Transcript
My name is Miles Bassett, and this is Ask Wildman.
Welcome to Ask Wildman, an open Q and A live stream produced by Wildman Web Solutions here in Lawrence, Kansas. We are a full-service digital marketing agency specializing in helping small and medium-sized businesses, leverage technology to grow and achieve their goals. We started doing this live stream about a year ago to answer any and all questions that come in. Trying to provide a resource to all sorts of small businesses in our community that are asking us all sorts of questions about technology and marketing and advertising.
So, we figured this was a more efficient way to get things out there. So, we are here to answer your questions. If you have any questions. I see we’ve got a comment here already from our favorite viewer. Hello, Jeff, do you have any questions? Follow his lead and throw your questions in the comments below. Also, this doesn’t have to be a one-way street of communication. If you have some experience dealing with what we were talking about, you want to jump in, be part of the conversation. Please jump into the comments. If you are seeing this later, you’re not watching this live. You can still involve yourself by emailing us your questions at askwildman@wildmanweb.com.
I have that address scrolling below me here in the ticker. If you need it. And we’ll hit your questions next week as we do this every week, Wednesdays at 11 live streaming to currently our Facebook page, YouTube channel and Twitch account. So, pick your poison there also one final note here, before we get going, if you like what we’re doing, you think that our content is helpful you would like for some more people to see this, be able to ask us some questions please like share comment, subscribe, what to do. That helps us to reach more people, be more of a resource and answer some more questions. So, without any further ado, I’m going to bring in my partner, Mike, to help answer some of your questions.
Hello, Mike, bringing you in right in the middle of a drink. You’re welcome. Good morning. Miles. How in the heck are you doing, sir? I’m doing good. Ready to take over the world. Let’s do this, Mike. All right. Like I said, this is an open Q and A, so anyone watching out there please feel free to throw your questions in the comments below and we’ll hit those as they come up.
If you’re watching this later, please email us, at askwildman@wildmanweb.com you can also check out our website for more resources. We’ve got tons of blogs, articles, and other resources for small businesses, all free and ready for you to use at wildmanweb.com. All right. To start things off here before all the questions come pouring in, as I’m sure they will here, you guys are just furiously typing out there.
I wanted to hit on something that we don’t really talk about a lot here. I feel I end up falling a little bit more on the technical side, talking about websites and apps and building stuff. Cause that’s mostly where I live. And then Mike, you fall over on the marketing side, we end up talking about messaging and advertising and social media and that kind of thing. And there’s one thing that we gloss over a lot yesterday. I was building a couple of sites for clients and realized how much time I actually spend on the design of even the simplest of websites. Just building out a simple one-page landing page for a client yesterday and spent hours just getting all of the colors and all the alignment and everything just right.
I realized that we really don’t talk about that a lot. So, I put together a couple of tips for small businesses when it comes to design first and foremost design is everywhere. Yeah. It’s not just when you’re building a website, it’s not just when you’re designing a new logo, it can be. If you are posting to social media, doing a new business card, or even the restaurant owner that is writing a menu out on there, a little chalkboard out fronts on the sidewalk, you always have to think about how something looks.
So that comes to my first tip here as know your objective. In business design has function, it’s just as much about function as it is about form. No matter what you’re doing, if you’re putting together a website, if you’re putting together a new logo, if you’re just posting your social media, you have to think first and foremost about the function of it. I find that people, when they’re putting something together, aesthetically they’re designing something visually they tend to get lost in the design of the whole thing and the aesthetics of everything. They have an idea of how they want this thing to look, and then they end up just going down this rabbit hole of the visual end of things and lots of times we’ll lose track of what this is supposed to do in the first place. My tip here is to first, before you put pen to paper, before you start working on something, think of what it’s supposed to do. Find the function. Is this supposed to catch people’s eyes is it supposed to communicate a particular message?
Is it supposed to display a particular product or a service or a, how are you displaying this as its online? Is this a physical signage being H how is this actually being put in front of someone? Think about all of these things, and then keep that in your mind. Maybe write it across the top of your notebook across the top of your document. However, you’re working on this to make sure that stays top of mind throughout the entire design process. I had a quote here from the late and great Steve Jobs. He says most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like. People think it’s the veneer that the designers are handed this box and told, make it look good.
That’s not what we think design is. It’s not just what it looks like and feels like design is how it works. So, it’s important to think about design in terms of both form and function. It’s really easy to lose track of that function. At least on my side of things. Maybe some other people will go off the other direction, but make sure you keep both of those in mind. Second tip here is just sticking to your brand. Be consistent with your fonts, with your brand colors. That doesn’t mean make everything look exactly the same, or just slap your logo on every single image that you put out there. It means. All of your imagery and everything that you’re putting out there should have some sort of consistency.
It should look like it’s coming from the same person. And some of the easiest ways to do that is to incorporate some of your brand colors and your brand fonts in, throughout the design. So just go scroll through our social media. You’ll notice lots of whites and blues, some of the blues that you see in the mountains of our logo our particular fonts, we’ve got a set of fonts that we use in different functions.
So, we use those a lot, not exclusively, but those are all over the place. And it looks and feels like it’s all coming from the same place. This gives you a cohesive brand identity, and eventually allows you to have this very quick reaction of people. When they see your designs. When they see just a post on social media, they haven’t read it yet, they haven’t looked at the imagery, they just get this glance out of the corner of their eye, and they know it’s you. Think about some of the most successful brands, biggest companies in the world. I’ve just used Steve jobs, so, Apple is a great one where they have a very established visual brand identity out there. As soon as their commercial comes on, as soon as their ad shows up their logo is there, you don’t really have to look at it and it’s got that very clean, they always have the just unreal white background in all of their ads.
