Fiona Allman-Treen: Websites as Powerful Business Assets

Nigel Rawlins: Fiona, welcome to the Wisepreneurs podcast, would you like to tell our listeners something about yourself and where you're from?

Fiona Allman-Treen: Thank you, Nigel. It's great to be here, really appreciate you having me on the show. Uh, so I am based in Hastings on the South Coast of the UK and my company creates websites for business owners who don't speak tech, so we really specialize in focusing on the business benefits of a website and how it can help you achieve what you want to achieve in your business and become a real asset rather than just being an empty shop window as some of them are.

Nigel Rawlins: Oh, yes, now, I came across you because you wrote a book, Website Mastery for Business Owners Who Don't Speak Tech. How did that come about?

Fiona Allman-Treen: Well, for many, many years I've worked with, um, business coaches and they've always said to me, Oh, you should write a book, you should write a book. But that's mostly because I'm very good at remembering funny stories and anecdotes rather than I should become an author in any sort of sense. My most recent mentor, I worked with her for about four years and she said to me, you know what, you should really write this business book because it can then share your 23 years of experience, in creating, award winning websites for companies all over the world and get it into one place, really encapsulate the essence of what you do. And it gives you a very clear process because it's good attracting new clients who that appeals to as it is to perhaps lovingly releasing those who aren't such a good fit for the way you work.

And I could really see the value for my business in that because that felt like not just a marketing tool, but kind of a filter to bring the right sort of people in who we really want to work with and who we can get results for.

Nigel Rawlins: I read the book, so that's why I got in contact with you. So, who does need a website?

Fiona Allman-Treen: Now, the salesperson in me wants to say everyone, but you know what? It's not actually true. I actually started my business because I was working for another agency and it was very much in the early days of websites and they were trying so hard to convince this guy who ran a cleaning company, that he needed to spend like 4, 000 pounds on a website. Now this was over 20 years ago. That was the price of a new car. It was a huge amount of money. And he said to me, you know, do I need to do this? And I said, no, you're a cleaning company. People always need cleaners. You know, get a one page site or get the front page of your local paper every day for a year.

You know, you'll see the benefits. So it's maybe not always the right time for everyone to have one, but I do think for business, you do need some sort of web presence just to validate that you are who you say you are. It still gives a sense of credibility. Customers are still definitely looking.

They want to find out a bit more about you, especially in the service industry before they're willing to make that commitment to work with you.

Nigel Rawlins: Depending on their budget, I suppose, if you're running a company, then obviously they can afford it. Do you find that some companies are reluctant to pay the money they need to pay?

Fiona Allman-Treen: Oh, very much so.

Nigel Rawlins: Hmm.

Fiona Allman-Treen: Very much so. Because I think there's still an element of mystery about what we do, um, particularly with the advent of AI, with every news program is talking about, oh, you just click three buttons and AI builds your website that builds a, you know, builds your business. And there's a lot of mystery around it and a lot of jargon, which is why when I wrote the book, I particularly honed in on that lack of jargon, the non coders guide to launching a successful website is how we really pitch it because we didn't want to be, uh, trying to write a book about code and saying, oh, you know, code this way and tick this box and you get the results because that kind of stuff is so transient.

It just changes all the time with the way our technology and our industry changes when we find, when we come to some companies and they say, okay, I've, I run, we actually had this happen, a seven figure business and I have a 500 pound budget. And you're like, you know what? You really should be looking between the 5 percent and 10 percent is what you need to be of your turnover is what you need to be investing in your marketing overall.

I would say that, um, over the course of a year. So, uh, If one year you need a brand new website built, that's going to take a big chunk of that, but it might be that if you had a website built last year, now you just need to focus on the marketing things to promote it, but when it comes to your website, yeah, you really should be looking at a significant investment, but the best way to find a budget is to look at your return on investment.

What do you want to get out of it? You know, if I have clients and I do have clients who, they will sell a product that costs like a few US dollars and they'll say, okay, so what should my budget be? And I'll say, well, how many can you sell? What's your market reach? What's your, um, you know, your product reach, what awareness is it?

Is it a brand new product? Are we having to educate people on it? Is it well known? Is there a lot of competition? Because you've got to work out how many you plan to sell. And that will then tell you what your return on investment is. Similarly, if you have, uh, we have one company who they do events and for each event they're paid in the region of 25 to 30, 000 pounds and they said, Oh, we just want, you know, we spend a couple of hundred on a website and I'm like, well, if I've got 30, 000 pounds in my pocket ready to invest, am I going to spend it with somebody who's got like a single page or two or three pages that are very basic and don't tell me what I need to know and don't help me connect with you?

Then no, I'm not going to do it. So it's measuring that return on investment. What do you want to get out of your website? We'll tell you what you should be investing in it.

Nigel Rawlins: Hmm. Well, let's just talk about that for a moment. Two things mentioned there was the AI ones and the one page website. Now, as a marketing services company, some of my work does include websites, but I don't, that's not my main source of income or anything. I do look after them, but I decided to try an AI website builder, and it

Fiona Allman-Treen: they fun?

Nigel Rawlins: did the most disgusting website, the most disgusting pictures, you know, weird five, no, seven fingered people from above and, and the wording was just horrific.

So I ended up having to pay my web developer to fix it up. And, uh, I'm getting rid of it fairly soon. I'm not going to continue. Look, it was an expensive process and I think it would be a mistake for people to go down that way. So I don't think they really saved money there, but the one page website too, is very difficult for that to work on Google because you've got everything on the website. So let's talk a little bit about one page websites and what sort of websites they should sort of build.

