Unveiling Web Design Secrets with Greg Merrilees to Boost Your Podcast's Impact

Dave Jackson [00:00:00]:
I'm listening to a book right now called The Compound Effect by Darren Hardy, and he made a great point about how your why can affect what you do. Case in point, let's say there's a plank, and it's on the top of a rooftop, and it goes from this rooftop over to that building way over there. And somebody goes, yeah. I'll give you, you know, $300 to do that, and you go, yeah. No way. Then let's take the same scenario. And now your baby is on the other rooftop. Oh, and the building's on fire.

Dave Jackson [00:00:35]:
You would be running across that plank. You wouldn't want any money. You're off to save your baby. Why? Because your why changed, and your why can affect what you do, whether that's pressing publish on a podcast or shaping your website. And so today, we're talking with Greg Marliese from Studio 1 Design, and there's some really interesting tips in here that I was like, oh, oh, yeah. That makes sense.

Dave Jackson [00:01:38]:
I'm bringing in some people who build websites for a living because I hack my websites together. And in the same way that when I've made my own artwork for my podcast, it's looked okay. And then I'll bring somebody in that does that for a living, and I go, oh, yeah. That's that's what I was looking for. And so I'm bringing on Greg from studio, the number 1, design.com, and we're gonna talk about strategies. Many of them you're probably already doing and how you can do them better. And wait till you hear Greg's story. It's an amazing tale of how he got to where he is today.

Dave Jackson [00:02:22]:
When you start, I wondered, is it like a podcast? Do you start with your why? Where does Greg start with his clients?

Greg Merrilees [00:02:32]:
Absolutely. Like, what is the purpose of their website? Is it just to host a Podcast, or is it remote, one of their services or coaching or courses or whatever else it could be. Right? So that's the first thing because realistically, you've got to have the end goal in mind before you start designing. And then we have to figure out a strategy before we start talking about look and feel and colors and design. The most important thing is the strategy, and then we work from there.

Dave Jackson [00:02:58]:
One example of this is one of Greg's clients is Jordan Harbinger, who does the Jordan Harbinger show.

Greg Merrilees [00:03:05]:
His main income source is advertising. Right? So is this sponsorship page that we had for we have on his website? And so what this is all about, we put a lot of effort into this because this is his number way of monetizing is to have advertisers sponsor the show. Right? And, by the way, I love one of your episodes where you're talking about having your audience talk about what annoys you about ads and people ranking, and you even said yourself that he does it really well because he reads the ads himself and it's different every time. Right? Yeah. It was really cool. But anyway, so we have this page which really talks about his audience and what his advertisers will get out of this audience essentially. Right. So he breaks it down with the demographics.

Greg Merrilees [00:03:45]:
So in this case, you know, 25, 4, 49 year old men and women and just talks a little bit more about, you know, their demographics essentially. And then he is talking up his podcast, top 1%, most followed and most shared Podcast on Spotify. And then he's got a little bit more of a a breakdown and of, you know, what's important to, you know, an advertiser on his show and how he will advertise in, like, 60 second mid roll and, you know, things like that. Right? So then it's just an infographic podpage, essentially, just really breaking down the demographics into more and more detail. So, yeah, it's to me, it's like this because this is his number way number one way of, you know, creating income, that's why he put put so much effort into this page. And you don't have to do this every time, but it is a a pretty powerful page. And then, obviously, there's some social proof from people like Tim Ferris, Rama Sethi, Simon Sinek, Malcolm Gladwell, etcetera, and then a a call to action to inquire essentially. So, yeah, that's, you know, that was our strategy because of the fact that his number one way of, you know, generating income is through the advertising.

Dave Jackson [00:04:51]:
Now as we did this interview, Greg was sharing his screen. Now anything that you really needed to see, I have removed from this interview because, well, you're listening to it. If you go out to your podcast website, you can actually see some of his amazing work and as we're looking at these before and after versions of some of these websites. So I just wanna let you know you're getting a different version than the video version. But on the other hand, the video version is longer. I'm doing this in a narrative style. So one of the things I noticed is before we get off Jordan Harbinger's page, Jordan has a great idea. All of his sponsors are on one page.

