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Welcome everyone, Thank you all for joining me today for website foundations, crafting goals and content that convert editing prospects.

I am your host and presenter Erin Brenner.

Before we dive in, I'd like to acknowledge that I'm speaking from Haverhill, Massachusetts, which is the traditional land of the Pennacook, Pentucket and Merrimack tribes of the Abenaki nation.

I'm grateful for their stewardship of the land and the enduring relationship between local tribes in their traditional territories.

Thank you once again for joining me.

This is part one of the Editors Complete website toolkit If you have not signed up for all three parts, that's totally fine, this is self-contained you'll get what you need today About website Foundations If you are interested in the in the subsequent parts part two and three I will share a link with you for finding that again, my name is Erin Brenner I am the author of the Chicago Guide for Freelance Editors How to take care of your business, your clients and yourself from start up to sustainability I offer coaching two editors I do business coaching, I also do website reviews so if what you've learned here today is a is a good start for you, but you want more I'll do a one-on-one session with you.

I also review LinkedIn profiles along the same lines.

I also run Right Touch Editing, which is an editing agency We focus mostly on business copy, we work for businesses, non, profits, educational institutions and the like and that includes websites, and I have personally been involved with editing websites for over 25 years now, which seems a little ridiculous, but I really love websites, they're a passionate topic of mine, which is one reason I wanted to do this series of weapon for you, it really does allow an individual to compete with bigger institutions it allows US-As freelancers the opportunity to to reach a wider audience and that's going to help us build a more sustainable business.

Websites are relatively affordable to build and run, and they can be relatively easy to update.

A lot of that does depend on the choices you make for your website and what your skills and budget look like, but for the most part, most of us can put up a fairly simple website quickly and easily and start to get the word out about our businesses and I think this is crucial because you do need a website 90% of business to business customers start their search online.

80% of business to consumer customers start with an online search, so even our indie authors, who are She's stringing their whole publishing business.

They're going to start looking for us online, so people are going to look for your website and you want to be found.

We can certainly be found on social media, in directories, in other places online, but we don't control those places.

Those are somebody else's offices, if you will, and so they can go out of business, they can limit what you can put up.

Everything is controlled by the owner of the site.

When it's your own site, you control everything.

Just having a website gives you a look of professionalism and credibility.

You've taken the time to build something, you've taken the time to put yourself out there, but it's a place where you can talk about your services in detail, you can talk about who you are and what you do in details the way you can in other people's spaces, there's an opportunity to make a compelling, persuasive argument about why editing is important if you need to do that or why your services are the right choice for someone, it's a place for you to differentiate yourself from other editors.

Certainly we all correct language copy editors all worry about nouns and pronouns spelt Mental editors worry about structure and flow.

But what makes you different? What makes you the right choice for your chosen client? Your website is The Place to talk about that.

The problem is that websites are essentially limitless You can have as many pages as you want, you can talk for as long as you want and that can be a little overwhelming.

It's like opening up a word file and deciding you're going to write the next great American novel.

There's a blank space there and it can be infinitely long.

What do you do? So we have these kinds of these questions we have to answer what kind of website do I need, how do I build it? What do my clients need for a website who's going to visit other than my clients do I need to address that audience, you know, the questions kind of go on and on and then we worry about do we have the right skills? What kind of time do we have? What's our budget and we can very quickly become overwhelmed.

Now, in a format like this, I can't tell you personally what kind of website, what's put on your website for your specific business and for your specific client because it does vary based on what you're offering and who your clients are, what they know about editing what they need and so it's an individual business decision, That's why I do the website review coaching because we can look at the details of your business and make some decisions in this kind of setting, What I can do is give you an overview So here in part one we're going to get an overview of what your goals can be and what broadly speaking, what kind of content you can put up.

What kind of site you can put up Throughout the series, there will be a hand out you'll have a rich list of resources for each session and by the end you have quite a comprehensive list of resources and you have worksheets that will help you make some decisions, help you think about your business a little more strategically and make some decisions that are in line with that so that's part one is crafting goals and content in June we will do website copy will look at at what our clients needs are and how we can talk about our clients and their needs and how we help them in a way that doesn't feel overtly salesy, that doesn't feel pushy that in fact engages the client with who you are and what you offer and helps move them along to purchasing services for you then in July we'll do Part three Protect and Optimize Tech essentials we'll talk about E but we'll also talk about website security, Website visibility How to keep your How to maintain your website Keep it up-to-date, keep it backed up, keep secure and some of the more back office sort of things for our websites.

So let's jump into today's topics.

We are going to talk first about goals and content, then we'll talk a little bit about what website technology, these, the very basics if you have any sort of a website up now you might be familiar with them, but I hope you'll stick with me because we will do.