Fiona Allman-Treen: Sure. I mean, the basics are, you know, everyone talks about the brochure website, the kind of who, what, why, where, and how. That needs to be the absolute minimum that any website is, but it all comes down to what your target audience needs. I always say to people, your website is not about you. It's about the people you want to work with.

So if you are selling a widget for a few dollars that everybody else sells, and all you want is to put adverts out on Facebook, which lead to a landing page, which tell you all about the widget on one page and they can buy it on that page and that's it, bang, bang, bang, that technically could be a one page website because they're, particularly the audience, you see, it's all about that audience, they're buying on price.

They're short of time. It's an impulse purchase, so they don't need a lot of information. Whereas the kind of businesses we deal with tend to be, uh, they're in the scale up mode. They've already been going about five to 10 years. They've got five to 10 staff as a minimum, and they're looking at getting above the, you know, half a million turnover and really scaling up and that's where you need to be looking at, not just who, what, why, where, and how to explain who you are as a, as a business, but also what can you take off your desk? So what are you mailing out? What are you sending out to people? What are you doing copy and paste with?

That's always my favorite. If anything to do with your website that you're then copying and pasting. It could be inquiries that come through your general inquiry form. It could be messages from people saying, Oh, I'd like to book a meeting with you. When are you available? And you're having to like copy and paste that into your CRM, or you're having to copy and paste their availability into your calendar to see when you're available.

That's all stuff that your website can be doing behind the scenes. So that's taking work off your desk. It's becoming a more valuable asset in itself, but it also, it saves your team time doing those boring repetitive tasks. Cause I find in my experience, in my business, that's where mistakes are made is where people are doing the same click, repeat, click, repeat, click, repeat.

That's where people just stop looking and they get bored to tears and that's where mistakes come in. Whereas if you automate all of that, it's not just the time saving. It saves the sanity of your staff half the time.

Nigel Rawlins: That's actually a really good point. What you're talking about there is, everyone now, I guess, because of AI and everything else, they're saying, well, what can we automate? Which is fantastic that we can do it. So you're putting that thought into their website. So they might come along and say, we want a website.

And you're now opening it up and saying, well, what are some things that we can get the website to feed in to your systems? I think that's really, really good. I haven't got that sort of ability because I'm just trying to automate the processes that I use myself. Okay, if you've got a one page website, it's pretty obvious to me, Google's going to get confused about what to look at on that page.

Whereas like you're saying, if you've got a business, you need a number of pages. So what do you think about that sort of thought?

Fiona Allman-Treen: Well, also, you can use it as a real support tool for your sales team. Again, thinking about the people, the technology is just the tool to aid the people, whether that's getting your marketing message across or receiving sales and making them in a, in a valuable way, in a meaningful way. Pre qualified kind of method and the way to do that, we're doing this at the moment with a client where they've said, we have a sales team, we have three or four specific industries that we offer services to, so we've said, rather than having just have one general services page, have a services to this industry page, have a services to that industry page, and they can be, they can be public or they can be hidden.

It's better if they're public because a lot of people have a lot of things that, oh, if I have a hidden page, people think it's exclusive. Nobody cares. With the greatest of love, nobody cares if you think your content is exclusive. They just want to find you. So for visibility, we've said to them have a page for services for industry A, services for industry B, services for industry C.

Now this has a twofold effect. Firstly, when the sales team are targeting industry A, They can send all of their, if they're doing an email campaign, if they're doing a paid ad campaign, anything like that, that they're doing way outside the website, nothing to do with what we're doing for them, but we can then say to them, we'll build a page that's optimized for that industry, uses that industry's terminology, touches on that industry's problems so that they're like, Oh yes, that's specifically what matters to us. And then it reaches out and gives them a calendar that's purely for that industry. Speak to our expert in your industry today. So then the sales team go and do their email campaign, their LinkedIn campaign, their paid ads, whatever they're doing.

And they drive people not to the homepage, but to that specific landing page. And their conversion rate has almost doubled as a result in a matter of days. Literally, it's gone that quickly because it's very specific. Now over time, because we've optimized that page for that industry and their specific keywords and search terms, that's going to become more visible to people who aren't even being targeted yet.

So it's helping them to grow that business without their active input. So it's a balance of supporting the actions you're taking and also taking action on its own to support your overall goal.

Nigel Rawlins: So I see from the book, if they've read the book before they approach you, they've got some idea of your process that you're going to go through because, you know, I don't know, do you still get people who turn up and say, I just want a website?

Fiona Allman-Treen: Yeah. Yes, I do. I do. And that's the nice thing is because after the initial meeting, I will send them a copy of the book and I have had one client that I can think of who came to us and she was all gung ho to work with us and then she read the book. She went, Oh, do you know what? Actually you sent me that book and now that I've seen that you want me to like spend time on the strategy.

And really pinning down who my ideal client is and their demographics, geographics, psychographics, all of that kind of stuff. I don't really want that. I just want someone to quickly do it. And I said to her, then you know what, that's fine. We're just not a good fit for you because we're, we're more in depth and then we're gonna, we know that that will give you better results later.

But if you just want quick wins now, we're just not the right fit for you. And that's fine. That's the nice thing of, of being in business a while is, is that you get to recognize and value your time. And when there's the jobs that come along that occasionally someone on my team will say, Oh, but that's easy money.

No such thing. There's no such thing as easy money.

Nigel Rawlins: Hmm, you're dead right there. So what, what would you recommend to that lady who, I just want a quick website, where should you send her?

