Top 3 Reasons to Update Your Web Presence

1. You are in the supplies business.

So you make, sell, distribute, etc – the stuff that people need to make their art or craft.  Perhaps you’re a yarn shop, maybe you sell quilting templates, or perchance you create and distribute fantastic patterns that sewists use to create their own brilliant works of art.

Your remaining competitors are Amazon, Hobby Lobby, and Michael’s on the big corporate front.  And there’s a movement at hand to convince people – not just artisans – to spend less with these behemoths, and to spend more, both in volume and per unit, with smaller, more relatable companies who share a common set of values.

Now is the time to make your move.  The current environment is not likely to be more amenable to your business picking up market share, increasing revenue, and generating a better net spend from your customer base.  Online sales may not be as much fun as setting up a booth at Quiltcon, but they are a reliable means of generating repeat sales and streamlining your organization so you can squeeze in a day off here and there.

It won’t happen with a tired old website, an Etsy shop, or selling just on eBay or an IG shop.  You’re going to need to take control of your own destiny and build a name and a brand for yourself.  One that you control, you can monetize, and you are proud to call your own.   Talk to me about the member discount, and let’s build something fantastic and beautiful, just like your products.

2. You are a teacher or instructor.

YES!!! to you, I think it’s awesome that people like you build classes for people like to me to use to learn stuff.

But there are a LOT of options out there – and most of them involve making decisions that don’t seem very important at the time but turn out to be the very things that cause you to spend a lot of time banging your head and saying “why didn’t I know that Platform K was going to nickel and dime me for every single additional feature my course should have?”, or “what do you mean I can’t hook my Mailchimp up and run a drip campaign automatically?”

Or possibly you have been THINKING ABOUT taking that giant storehouse of cool knowledge in your head and turning it into a fabulous course that people would love to access.  But you have no idea what platform to use, what items are essential and which ones are more like fluffy icing on the cake, or how to integrate your class videos into short teaser clips for social media, and instead of going forth and setting up your virtual classroom, you are sitting in a semi-permanent state of analysis paralysis while time passes you by…  yeah, I can sympathize with you.

It’s incredibly hard to make that first decision, and even harder to come to terms with the idea that maybe a partial – or even complete – overhaul, or a migration to a new platform, or some other massively time consuming and unappealing stuff has to happen to get the business on the correct track towards marketing, sales, transactions, and profitability.  Talk to me about the member discount, and let’s get your course out into the world.

3. You are an artist doing retail sales.

Oh boy, my heart goes out to you.  This is like the scariest one of the bunch, and it’s always my Achilles heel.

There are a million marketplaces, and each one charges you a little bit more than the last – whether its a monthly placement fee, exorbitant transaction processing costs, hosting charges, whatever – the list never gets any shorter.  It’s already bad enough that trying to be an artist running an arts related business is not making art like you originally set out to do.  There’s a reason why gallery representation usually lops the top 50% off every sale.

Setting up an online storefront should be a simple and straightforward proposition, but somehow those promises of “you can build a professional looking e-commerce site on your own in ten minutes” never really seems to work out, at least not for the artistically bent souls who actually like pixel perfection and a color palette that induces the warm and fuzzies.

Trust me, I know.  I set up my first e-commerce storefront in 1997; while the tools have proliferated, the basics of creating a site that convinces people to buy from you has not.  You need fast hosting, a way to take payments, some nicely crafted descriptions, ALT tags, etc to do the heavy lifting for the search engines in the background.  Then you need to feel and believe that your site is as beautiful as your work, while still making it simple for customers to complete a purchase.  Talk to me about the member discount and let’s get your sales (and your confidence) up.

The rest of the story.

OK, here’s the deal.  I’m not telling you to go build a new website.  I’m not telling you that you should not use existing platforms.  I’m not saying you’re currently doing it wrong.  NOT AT ALL.

What I am telling you is that if your current website isn’t getting the job done, we should talk.  Whether your site is built on Shopify or WordPress or Squarespace or Thinkific or pretty much any other platform out there (except .net or Magento, I don’t do those at all), it’s likely that it can be more productive, generate a better ROI, and make you smile more when you look at it.

The most important part of what I’m telling you is to make sure that you own your own IP (intellectual property), you own your own customer lists (email and physical addresses, etc), and that you can take the pieces of what you are using and hook them together into a working system that automatically does a lot of the heavy lifting for you.

How is this a WIN-WIN?  You get a beautiful, professionally created update for your online presence, and I can keep on procrastinating about swapping out website builds and graphic design for a full time art career attempt.  Yeah, I know.  One of these days I’ll be ready to make the leap, just not this week. 

I build all kinds of sites that do all kinds of things.  I edit video, create graphics, structure UX/UI, optimize for SEO, tweak for conversions, all that stuff.  You can find featured sites in my portfolio by clicking here.  You can see the list of platforms, technologies and programs that I work with by clicking here.

Some of the available options include:

• New build or renovate – get a quick glow up or a completely new online presence
• SEO optimization – yes, search engines do send customers, and you are gonna want to take advantage of all the tricks for this
• Landing page buildouts – if you’re running campaigns or ads, then you should be using landing pages to effectively track and tweak
• Theme or template refresh – sometimes you just want to get a quick haircut instead of a makeover
• Plugin or app audit – what’s all this stuff you are using (and probably paying monthly for) doing for you anyway?
• Graphics update – new colors, who dis?  In all seriousness, customers get bored when nothing changes
• Custom packages – a la carte style, one from column A, two from column B, that kind of thing
• Video templates – are you using all the features that YT, Vimeo, Reels, etc offer for getting more eyeballs on your videos
• Social media templates – if you aren’t working from a cohesive playbook for your socials, then you are likely missing out on views and sales