Qna At The end and I Will Take As Many Questions As I can, so let's move forward with website goals and content and I've said people are going to look for your website, websites, marketing tools, They're also sales tools, but first and foremost they need to do a few things to help prospective clients decide they want to work with you and move into the sales process I like the ADA model of marketing, that's how I like to think about it, it's a sales funnel that says before people can buy from you, they have to be aware of your business they have to have their attention and your website can announce that you are a business and you are here and this is what you offer, but before someone is ready to buy, they need to be interested in what you have to offer and we can build that interest with our website From that interest we then need to build desire for our services and that's something too again we do with our websites and then finally we need to give people excuse me a way to act on their desire, we have to move them into action you might be familiar with the term call to action that thing you're asking them to do all of this is a funnel, so the biggest portion of our audience we will have their attention and then we will winnow it down a few few less people will be interested, A few less people have desire and a and a final few will take action and the wonderful thing is we don't need everybody in the awareness audience to buy from us If we did, we'd be overwhelmed.

The point is to educate them on what we do, persuade them to work with us and the few that we can handle and hopefully fill out our schedules with are the ones we will move to action.

Your website can do all of these things.

Ultimately it is to get people to take an action to contact you, to hire you, but we can focus our website on different goals beyond that, the most basic goal we can do, we can have is to just introduce our business This is especially good if you are working with clients who are very familiar with editing who have their own publishing processes and really don't need to be persuaded that Yeah you need an editor Think publishing houses University presses, pack book packagers and the like.

Right, they know what editing is, they don't need that education, they know they want editors, what they need to know is who you are and what you can do for them.

So a website that introduces your business can be very simple.

I call it a brochure website.

You might hear that term around, but it really is just the information that you would find in a print brochure.

Right, you have basic sections or pages, you know your home page and about page services, you'll have some testimonials, you'll have a way to contact you, even if you think you want to do more with a website you need to educate your clients or you have other plans for your website A brochure website is a great place to start because it is so simple you can put together a few pages and get something up rather quickly and then build it out over time.

Another benefit of a brochure website is it doesn't have to change often, so if your clients know what editing is and don't have a huge interest in running a big website, you don't have to A brochure website might be the way to go.

I want to give you an example of what a brochure website can be that it doesn't have to be boring.

Now I'm not sharing any live Web sites with you today.

We want to keep the text simple, so what I have are some screenshots for you.

The hand out will list all of the websites I talk about and show to you to day so that you can go look at the live site at your leisure.

What I've got here are a few screen grabs from Kingbird Editorial, which is run by Laura Whitemore.

Laura specializes in books on birds and nature.

We see at the top of the screen we see her header, her masthead for her website, we've got the name of her, her business, but then we have a, you know, a nice image of a bird that backs up what she does and hopefully you can see it on your screen she's got just a few Web pages in her menu home copy editing, proofreading happy clients and fees and contract now on the left I have a screen grab from her home page and her writing backs up what she does and put it really front and center, it's the right blend of word notary and bird notary she has in her headline and if you scan the text, you'll see that she specializes in books on birds and birding and natural History She's been putting the-in Scrub Jay Since 2011 she's great at catching some common errors like the great horned owl Immediately she's sharing some problems the clients have and what she does about it, what she knows on the right of the screen.

We have a grab from I think it's the copy editing page.

You know why you need copy editing, but what she sprinkled throughout the book and has done.

Here are our covers from some of her editing projects, so you get a nice visual that helps tell people what she does and the kind of clients she works for.

I think it's a very interesting site that shows what Laura can really do.

Now maybe you want to do more with your website, Perhaps your clients need to understand what editing is or why they should hire an editor, but you may just want be one of those people who wants to do more with their site and so there are different ways we can encourage people to come to our sites again and again and again to be a resource for visitors, of course, the site is going to include all the basics right homepage services page, so on and so forth.

But then you can create content around education.

Louise Harnby offers some training programs both for editors and for the writer she works for, which is a great way to help her her perspective clients who are mystery and thriller writers, it can help them understand their craft a little better, improve their copy and in general start to really trust Louise and her skills so that when they need an editor, they're going to hire her.

We can also educate entertain people, both editors, our prospective clients and others.

IV A Chun does this really well with her cartoons they give you just a little bit of the behind the scenes of being an editor in a humorous way, I think a lot of editors really like her work, but it's a great way to get people to come back and rack and back to the website and you feel like you get to know IV a little bit through her comics, through the things that make her laugh or maybe frustrate her a little bit and that can build a little bit of trust in a perspective client say you know what she really seems to know, what she's doing, I want to hire her you can inform your site visitors the way Catherine no more cloth does with her copy editors knowledge base Now the knowledge base is focused on copy editors, It is a fabulous collection of links to all sorts of resources online that an editor might need training and organizations and other resources and what you might be asking is well if that's focused at editors.