Dave Jackson [00:05:31]:
If you go to jordanharbinger.com/deals, I think this is an amazing idea. Because let's say you send somebody to your website because BetterHelp is sponsoring your show. Well, while they're there, they might actually pick up some MyUndies or MeUndies or whatever it is and a mattress and all the other things that you have as sponsors. I think that's great. And your audience only has to remember one link. He also has a start here with kind of grouped episodes together. So if you're brand new to the site, he's got it there to get you in control. But the one thing I noticed is when you go to the page that Greg was talking about where you're trying to convince a company to sponsor your show, when you go to that page, the whole menu at the top, everything changes.

Dave Jackson [00:06:16]:
You can't leave that page.

Greg Merrilees [00:06:18]:
Exactly right. We wanna remove all distractions, you know, so we remove the top navigation, you know, we remove the logo because obviously, we've got the logo here anyway, why sponsor the show. And the call to action, you always should have a call to action above the fold. And this will just literally anchor link down to the bottom where they can fill in the details. And the reason we do that is so that people realize, oh, I just missed all this stuff if they didn't scroll in the first place.

Dave Jackson [00:06:44]:
Now if you're new to web design, the phrase above the fold actually comes from the newspaper industry when newspapers were folded in half, and everything above the fold was something that was seen without any effort. And on your website, the things that are really important should be above the scroll, I guess, in this case. But we still call it above the fold. Now I mentioned in a previous episode that often we try to use tools that aren't made for Podcast, and we try to shoehorn the podcast in there, and they have some template that's made for a hotel or who knows what. And so when I asked Greg, what are some of the common mistakes, yeah, templates came up.

Greg Merrilees [00:07:25]:
I just use a template and on various screen sizes that would chop off the person's, you know, the host head. So it has a a little rookie mistake there, but then there's no call to action here. It doesn't really have much clarity on what this podcast is all about. You wouldn't know it's a very popular podcast. And as we scroll short, they've got you know, listen on these things, which is fine. And, by the way, these things are essentially what we call a leakage point. But because they're going off to these platforms where people can subscribe, then that's going to build more trust in the brand. So that's totally fine.

Dave Jackson [00:07:58]:
So a leakage point is something that takes people away from your site. You've got all this traffic, and now you're leaking it. And in this example, he was pointing at the Apple button, Spotify, things like that. And, obviously, we want followers because it helps us connect.

Greg Merrilees [00:08:13]:
But, yeah, then, literally, the rest of the home page just had a little bit of, you know, what this is all about, etcetera, you know, a little bit of authority boost in things here, which, in my opinion, quite hidden, you know, top 5% traffic prog Podcast worldwide, etcetera. Watch a show, some video, and that was it.

Dave Jackson [00:08:31]:
So authority boosting could be anything that gives you, for lack of a better phrase, street cred. Maybe how many total downloads you have or how many countries your show has been heard on or how many appearances you've been on other show. Whatever it is, some sort of stat, something that helps answer that question, why should I trust this person? Why should I stay on this site? And we'll be talking tools throughout this conversation, but I wanted to ask him if he had any kind of favorite tool when it came to the person that didn't have the budget or didn't wanna hire somebody to design their website, did he have any kind of favorite tools?

Greg Merrilees [00:09:12]:
Yeah. I mean, look. You guys use PodPage. Right? Yeah. Yeah. Which I think is fantastic. And that's what I'd recommend if you are starting out for sure. I mean, they've put so much thought into this.

Greg Merrilees [00:09:23]:
I heard the the founder on your podcast being interviewed ranking about, you know, what they have in there. I think it's the premium plan or what whatever they call that plan.

Dave Jackson [00:09:32]:
Yeah. The Elite plan, I think. Yeah.

Greg Merrilees [00:09:34]:
Elite. That's the one. Yeah. And I thought that was fantastic. Great interview. But, yeah, all the features that these guys have is incredible. I mean, you can do the same thing on WordPress, but this is all built into 1. I mean, there's nothing wrong with this as a, you know, a platform in general, even if you grow.