Everything is this pristine white. They have this complete visual package built out across everything that they’re putting out and in visual mediums so that you don’t have to think about it that’s Apple. So, you can do that on a smaller scale by just throwing in some of your colors, some of your fonts and trying to make everything a little bit more cohesive across the board.
Next tip is white space is the space in between the elements and your design and the outside border. Don’t waste it. This is something that you can use. People don’t really look at it a lot. They think it’s just empty space in between what they’re trying to put out there and the margins that they have to have between the outside borders. But you can use this intelligently, first of all, just to keep everything simple looking, you have to have the proper spacing in between letters to make sure everything is legible. That kind of thing is known as passive white space where it’s not really meant to do anything. It’s just making something a little bit easier to read, making it format a little bit better, depending on if you’re posting to Facebook or maybe this is a display ad, or maybe this is print media or something.
This is a little bit more strategic and functional putting out there to make sure that you can actually read everything active white space is something that’s really meant to do something it’s a little bit more intentional. The best example I have here is FedEx. If you look at them, the logo at the E and the X, the blank space in between those two letters actually forms an arrow, which being a shipping company is an accurate representation of what they do.
And whether you notice it or not that little messaging there is subliminally getting in there and letting you know that they like to move. So, use that white space effectively really be, be cognizant of the blank space and the backgrounds of your images. Keeping that in mind, white space doesn’t have to be white. Your backgrounds can be much more interesting if you have an image there with a nice overlay. So, you can still read the text, or you just have a cool pattern in the background, a nice frame around everything. These things can elevate a design from just plain text on a white board. That comes to my second, the last one here.
And that’s just keep it simple. Don’t go crazy on these designs. Simpler is always going to be better, especially in the small business space. You’re going to waste hours and hours working on designs only to find that you’ve overdeveloped something it’s way too busy. It doesn’t make sense anymore. You’ve lost sight of your original function. You’ve completely skipped all of the previous tips that I’ve put out here just because you’ve overworked the thing. So, keep things simple. As soon as something’s good, maybe get a second pair of eyes on it or something and push it out.
Finally, this one’s a little bit broad, but just be creative. Look for something different. Try to stand out a little bit. Visually, this is something where people really can flex their creative muscles a little bit more than they can in the regular day to day business. You can put your content out there and just do something just a little bit different from what your competition is doing from what everyone around you is doing and you’ll stand out wonderfully. Just in the last couple of weeks, we’ve started putting out these audios, which I really love. It’s little clips of this show and other audio content that we produce. It’s got this little sound wave moving animation on there, and usually the transcript of what we’re saying.
So, it’s really enticing visually, but also primarily one of the reasons I like it is it’s different. I don’t see a whole lot of people putting out content just like that. This is your time to shine, to be a little bit creative, be a little bit different, put out something new, be a little experimental. You can stay on top of the most recent design trends, or you can just try to be yourself, but overall, try to do something new. Try to do something a little bit different. Be creative. So those are my tips for design for small business. Mike, did you want to jump in on any of that? Otherwise, we’ve got a couple of questions coming in on this.
Okay. Yeah, I’ll throw my 2 cents in Miles. I’ll try to keep it brief here for you. But to me, the reason you touched on this a couple of times there, to me, the reason that design is so important is because it’s usually the thing that draws somebody in attention wise, even on a subconscious level before they actually read or listen to or digest, what the message so to speak in the ad is known, or when the, seeing the product, on a shelf or something like that.
It’s usually that font or that look or that logo, or that sound. We didn’t touch on sound design there, but that’s also extremely important and we’re going to get into some sonic branding stuff later on when we get into the news. I do have some audio, voice related news stuff for you. Of course, we couldn’t get away without that. So, I’ll just throw that in there, of just the why just to break it down into one simple sentence of why you need to take this really seriously is because it could be the difference between getting somebody’s attention and not, and or your competitor getting their attention.
And then the last thing I’ll throw in and we could expand upon this thing for a whole show in terms of different design elements and design tactics and strategy, but I think color is really important too, and underrated. Back in a former life of mine, I was actually a lighting designer for touring rock bands. How many former lives do you have? This man is like a cat. I’m living a little healthier these days, but yeah. So anyway, so in that period, I did a lot of studying on the psychology of color and it’s really interesting, the emotions and the feelings and the thoughts that can be produced. And this is all backed up through clinical trials, not just some crazy lighting designer out there pushing buttons. Through color, you can create emotions, you can create reactions and its really powerful stuff.
You do need to take a lot of thought when you’re putting together your brand into your color strategy, which you alluded to because it does a whole lot more than you think on the subconscious level. Let’s get to some questions. Yeah, color is a lot there. You see all those studies out there saying certain colors create certain feelings, certain emotions where some will create trust, some will be inspired. Some people say that the red and yellow used in McDonald’s is specifically scientifically proven to make you hungry.
So that’s true. There is a lot out there, my, my point in there was really to just. Use your brand colors to make things cohesive, but yeah, you can do a lot more with that and think about your colors that you are putting out there, both in and outside your brand colors, and you really need to, because you don’t want to give a w you don’t want to give the wrong subliminal messages, if yeah.