How does that help Catherine get more clients? And it does a couple of things.

First, it shows what she knows displays her expertise in editing in the resources that help make a good editor, and that can help someone have confidence in the work she can do, but it also shows her as an active member of the editing community someone who is willing to give to someone else and that can help you trust a person if they're actively volunteering this to their colleagues.

Surely there's someone I can trust with my work.

Finally, you can help visitors solve small problems, it might be through blog posts or other other platforms.

Podcast videos help them solve problems.

How do you punctuate dialogue or you can do something more business related the way Adrian Montgomery does with her instant estimate calculator, and all you do is plug in the number of words in your manuscript The level of editing you would like and the calculator will spit back timeline and an estimated cost The page also describes the different levels of editing and can help really guide prospective clients to understand what they need and where they might go with that being a resource for visitors has a lot of benefits repeat visitors become invested in what you are offering them and so they're willing to come back again and again and it as I said, builds trust in those visitors so that among those visitors, those who might be clients start to trust you in a way, trust you enough to desire your services and from that desire take an action A resource website is usually applicable to a much wider audience.

Now why would we want a wider audience because more potential clients can be in that, in that, in that audience, so more audience members, More potential opportunities Finding clients can be a numbers game and so if you start with a bigger pool.

Hopefully you'll end with a bigger pool of clients and having a resource website means encourages more pages to be visited right, encourages people to come in and read more pages.

That's good for SCO.

Now SCO is changing, but at this moment more page visited, more time on the site.

This is still good for us.

There are drawbacks, no creating a resource website is a lot more work and it has to be maintained, things become outdated, links, get broken, technology changes, you have a lot more to do and it can take a longer time to build the audience you want, because again you want a wider audience? Well you have to actually build them, they have to come and they have to come regularly and you need to work that so you're going to need to promote your website more as well.

I want to give you an example of a resource website I'm going to show you my own website what you see here is a version of the main menu across the website.

I fiddle with my site a lot.

It does not look like this today because I've been making changes, but roughly speaking this is what I offer.

You'll see that I have a blog the writing resource and right now we're publishing two new articles a month, it gives writers and editors something information, a lesson, a little education, and it keeps people coming back as I have the Editor Resources Library, which offers a lot of downloads I have links out to my webinars with editing organizations, but I also offer downloads like the PDF of the copy editors typographic oaths and a PDF of a Web editing checklist if you're going to edit websites, Here are the things you want to be looking for these things position me as an expert in the field as somebody who is active in the editing community.

At least that's my goal and I hope that's what people are saying, but I also have other pages on the site.

Why hire a freelance copywriter? We do offer copywriting services, and so I have a page that talks to businesses and other organizations who might be tempted to just do the copywriting on their own.

They don't have a house writer, but this marketing person writes a little copy that salesperson writes a little marketing copy, Maybe the Product Manager does and the page talks about how, how that can be problematic why it's important to have professionally written copy and makes the argument for hiring a Freelancer I also have a page that addresses indie authors who are writing a business book, a business card book Right, they're trying to promote their business or their personal brand.

And again it's tempting to write the book and do all the publishing tasks themselves, and often these are professionals who are working a full-time job and don't have a lot of knowledge around publishing and so the whole point of this page is to kind of help them understand why you need some education around this and help them understand why you want somebody to help you through this process, so that's the way I approach it, there's another goal I want to talk to you about today, just just one more and and that is about getting visitors to contact you now most often that's what all of our websites do? Right, we want people to contact us in some way, fill out this form, give me a call, email me whatever it is, but you can have a website where that's the only goal you're not worrying too much about introducing yourself, you're not worrying too much about being a resource, you just have people working through that funnel of awareness and interest and desire and action so that's called the lead generation site and I'm sure you've heard that a lead generation website is going to have a really specific path through the site you want people to read the content, Hear your arguments in order right, because then it will make sense so it's it's very structured but because it's structured it's not going to change often once you have your process down once you have your argument down, you shouldn't need to change it too often.

You also are not going to need a whole lot of pages because the more pages people have to click before they can do the thing they want to do, the more likely they're going to leave if it takes me three clicks to do something every time on a website I use every day I'm going to get frustrated I want to do it in one click so you're Gonna be able to create a a smaller website, but you are Gonna need a very strong persuasive argument and you're Gonna need a strong call to action.