Greg Merrilees [00:09:49]:
Right? But to me, it's just the design feels a little bit templatty. That's my only criticism, but I think it's great when you're starting out for sure.

Dave Jackson [00:09:57]:
So how do you know when it's time to have someone design a website SEO it looks completely unique, It's totally yours, and it doesn't look like anybody else's website.

Greg Merrilees [00:10:07]:
But I feel like once you are monetizing your podcast, if that is your goal, some people don't wanna monetize. It's just a hobby, right? But if you are monetizing it, then that's when I feel like you need to invest back into the look and feel and obviously even copywriting and, you know, photography and and yeah, all sorts of things.

Dave Jackson [00:10:24]:
So how does a redesign work

Greg Merrilees [00:10:26]:
for, you know, redesign is we'll start with what we call a mood board. And this is literally just coming up with a color palette, a look and feel. Before we do this, though, I should say, we do have a call with the client. They answer a questionnaire, and we dive deep into the questionnaire on the call. And that's after that is where we figure out what direction to take the brand as far as the look and feel.

Dave Jackson [00:10:48]:
And this, again, was based on a questionnaire.

Greg Merrilees [00:10:50]:
And just some keywords that come out of the questionnaire and the call, in this case, was loyalty, excitement, modern family, playful, fun, and friendly. So this color palette represents those words. And when we send this this bit of a color breakdown, when we send this to the client, we give them a walk through video from the brand director explaining why we did what.

Dave Jackson [00:11:10]:
And you should know in your mind, on a notebook, whatever you wanna do before you grab a mouse to do anything to your website. You should have a clear idea of what it's going to look like, what it's going to do, and how it's going to work.

Greg Merrilees [00:11:23]:
When we present this to the client, it's really just a bunch of ideas. We get their feedback before we start designing because when we start designing, we want it to be pretty close to, you know, to what they have approved. And then we offer unlimited design revisions on everything we do, so we just wanna start with the right foot. But, yeah, just some background elements and colors, etcetera, tying in with the brand, photography direction that we give them as well SEO they can hand this to their photographer. And then just some various icons and

Dave Jackson [00:11:58]:
and having the important things above the fold. Listen to Greg as he explains a website we're looking at and all the important things that are above the fold. And

Greg Merrilees [00:12:08]:
you'll see, you know, just above the fold, the Commercial Break podcast, who the hosts are, picture of them, obviously, pretty cool design, And then a little bit of a explainer. It's not much, but it's enough to let people know what this show is all about. And then 4,100,000 podcast downloads per month. You know, all these little metrics are just things that people can instantly realize that these guys are the real deal, and, you know, it just builds more trust in the brand.

Dave Jackson [00:12:32]:
And having your audience's trust is huge. And so as we were popping around different websites and looking at things, of course, I wanted to know what tools are you using to put this stuff together?

Greg Merrilees [00:12:44]:
For design, we use Figma to, you know, for custom design. Everything's custom designed. And then for imagery, you know, obviously, we try not to use stock imagery if we can help it. We encourage clients to use our own photography. But sometimes if we create imagery, we'll use the baby Stalker will use, you know, mid journey for creating imagery. But for building the website after it's all approved, we build it using Elementor for, for Wordpress, essentially. And that has a lot of stuff built into it as well. Because like I said before, you've got to work out what the main purpose of the website is.

Greg Merrilees [00:13:15]:
And if it's not just all about a podcast, it might be to promote your services or whatever. Then if that's the case, you want the functionality to have everything built into it so that you can offer all those other little features that come with offering services or a SaaS business or coaching, etcetera.

Dave Jackson [00:13:33]:
And as he's building this all in WordPress using Elementor, who was his favorite WordPress host?