If I’m wanting somebody to be, really active and passionate about my product and yeah, I’m probably going to use some reds, some yellow, some oranges and purples, I’m not going to use blues and greens. That’s a more cooling, empathetic, relaxing type of a, an emotion that you’re going to get across with that. And so, you really, that’s why it really needs to pay some attention to this. I’m not saying you got to, become a scientist over it, but don’t just go through, hey, my favorite colors are blue and green. I’m going to make my logo of that. No, you have to put some thought into how you want people to think and feel and react when they see the colors that your brand represents.
Yeah. And that brings up kind of my first point here. And that was that design is everywhere and we were talking about logos and websites and that kind of thing. But then, McDonald’s, they’re putting that stuff all over the, they’re talking about the colors of the booths and their restaurants. So, this can come into play when you’re just painting the walls of your physical store. Yeah, it’s, it really is all over the place. When you’re thinking about the aesthetics of something, when you’re looking at the visual elements that represent your business, whether that’s your website or your storefront, or your physical space, or your logo or your letterhead, or your social media, whatever you’re doing, these tips should be fairly all encompassing throughout all of those throughout all those mediums.
Yeah. And if we put this in website terms, really your website is just an, if we’re talking about traditional retail store, it’s an extension of. The square footage that you have in your store. And all of that stuff needs to align on, on a branding sense, but you also need to think about the customer journey and the customer experience and how they’re going to relate to all the design elements that you’re putting into your website, as well as your store.
And then as you said, making sure that it’s cohesive. I was making this point to somebody the other day actually Miles. I think just yesterday, it was that I see this trap and I’m not trying to blame local small business owners. That’s not what’s happening here. I’m just, I’m just pointing out a scenario that could use some improvement from my perspective. And that is, if I’m a downtown business owner and I put so much time. Into, that experience of people coming into my store and that and walking them through the volume process and being that knowledgeable person that they can talk to face-to-face and having that local hometown feel and shop local shop local.
How do they feel when they go to my store online? And it’s a Shopify site and it’s this big corporate yeah. Bluffing that looks like everything else. It’s a cookie cutter of every other type of retail shop out there. And it’s not local. It’s not personalized. It’s not customized to that Lawrence downtown feel. That’s a complete disconnect that probably 80% of them are doing right now. And again, I’m not blaming them because that seems like a reasonable solution, hey, Shopify. Great company. I’m not bashing Shopify. But it certainly is a design. And I would say a customer experience disconnect from what I’m trying to get across as a local shop owner in a place like downtown Lawrence.
Yeah, no, there’s some things that you can do with that as well. Cause that is, I mean that’s bridging the gap between the visual design and then your own, your messaging. So, you’re always talking about putting out a message. So, I was trying to make a point of making sure that the visual elements of your brand both online and in the real world are cohesive in one way or another.
But your message is the same thing going from online, through your advertising, to your social media, to your website, into your physical location, your messaging should remain consistent. And those two somewhat converge Here, where you’re talking about, having an online shop or something and where you can put those things together. Tools like that, really, they do have their time in place. They’re definitely a very they’re easy, but if you do have a message like that, and then they show up at a cookie cutter Shopify site, then that can be a disconnect. So maybe you can utilize the visual elements there to help to make that transition or to make things a little bit more cohesive where, you’re designing the Shopify site a little bit more, maybe you’re using your product imagery or, you’re making sure that it’s utilizing the same colors and the same fonts.
You’re customizing it a little bit more. So that there isn’t that just jarring shift from local custom business too. Large corporate cookie cutter, black and white online shop. Yeah. There are some things that you can do within the visual space to help, to assist with your messaging and to make sure that this entire customer journey is a little bit more, let’s just say a little smoother.
A hundred percent Miles, and to be completely fair, I am being a little overly, highly critical, cause I’d much rather them have a Shopify site than not have an e-commerce site or have a Wix site that’s pieced together by rubber bands and paper and glue. But yeah, there, there is a disconnect there. And so that’s just going to take times, this whole thing is an evolutionary process and to be fair, there hasn’t been a lot of good local solutions, at their fingertips in the past. And like I said, I’m not casting blame out there saying, oh gosh, you guys are idiots or something, it’s just it’s a good transitional piece, but not where you end up wanting to end up when you’re thinking about your customer experience and your overall brand and something I don’t think a lot of people necessarily think about, they think about their physical location and making sure that’s nice and inviting. They’ve got flowers on the table and those extra little touches just to make it that much nicer. And then their website’s just this black and white block thing and those things.
Yeah. These things have to connect, and you have to have put that same energy and love into your online presence as you do into your physical location, especially in 2021 where a lot of businesses, that’s a big piece over there. Let’s get to some questions here. Yeah. We got some questions coming in here and then we’ve got some other topics. I know we want to get to so first question here Probably going to fall over to you, Mike, you’ve got more production experience here. Any tips for making short promotional videos with a green screen? Okay. Yeah, a little bit off topic here, but yeah, I don’t know. Are they asking about I get, Oh, it’s Jeff.
Okay. I can see it now, yeah. Does this flesh out your question, Jeff, or are you asking about process or are you asking about what kind of production equipment that I need and stuff like that, I’ll just start with process. I think the best thing to do is to storyboard something out. Even if it is good, it’s going to be a short little thing storyboard out, maybe not every frame, every shot, or, everything that you want in that. So, it’s going to be thought out and that’s not to say that you can’t improvise because sometimes improvising.