Right you really that's the only thing there for folks to do, you really want to nudge them forward and get them to reach out to you.

Molly Mccowan does this very well on her website.

Inkpot editing Now if you go to the home page, you'll see that there are two paths through her website.

One is for editors because she offers training for editors and the other is for writers, though she wants to edit for, so I took some screenshots from the writing path through her site and really you click on the button for writers and you're presented with one page it The headline is from a seed of an idea to a published book and then there's a little bit of text that tells you who she works with and what your problem might be she says, craving clarity on the next depth in your book Journey learn more about our editorial services now by scheduling your book strategy session and then we have that big black button Schedule your Book Strategy session This is what she wants, she wants people to come to her and say I have a book, I have an idea it's kind of a mess.

I'm not sure what to do with it, I need, I need a strategy and I want you to help me, so the rest of the page really digs into this situation.

We have a headline a section is your book idea keeping you awake at night so this is the problem right, this is the, the client has a book idea or has a draft or an outline and it is stressing them out right, it's keeping them awake and there's a discussion of that.

There's a couple paragraphs about that.

The next section is it's a sad truth most books never see the light of day.

This is great because Molly's going from yes, identifying their idea er identifying their problem, but then she's making that problem urgent, I have to solve this now because a lot of books never get published.

I want my book to be published, I don't know what to do, and she talks about, you know why this happens, why most books never get published.

There's a section on her, her biography and some more information, and then she brings it all home at the towards The Bottom and site says Take the next step toward becoming a published author.

Right, you have a book idea.

Most books don't get published.

I can help you get to that next step.

I can help you become a published author and all you have to do there's another button schedule your book strategy session and that's that's the push.

Right, I hope you can see how this really gets into the clients head.

Right, what, what are they thinking? What are they worrying about? How can I help them? I would encourage you to go read this page it's really great a great example so for this first section, How do you choose site type of goal for your website and I want you think about what would help your business the most in the, in the worksheet, in the handout there are several questions who your clients are, What do they understand about editing, What do they need to know in order to make this decision, things that will help you identify what's going to help your business mouse What kind of goal will help, but then I want you to think about you, How interested are you in managing your website, Do you want something you post and maybe you check on it once or twice a year or are you interested in doing a lot more we can have these grand ideas and really want to do a lot and that's fabulous but I would encourage you to step back and say Okay if I were to do that.

How do I feel about creating all this? How do I feel about managing this over time and then start to look at your resources? What kind of website skills do you already have? Do you need to obtain more in order to do some of the things you want to do, or what does your budget look like Could you hire somebody to help you build it and teach you to maintain it over time.

How much time do you want to spend on building your website? On maintaining your website, I don't want to dissuade anyone from doing a big grand website, I think they're fun but I know they can be a lot of work and it's not a bad thing if your site starts out really simple and you take it piece by piece, step-by-step, What would I like to add this quarter What would I like to add this year What skills do I need and what kind of time do I need to set aside to make my goals so I want to move on to our second topic, website technology and I promise I'm not talking about coding if you don't already have a website the first thing you need to do is get a URL your address you will get to choose what's called your top level domain name your Tlt and let's just break apart my URL to see what I'm talking about the HTTPS calling forward/forward slash That's the scheme it defines the protocol tells the computers to access a certain resource on the website the WWW is the subdomain and that's most common.

Occasionally we'll see different, different subdomains.

You might, if you do any fact checking for your work, might see that quite a few the next piece, that's the customizable part.

Right touch editing is the top level domain I chose for my website and then we have the website extension that's the.com most of us will be looking for a.com, that's what most people expect, that's what we put in but it's not the only choice, and especially if you are outside of the United States, you will often have choices like.co Dot CA for Canada co.uk for the United Kingdom, But you can also choose things like.net and.this and.info that's quite a bit of choices.

So how do you do? How do you make that choice? Your URL should be easy to remember because you're going to tell people a lot or they're going to read it somewhere and then they're going to go, have to look for it, it should be easy to spell because someone is going to type it in, you know links are great, but if you've told somebody what your website is they're Gonna have to key it in and when you read it, it should be easily understandable, so I chose right touch anything that means those words all together with their spaces and you want to avoid domain names that when the words are are all switched together, they can be read in a different way, especially if they could be read in an unfortunate way we want to, we want to avoid that, choosing your business name or or your personal name if you trade under your personal name is a fantastic choice.

Right, that is the wording people are going to remember the most.