Greg Merrilees [00:13:39]:
Definitely WP Engine all the way. Yeah. Based in the US, but they also have servers all over the world. So to me, like, super fast no matter where you're located, but it's also the world's, in my opinion, the most secure website hosting flat platform because they don't allow crappy plugins. So peep that's where a lot of hackers get in through plug ins. So they yeah. And they also keep plug ins updated automatically, and they warn you if there's a plugins on your website and, you know, yep, they'll remove it if it's a a threat. And they also have daily daily backups as well.

Greg Merrilees [00:14:12]:
So if you mess up something yourself, you can just replace it from the day before, and everything's fixed again.

Dave Jackson [00:14:18]:
And we'll be talking about Leadpages a little later, but that requires some sort of email tool. So what was Greg's favorite email tool?

Greg Merrilees [00:14:25]:
Yeah. ActiveCampaign, just because we use it and we I used to use Infusionsoft, and it was pretty confusing, you know, and used to have to pay a consultant to to run the whole thing for us. But now we just had somebody set it up for us, copied what was in Infusionsoft, and we just run it ourselves quite easily. But it's really good not just for email marketing, but for, you know, lead flow as well and having, like, a sales pipeline and figuring out where every lead is in that pipeline and what stage they're at, and it can send automated follow ups and things like that. So, yeah, I find that's pretty good value. It does the price goes up as you have more people on your list, but I think it's awesome. Yeah.

Dave Jackson [00:15:04]:
And if you find ActiveCampaign a little out of your reach or maybe just a little too much, check out ConvertKit or MailerLite. In just a second, you're gonna find out how I got really embarrassed. Boy, you know, when I look at your website and you go to mine, it's like, it's like, wow, that is a shock to the system. Like, oh my goodness. Oh, wow. 1 was designed by a guy that does it for a living. The other guy was a design that's well, the teacher. Yeah.

Dave Jackson [00:15:35]:
So just a little bit of a difference. And, but nonetheless, the front page is still a, it's a landing page, but wow. That's a, that's a shock to the system. Oh, yeah. Go right ahead.

Greg Merrilees [00:15:46]:
Yeah. You do some things really well on here. I mean, I I think, you know, school of Podcast, I think it's a a great brand and says what's on the box.

Dave Jackson [00:15:54]:
You know

Greg Merrilees [00:15:54]:
what I mean? So but then you're talking here about the problems. This is fantastic copywriting. Like, most people don't understand their audience, and you really understand your audience. I know you you obviously, you've got your podcast community. You ask them a lot of questions in there, but you also ask questions on your podcast and have people call in. Right? It's amazing. But the point is, yeah, you understand your audience. And when you put this on your website, the, you know, you might be feeling a little overwhelmed and then you're talking about the problems that they face essentially, then people are going to identify that, you know, the the correct target audience will go, oh, yeah, that's that's me.

Greg Merrilees [00:16:30]:
Right? So this is really important in copywriting to let people know that you have a solution to those problems. So you're doing some things really well. It's just the designs letting you down, but it's not bad. You know? You've got a lot of,

Dave Jackson [00:16:43]:
You're very kind. I would call it bad after looking at yours, but I'm like, big giant join today button, and it just, yeah, it's At

Greg Merrilees [00:16:52]:
least it stands out. But yeah. And then, you know, you have some really good social proof as well. And, sorry, authority boosting, like the hall of fame, you know, that you mentioned on your podcast as well. All that stuff is fantastic for boosting, you know, credibility and trust in the brand. But, yeah, having really good testimonials as well is, you know, it's certainly what you wanna offer. And then you have this incredible 30 bay 30 day money back guarantee, and that's on the the the monthly and the annual. Right? Like, you have a yeah.

Greg Merrilees [00:17:22]:
Which is really cool. And a big call to action. Sure. It's big, but it gets your attention.

Dave Jackson [00:17:26]:
Yeah. Yeah. I I had a business coach because after I was, you know, in the hall of fame, I wasn't really saying it. And he goes, how many people can say that? I'm like, I don't know, 14, I think at that point or something like that. He goes, you need to say that every time you turn on the microphone, I go, but that's that whole impostor syndrome, you know, kinda thing. Yeah. He's like, look. Use it.