Fiona Allman-Treen: With people like that, we have a strategic partnerships that we can refer people to if they have specialties in particular areas, but to be honest, she was a complete startup, we're not best suited for startups. I love startups. They're all so enthused and they're so crazy with excitement.

They all want to be a millionaire by Friday and think they've invented the new eBay and I just adore their energy. I feed off it. It's then you spend a lot of time managing that and managing expectations and kind of coaching them almost, which I don't mind. I've done a little bit of mentoring in my past in a voluntary sense.

So I don't mind doing that. But really, we know where we can deliver the best value. So I actually said to her in her case, you know, go and have a look at Squarespace. They've got nice templates. Go and grab a Squarespace template and put something together. And in six months time, look at your results.

And she said, well, I look in a year. I said, six months, this industry is far too fast moving for a year. So give it six months, then look at your results. And then hopefully if you've got a bit of traction, you've started to get your name out. You're doing all of the other stuff, the offline, networking in person, um, networking, advertising, all of that sort of thing.

You've started to build a bit of momentum, then come back and have a chat with us. But in the first instance, the irony was she did end up doing the exercise in stage one of my book, which was about identifying your target audience. So it did help her in the end.

Nigel Rawlins: That's the thing about strategy that I'm coming to realise, there's quite a discipline to it, and I don't know, I think a lot of us single person businesses, like I'm a single person business, and we're a bit creative, don't like to be tied down to thinking like that. 

Fiona Allman-Treen: It terrifies people.

Nigel Rawlins: So tell me, how do you get your clients focused on the strategy and the roadmap?

Fiona Allman-Treen: Well, the simplest way that I put it to them is, do you want me to bring you a thousand clients who look at your website or a hundred people who buy? And I did actually have one client historically who said to me, let me think about it. And I said, okay, then we're not right for you because you're not thinking it's all, you know, people are all about the volume.

And we do see that where people go with paid SEO campaigns and things like that, they're like, I just want more traffic, more traffic, more traffic, and, the SEO people, although they'll try very often and guide people as to what you then have to have on your website, that wasn't their job.

Their brief was to bring you more traffic. They brought you more traffic. Doesn't mean they're going to buy. And the way I always, um, describe that the magic formula that you need really for a website for that is that ace, it's that attracting, connecting, and engaging that your website always needs to be attracting so that visibility piece is massive, connecting so when they get there, they see the right Images, the right text, the right message that appeals to them, the right navigation so they can find things easily in the way they think and then engagement, which is then driving them to then reach out to you, book a meeting, make a connection, download a marketing piece, something like that.

But it really is all about getting, getting people, not just onto your site in the first place. They have to be the right kind of people. And that's what helps people when I say, you know, we're just going to spend a little bit of time on this and literally we'll spend like not even an hour on the phone with the client.

And we'll go through, you know, just think about who is that dream client. And the nice thing is if you've been in business for like longer than 10 minutes, if you've got a few clients, literally a handful, you know who your dream client is. All you need to do is close your eyes and think, who's that client that when I see their number come up on my phone, I think, Oh, yay, I wonder how they are.

They're your dream client. And then think about what age are they? What whereabouts are they geographically? Does that matter to you? You know, cause it's very easy to say now we can work with everyone in the world. I want to work with everyone in the world. You might not want to, what if they're paying you in, you know, Venezuelan dollars or something?

You don't know what to do with that money. You don't know how to pass that through your bank account, et cetera. So that person that you think straight away, Oh, lovely. Mine is Peter, a guy called Peter. He was my client number 21. I still remember his number. He is a, he won't mind me saying this. I'm sure middle aged, businessman.

When I met him, he'd been running, he and his wife had been running their business about six, seven years. And now the business is just so huge. The turnover figure was enormous. They have offices all over the world. They're absolutely massive. But to me, he was still my dream at that time was still, they were the people, five, five staff, five years, 500K turnover. They were the ones that I was looking for and he was just perfect for that. So just think about who's that client you love. They're your dream already.

Nigel Rawlins: Well, that was an interesting point you just made about the turnover of that particular client, so you could figure out if you could work with them. And obviously with a client with that sort of turnover, and you mentioned earlier, it was the percentage of money that they should put into their marketing.

Let's go back to when you first started. Do you remember that? Well, I remember too, because I started about 25 years ago, but not doing websites. Most of my work was print based for many, many years, and then people started wanting these websites. And we had to do it in HTML, so you

Fiona Allman-Treen: Oh my gosh.

Nigel Rawlins: days.

And they were pretty ordinary looking and you're trying to get attention, but in those days you wanted hits, and you had

Fiona Allman-Treen: Yes. Hits.

Nigel Rawlins: So, The issue today is you get a client who's fairly established, they've been dabbling with a bit of a website, but it's pretty ordinary. They're not getting much traction. Obviously you've got a strategy to go through, but how do you get them to get noticed out there, especially if they've got lots of competitors? How, how are they going to stand out?

Fiona Allman-Treen: Well, it's, it's the oldest message in, in marketing, isn't it? As you'll know, is that USP, what's your unique selling proposition? What makes me come to you that I wouldn't go to others? And very often people will say things to me like, um, oh, we give great customer service. Everyone thinks they give great customer service.

Whether they do or not is another question, but they all think that they do. So I'll say, well, why would I come to you? Oh, well, you know, cause we give great customer service. Okay. So when I've got a good customer experience with you, what does that look like? Will you get a dedicated account manager? Okay.

That's something that's number one. That's, that's an, a dedicated account manager is a big deal, I'm not going to get passed around a whole team of salespeople. What else does that experience? Oh, well, we give you like full instructions after, you know, we, we've done the installation, we give you instructions on how to maintain it.