In the middle of a shoot, it will get you something better, but at least have a starting place by storyboarding everything out and scripting everything out, which is something that I don’t see everybody do, their due diligence on. And then the next step is to actually shoot a whole lot more than you need. That’s the, just the number two rule of thumb is just shoot, shoot, shoot, try things out, in the shoot while you’re using the green screen, take chances. Like I said, improvise things that maybe aren’t in your script that aren’t in your storyboard and shoot as much as you possibly can because you never know when you’re using a green screen, when something might work, when it might look hokey later on when you’re editing things.
That’s just my kind of strategy two tips there, but I don’t know. I don’t know if that’s where you were wanting me to go with that question. Jeff, he’s followed that up with visuals. Just the word visuals. Okay. It’s a little vague, I’d say, the power of a green screen is obviously you can use, visuals from all over the world or, wherever, but you can also get a little drunk on that.
I feel like so that’s why I feel like, the storyboard exercise is really important because, make sure that everything you’re showing on your green screen is relevant to the end message that you’re trying to get across with your end consumer. And you’re not just, having fun for the sake of having fun.
Now, again, when you’re shooting stuff have fun for the sake of having fun, but I’m talking to like when you’re actually putting these short promotional videos together, and the editing process is going back to that storyboard, go back to that original messaging that you were trying to achieve and say, hey, does this really.
Achieve, the, that with this image that we’re showing on the green screen, is it really translating to that message that we’re trying to get across to the person? Or is, are we trying to, are we just trying to too hard, so to speak my showing things that aren’t exactly relevant to the end message.
So hopefully that helps you. Yeah, I’ll jump in and just say that probably defaulting back to some of my design tips here is keep your function in mind. Decide what you’re wanting to do with this particular video and then make sure that everything you’re doing is in pursuit of that goal.
Green screens are a fun tool, but they’re just one tool in your belt. And so, if that cool green screen background, isn’t. Necessarily pointing you in that pro in that direction, isn’t helping you to make whatever point it is that you’re trying to make. Then, sometimes I’d rather just see your office as the background or a plain wall or something like that.
You don’t necessarily have to use every tool in your belt and every fund, new toy that you have for every single message that you put out there. Yeah, back to my tips here of know your objective and keep it simple. Apparently, that was the advice he was hoping for. So awesome.
Glad we can help. He did throw one thing in here while I was talking about design stuff. He says, thanks, thank goodness for professionals. I can’t draw a stick figure. That that two points on that one is, don’t undersell yourself. Lots of people are a little bit more.
Creative visually, then they know, like I can’t really draw at all. I have no visual art experience, but I can do some graphic design stuff. We put that art on a screen. There’s lots of tools out there to help you out with everything. I can do lots of great web design stuff. Coming from my coding background, having that technical expertise allows me to do a lot of things online that, some strict, more strict designers can’t necessarily do.
And so, your skill sets may shine visually in ways that are unexpected. So don’t short sell yourself. And overall, we’re not saying that you have to design something fantastic. This doesn’t have to be a masterpiece. You’re not making the next modal ISA or something or making a post on social media.
And instead of just putting black text on a white block, for you guys have Jeff talking to you. I know you have greens and gold in your color scheme, just throwing in making, instead of that white background, maybe it’s a very light gray. Maybe you have a cool border in your greens or in your goals or something.
A gold border could really make something shine. And that text, maybe it’s also a goal to match the border and has a little bit of a drop shadow to make it stand out a little bit, just little things like that can help your message to stand out amongst the noise online. We’re not necessarily talking about drawing stuff out or, designing a masterpiece, just little tiny things and fonts and colors and adding just a little more thought into the visual elements of your brand, both online and in the real world can help to elevate your business just to that next level.
So, I just wanted to hit on that. And then the second point there is obviously thanks. Could they goodness for professionals. Yeah. Know your limits. There are lots of great designers here in Lawrence and everywhere if you’re listening. Somewhere else, obviously we have some graphic designers over here and we do some good work there, but I know there are some other amazing designers here locally.
Definitely make sure to know your limits and reach out to a professional when. Necessary. I feel you just gave a drunk driving piece PSA there. What do you mean drunk driving PSA. Never mind. What’s the next question. All right. Jumped in laying there. Hopefully somebody in the audience. Got it. Just right over my head. I don’t know. You were talking about knowing your limits and asking for help when you need it.
All right. All right. Yep. Okay. Yeah, if you’ve got any other questions on that, please throw that in the comments here, we’ll hit those as they come up. I’m seeing some other things flowing in here, but I did want to take a little bit today and talk about something that came up this this last week between this show and our last one.
And that is, something I’ve talked about on this show before. But I think it’s about time that we rehashed it and maybe dove a little bit deeper into it. And that is hosting. We’re not talking about hosting a party here. We’re talking about web hosting. So, when you are, whether you have an existing website or a, putting together a new website, you’re going to need a couple of things.
First of all, it’s the website itself. Those are the site files, the design, the pages in there. You’re going to need a domain and you’re going to need hosting those three things together. Give you an actual website, live on the internet. Your site files are just why I had just described there. It’s the actual pages, it’s the design, it’s the HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and whatever other nonsense he got going on in there to display your website.
You can open these files up locally and just have a display on your computer in order to get on the on the internet, you have to have a home. So that means you were paying someone, some company for some space on a server somewhere to actually house those webs those files. And the domain is just the address of that host.
Every computer in the world has an IP address. Including the host server that is housing, your website files. Your domain is just an easy nickname for that IP address. It’s actually masking an IP address. If you look at the top of your browser right now, you’ll see facebook.com, youtube.com, wherever the hell you are.
