How to Optimize your Website for Conversions With Calandra Martin

How to Optimize your Website for Conversions With Calandra Martin

Welcome to The Determined Mom Show, and I have a very special guest, Calandra Martin, who will be sharing with us today. Optimizing your website for conversions is an important topic because if you have people coming and they leave and never come back, that’s a problem.

How you got started in working from home, how you get started in your business, and all of those things.

I’ll give you the Cliff notes version. I started my business about three years ago and started my business simultaneously and at the same time as becoming a mom, which was jumping off of the deep end. I had dabbled in network marketing before having my son, and the second that he was born, honestly, before he was born, I decided that I didn’t want to go.

To a regular nine-to-five and be away from him. I decided to go all in in the online business space, wondering what I was getting myself into or what I was doing. And I pivoted quite a few times in the last three years. And finally found my home and my passion and obsession with branding and helping online entrepreneurs stand out in the online space because it’s a busy place to be in, especially now in the world that we’re living in.

And it’s something that lights me up and helps me fuel every area of my life. So I’m obsessed with what I do now. That’s awesome. I love it. I love that story. So what were you doing before, like what is your background or history? I was a college dropout, so I went to college and needed to figure out what I wanted to do.

I dropped out of college and knew that I didn’t want to spend the money on something that I wasn’t—I jumped from job to job. I was a barista. I was a doggy daycare attendant. I worked in a couple of preschools. There were a lot of random things that kind of all funneled into making me who I am today.

Before we go into tips and strategy, I want to highlight what a website does for you and your business. So for my clients, myself, and my business, what I find to be the most beneficial aspect of having a website is that you get those conversions and what that means when you look at conversions.

Getting people through the door, getting them aware of what you do, what your business is, and what your brand is all about, and then keeping them around and opening up the opportunity to nurture them to build a relationship that leads to the sale. Which is the ultimate goal of your business. So it is this machine that works 24 7 for your business.

But then, that conversion is, is the key. What I find a lot of people tend to do is think that the website is just the storefront, right? It’s just the thing that looks pretty and makes you look professional. And while that’s true, it must also do something to support your business.

You must do more than dump the money and time into it. To have it look nice, and that’s a huge misconception. I do a lot of website building for people. Ensuring all those things are in place is also an essential part of it. And make sure your website can even be found on Google or all of these things is important.

So there’s a whole package of things that go into it, and you bring up such a valuable point that people need help understanding the why behind having a website, and I love that you brought that up. It’s very important, and I was somebody who only understood why I needed it once I made one.

Before I work with clients, one of my biggest tips is to set the website’s intention. For example, talking about my website, the brand personality quiz is my number one opt-in on that site. It is the thing that I want people to take action on. So before you go and create a bunch of pages, you have to know what that call to action is, and then you can start placing things strategically to get people to convert.

So knowing that primary purpose, Like the very first step before you even create an account, before you start getting colors and pictures and all of the fun stuff for the website, you have to be intentional on what the purpose is for your website. And that’s sometimes hard for people to identify.

And generally, that is considered—the entire funnel of your business. The user experience, your audience is experience. So if somebody is coming to you for the first time, you have to think about their initial impression of you and what you want that second impression to be.

I think of it as a second date. Your home page is the first date you’re, hooking them in. You’re getting them excited about what you have to share with them, and then your opt-in conversion will lead to that second date, where you get to know them better.

You give them just a little taste of what you have to offer. It could be a connection call, a discovery call, or getting on your mailing list. There’s a lot of. Options for that. It could be a low-cost offer that you’re calling them into listening to your podcast. The options are endless, but you want to be specific on what that is and not overwhelm people with many different options because it gets too much for the user.

The visuals, as does the communication in your writing, do much of the work. So when I work with clients for web design, they typically come to me unprepared. And it’s a matter of looking at the outline of the pages, the content that goes in the pages, and how you’re communicating your message.

So having the purpose identified is the first step. And then you want to look at the experience on every single page of yours. And how you’re communicating your business. Working with a copywriter is helpful for that. Still, it’s also just important to know what that user experience would look like so that you can use the right language to place your opt-ins, buttons, and all the right places to prompt that conversion.

The purpose piece is really important. So if you’re setting up an opt-in and calling people into something on your website, you want it to reflect your next step. So looking at the bigger picture and reverse engineering what your options might be will help get those conversions to matter.

It’s all fine and dandy if somebody signs up through your email. But if they’re not interested in your paid offer because your option has nothing to do with it, , then it gets to get a little bit tricky. So having that intention and purpose and then communicating that throughout every aspect of your website.

We have templates, pretty graphics, and all social media accounts we want to highlight. So knowing ahead of time what your brand identity is, your visual guidelines, Knowing what contact information you’re putting on your site, the clear call to action, the opt-in, and just knowing the messaging around your website, those core elements are going to help you show up and keep that website super simple.

I redid my membership site because I was like, Ooh, I wouldn’t say I like it.  I completely wiped it clean and completely renovated it. And it’s one of those things where I was like, okay, I have to simplify and exactly what you’re saying. And it sometimes helps to have an outside perspective, too, if you’re getting sucked in.

Sent it to somebody that has an eye and an understanding of your business to get that feedback, whether it’s working with a designer or a coach or somebody else in your network; that really, really helps because we get sucked into what our business is, and we know what it is in our brain, but we don’t always know what it is.

We should translate that to our audience differently than we do. We do that a lot, and it’s just instinct. It’s like, don’t you already know what I do, don’t you? What is inside your head, and nobody knows an outside unless you tell them exactly what it is.

So that’s a great idea. These are amazing tips for optimizing for conversions. I love. And do you have any, this is me, this is my little technical side coming out, but do you have any favorite tools you love optimizing for conversions? This is specific to the platform that you use.

So every platform will have different functionalities, tools, and plugins. The two website platforms that I love are WordPress and score. On Squarespace, it’s very easy to set up something like an email opt-in, so that’s already built into that platform. On WordPress, one of the tools that I love is the Bloom plugin, which is for newsletter opt-ins.

You can create as many different designs as you want. So you can create different options and publish them and unpublish them as you need to, and they track all of the conversions for you right there on your website so that you can see on the backend what is working because the thing with conversions is that you want to know your numbers.

If you’re guessing and thinking something’s working, it won’t help you grow that conversion rate. So that’s a tool that I love for that in part. I always love to know everybody’s favorite tool, which is my favorite opt-in tool.

The best place is my website, calandramartin.com. That links to my podcast, my Facebook group, the social media platforms, Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest. And it’s my name everywhere, which is a pretty unique one. I love your name. I was thinking about one of my college names. I love this name, Calandra. 

 Did you hear of it before? That’s impressive. It’s very funny. I won’t tell you where it came from, but could you tell us a little about the Magnetic Boss? The magnetic bus is an extension of my brand, where I help empower female entrepreneurs.

So we have the collective, our free Facebook community, and then we have the membership, which is the paid space with many resources. I need help to begin to tell you all about branding, design, and marketing. And then we have the podcast now, which I’m obsessed with as well, which goes out every week on Wednesday and is full of incredible tips around business growth.