044 Why Your Website is Your Priority
Your website is the single most powerful tool for controlling your online presence, attracting leads, and converting them into loyal customers.
*Please note that this podcast was previously called THE "Video Confidence Coachcast" and the "Do Video Podcast" previous to 2025. THANK-YOU FOR YOUR UNDERSTANDING AS I TRANSITION THE BRAND TO BE MORE CONSISTANT FOR YOUR LISTENING AND WATCHING PLEASURE.https://youtu.be/hqrq-wzeRtU
Quick Quiz Time 🥳
What is the primary reason your website should be the foundation of your marketing strategy?
A: It requires less maintenance than social media.
B: It provides full control over your online presence.
C: It automatically generates leads without effort.
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B: It provides full control over your online presence.
A website is your ultimate marketing priority because it provides unmatched control over your brand, content, and how you connect with your audience. Unlike social media platforms, which can suddenly change their rules or even block your account, a website ensures that you own your space online. It’s the one platform where you can control the narrative, showcase your products and services, and directly engage with potential clients without interference.
Keeping your website up-to-date is essential for maintaining trust and relevance. A well-maintained site not only presents a professional image but also ensures your audience finds accurate information about your offerings. Regular updates demonstrate that you care about your business and are serious about delivering value to your customers. It also provides a home for all your other content, from blogs to videos, creating a cohesive hub for your brand.
This episode reminds us that while social media and email lists are valuable tools, they should complement—not replace—a strong, well-maintained website. For tailored strategies to simplify your marketing, build a personal brand, and reduce overwhelm, work with Zoë Wood and the Video Confidence Coach team to get your website (and marketing game) on point.
What Was Discussed This Episode + Timecodes:
00:00 - Introduction: The chaos of small business marketing and the solution—your website.
01:25 - Why websites are critical for controlling your narrative and showcasing your brand.
03:07 - Case study: Using a personal website to level up professionally.
05:02 - How websites convert leads into loyal customers and create repeat business.
07:32 - The risks of relying on social media platforms and the importance of website ownership.
10:26 - Building trust through ethical data collection and strong website design.
14:03 - The necessity of keeping your website up-to-date and relevant.
16:13 - Final thoughts: Simplifying your priorities to focus on what really matters.
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0:00
Life is chaos. There is so much to do, and especially when you run a small business, there is even more to do, and now you have to do marketing on top of that, you don't even know where to begin. You don't even know where to start. And there are so many ways that you are being pulled in all directions because there is so much that you could possibly do. Where do you even start? Where do you begin? And how do you reduce this crushing overwhelm
0:25
your website? The answer is your website.
0:29
And as you can probably imagine, with the answer to that little rambling story that I gave you, or a little imagining scenario, if you will, I've been trying to start my podcasts with that recently, I want to talk about why your website should be the priority in your online marketing. Now, of course, this, for some people, may seem like a very obvious point of difference, if you have been, you know, marketing yourself digitally or in the online space for any length of time,
0:58
and I'm mainly focusing on the people who maybe are starting a side hustle, or who are moving into growing their personal brand, from not exactly from scratch, but from people who are moving into this space now with the control that you are the one to make the decisions, and not a committee or a team that You may have worked for in your corporate life.
1:23
Again,
1:25
the reason I say that your website should be the priority in your social marketing is because your website is a place where you can control
1:37
you can control the narrative. You can control what is seen and what is not seen. You can showcase your values, your products, your servicing and your offerings without any barriers,
1:49
on desktop, on mobile, on tablet, on whatever device people are going to see your website on. You have full control over it,
1:58
compared to social media, compared to email lists, compared to any other form of getting yourself online, there are always barriers getting yourself on the other pages. There are barriers getting yourself on to platforms like Reddit or Pinterest or again, social media platforms, but anywhere else online that people can find you, comment sections wherever they find more about your business. Again, building that awareness and educating themselves about your solution is always filled with barriers, with things that are going to stop them and hopefully distract them, to keep them on the platform they're on, if it's social media or just life is going to distract them? Where from, say, reading an email that maybe they signed up from you.
2:49
So the reason that I always preface a website, and for example, when I discuss with people about their marketing strategies, I work with people with coaching and mentoring. But I also work people, work with people on larger marketing strategies to propel their business to achieve a goal.