Those are all just masking, an actual long string of numbers. That is the IP address pointing to the location where that server is.
However, people can’t remember that crazy long string of numbers and people can’t remember words. So that’s what domains are. They’re just masking the address of the location on a server where your website files are.
So that’s a quick rundown of how websites work. Now we talk about web design on here a lot. We talk about building functional websites. We’ve talked about domains. I think we did that last week. I actually wrote a couple of articles and publish it to the website a few weeks ago, just about domains, picking a domain, buying a domain best tips that I can come up with there.
But now I want to talk about hosting and maybe I’ll write an article about this as well. It’s important to pick a good website host and it’s something that people cheap out on a lot. Just because, they think a host is a host. What’s the big deal. I’m going to go with the one that’s $5 a month.
Why would I spend a hundred dollars a month on this thing? It’s just a place on a computer. It turns out there’s a ton of different factors that go into website hosts that make it. You get your money’s worth for it. And a lot of it, I want to go over a couple of things there. First of all, is just the different types of hosting so that, when you see these words, what you’re looking at the first thing, and one of the most common ones, especially for the economy hosting packs out there is shared hosting.
If you see shared the word shared, they’ll have some different verbiage around it, but shared is the key word. And that means that you have one server. Think about your desktop computer, there’s one computer, and there’s several different websites living on that computer. That means that one, that computer and everything on it, all those websites are going to run a little bit slower.
Cause there’s a bunch of different people going to it. They’re not going to be able to handle as much traffic. Cause there’s only so many people that can be accessing files from that server. At the same time, you’re going to have limited bandwidth limited traffic, limited file storage. So, you’re only going to have a certain segment of that machine segmented off for you.
And so, it’s going to be fairly limited in how much, physical data you can actually store on that machine. And there’s also some security issues on top of those performance issues. If any, one of the. 10 50, a hundred websites are on that server have an issue. And then that can be an entry point for a hacker or malware or some other sort of malicious material to get into that server.
And then it can access all the different websites on there, depending on what kind of security they have. So, if you have some great service security on the front end, nothing’s getting in through your website, that way you might’ve left a back door open and all of a sudden, you’ve got some malware.
There’s also some just, business reasons to not do that. So, if someone has a shared server, that means that if something goes wrong with that computer, they have to do maintenance on that computer or something. Your website is physically on that server. So, if they have to shut that down, or if any other issues happen there, then your website’s down along with everyone else on that machine.
So, it’s cheap for a reason is what I’m trying to say there. And upstate doesn’t have its time or place, but if you are really looking for something that can handle a lot of traffic hold, a lot of files is high performance and very secure shared is not going to be the one you want to go for. The other end.
Yeah. Of that is dedicated. A dedicated server is that means that you have that entire server all to yourself. So, you have an actual physical machine somewhere in the world in some server farm that is just dedicated to your site, to your application. This is definitely the way you want to go.
If you have a ton of files, if you’re going to be experiencing a lot of traffic and you need a lot of processing power or something as you get the entire machine dedicated to you that way. But again, it can be fairly expensive. So that’s not necessarily a good option for everyone in between those two options is VPs or a virtual private server.
So that means that you are technically sharing a machine with some other people, but they’ve set up some virtual machines on there to give you your own space, your own processing power in there. It’s artificially segmenting up a single machine into multiple machines. And finally, the new player in town is cloud hosting.
Cloud hosting is a little bit but harder to explain. It’s new technology relatively anyway. And the idea here is that you’re actually hosting your site files on not just one machine. But a series of a bunch of different machines. This means that this comes with certain benefits. Your performance is going to be better because it can allocate resources smarter from machine to machine.
If it needs a little bit more, can draw more from over here for you. And then when you’re going slow, it can draw more from over here for someone else. It means there’s built in redundancy. So, if one machine gets shut down for maintenance or a security breach, or I don’t know if the power goes out in that building, something happens, then your site is still up because you’re hosted on a thousand other machines over here.
And there’s also the added benefit of it’s not a physical space on a single machine. That means that it can be vertically scalable. So, you can start off at the lowest tier, just paying, 20 bucks a month, 30 bucks a month, whatever for this package. And then as you grow, you need more space.
You need more you’re going to have more traffic coming to this site. You need better performance. Then you can just pay more and get more and more space vertically scaling your site. So, cloud hosting, while it’s not the cheapest option out there, like shared hosting has a ton of amazing benefits.
And as I said, it’s the new technology in town and it hasn’t stopped growing since it entered the market. I think that’s the name of the game moving forward, we’ll see before I go any further into that, Mike, did you want to jump in on this hosting conversation at all?
No, I think you can get a little ranty. Hopefully this is useful. We did have a comment come in here. That is a useful point. I won’t name the actual company being cited here, but some companies will give you that chief intro year. So, keep an eye on that. Hosting is something that you really want to pick at least a particular provider and stick with because moving is messy and that’s when things break and sometimes, he’ll get stuck into long-term contracts.
Sometimes it’s better because if you sign a long-term contract, you’re going to get better pricing. So do a little bit of research upfront. I’d rather you spend a little bit more time researching the proper provider and then sticking with them in the long run, rather than jumping on whatever one seems to be, have the best deal of the day right now.
And then having to switch a year or two down the line. And yeah, watch out for those intro deals. They won’t necessarily be. Super clear about that. And all of a sudden, your pricing just doubles in the next year or two or something. A couple of other features to look for when you’re looking at different providers look for bandwidth.