Okay, lovely. So you, you send me off fully equipped with my dedicated account manager, I'm fully equipped to get up and running and it's all of that whole thing of just turning it around. So you're selling the sizzle, not the steak, as I was always told when I started out, and that's no different on your website.

But it's just making sure it's all about that. When I see clients who say to me, Oh, we want to say, we do this. We do that. We do that. I say, well, you're weeing all over people and that's a whole other website. Nobody wants that. So it's not about you. It's about them. So you can say things like, um, say for example, with us, we are, we have a strategy first methodology.

We lead with strategy first. But if I say that to a client, they go, eh, whatever, I don't even know what that means. So it's always putting that in context. We lead with strategy first. So we know that you get a website which appeals direct to your target client, your dream client, who you want to work with and who are more likely to buy from you, and that's the piece that the clients are going to listen to.

It's always, what's the flip side? What's the other side of that coin? And when people say to me, you know, I just want more visibility. I just want more traffic. And you say, well, do you? Let's look at what you've already got. And I think they need, maybe they think they need a whole new website. They don't always need a whole new website.

There might just be barriers to purchase. E commerce is a great one. Any site, and I do still see some, but any site which requires you to register before you can purchase is dead in the water. I'm not going to give you my personal data. We're in an age where we've recognized the value of our personal data, the importance of securing our personal data.

Why would I give that to you? Just because I want to buy a bracelet. So that's, that's what we need to be thinking about is what does it mean to the client? That's, that's always the underlying message.

Nigel Rawlins: Yeah, you'd laugh. Amazon delivers to my house every day now. Ha, ha, ha,

Fiona Allman-Treen: Do you know what my friend actually said to me? Her daughter was ill and she said, I swear to goodness, I thought the Amazon man was going to knock at the door and see, was she okay? Cause she hadn't ordered anything today.

Nigel Rawlins: Well, it's one click. It's got all my details in there. Unless of course I want to use a different card and it's so easy. And you know, I sometimes shop around, but there are some, Shopify is really good like that too, because their system recognizes you as well . 

Fiona Allman-Treen: Yeah. We love Shopify. We really love it. And, and it's interesting because we do get some clients who will come to us with a fixed piece of software in mind like that, and they say, can you work in Shopify? We absolutely can, but it depends what you need from your website, we do have a couple of clients who moved to Shopify and it's not the right fit for them because they're at a level where they've got a huge amount of customization.

One has over 130, 000 product lines and at that point you really need a custom solution.

Nigel Rawlins: I would not like to even think about how to organize that.

Fiona Allman-Treen: No, it was fun.

Nigel Rawlins: Well, the difficulty is getting the particular product, the description. I guess they use a SKU number, S K U, so that you can track it, and then you've got to track if it's sold. 

Fiona Allman-Treen: And sometimes it's, it's what you don't say on your website can damage you as well. I mean, I ordered, it's my daughter's 21st coming up and I ordered her a beautiful necklace from, from this shop online and really nice. And I knew the company like as a bricks and mortar company as well. So I had no problem spending this and then I'd got this email back saying, Oh, thanks very much for your order.

We'll be in touch within five working days. And I thought, what do you mean in touch? When's delivery? When is that coming to me? How's it going to come to me? And I phoned up and I asked all of those questions. I said, you know, there's nothing on your site says about delivery times. Oh, well, we don't like to guarantee times.

I was like, well, I don't know if I'm going to be waiting a day or a month. Oh, well, it's usually within five or six working days. And I'm like, okay, do I need to be in? Is it signed for? Oh, um, Oh, I don't know, nobody's ever asked that. And I'm thinking you're losing sales. I know that you are.

I didn't say it to them because nobody wants to be educated on their website from some mad woman on the phone. But it is that thing, you know, you, you need to put that stuff out there. And again, having somebody perhaps one step outside your business as your design agency agency should be working with you as a support system should be pointing these things out as well and saying, let's put that on there.

Nigel Rawlins: Well, that's the benefit of your experience because you've been doing this for a number of years, I did have a mentor and he used to say, you know without seeing,

Fiona Allman-Treen: Oh, I like that. Yeah.

Nigel Rawlins: knowing without seeing, these are the issues because you know when they come through the door that that's the issue.

And that that's a really important point you've made because, we do order a number of other things and then you order it and then you don't really hear anything. And you're thinking, well, when's it going to turn up?

Fiona Allman-Treen: Yeah.

Nigel Rawlins: That's where Amazon's killing it. But, it's pretty obvious that what Amazon's done is that they've got warehouses in most regional cities now.

But there's also, there's another place that we order stuff from if we want a bigger appliance like a washing machine. They deliver the next day too.

Fiona Allman-Treen: Yeah. It's crazy.

Nigel Rawlins: They've got it. And this is, it could be a $2, 000 fridge or it could be a $700 or $2, 000 or $5, 000 TV. It's there the next day. And again, we're in regional Victoria , so for them to do that, I guess that's part of the reputation, isn't it?

So the big point you're making is, it's no good having a website anymore, unless it's doing something for your business. 

Fiona Allman-Treen: Hundred percent. Yeah. A hundred percent. The whole shop window thing. People say, Oh, my website's just a shop window. Then you'll, you have a rubbish website. I'm sorry, but that's just how it goes.

Nigel Rawlins: So how much work do people really need to do on a website? So first of all, if they go through your process, you've got quite a fairly big process that you go through. So how long does it take? They'll come to the door, they say, Yes, we want to work with you, Fiona. What's the process? How long does that process take before you actually have finished, say, building it?