Dave Jackson [00:17:47]:
Not everybody can say it. I was like, alright. So

Greg Merrilees [00:17:51]:
I love it.

Dave Jackson [00:17:51]:
Now we did mention impostor syndrome there. I'll put some links out at your podcast website. If you're dealing with that, I've done a few episodes on that on the school of podcasting. But we also mentioned copywriting. And so I asked Greg, I go, which one's more important? Do you need copywriting or is it the design?

Greg Merrilees [00:18:10]:
It's both. Look, I have no doubt that copywriting is what people will read to make sure that they're in the right place, to make sure that they understand because people don't care what's in it for them. So they they just need to know that you understand their situation, their problems, what the implications are, if they if, you know, they don't address the cause of the problem and the need, which is your solution essentially. And so to me, the copywriting needs to say all those things, and that little thing that I just said is using the framework called SPIN Selling based on a book by, Neil Rackham, SPIN Selling.

Dave Jackson [00:18:43]:
Link's in the description.

Greg Merrilees [00:18:45]:
And there's another book, Building a Story Brand by Donald Miller. His philosophy as a in a nutshell is your website needs to be the guide and your prospects or your clients are the hero, and they need to be the hero of your story.

Dave Jackson [00:18:58]:
That is a great book. And when it comes down to the design

Greg Merrilees [00:19:01]:
The design needs to give copywriting wings, essentially. Right? It really needs to enhance the messaging to make you look as professional as possible to and, obviously, design in a way to appeal to your audience as far as color palette and imagery used and things like that.

Dave Jackson [00:19:16]:
And remember, that design is based around knowing your why and directing your visitors to do your call to action. And sometimes those bright and shiny new trends come along and just, well

Greg Merrilees [00:19:30]:
Design trends, they're a pet peeve. Right? If you look at most design trends every year, designers come up with new trends, and I think it's just to keep themselves in work, essentially. But most of them are conversion killers. We're very conversion focused with our design. So what that means as far as pet peeves with pet peeves in design, the trends are all about movement and interaction and parallax effects and, you know, just all this stuff that's very distracting, and that's why it's a conversion killer. But if you have everything static and put the control in your user's hands, so even if you have an image slider for testimonials, let them scroll through them to get to the next and next. Don't just have them automatically scroll because it's just annoying for people. So even video backgrounds and having text over the top, the most important thing is the text over the top.

Greg Merrilees [00:20:18]:
So those video backgrounds are going to annoy people and not read the text, you know, so that's yeah. A lot of trends

Dave Jackson [00:20:25]:
suck. And there are things we do that are okay, but there are ways we could do them better. Case in point, when somebody orders something from your website, they are sent to a success page.

Greg Merrilees [00:20:35]:
It's all about the strategy piece. So after somebody opts in for a lead magnet, they'll just have a line of text in the pop up that says, you know, thanks for downloading the the lead magnet. So the problem with that is that there's no success podpage. So there's no page that it goes to like a slightly different URL like forward slash, you know, thanks for whatever. And when you don't have a success page, you can't track that as a conversion. And so your Google Analytics, if you set that up properly, won't be tracking any conversions of that little, you know, download. Now if you do have a thank you page, once again, a mistake is people just have a little line of text saying thanks for downloading the thing. But that's a wasted opportunity because, realistically, you've just got somebody's email address because they're interest interested in your free offer, and you don't know that they don't want more.

Greg Merrilees [00:21:23]:
So to me, the perfect opportunity on the sorry. The thank you page is the perfect opportunity to offer the next free thing in your funnel. It could be a free call. It depends on your business. It could be a free trial. It could be a limited time offer. It could be a free sample. You should always offer something else on that thank you page.