So, bandwidth is actually the speed of a network. Higher bandwidth enables more visitors, access your site at one time while maintaining a smooth experience. So, the more people that are accessing your website at the same time, if it’s seeding your bandwidth, then people are going to start having issues.
Things are going to load slower. Some pages might not load at all, or some files might not load meaning that your site loads, but it doesn’t look right, or it doesn’t work. You’re going to start having problems. So, make sure to check on that bandwidth and you’re going to use that to compare different services or different companies.
Also look for an SSL secure socket layer certificate. This adds. Security to your website. It basically allows you to sign, put a digital signature on your website saying, yes, I am who I say I am. Search engines are looking for this. Other providers are looking for this. You’ll actually see improved search results into improved function.
And also, it’s just nice for your visitors because they’re going to look up there and they’re going to see that nice little green lock icon saying this site is secure. If you’re on Chrome. For example, as of, I don’t know, last year or two years ago, they put an update in where it actually has a little red exclamation point.
It says this site is not secure across the top. Looks horrible. And it doesn’t really impact the function of your website, but people freak out and they definitely aren’t going to trust it as much. Think about putting a credit card number into a site that literally says this site is not secure.
Lots of hosting providers are providing SSLs now. So, check for that. Lots of companies will brag about their uptime. Basically, all company, major hosting companies are going to say they offer 99.9% uptime, but that’s just because they’ve got a billion people all hosting on this, and most of it works.
And so that one person that gets hosed every couple of days doesn’t really drive down that average very much. So, I’d say, look at reviews, look at customer reviews at this point. And look for one that if you see one that everyone’s just complaining about their site being down for prolonged periods of time, then you know, maybe not that one backup is an important feature.
Lots of hosting providers are now offering backup features where they’ll actually back up your website. So, if anything does happen, you can easily just restore that backup. You’ll want to look at size of backup restrictions. If they’re backing up gesture files or your files and your database and how many backups, they’ll store and for how long.
That’s the main features that you’re looking for there that can be decision-maker and then finally just storage. How much storage space are they actually giving you? Some of them limited, some of them don’t they just give you unlimited everything. Depending on the type of service that you’re looking for, you’ll see different types of restrictions as far as storage and for a lot of small business websites, actual data storage, isn’t a big deal.
Cause you’re just looking for a website to say here I am. Here’s what I do. Here’s how you contact me. And so that’s really not going to take up much space if you are a larger site or you’re wanting to do a bunch of images, a bunch of videos on there, you’re doing a recurring blog on there, or article posts you’re continually putting more and more content up there.
Or you have user-generated content on your website, then you can exceed a storage limit pretty quickly. Keep that in mind. Yeah, final tip here, is just going to be, do your research. I know I already said this earlier. I was meaning to reserve this for the last tip, but I skipped ahead a little bit.
Do your research upfront. Moving web hosts is a task and is oftentimes a lot more difficult and expensive and a huge headache, much more difficult than you think that it’s going to be. So do your research upfront find a good provider that you know is going to work for you and your purpose is not only your purposes right now, but your purposes into the future.
So, try to think ahead a little bit of what you’re going to be doing on this site. Look at reviews because they’re all going to say that they’re the best thing out there. So, look for reviews of these different companies, find the ones that don’t have a million people complaining about them. Make sure you know your terminology so that when you do that research, you’re doing so in an, a form.
Doing so in an informed way. And you’re able to make the right decision. And finally, on pricing, I know lots of people like to cheap out on hosting. You don’t have to spend a fortune, especially if you’re not developing your own online application, you’re not running a social media company or anything.
You just have a business website, so you don’t need the most expensive thing out there, but also don’t pick the cheapest, go middle of the market, find something that works for, these features find the one that has the features you want, and then shell out the extra 10 bucks a month for whatever it is that you’re needing to do here.
It’s going to be worth it for you, right? That is my hosting rant here. So, if anyone has any questions or wants to chime in on that, please do. So, in the comments Mike, did you have any updates on that or anything else that you wanted to throw in before we move on to the next point? No, I’ll just say a, you get what you pay for. Yeah. Yeah.
And then unfortunately, we get to see that nightmare, a lot of people coming to us and saying, Oh, we’re not in this good situation with the host. And then we have to try to move them or, figure out some sort of solution there. One thing I didn’t actually put in my list here, I actually just, I just thought of, but could be a very useful part of this is support.
Look for one that has good support because when something goes wrong, not if, when something goes wrong, at some point, something’s going to go sideways on your website. You need to know that you can contact someone that you have someone for support. In some of these hosting companies have amazing support.
Some of them really don’t. I’d say the way that a little bit heavier than you think I’ve worked with hosting companies before that. We’re a little bit cheaper but didn’t really have support. And because, I have that technical back background. I could do a lot of the management myself and I didn’t really need that support, but then eventually when something did go sideways, that was out of my control.
I was just out of luck until someone from their support team in Bangladesh could get back to me. Yeah. Look for support as well. That’s a very important factor in hosting. Alright. I think we’re going to move on here. We have a couple of updates from the news desk. I understand. Yes. Yes.
We’re going to give them the news update and then probably going to have to wrap this up, unless there’s any questions down there, Miles that we need to get to really quick.
Got a couple of comments here, but no direct questions. Okay. Go for it. And with the news. Okay. Can you research you? People probably were aware of. Large research organization, the Pew research center, they just recently released I believe it was about a week ago. The new stats for social media use and trends across the United States. And w we’ve got our newsletter coming out. I don’t think it’s out yet.