Because obviously it's a whole lot of steps. Some of them are pull your hair out. Steps.

Fiona Allman-Treen: Well, this is the nice thing is we walk you through it. It's a five step process, and what it typically takes time wise is hard to say because everything we do is custom made. So we might do some websites that are like 10 pages. We'll do another one that like the one that was 130, 000 products. You know, it was months and months of work, but on average for a, for a kind of 10 page site, we always work out in advance, we work out a full schedule and that's all part of the strategy piece. So when we start working, stage one is that strategy. So it's the client, working out that target audience. Then we do like an industry 360. So, and this is something that you can do yourselves.

People don't need to come to us for this, you can do it yourself, but have a real look at who are your clients looking at other than you. And the surprise here is it might not be your competitors. We worked with one chain of nursing homes and they said that their target audience, firstly, they thought was, older people was, I think they said 75 to 95.

And we said, no, it's not. Your target audience is the grown children of those people. And then I said, who's your, who are your competitors? Who else are your clients looking at? And they said, Oh, there's this company. There's that company. And they were all other nursing groups. And I said, well, you might find actually it's real estate agents that they're looking at because they, they might think instead of spending all this money on the nursing home, I can have mum or dad come and live with me.

So what matters to them about that is the location and that's what they're used to looking for is locations. So you might have a nursing home on, in your case, on the Gold Coast, it's nowhere near you. You don't want to do that round trip every weekend to go see mum or dad.

You want to know who's in my area. So we do that thing, the whole industry 360 as well, see what else people are looking at. Obviously, we want to know your likes and dislikes, but really we get into the mindset of who's that client. Do they have lots of time? Are they big fact finders? If you've got people who like a lot of information before they make a decision, this is particularly people in the FinTech world.

So if you're aiming at anyone in financial or technical areas, they want a lot of information before they make a decision. So they will want things like your case studies, your accreditations and, uh, associations, affiliations. Which groups do you belong to? What backup do they have? What experience do you have?

Who else have you worked with? Portfolio, all of that kind of thing. And then you've got other people who like, are Amazon buyers. If you've got a product, that's just something that people will buy repeatedly, you know, frequently. Stationery is a great example. People who want to buy stationery. I don't want to have to go in every time and find the page for the Post-Its that I bought last time and find the page for the to do list that I bought last time. I just want that to be saved in my account. Click, bang, done. Short of time, to a point, don't mind the price. I'm still price aware, but I don't mind it as long as I get it the next day. So that strategy piece is the first piece. That's the real homework and that's what we really walk you through.

And then we move on to the design. Because, everything after that is back to that target client. What do they like? You might love black and red and chrome and you're selling to party planners for little, little girls. And we're going to be very sexist and broad here, but you know, they tend not to want chrome.

For a party theme for little girls. So, you know, you've got to look at that sort of thing. So the design has to appeal to them and obviously then when we're coding it, it needs to be visible with their choice of keywords. We had one client who did that. He sold building supplies and he said, I want to come up for building supplies.

So we did that and he came up for building supplies, but he didn't get good traffic. And when we actually looked at the other side of it, what are people searching for? They're looking for builders supplies. They didn't look for building, they look for builders. We changed it to builders and the traffic went through the roof.

So again, all about that target audience. And then to be fair, the last two stages are getting it launched properly and getting a decent hosting platform. Cause the last thing you want is to come in in the morning and your website's been down all night. Nobody knew and nobody's looked at it. And then part of that is support and keeping it updated.

That's the most important thing. Do not do your website and leave it. There's all these ghost ship websites around the internet and they really need support. Your website needs love too. No website left behind. That's my motto.

Nigel Rawlins: Alright, so we're going to go into that in a moment, but I guess the biggest bugbear is how do you get the content out of your clients? The words for the pages? 

Fiona Allman-Treen: Oh, that is the best thing. No, we don't write it because I believe the best people to write about your business is you. But then have guidance. So that's where people come back to us and say, we do this, we do this, we do this, we do this. And I will say to them, okay, so that all you need to put is the end.

So that you, da, da, da, which means you, da, da, da, and it just needs that little, so that you, which means you, eventually this leads to you. It's always got to be that sizzle, not the steak and when flipping that around. So we do guide them on that. Some clients really struggle with this and now, with some of the AI, we say to them, you know what, we can give you a list of starting points to think about, and then we can use AI to search what are the most popular terms at the moment in that industry? What are the things that people are really searching for in that industry? That sort of stuff. We can give them that as a list, but we don't recommend using at the moment, I have to say it's, it's advancing at a rate, but at the moment we wouldn't recommend using AI to write your website.

A human being is always going to get a better connection with another human being than a robot.

Nigel Rawlins: I must admit, in the past I've hired journalists to help write. I haven't created any new websites for several years now. I'm still looking after the 18 that we've developed over the years. So I've got clients who go back maybe 15 years and I'm still looking after their website. So I don't seek any new clients, that's why I wanted to talk to you because I think you are seeking new clients which is good of this particular type and the listeners can hear that you know what you're talking about I don't want them coming to me because I'm busy enough as it is I am supposed to be retired too, but I'm not getting a chance to be retired. So, you launch the website and you can't just avoid it from there. Now you talked about getting a good website host.

So people got to realize it, you don't just get a website, it's got to be hosted somewhere and you've got to pay for that. Now, I don't think we've actually mentioned the types of websites yet ? All of mine are WordPress, except there's a whole range now. There's the AI ones, believe it or not, most of the AI ones are WordPress, actually.

