, one of the things that really I is like, oh, drives me in banana pants, is read the copy on your homepage. And when I say copy, that means the words. That's why I say launch with words, right? Read the words on your homepage. If you could keep that language and it, and it applies to a construction company, then you need to rewrite it. If you're providing valuable solutions to your customers that produce, um, proven results, you could be a stockbroker, you could be a gym coach, personal trainer person. I mean, you could be anything. You could be driver's ed program. What the hell does that mean? Yeah. We, the wor the internet is blind. Words are so important. When you go for search, you need to use like, what the hell you're doing? You're a marketing agency. Then say, we do this <laugh>,
Matt Levenhagen 00:29:43 Right? You should, when you land there, you should figure it out.
Bridget Willard 00:29:45 Should know what you do. Like, you shouldn't be like, that's right. What do you do again at Thanksgiving? What do you do again? And that's,
Matt Levenhagen 00:29:51 That's actually, yeah. It's funny because you go to a lot of marketing, uh, websites or agencies or whatever, and you, it takes, I was on like a videographer. Like I was looking for a videographer on one of their websites. I'm like, I don't actually know what you do. <laugh> some of about video. What kind of video? Like what kind of like, what have you done? Are you doing
Bridget Willard 00:30:10 TikToks? Are you doing YouTube shorts? Are you doing, I tell you, wedding photography, <laugh>.
Matt Levenhagen 00:30:14 Exactly. And actually I got a fifth one. Uh, this will be six now. I think we just had,
Bridget Willard 00:30:20 No, that was mine. So what's your fifth one?
Matt Levenhagen 00:30:22 Okay, my fifth one is, uh, go to your website once in a while and click around.
Bridget Willard 00:30:28 Yes. Click around. You know what, woo. Click around. Woo.
Matt Levenhagen 00:30:32 And I say that click, because again, I was just at an agency, uh, website today. And they, I am like, why? I clicked their menu buttons, their menu items, several of them. And they were all going to a 4 0 4 and <laugh>.
Bridget Willard 00:30:51 Oh My God.
Matt Levenhagen 00:30:52 And I've had that happen before. There, there's another agency that I know, I won't say who, uh, they had this, I actually contacted them 'cause I knew 'em. Like, you know, that your website's broken, but click around 'cause things can change. Things can happen. And suddenly you have this great contact us button at the top that goes nowhere. Yes.
Bridget Willard 00:31:12 That happens all the time. Or the social icons on the bottom. Yeah. Or, or like you have, uh, somebody redesign your website and then the blog isn't there anymore. And your social media manager is like, what happened to the blog? Oh, there isn't a blog anymore.
Matt Levenhagen 00:31:30 Yeah. So I mean, if you don't have somebody now, you might hopefully have a maintenance team that checks that stuff for you regularly.
Bridget Willard 00:31:36 Yeah. But this is part of the problem. The smoke and mirrors and the, and the slick willy talking of salesmen like, oh yeah, we're gonna do this and this and this. And you're like, okay. And then all of a sudden you're like, where's my blog?
Matt Levenhagen 00:31:53 Yeah.
Bridget Willard 00:31:53 Well, that's true. Well, we, that wasn't part of the scope. Well, what happened to the 40 posts that used to be there that I hired somebody to do, they might not all this money on.
Matt Levenhagen 00:32:03 Right? 'cause the tech, listen, tech people are, they do what they do. They don't, A lot of tech people, programmers or web developers don't know, uh, how to market or how to sell or what content even is. Um, so you do need to visit your own website once in a while. In fact, I just caught something on one of our websites. I won't say where, so you can't find it. Uh, but it'll be fixed in a day or two. But we found there's some images that were outta whack. They were like really granular because they're, they weren't being optimized or there, there's a situation. Um, but I wouldn't have seen that. And my, my team may not even have caught it. Right. You know, 'cause it's so subtle. But I saw it and I'm having to fix it. But just little things like that. It
Bridget Willard 00:32:44 Could be that or just visit your website or all of a sudden you're getting syndicated content. This is part of why I had my idea for launches. Words, getting syndicated content on your travel website because you decided to go with one of your peers recommendations for one of these giant multi-site deals. You know, like the realtors or the same thing. And you're getting syndicated content, pushing cruises. You don't even like cruises. You don't sell cruises. You hate cruises. You don't even wanna sell cruises. And it's cruise, cruise, cruise, cruise, cruise, cruise. So the, the, but it's hard because business owners don't always understand what is involved. And so that's why Warren and I wrote our book, the Only online marketing, uh, book you need for your small business. That's why have this podcast. That's why you have your podcast. Like, you have to know what's going on. You're not gonna know if you're not educated. Matt, thank you so much. I feel like I need you on 10 more times. This has been so great. It's always great. Um, y'all, if you liked having Matt on the show, go listen to the Builders podcast. TheBuilders.fm
Matt Levenhagen 00:33:56 Thebuilders.fm.
Bridget Willard 00:33:57 Yes. Thebuilders.fm. I was a guest on there once, maybe twice, I can't even remember anymore. Super great content, reliably produced. He's on everywhere that you can find your podcast. Apple, Spotify, Amazon, wherever. I don't even know where you can get Stitcher or something. Blahda. Um, yeah. iHeartRadio over whatever, right? YouTube. YouTube. Um, YouTube. Yeah. Just go to thebuilders.FM and Unified Web Builders. Hey, if you are listening to this podcast and you made it all the way, that's 34 minute mark. Thank you. Um, send me an email and, uh, I will connect you with Matt if you need a website. Uh, that's, that's better than what you have. Uh, Matt's your guy. All right, Matt, uh, anything parting words before we press the outro button? Yeah,
Matt Levenhagen 00:34:46 Just, yeah. Unified web design.com. I'll see you there, <laugh>. Uh, If you submit, it'll open a ticket and that ticket will find its way to me. I always say that <laugh>. Um, but yes, that's, that's it. I, I really, I I love sharing, uh, today. Hopefully it helps some of the business owners out there, uh, rethink their situation or, or, uh, you know, think a little more critically about it.
Bridget Willard 00:35:05 Thank you for listening to this episode. Come to Jesus moment. <laugh>. Let's look at your website people. Okay, that's like, that's right. I'm gonna play the outro <laugh>.
Bridget Willard 00:35:15 Thanks for listening to Launch With Words, a podcast by bridgetwillard.com. If you like this podcast, why not go ahead and share it with your friends, small business owners, peers, your brother <laugh>. Oh, I really appreciate your attention. If you have any ideas, contact me on my website. Follow me at @BridgetMWillard on Twitter, and I hope to see you on the next episode or the next season.