It should be out any minute though. And I believe Anna is doing a deep dive into this into this research when that article, so make sure you check that out, but basically the overall trends were by and large social media, it has not, it’s not going anywhere. And it, and it’s staying steady over the past, four or five years in terms of overall usage and overall, number of people on platforms of course, platforms are changing and where those people are is changing.
And so that’s, what you can dive into and have a lot of fun on this, but YouTube, seems to be the big, clear winner out of all the different platforms they are really grown strong over the past 18 months or so. And they now have an 81% share of users of 81% of all Americans use YouTube on a regular basis.
So, I believe that was one of our tips Miles at the beginning of the year for success in 2021 was look at YouTube advertising, look at using Google keywords and Google ads in order to re target people who were searching for things on Google video and use a combination of a video and Google ads to accelerate your business on YouTube.
And I’d say that trend. It is definitely on par Facebook holding steady, but still, the second most used platform out there tidbit from that was it had the highest. Repeat users within a day. I don’t know if that’s the way to properly say, give a citation for that stat, but, basically the P that, that was the platform that had the most people going on the platform using it multiple times a day.
And that one in which of course Instagram for advertising purposes is tied in together also a really big mover and shaker. And then of course you have apps like Tik TOK. That are, shooting up the charts with the younger generation. And this was the first time that the peer research center poll, they do these polls and these studies every year.
And so, the first time that they’d included tick talk and next door and some of these emerging platforms. And so, the research, so it was really interesting to see how some of those platforms have been getting they’re utilized. And then on the other side of things on the advertising front, we also had a study, or I guess, a poll that was recently done across all the big advertising firms.
And it was pulled from their chief marketing officers. And basically, what it said, it was over the next three years, over 50% of those polled said that they were going to double their advertising budgets. They were going to grow by more than a hundred percent specifically on social media advertising.
You have obviously it’s, go where the attention is, right. And so, you have the Pew research, backing up the fact that this is where most of the attention is this, that these are where people live, so to speak and where you can find them the most times throughout the day.
And so that’s where the money’s going to flow. And 90, over 90% of those poles that they were at least going to increase their social media advertising budgets over the next few years. And so, what does this mean for us as small business owners and marketers in general? It’s, what we’ve been warning about for years, and years was that there’s going to be a point in time where the big fish, if you will, are going to wake up and they’re going to realize what’s happening.
And so, they’re going to put all of their money or a large substantial amount of their money into these platforms. They’re going to cut their cable budgets. They’re going to cut their print budgets. They’re going to cut their outdoor budgets. They’re going to cut their and welder of it. Budgets went away by force; they’re going to cut all those and where’s that money going to go?
It’s going to go into social media. It’s going to go on digital marketing and this whole thing, obviously supply and demand, right? There’s almost, there’s only so much room in a newsfeed on any given platform. There’s so much, there’s only so many ads that a platform can serve to an audience before that audience turns away and spends less time on the platform.
And so, what’s going to happen is the price is going to go up. It’s just simple supply and demand. And so that means as small business owners and as marketers, should we turn into, should we give up? No, it means we have to work smarter, not harder. We have to really make sure that every ad dollar that we’re spending is going in the right direction and messaging is got to be creaky and got to be critical.
We have to really dot our I’s and cross our Ts on our content and our messaging and what we’re putting out there, because there’s going to be less and less room for error when we’re dealing with the type of budgets that we have with a small business. So, food for thought on that Miles and also.
A couple of interesting things coming out of this as well. Just in terms of where people are going, with the YouTube thing is, there’s obviously a big drop in cable amongst the young people. We’ve known about that for a long time. More and more brands are also going on connected TV, which has really taken over, the segment of the viewing population that is not, or got to say not on YouTube, but in addition to YouTube.
And that’s an area that people can be and should be exploring. But again, the prices on that, I feel like a really going to accelerate fast with these bigger brands coming in and spending a whole lot more money on these platforms and they have in the past. Then the last thing here I wanted to get into was some news about one of our fans, favorite topics, and that is of course voice technology and the app clubhouse.
Miles is smiling because he knows how much I love talking about Clubhouse. Clubhouse as probably all of our viewers or listeners know is a relatively new, it’s just now a year-old social media app. That is audio only and is growing rapidly. It is still in beta mode though, and only on the iOS, on the Apple platform and only invitation by invitation at this point that is going to change and is going to change quickly.
Probably next month, at some point, the platform is going to open up to Android starting with just the US but eventually the entire Android market. And so, it’s going to be really exciting, but a couple of pieces of news circulating around Clubhouse. One of them was actually sent to us by our favorite viewer, Jeff last week he sent me this article talking about.
Clubhouse basically turned down when they were in talks with Twitter, for Twitter to buy clubhouse and they turned down, their offer was reportedly a $4 billion offer. And then basically what clubhouse has done is they’ve parlayed that $4 billion offer from Twitter into evaluation. And they’re now going around and doing another seed round in Silicon Valley, getting more investors at that $4 billion valuation.
So, it seems like at least in the near term that they are digging their heels in, and they are going to see this thing through and not sell out to one of these bigger corporate tech giants in Silicon Valley. We know that they did get an offer. I believe, maybe three or four months ago from Facebook.
So now we have a report directly that they got one directly from Twitter. Both of those have been refused so Miles, just going back from our discussion in the summertime, can a new platform emerge from nothing and go from zero to 60 in a short amount of time and end up being a competitor in the space?