Fiona Allman-Treen: Yeah.

Nigel Rawlins: So let's talk about that. Got some people out there who are a bit technical and they, they want to make it with their particular one, like, I don't know, is Drupal still around?

Fiona Allman-Treen: Still going. There's so many, I mean, there's, there's, there's the platform that you're on. And. And there's also what we call the engine that's behind it that you can use. And I think a lot of people don't realize that with WordPress, because we've developed a lot of sites using the WordPress content management system.

And that means literally we create a completely custom, unique design, specific to that client. But we use the WordPress engine behind it, so it's nice and easy and familiar for them to go in and go, okay, edit page, click that page, type, type, type, save, publish, done. And so they're super happy with that.

But we have other clients, as I touched on earlier with Shopify, who they've heard of Shopify or they've been on a course and they're told Shopify is the way to go. And what we can do is then say, okay, Shopify for e commerce, particularly in early days is great, or as a first step up, is really good.

When you reach the point that you have hundreds of thousands of product lines, and then you've got different varieties, for example, one other client that we have, they have, I think, About 80, 000 product lines and each one has like 12 different color variations and some color variations have three size options, other color variations only have one size option that all becomes very convoluted and it becomes, it's not that Shopify can't handle it, but you need a higher level Shopify programmer to deal with that and they're going to charge you more per hour to make those changes. So you could actually be cheaper going for a different option, but yeah, there's all sorts of options for content management systems. We've worked with Drupal, Joomla, not so much Joomla now, wordPress, everybody is now very comfortable with.

So they tend to be the ones, but what we get asked for more now, rather than people saying about the content management system is, will it talk to my other software that I already have? So if I already have a CRM system or contact filing system of some sort, whether that's, HubSpot, Act, Salesforce, or even taking them into Outlook contacts and stuff like that.

Can my website talk to them? Because they don't want to be doing that copy and paste that we're all trying to escape.

And it's all about getting the right advice as to which one could be best for you. We always give a range of options and give the pros and cons for each and the client chooses.

We will always say, we think this one would be best for you, but. If somebody's dead set on it, we worked with an international charity and they were dead set on Drupal and Drupal's pretty ghastly to work with, to be honest, it's not nice, but they insisted on it because their current site was in it and they didn't want to have to reinvent the wheel.

So we were like, okay, fine. We worked in Drupal for them.

Nigel Rawlins: I did try a Drupal one once and it drove me mad.

Fiona Allman-Treen: Yeah, it's awful.

Nigel Rawlins: Most of my websites have been built over the last, maybe 20 years. Some of them, they've been updated in that time. And I just maintain them.

I haven't built any for a few years, apart from my own ones, my own personal ones. I haven't lost any clients for a long time. So I'm still looking after them. And as I mentioned before, I'm still charging them what I used to charge years ago, so they're getting a really good deal, but I maintain them, but I also do a lot of writing for them. 

Fiona Allman-Treen: Oh my gosh.

Nigel Rawlins: So one of the things that they do need, and we talked about it, is maintenance, but there's more than just maintenance. Can you explain what the maintenance part is and then also about updating content? Because they're not the same thing, are they?

Fiona Allman-Treen: No, absolutely. In the book I talk about this as stage five, which is, we call it support, but really it's customer care or from our point of view, but from the client's point of view, it's making sure you have support. Because what we started out with was saying to people, Oh yes, for your first year, we'll do one update a month or something. And then you find some clients would do nothing for a year and then it comes to renewal, they say, Oh, I've never used it. And I'm like, well, you should have. So now we have a very proactive thing where we actually reach out to them every single month and say, Hi, how are you doing? What's new and good. We have a look, see your statistics have gone up. Your visitors have gone up. Your visitors have gone down. Uh, there was a big spike on one day and they go, Oh yeah, I did an exhibition. And we'll be like, okay, well that really worked because you had so many hundred extra visitors and they're like, Oh, I didn't even think of looking at that.

So, it's giving that, giving them a fuller picture of what's working and what's not in their business, because you don't know what you don't know. So if you're working in a business and you're thinking, Oh, and I keep posting on Instagram and I'm guilty of this myself. I thought last year, I keep posting on Instagram.

I don't know why we get nothing from it. We get very few likes, very few engagement. We had a client came out the blue, really big client, worked with us. Fantastic job. Lovely people, really loved working with them. And I said to them, where did you find us? I said, Oh, on Instagram. And I'm like, I'm looking in my followers and I'm like, you're not one of our followers and they're like, no, no, we just, we just looked.

And that's, that's the hardest part. I think about the support that we give is sometimes you don't always see the benefit. There's obviously direct support. So anything goes wrong with your website, we'll help you with it. Or if you uploaded a picture and it's the wrong way round, then we'll go in and flip that around for you before you've even noticed it is the wrong way round very often.

So there's that kind of thing, but it's also that support of having like an outsourced person who's still looking at your site and saying, this is really working for you, or that really isn't. And one of the things is blogs, you mentioned about using AI for writing. We've got one client in particular is a very niche, very specialist market.

And he said to me, everyone says I should blog. I don't know what to blog about. So we used AI to research what are the most popular and, uh, frequently asked questions in his industry. And it came back with a list of topics and we said to him, well, look, you could , just write about these. If I said to you, how do I know blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

And he said, Oh, well, I would just say you could do this. You could do this. You could do this. You could do, I said, okay, write that down. Or if you're not a big writer, this is one thing I'm guilty of, although I'm a very fast typer when my nails are short enough, although I'm a very fast typer. Very often I just think, Oh, it just takes so long, just takes so long because we've all become so time short.