3:07
And of course, a lot of people say, Zo. That's how it works, not what I mean by that is, for example, a client that I worked with who had is fairly successful in the FinTech arena, she wanted to
3:22
go up, I think, three levels within her company, to a hefty and slightly light and a much larger, I should say, pay packet at the end of the day. We used multiple different tactics, and I think I've described this in a couple of other podcasts, so feel free to listen to this out if you've heard the story before. But we very much focused on her personal brand website, her website that was able to showcase herself and the work and the accomplishments that she'd made within her field, within her within the work that she'd done, and every ad, every post, every podcast that we were getting her to guest on, again, these are the podcasts that the higher ups and the managers who were making these decisions actually listened to on a daily basis, and she kept appearing. All of them spooky. It wasn't spooky. We actually made that decision. But again, so that particular story those have for those concurrent listeners who have heard that story before,
4:20
we all linked them to her website,
4:23
and we linked them to different landing pages within her website. Landing pages, as you can imagine, are pages where from either an ad or a post or some other place online, we lead them to a landing page which is able to convert them into leads ultimately what a landing page is. And yes, there are platforms out there that can do it for you in a step by step basis, but usually those platforms are quite expensive when reasonably you can pay a much lower fee and have more control, because it's on a website, especially website that you own, and a website that you have.
5:00
Control over at the end of the day
5:02
and when it comes to making these marketing decisions, because at the end of the day, we want people to convert to leads, to grow more awareness of our solutions and the trust that they have with us, and ultimately, to buy from us. And hopefully, if we're lucky,
5:19
to buy from us repeatedly, to love us, to rave about us, to talk about us with their friends and anyone who has the problem that they were once facing to, then promote us to, then get them as leads to, then start that cycle all over again. That is what marketing is ultimately there to do.
5:37
And your website is your real estate, your website is the place that you fully control, that you can fully control the narrative, and you can lead people down that path to eventually a lead. Now, of course, not everyone is I want to stress that not everyone who comes across your website is going to be the perfect fit for you, but your website can help you distinguish if that is the case for someone, your website can appeal to certain demographics that you want to get on board, because you know that they are willing to pay, that they are easy to work with, that they actively take on board what you say or what you do. They use the products religiously and are repeat buyers, whatever mantras, whatever
6:19
reasons you have for targeting your audiences again, I'm sure you already have an inkling, or even have a very clear breakdown. If you've ever worked with me, you will have a very clear breakdown of your customer avatar.
6:33
Knowing this stuff ahead of time is very useful to and then, like I said, impact on your website and when it comes to priorities underneath, when it comes to marketing priorities, the top thing, the top priority, obviously, should be your client. Should be the who, the what, the where, researching as much as you can about them, what makes them tick, what they like, what they dislike, and how you can show up and be there for them, to ultimately serve them, and then get money from that, of course. But the second thing should be your website,
7:08
because your website is the thing that you work very hard on and proceed to, again, where the sales happen at the end of the day. It's where the magic happens at the end of the day, because the sales are the things that give you money. And I know that seems very straightforward, Zo, but of course, that's what I mean by that, is the website is the place where this conversion takes place.
7:32
And when it comes to comparing websites to social media, you have, as I mentioned earlier on in the podcast, there are so many barriers between you and the client using social media. There are multiple people that I have worked with in the past where, for example, and I have been running my businesses for a while now. Want to say about 10 years ago, there was very much a big cull of Facebook pages, and this was for a multitude of reasons, Cambridge and Cambridge Analytica scandal for one, as well as a couple of other scandals that happened with Facebook at the time. But there were a lot of large Australian businesses that I was working with where their pages were completely wiped, completely gone, never to be voted again. Facebook now, meta was not responsive, as they are now, and was not giving them a bar, keeping in mind that these were people that I was working with that were spending a minimum of something like 15 grand a week, sorry, a week, 15 grand a month on Facebook. Ads alone, they were growing these million million follower accounts on Facebook, and
8:45
it was gone. It was gone like that, boop done.
8:50
And this, as you can probably imagine, took a major hit to their sales revenues, to their awareness, and they had, because they had not taken the time to invest the energy that they put into their Facebook and their ads onto their website to hopefully get email lists at it, I'm sorry, to get email addresses at a bare minimum,
9:11
they lost,
9:14
you know, a lot of their team. They lost a lot of their revenue really quickly, and they had to scramble to try and get back on board to where they were. And of course, some of them have had to close unfortunately, and some of them have been able to reconfigure themselves to not rely so heavily on social media. And as I said, social media can be great, it can be useful, and it can suck up a lot of time,
9:38
but your website is there to process those leads, to get people on board, or to give people who are just interested in the what you do or the solution that you can provide once they want to be able to see the website and know that the information is correct and up to date, because your website should be the first thing that you update whenever anything changes, your website should be the first protocol and.
10:00
Then your email list, then your then social media, and in that order,
10:06
you ultimately have control over the data that you collect. And hopefully you're doing this and following any of the laws that have been created regarding data collection on your website, in your specific country, or in the demographics that you target, that you target,
10:26
and you're ultimately able to since you're doing that ethically, you're able to build a stronger relationship with your audience, because again, you have direct access to them. You have very little blockages between you and them regarding answering their questions, engaging with them, providing them answers, either in blogs or in videos or in other ways of content and marketing yourself. Using your website as that go to place allows you to control, ultimately, the narrative, but also allows you to keep an eye on what people actually want to engage with, because, yes, the social media platforms do provide insights. The or analytics, as they're also known, is essentially a lot of numbers and graphs and plenty of other things, but they also hide a lot of that information because it's not pertinent to you. It's pertinent to that platform. You might be the one bringing in those eyeballs. You might be the one bringing in those clicks and that engagement and that time being spent on the platform. You might be the one bringing those people in or keeping them there to a more extent, especially over the past couple of
11:33
years. But you don't own that content, and why would they give it to you?
