Personalized profitable websites for authors
Our friends and family may really love us, but that doesn’t mean they want us to succeed.
I first became aware of this phenomenon while listening to The War of Art. Author Steven Pressfield recounted the calamities that happen when family and friends begin to fear that things will change for them if we really do achieve our goal…
[Read more…] about You Are Born To Succeed
After building websites for coaches, consultants and small businesses for over 15 years I discovered a new way to create your best website ever.
It used to be a struggle to find the right words for my clients’ website.
Without ‘the right words,’ it was a challenge to find great images. The ones that create a “Wow!” response the minute someone lands on your site.
A few of my blog posts are attracting lots of visitors to my website each week, but they are older posts. Come behind the scenes. You’ll see want is working now and discover what will make my top performing posts even better. Step-by-step video below.
You can’t improve what you can’t measure. Thankfully there’s Google Analytics so you can see your top performing pages.
What can you expect to pay for small business website?
It depends on what you need.
If you only need a blog, you could create a website for free by signing up with Medium, or WordPress.com (not WordPress.org: big difference).
Most independent professionals need more than a blog, however. They need a website that attracts more customers, and they need to move beyond their first website that may have been built by young family relative who did not have marketing experience.
If you’ve been in business for at least three years, ask yourself:
There are so many choices when it comes to building a website. When you’re just starting out it’s difficult to know which one is right for you and your business.
My choice for building a business website is WordPress. Here’s why.
Click here to download the same checklist I use to build business websites.
[Read more…] about Website for a Freelance Copywriter: Before & After
Carol’s daughter helped her create her first business website. Carol purchased her domain name from GoDaddy and decided to use GoDaddy’s proprietary drag and drop website builder.
Even though Carol found a pre-built website template she liked, Carol and her daughter struggled to get the look Carol wanted.
Drag and drop website builders are super easy to use for people like me who have designed lots of websites, used hundreds of templates, know what images will work best, at the right size, and can write copy to fit the space provided.
Click here to download the same checklist I use to build business websites.
Instead of spending a few hours building her new website, it took Carol and her daughter many days to complete the home page.
A year passed and Carol needed to make a few text and image changes.
She forgot how to do it. Her daughter forgot too, plus Carol’s daughter was so busy with other things, she no longer had time to work on her mother’s website.
Forgetting how to make text and images changes is very common if you don’t build websites full time. I still remember the day I forgot how to log into my new WordPress website.
Carol wanted to launch her copywriting services using the Product Launch Formula.
Carol’s coach highly recommended creating a landing page with an opt-in form to build her email list. Carol needed a minimum of 300-500 subscribers to justify spending the time and energy on a product launch.
The online world of sales and marketing is always changing. Landing pages with a built in opt-in form are a better way to list build for 3 big reasons:
Carol and her daughter created Carol’s first website using GoDaddy’s website builder. The same one that you see advertised about how easy it is to create a drag and drop website quickly. You choose a prebuilt, template and drag and drop your images and text.
The problem was Carol wants to launch her copywriting services using the product launch formula method and WordPress is a much better platform for launching products and services because Carol can use landing page software to build her list. And before I replaced her GoDaddy website with her new WordPress website, I wanted to show you what Carol was struggling.
It did take Carol and her daughter hours and hours to complete the home page. And she’s happy with the overall look, but she forgot what she had done to add the text and images. And her daughter’s busy doing other things in her life right now, and she can’t help her mother any longer.
The first thing that held Carol back is that she has an opt-in form here. Instead she wants to add a link to an attractive landing page that was created in LeadPages, but she doesn’t know how to make LeadPages work with GoDaddy.
I asked Google if GoDaddy’s website builder works with LeadPages and I couldn’t easily find the answer because GoDaddy kept leading me to their landing software and lead pages kept saying, we can also design your website.
WordPress and LeadPages work so well together that there really isn’t any need to be fighting with a platform that you don’t really want to use.
A problem Carol had wason her about us page. Her text is centered. It is very hard to read centered text. Centered text is great for a formal invitation, but definitely not for a website that you want people to read.
The other thing is her privacy policy. Privacy policies do tend to be long as is hers.
At’s also in a column on the left, which looks a little strange.
In general, Carol found it too difficult to work on her site.
Plus I can teach her how to use your website after it’s built. And I can show her how to add text and images without spending hours and hours going through online training, trying to get the answers that she needs.
How to properly credit any image you download from a free stock photo website:
If you’d like me to notify you each time I give a free, live 10-Minute Monday presentation, click here to sign up. You’ll also received my list of favorite free stock photos.
As a fashion and beauty editor for Glamour, Mademoiselle and Weight Watchers Magazine photo credits were a must.
Today many free stock image photo sites say, ‘Attribution is not required, but appreciated.’ I like to give credit to anyone who has given me something of value for free.
The following instructions are for WordPress
Part of giving credit is linking to the photographer and the stock photo house (“Photo courtesy of [link to photographer] via [link to stock photo house].)
The problem is you don’t want the search engines, like Google, to follow the link because Google may think you are a spammer who is trying to create false links, just for attention.
The solution is to create a nofollow link. Here’s how:
Super important!
Search engines cannot yet read your images so you need to describe each image you upload for people who are visually impaired.
This short article will show you how to tag your images in WordPress.
Hi. I’m Nancy Fields. I’ve been a graphic design for over 28 years. I build websites for coaches, entrepreneurs and small business owners.
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Featured images courtesy of picjumbo via Pexels and Pikwizard
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You will create a great user experience by adding:
Five must haves on a contact page for your company: name, address, and phone number. And you’ll see a qualifying statement here because for your company address, you only need your town and your state, or even just your state. That gives people a sense of where you are in the world, but you don’t have to put in your full address if people are not coming to, you know, to a store, for example.
And then, add your company phone number. And this is where I’m excited to show you.
I have some additional information about adding a company phone number with a mobile friendly link. So if people want to phone you on their cell phone, they can just hit the link and it goes right to your phone.
Add your email address, but this is a thing that I learned many years ago: Do not put a live link in your website because there are spam robots that crawl websites looking for email links.
I truly do have a customer who insisted she wanted the live email address because it really is user-friendly for customers. But she got hit with hundreds of spam emails a day. Soon she was receiving thousands of spam emails in a week.
She spent a lot of time deleting the spam from her email inbox, and then she spent money and time getting it resolved.
So a Contact Form is great because it lets people contact you. They give them you their name and email address.
And you could even ask them some questions if you want to know a little bit about them before you reach out to them.
So it’s about you then reaching out to them.
I’m going to show you how to create a live phone link. How to add it manually, and how to use a plugin to add a phone link.
What I did, I just hovered over the phone number and I hit link. Then I typed in T E L for telephone, added a colon, and then entered the number: No dashes or spaces.
That is the way to manually add that in.
If you want something fancier. For example, if you wanted a Call Us button, this is done with a plugin called WP Call Button.
It is free.
I set that up in the dashboard under Settings. I set up the phone number in the US. I put the phone number in: as you can see, no dashes. I chose where I wanted it to appear. I chose my button color, which was the color of all of her buttons on our website. And I put show everywhere and save the changes. And that’s how easy it was to fill it in.
But there again, you do not need to have a plug in if you don’t want to. You can have something as simple selecting your text and linking it with TEL colon and your phone number. And you’re good to go.
Receive an invitation the next time I go LIVE for a FREE 10 minute training. Topics include WordPress, design, and tech challenges others are struggling with when creating a website.
You can also email me a question about your own website or tech challenge and I may feature it.
Sign up below. I hope to see you on my next 10-Minute Monday!