I will dictate it into my phone and then obviously spell check it and run it through and that's where that can be really useful is using that sort of thing. Now technically that's AI, but I've had that app for years, so I didn't think of that as AI. That's just my little dictation app. So that's that, but that can save you time.

Nigel Rawlins: That's brilliant, because that's what they've got to think. So, we didn't actually mention what blogging is about, because you put together a website, and that's basically going to be fairly static unless you update it. Now, where does the blog fit in? And should we call it a blog anymore?

Fiona Allman-Treen: Well, yes, there's a, there's a lot of division on this. I'm a great fan of this wonderful expression that my mentor used to use, which was cook once and eat often. So it's all about that repurposing. So I say to people now, if they say, should I blog? And I'll say, Are you a good writer? You know, do you like to sit and write?

Do you like to sit and type something out? I love doing that personally. A lot of people, it's not their bag and that's okay. So I'll say, all right, I'll give you the topic. You then dictate it into your phone. And then you run it through a spell check, make sure you're happy with it. Da, da, da, send it through to us.

What you can then do is you can then use that, you can have that as a blog section on your website, which we will optimize and put lots of good, lovely, rich keywords in. So people might not have heard of your company, but they want what you do. So if they start searching for those keywords, that's going to lead them to that blog page on your site, lead them to that blog post on your site. The other thing you can then do is then you can repurpose it as a LinkedIn article. You can then take little snippets out of it and use that as social media posts. You can then have them as little quotes, stuff like that. So you can put those out.

You can have a little quote of the week on your website if you want to have something like that, but just a blog and having it a manageable blog like that. So you do one little thing. You sit and dictate for 10 minutes, if, if that, and do a little bit of editing afterwards, 20 minutes tops, you've got a blog on your website, which is going to drive more traffic to the, through the search engines to your website.

You have an article on LinkedIn, which builds your credibility and visibility on LinkedIn. The more you update your LinkedIn profile, the more visible you become, which if you're selling B2B is critical, you can then use it on Facebook if you're selling B2C, Facebook might be a better platform for you, and then little snippets to go on, you know, on X, uh, on Instagram with a nice little picture, something like that.

So you've got like five or six pieces of content from 20 minutes. So it's all about being smart, what can I use this for again and again, and that will make the big difference.

Nigel Rawlins: That's what it's about, isn't it? It's not just we're going to maintain the backend, so you've got plugins that are doing certain jobs on your website, you've got to upgrade WordPress, but the ongoing content, by putting a blog article in there, it's going to signal to Google that you're an expert in that field and you're encouraging them to do that.

So I like the idea of your support reminding them, what are you doing this month? So they pay for a 12 month package with you. 

Fiona Allman-Treen: Yeah, they, they pay for 12 months and we include that with every new site that we build, we include the first year of hosting. We host with the Amazon web services. So it's the largest commercial host in the world. So we host with them and we also give you a year's worth of updates and contact.

Through the site. Now, sometimes people will say, you know, Oh, now I've decided I want to do this, or now I want to decide to do that. But you also, this is where we give the real values. We can also give you a pushback if we don't think it's right. We had one client that they were selling refurbished camera and video equipment.

And they came up top of the list all the way for Canon. Canon repairs, Canon refurbished, Canon second life, Canon pre loved. They came up all the way and they said, great. And we gave them access to their content management system. And they said, right, we've taken out all references to Canon and we've changed it to Fujitsu.

And they bombed in the search engines. They absolutely bombed. And we said, this is where you need to speak to us and say, now we want to come up for Fujitsu as well. And we'll start building that up as well without losing what you've already, what you've already achieved. So again, it's having somebody who does have that experience who can then say, I get why you think that, but it's not going to be the best solution for you.

Nigel Rawlins: it's worth every penny if, if they will listen to you. 

Fiona Allman-Treen: You can lead a horse to water, sometimes you just gotta drown it.

Nigel Rawlins: yeah, what was the quote I heard the other day about that? You've got to find thirsty horses.

Fiona Allman-Treen: Yeah. Love that.

Nigel Rawlins: Now, let's move on. You also have a program called Publishing Mastery.

What's that 

Fiona Allman-Treen: Yes. Well, that was, do you know what? I had so much fun publishing my book, writing it was actually pretty easy. I just broke it down into bite sized chunks like we're always told to do. But then when it came to publishing it, I didn't want to go through the traditional publishing route. I wanted to self publish because I'm just, you know, totally uncontrollable in terms of being told what to put in and what to take out.

I'm unemployable as a, as a human being. I know this, but, um, I just wanted to make sure that it was easy to get it out there really quickly and that I could do it without having to print like 5, 000 copies. I'm very eco aware. Um, I don't like wasting paper. I recycle every scrap of paper that comes across my desk.

It's just crazy how many times a piece of paper gets used. And so I didn't want to end up with piles and piles of books, not going anywhere. And I, I learned myself. I went on YouTube and I watched, and I mean hours and hours and hours of video on how to publish, looking at all the different publishing routes, the, um, you know, the Amazon KDP, the, uh, lulu. com, there's another big one as well, which the name escapes me. But there's all of these different options, pros and cons of each, how I was going to do it, blah, blah, blah. And also staying aligned with my mission for the book, which was to promote my business. And that was the biggest challenge was the ego kicks in and be like, I'm an author, I'm an author.

And you get all excited about that and you forget that what this is about is driving business. But I spent literally about six months doing that. I finished writing my book in September and I published at the end of March the following year. That's how long it took me to work all this stuff out.