It is what they're going to assume your website is, so you're going to be found more often, but if your name, whether it's your business name or your personal name if it's particularly long or has an uncommon spelling you may want to choose something else I mentioned Adrian Montgomery earlier, her website is actually PSI Editor SCI editor.com because she focuses on science, editing and one reason for this is because both Adrianne and Montgomery can be spelled in various ways and the number of times you have might have to type that in and how do I spell it and how do I find her again? That could be problematic, so she chose atit You could also get common misspellings of your name, of your, of your domain name and redirect them to your actual website you can get other domain extensions if you think people might look for.c dot CA and you could get that as well as.com if people are going to look for both and the key is that you are looking using one for your website and you're redirecting the others to that website.

This could be a great way to make sure you capture your audience.

Where do you get a URL now? I want to enforce here that although we often talk about getting our URL, buying our URL, what we are actually doing is renting it, you are going to a domain registrar and renting this name.

That means if you should miss a payment, they're going to shut down your website, they're going to shut off your access to this address and I want to reinforce that just so we avoid accidentally losing our websites.

Right, it's you're putting in a lot of work and part of that work is being available day after, day after day being findable and if we forget to pay that bill, we won't be so we're renting our URLs you are going to rent from a domain registrar.

Many of them are also website hosts your website host they own the servers where your website is going to live so on the screen I have just a few examples Dream Host, Blue Host and In are all reputable registrars and hosts.

There are many more in the handout How do you choose a host? Certainly we're Gonna look at price, but I would encourage you also to look long-term at other things.

How easy is it to move around? Found in their environment? What is their customer support look like and how much support do you need? You don't have to go with someone who charges a premium for customer support if you're a Dyi person, if you can do this yourself, you don't need a lot of support, but if you feel like you might want to make sure you have contact to a person and to be able to ask questions and get help, look for that many hosts have website builders, which means you can build your website right there that may be beneficial to you and if so, we're Gonna talk about website builders in a minute you want to look at that uptime that is to say you want to know how often their servers go down taking your website with it and how long it takes to get backed up most hosts are 247365 they're very stable but it doesn't hurt to make sure if your chosen host maybe isn't as well-known.

Look into it.

How stable are they and what do they offer for website security? You want to make sure your website isn't hacked, isn't taken over by somebody else and what happens in a security emergency? How do they handle it? You want to know your website host is going to act quickly and decisively and and protect your website.

The next decision is you have to build a site where somebody does.

How do you do that? You can use either a website builder or what I call the other CMS the content management system.

Web builders are fairly easy to use, there's no manual coding you are generally using templates and they are customizable and there's usually it's usually a drag and drop kind of environment, so it's easy to use the logo here for go Daddy, we and w they're all common website builders, they're very popular website builders tend to be Sim help you build simple sites they tend to be very user-friendly content management system is more comprehensive it allows for things like multiple contributors to a website if you were going to have a blog with lots of contributors A CMS would help you do that.

It has the option for a lot of plugins, so if you wanted to have an online store, that might be an option for you and they, they too offer templates they're called themes they tend to be far more customizable, allowing you to build rather quickly, rather comprehensively, a unique site, and here I've given you some examples Druple Juma and we press my own site is on Word Press and has been for quite some time, but there are more suggestions again in the handout some of these companies offer both the Web builder and a CMS.

So how do you choose price again? Is something that we're all concerned with, but think about your skills.

Do you need training and how good is the training and help files? Do you need some custom customer support? What does that look like? Think about the day to day of your website how easy is the system to use, especially if you're Gonna build this yourself.

You want something that fits your skill set and think about the future.

How expandable is it, how flexible is it, how reliable is it, how will it work for you tomorrow? Five years down the line, ten years down the line It is absolutely possible to change hosts for your website, but it can be a lot of work, it's kind of like moving house there's it can be a lot of stress, it can be confusing, it can be a lot of work so if you can spare a little time now at the beginning before you're heavily invested in website to choose a host, a builder that will work for you, you're going to do much better in the long run I started out, I think I had a blog on blogger and my website was initially on Word Press it's still on we press today and I've been with the same host Since I think 2009 when I first launched a website so there's something to making a choice that works for you.

Okay so you wanna set your websitee you wanna make those first moves, think about who your clients are, what they need to make the decision to hire you, but then think about what you're interested in doing what you're not interested in doing and it is Okay to say oh my gosh I don't want to manage a big website you don't have to and what resources do you have Do you need excuse me more resources.

Do you need time to up your skills or earn some money to pay somebody else? So I hope that was informative.

If you want more website information, if this is just not enough, you don't forget.

In June we're doing client winning website copy and in July we're doing checked and optimized tech essentials.

You can, of course, check out my book, The Chicago Guide for Freelance Editors.

There's a couple chapters on marketing as well as one on sales.

Excuse me and of course you can sign up for a website review, You can go to the Link tree URL here.