Greg Merrilees [00:21:40]:
And we recommend having a face to camera video ranking them for downloading the free thing and then talk about the next offer in that video and then call to action underneath. And you can also have extra things on that page, social proof, other things like if you've spoken on stage, like, it's all about boosting your authority and building trust in your brand by just keep offering free things. And, obviously, you've collected an email address, so you wanna nurture that email because they may not be ready to purchase straight away. But, you know, if you if you're top of mind, then, obviously, at some point, if you keep offering value in those emails and don't just keep slamming them with, offers, like, for paid offers, it's like Gary Vaynerchuk says, jab, jab, jab, right hook. So just keep offering free stuff, and then we just say in your PS, offer a free call for a strategy. It depends on the business, of course, but that's where you you would have your offer.

Dave Jackson [00:22:31]:
And so many times, I see people with their social media links at the very top of the page.

Greg Merrilees [00:22:37]:
Yeah. That's a leakage point, and you don't want to take people off your website to social media. Purpose purpose of social media is bring people to your website, in my opinion. But, yeah. And then the other problem is people will have when they click click on one of these social media little icons, they'll have it open in the same tab and then your website's gone forever. So always have any external links open in a new tab.

Dave Jackson [00:22:58]:
Another trend that I see a lot that I go, why would you do that? And that is building and I'm gonna say Linktree. I don't wanna pick on Linktree, but Linktree type tools because, well, as Greg points out, why not just build one on your own website?

Greg Merrilees [00:23:14]:
No. I don't think there's any benefit in it. You're just paying Linktree. So, I mean, what we do instead, like, we literally just have we just offer this as a bonus on every website that we designed because it annoys us having people ranking Linktree. Most people have it. Right? But we just copy that, but we just go whatever the website URL is forward slash links, and we can put whatever we want on there, and they can change it to whatever they want quite easily. It links to your website or your latest Podcast interview or whatever you want, basically. Right?

Dave Jackson [00:23:41]:
And the same goes for funnel pages.

Greg Merrilees [00:23:43]:
We have clients that have built a lot of funnels on lead pages or click funnels or whatever. They all look shit in my opinion. They're templated and they're ugly and usually a Frankenstein because they've grown over time and had different offers, different looks. And so we usually just turn all that into their own, you know, website and, you know, they don't need to pay click funnels or lead pages each month. But there's yeah. There's no you're right. There's no SEO value in that.

Dave Jackson [00:24:06]:
And I noticed on Greg's site, studio, the number one, design.com, that when he had a video, it wasn't a YouTube video. It was a video that just kept you right there on his site.

Greg Merrilees [00:24:17]:
And, yeah, I would say for any marketing video on your website, apart from in blog posts and and podcast posts, etcetera, I would suggest you use another platform like Vimeo or Wistia because there's no leakage points. Like, if you if you have embedded YouTube, you can go and click on the little YouTube blog, you go off to YouTube, and you're gone forever. So that's why I prefer to use, Wistia.

Dave Jackson [00:24:40]:
I also like streamable, but if you are gonna send people to YouTube, there's still a better way to do that.

Greg Merrilees [00:24:46]:
And when you do send people off to your YouTube channel, you can have some code embedded so that there's a pop up as soon as they land on the YouTube page that says subscribe to the show. And that's great because as long as you can get people to subscribe to your show, whether it's a podcast or YouTube or wherever you have it hosted, it's going to build more trust in the brand. So I think it's a good idea. Yeah. It's just especially for non marketing videos, let's say blog posts or, or podcast posts on, on your website. If they are YouTube embeds and you press or somebody presses play, that'll add to the YouTube count. So that's a good thing.

Dave Jackson [00:25:18]:
So it's your choice. Would you rather have more views on YouTube with the chance of sending people away or keep people on your website and have them one step closer to doing your call to action. And right now, everybody is up in arms about transcripts. SEO the best thing ever, we vomit into a microphone. We have it transcribed. So are transcripts really that good? Because Google's looking for good words.

Greg Merrilees [00:25:42]:
I think it should be a summary instead. So we do work with other ex SEO experts as well. And as long as like, especially at the top of the post page, if you give people a summary of what it's all about, you can have the transcript underneath, but that's what Google is going to value as well. It's more the whatever's written in the top section of the of the page. That's what they'll value more than what's underneath. So, yeah, I would say do a summary and that can be done by AI these days based on the transcript, essentially.