And I found that after I published, so many business owners came to me and said, I've got a book I've written, I've never done anything with it. And I'd love to know, can you tell me how you did it? And I was spending hours and hours on zoom with people sharing, just sharing my journey. And I thought, you know, this is crazy.

I need to be just consolidating this into a single like data bank, a single repository for everyone to get access to this and go, Oh yes, that's, you know, that's all the information I need from how to manage the writing, I don't tell you what to write about, but how I did it, how I managed it, where I got the content from.

Again, repurposing content that I had that I could include in the book and then the publishing itself, the launch, planning the launch, making sure that I did that in a way that was aligned with me. And also I threw in a few ideas that people had given me that I didn't do. Things like in person book signings and things like that.

I didn't do that myself, but I know a lot of people who have, and then using the book as afterwards So again, it seemed to go through these stages and I thought, I can just record all of this, put it in one place and then anybody who wants to follow that journey, anyone who wants to find out all of the information in there.

And I put loads of links to software that I used and websites that really helped me and a few links to like free trials and, software for those sort of bits that I'd used. And I put that all into an online course and called it Publishing Mastery, and I put that online at publishing mastery. co. uk. So people can go and access that. And now it's a little online course that runs on its own and people can, can use it to publish their own business book.

Nigel Rawlins: That's a great idea. Now I saw that and I thought, I'll have to have a look at that. So yeah, but for any business to write a little book about business is, is going to help them with their marketing. And I think that's very, very important. So what haven't we mentioned that you'd like to talk about?

Fiona Allman-Treen: The only thing that stands out that keeps coming up for me is the whole AI piece. Because you can now write the whole book using AI. You couldn't, it's probably just as well. You couldn't, when I published mine, I don't know if I'd have had the discipline to not just have a dabble with that, but what's been most successful for my business the book has been transformative. 

It's literally, it's brought in like a hundred K worth of business that we wouldn't have had otherwise. It's been really fantastic for that. And I think the key thing, the lessons that I've learned with that is the thing that said to me more than anything by clients is I can hear your voice when I read it. Everybody who says to me, like, you know, Oh, did you get AI to write it? And I say, no, I didn't. I did get AI to help me with the title. I was really struggling with the title. I was going round and round. I had three or four different ideas and I put them into AI and I said, give me 10 single line titles from all of these ideas, and I just literally put it.

Absolute mind dump of just all these different ideas. And it helped me come up with the title. And I thought, Ooh, I like the start of that and the bottom of that. There we go. Put those together. There it was. Uh, so that was very useful. The key thing has always been the authenticity. It has to be authentically you and your own voice, I think is really important.

Yes, use AI to get started. Don't stare at a blank page for days. There's no point. Having that. Element of you and what you love. It's actually been really transformational internally as well for me and for my team. Because now my team will say, if we're doing something on a website, one of my guys will invariably say, Oh yes, that's in chapter doodah.

We talk about that. And I'm like, Oh, cool. Okay, it's like, you know, and similarly I'll say when I'm working with clients, I'll start talking about something and I'll just drop into, you know, this is what I really love and hopefully my passion and belief in what I talk about comes through and then they read the book.

They hear that as well. So it endorses your message. And I think just having a book for the sake of it, because everyone says you should have a book, is not necessarily going to work. Really have a book to endorse that you know what you do. That's what it is. It's a business card on steroids. When I go to networking now, I don't take business cards.

I take three copies of my book. And when I'm speaking with people and I think, do you know what? I think my book can help you. Whether or not you'll be a client or not. If I think my book can help you, would you like a copy of my book? I'd like to, I'd like to gift you a copy here. I'll sign it for you right here and now, or sign it by the way, because then people don't throw away a signed book.\

But yeah, you do that, you sign it and you hand it over. They come back to me every time.

Nigel Rawlins: What a great idea. That's an interesting point you made you can imagine websites that are just using AI to, to write their blog articles. I use AI all the time, but not to write all my stuff. It helps me, put together some ideas and then I put what I want into that paragraph and then I jumble it up and I say, look, can you help me clarify what I wanna say there?

And then I have to remove all the strange words that it use.

Fiona Allman-Treen: Yeah.

Nigel Rawlins: like it at the, the big one at the moment is a seasoned consultant I'm thinking seasoned. uses, who writes like that? AI writes like that. So

Fiona Allman-Treen: Love that.

Nigel Rawlins: But yeah, I agree totally. One is you've got to be knowledgeable. Now, AI can be knowledgeable, but it's not the same as our talk now, where you've had some 23 years in the industry, you know your stuff.

So that when somebody comes through the door, you know that they're not going to be a good fit, but you also know where they can go and take that, which is really important. Well, that's fantastic, Fiona. Thank you for the time you spent. How can people find you? Where do they find you? Tell us that.

Fiona Allman-Treen: Easiest way to find me, I'm not hard to find. If you search online or you go to fatpromotions. co. uk, that's me, or if you'd like to download a free chapter from my book or find any of the links to buy it, it's available in, I think something like 20 odd countries around the world. So if you want to reach that, you'd go to Websitemasterybook. com. And you'll find us there.

Nigel Rawlins: Fantastic. And I'll put all the links to LinkedIn and all that when we put the podcast.

Fiona Allman-Treen: Excellent. Oh, I look forward to hearing it.

Nigel Rawlins: So thank you very much, Fiona, for being a guest. 

Fiona Allman-Treen: Thank you, Nigel. Really appreciate you taking the time to chat with me today.