11:38
Oh, if you run ads, sure,
11:41
but
11:43
they can also change those parameters too. They can also change, for example, when I was doing Facebook ads, to be honest, over the past, I think three years ago, they blocked my account despite the fact that I was doing about two grand worth of various clients and ads, and they just blocked me because, of course, and I couldn't get a hold of anyone, and then they lost themselves money. Of course they would. And the reason I bring up this annoying story for myself is that it's not that hard to do to be blocked and locked off by these platforms, because, again, they provide the parameters. But one issue that we continually, continually kept running into was we would set up these ad sets. So ad sets are essentially lists of information regarding the people that we want to target, and then this information can then
12:31
inspire, hey, we want to list these type of people. This is the audience that we want to attract, and we're able to have a better idea of the type of people that were able to give us their email address to buy a free book with and pay for shipping. Again, whatever the package we were offering at the time,
12:49
we're able to do that via these ads.
12:53
And they would change the ad set parameters. Again, the information that we put into these ad sets, they would change them around, and they would take more money, but be serving our ads to people who did not want them or who are not interested.
13:10
We got so many, I think one day, I think it happened at like 11 at night and the next morning came in to a list of complaints
13:20
of people seeing this ad who just didn't understand it big. It's mainly but people who were just not our time are not our demographic, not our target market. And then I went to the ad set, and it had physically changed. I looked at the screenshots the before and after. They had changed. No one on the team had changed it. I had not changed it. And it's because it's that it's their matters platform, it is readers platform, it in its LinkedIn platform, what have you. They're the ones who have the platform. Therefore they're the ones that should get all the credit and energy and effort and time.
13:57
Thank you for letting me rant a little bit about that particular story.
14:03
But all in all, your website hosts, all your content, all your blogs, all every piece of information that you put out will have a web page associated with it. Every service that you offer will have a very detailed description and also very detailed outlines of how you go about providing your product or your service. What are shipping times like when someone purchases something from you, or maybe, if it's a bespoke piece, if you do specific bespoke products, what is that timeline like? What is that process like? Yes, you could do like an infographic that you infographic that you put on, say, a social media post, but people are going to find that on your website, because they're going to be looking for it on your website,
14:47
and when it comes to the energy and time that you put into it, I have met so many people who have not updated their website in six months a year, two years, and I am surprised, because.
15:00
I'm wondering why things aren't working out for them
15:04
when it comes to again, specifically in the niche that I focus in on, and
15:09
it's because the website needs to be updated. Honestly, I update my website, I'd say every day, at a bare minimum, not major changes every day. I mind you, I'm not the Terminator, but I update my website every single day,
15:24
because I want to be able to provide a useful tool to my
15:30
customers and my leads and also people who do not know me. I want them to see the messages that I have on my website and feel comfortable in approaching me, in approaching me and my team about getting their marketing sorted, about connecting the dots to reduce overwhelm from themselves, to build their personal brand. That's what we're here for, and we do so via our website. Everything else trickles, trickles down underneath that, because the website is what we fully control.
16:02
Now, of course, there is a whole other kettle of fish of the search engines and platforms and all the shenanigans that they are doing, but that is a completely different podcast episode. I
16:13
want to thank you so much for your time today in joining us on the video confidence coach cast, I hope you have
16:20
felt inspired. And if you have not touched your website in a while, Do not stress. I am not blaming you. I'm not shaming you. There are so many things to do in and on your business. I very much come across that self, across that with myself, regarding perfectionism and
16:36
a little bit of my focus just goes all which ways,
16:40
but to be able to simplify and reduce the overwhelm, especially if you are a solo gal, if you're the only one in your business, working on your business, then taking that time to prioritize and focus on the things that really matter most, and really get those leads, get those people trusting you, and get that money, then put that focus there.
17:03
Look forward to seeing you or hearing you on the next video, confidence coach cast. Make sure you check out our weekly live streams on Fridays from 10am to 11am Australian Easter, Standard Time. And I look forward to seeing you on the next one. Bye.
The above livestream episode description and transcript were generated together human knowledge + ai.
Who is your host?
Zoë Wood, your Video Confidence Coach connects the dots between personal branding and video marketing. Helping women and non-binary folk in small business, find their way in the world of marketing their passion without the energy drain.
Find out more about how to grow your personal brand with the power of video right here on vcc.training
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