Dave Jackson [00:26:10]:
We got a few more strategies, but I always say a podcast leads to relationships, and those relationships lead to opportunities, which lead to more relationships, which lead to more opportunities. Wait till you hear Greg's story. SEO how did Greg get into web design?

Greg Merrilees [00:26:31]:
SEO, basically, we started with t shirt designs. Right? And that's where we started, you know, 24 years ago. And then around, let's say 10 years ago roughly now, the clothing industry So, unfortunately SEO, unfortunately, the wholesalers were our clients, so they were getting squeezed out. And we tried going directly to the retailers, but that didn't work. They wanted to pay us in 90 days and take, you know, 2% off the invoice if they paid within just wasn't a good business business model. So then I went online and I found Podcast. Right? And I just absolutely loved Podcast. And there was one podcast in particular I think I get hosted by 2 business coaches, James Schramko and Ezra Firestone.

Greg Merrilees [00:27:19]:
He's based in New York, James Schramko in Sydney. And on one of their episodes, they said their logo sucked. I thought, oh, yeah. That's an opportunity for me to go in and design a new logo for them. So I did that, and they loved it. And, you know, Ezra, hot bang. You know, this looks like makes us look like a fancy soft ball team. And he loved it.

Greg Merrilees [00:27:36]:
And so then jumped on a call with Ezra and we started talking about other designs that we could do. And we started designing his website and then James Shramck, his website and started designing all of their clients website. Ezra had me on stage in San Diego. He's an ecommerce guru. And, yeah, and James James had me on stage in Sydney, and, yeah, we just grew our business. So it's thanks to Podcast that we made the pivot into what we're doing today.

Dave Jackson [00:27:59]:
Next thing you know, you're, you know, you're designing a website for Sly. I mean, that's Yeah. That's I saw that at the bottom of your one page, and I was like, hey. I need a website. It was like

Greg Merrilees [00:28:11]:
SEO that was that was from speaking at Ezra's events, Blue Ribbon Mastermind, I think, that you called it in, San Diego. And somebody in the audience was the son of somebody that owns a marketing firm that does marketing for Sylvester Stallone and, you know, like, all these other people, like Tony Robbins, actually, Donald Trump as well. Not that we wanna mention that we designed it for him, but we did design his landing page for his NFTs, if you remember that about

Dave Jackson [00:28:38]:
your house. So Jeez. Alright.

Greg Merrilees [00:28:40]:
Yeah. But we don't mention that on our website search. But, anyway, But yeah. So it just led to you know, like you said, one thing leads to another, and that's how we've designed for these awesome people. Yeah.

Dave Jackson [00:28:52]:
Another strategy that I saw is Greg is using quizzes. How are those working out?

Greg Merrilees [00:28:57]:
Pretty good. Yeah. Exactly. Because it comes from like, we have a generic one on there and that's just an exit pop and that's another little mistake just quickly. Some people have an entry pop. Soon as you land on the website, they have a pop up.

Dave Jackson [00:29:09]:
Thank you.

Greg Merrilees [00:29:09]:
Instead yeah. Wait. It could be a timed pop up and when they scroll to the bottom or they've scrolled through a few pages or it's a couple of minutes after they land on the podpage, but it's better to have that or when they leave the page and exit pop. You know, it's a side note. But, yeah, the quiz works quite well because it's an exit pop on our website, but then we do duplicate that for every podcast interview that I do, and that's where we get a lot of leads from. So, yeah, it works quite well. And we find we get a lot of feedback, you know, people going, oh, shit. You know, my website does that.

Dave Jackson [00:29:39]:
Yeah. Well, and do you know what tool you're using for that? For those, again, there's always gonna be the guy that's like, I'm gonna do it myself.

Greg Merrilees [00:29:45]:
Elementor. Everything's built into Elementor. Yeah.

Dave Jackson [00:29:48]:
Yeah. I see. Yeah. We were looking at one of his clients' websites who teaches music online, and I thought to myself, why have I never used this strategy?

Greg Merrilees [00:29:59]:
One thing that he does really well is has this section where it does a comparison chart of joining his sax school verse, getting private lessons, and then breaks it down into a cost comparison. Music Academy, 42,000 a year, private lessons, 2 and a half 1000, or his sax school online, dollar 32 a day. Plugins has a 90 day money back guarantee and a free trial. SEO, yeah, it's pretty powerful. And, yeah, he's just boosted his results like nothing else ranking this approach since the new website went live.

Dave Jackson [00:30:26]:
It was kinda funny when we first got online, Greg and I hit it off, and we just started gabbing. And it dawned on me, like, oh, yeah. I forgot to ask him, where do we wanna send people when we're done with this interview?

Greg Merrilees [00:30:39]:
Yeah. I mean, look. We haven't created it yet, but we could set up a checklist for directly for your audience. So studioonedesign.comforward/dave, and we can show them, 50 things that if they select yes or no in 6 areas across their website, we've done this for other podcasters. And so basically at the end of it, they get a score right out of 50. And if they score anything under say 20 and most people don't get much over 20, right, then at least it shows them what to fix. And if they wanna help, then, you know, we can we can help them. And, yeah, as a bonus as well, I guess if you're happy with this, if somebody does end up buying a website from us, we can give them a bonus of we'll design all their social media banners and posts, things like that for them as well.

Dave Jackson [00:31:24]:
How cool is that? Studio, the number 1, design.com/dave. Greg, thank you so much for coming on the show.

Greg Merrilees [00:31:31]:
Thank you, Dave. It's been awesome. Awesome. Really appreciate it.

Dave Jackson [00:31:34]:
And, of course, it all starts with your why. I know it's probably been 5 years ago. But for the longest time, my my website at schoolofpodcasting.com, if you went to it, it was a podcast that also had a business. I teach people how to podcast. And then it dawned on me that the reason I'm doing the podcast is to get people to sign up for my membership site. So now I changed my front page to be more of a landing page with a funnel because now it's a business that has a podcast, not a podcast that has a business. I love some of the things he brought up there, especially about the you know, how social media we're we're driving people away from our website, and we just got them there. And then all the things that distract us like automatic carousels and video backgrounds.

Dave Jackson [00:32:25]:
And when do you invest into a major website? Well, when you're making some money. And that's actually what mister beast, if you've never heard of him. Mister beast on YouTube has, like, 200, 250,000,000 subscribers. But for the 1st years, in fact, he still kinda does this. He reinvests his profit back into his YouTube channel which just keeps making bigger videos which generates more money, which he reinvest back into his next video. It's kind of interesting that way, but it does help build your authority. I know I have gotten advertising in the past because I was using a podpage website and I did my colors and kinda had it organized. And it looked good enough for a sponsor to go, alright.

Dave Jackson [00:33:11]:
You look like you have your act together. And I had the downloads to prove it and off we went. He also mentioned Hotjar. I like MouseFlow. There's a free version of that. And their paid version, It does the same thing as Hotjar. It's just a little cheaper. I'll have links to that along with Hotjar out at your podcast website.

Dave Jackson [00:33:34]:
So thanks again to Greg. I really do appreciate your time. And don't forget, there is a video version of this. So if you wanna see the before and after things, it was I'm here to tell you. I'm looking at these websites that he made, and they're just stunning. And then we would go back to my website, and it was just like, It was like, oh my gosh. Don't make me look at that. SEO funny.

Dave Jackson [00:33:56]:
So thank you so much. If you got some value out of this show and you know somebody else who is kind of not sure what to do with their website, tell them to go over to your podcast website. Or if you wanna send them to this specific episode, of course, you can just open up your phone and click the share button. But this one's at your podcastwebsite.com website because this is the 3rd episode. I'm Dave Jackson from the school of podcasting.com. I help Podcast. It's what I do, and I can't wait to see what we do together.

Meg the AI Voice [00:34:32]:
Your podcast website is part of the Power of Podcasting Network. Find this show and all of Dave's other projects at powerofpodcasting.com.