And so far, it looks like the answer to that question is yes, it is possible. So that’s exciting with a good idea anything is possible.
A good idea and great execution, right? Because good ideas are shit. As we’ve talked about on this show, it’s got to be executed. Anybody can have a good idea, but yes, I agree with you.
Okay. And then the next thing about clubhouse, and I really am going to try to wrap this thing up relatively soon. And this was super interesting. I believe Anna put a post out about this, on our social channels yesterday. So go and check that out. But I hop, serve sizzling bacon sounds on clubhouse.
And new menu items rollout is the headline from yesterday. And so, I actually just saw this morning. And so, I didn’t get a chance. I didn’t, I was on slab house yesterday. I didn’t go into the room and check this out. But basically, what I did was they set up they already have a club on clubhouse.
They started a room yesterday, which is where people can drop in and hear what’s going on audio wise. And the whole thing apparently all day long was just the sound of bacon. So how amazing is that a course? Everybody loves the sound of bacon, and it was in tandem with the release of their new, I think it was called their farm cut bacon that was five times thicker than the regular IHOP bacon. I love this idea Miles on multiple levels. This goes back into what I mentioned at the beginning of the show about sound design, and something called sonic branding, which I think doesn’t get as much notice and praise and attention as it should.
Just tying into our conversations over the past few weeks about voice and voice technology. This is a really important space that a whole lot of people need to be taken. The ticket heed and tying into their overall branding strategy as they roll out their voice strategy which hopefully, they’re working on right now.
And if they haven’t already. And do some research about Sonic brand, maybe we’ll do this on a demo show. I don’t have time to really get into it today. It’s just. The way, your brand sounds, and how your brand sounds. And so, this is super a great idea for I hop because what does I hop?
It’s pancakes, but it’s breakfast. And so, what is the most endearing, rememberable emotional sound, probably a breakfast. I think most people would argue the sound of bacon, and certainly that smell, but that sound, and just see the sizzle, that’s what we think about when we think about a great breakfast.
And that’s going to obviously be a part of their entire Sonic branding, is that bacon sound. And they want you to, when you hear that sizzle to think about, I hop, and so it’s really great. I love the way that they use clubhouse to roll that out. I think that there’s, there’s, it’s not the first brand to do something like that, but this was the first time to use it.
And just that, clear Sonic branding of only the sound and ma and creating that image within the listener’s mind. And I really thought that it was a brilliant execution and I hope that more people are going to take some chances and do some things like that. And I’ll just tie this in quickly, because since you brought up, we were talking about design earlier, you brought up McDonald’s and how they go into extreme detail.
And you’re absolutely right Miles about the color, the layout of each McDonald’s, the way that menu is the way things are presented to you, all of that is done from an extreme background of psychology. And so, it was their Sonic branding and they’ve had the same Sonic branding for, I’m guessing probably 20 years now, and that, I’m loving it is their slogan, but the Sonic branding is Don Detta at that then. It’s that little Sonic image that happens several times throughout a commercial, whether it’s a radio ad or a television ad or a video on a social media.
And sometimes they sing it. Sometimes they’ll have a guitar play at, or drama or whatever. It’ll be different incarnations of it. And they’ve reinvented it many times over the, the decades, but they’ve had that consistent sound imaging throughout their campaigns. Like I said, we can look this up to be accurate, but I want to say it’s at least yeah.
A long time. Let’s just leave it at that, and so that’s an idea of their countless examples of this, if you look at corporate branding, but that’s an idea of what I’m talking about Sonic branding. So, I think that even small businesses need to think about that. How do I sound when somebody goes to my Facebook page or hears my podcast, or hears me on a radio commercial or, just a video ad that are running on Facebook, anything that has an audio component to it?
We want to make sure that our S that our sound is consistent and has a message on a sub psychological level that is consistent with the message that we want people to resonate with our brand and our image and our company in general. And it’s, people think about jingles a lot, and that’s probably what their mind will go to on this, but it’s much, much more than jingles.
It’s really about the subtle things that we put inside somebody’s brain and how that connects to our brand and our imaging and our messaging as a whole. And I said that was going to be the last thing, not one more thing for you. And then I really do have to go because do something at 1215 here, but there was this reminds me of a study that I came across about a year or two ago.
Maybe we’ll do. We should do an article about this. This is going to remind me to do the article, but there was a study from Yale recently that came out. I said, a year or two ago, that kind of goes a week or two ago. I read this study and basically what it found. And this is, this is a new study that is backing up decades and decades of studies.
That also basically show the same thing. And that is that people trust, sound, people, remember sound and people identify with sound more than anything else. And this study was about messaging, and it was the, basically the difference between hearing audio only and hearing audio with images. And what they found is that when you only listen to the audio and you take the images out, like if somebody is listening to the podcast right now that they’re going to remember the, what I said far more.
Then the people that watch this broadcast, they’re going to trust what I said more than the people that watched and listened to the broadcast. And so, when we talk about branding, when we talk about messaging and advertising and marketing, that is really powerful, to think about is how can I leverage that audio only component knowing that people are going to remember what I say, trust what I say.
And the third component was reacting to what I say and take action to what I say more than if I if they’re watching it. And the re the reason the rationale behind it was basically because of the simplicity of audio, is that when I’m watching something and the brain is also sending all these other signals, how the person looks, what they’re wearing, their facial expression, all these different things that can be manipulated, misconstrued, et cetera, et cetera.
And when I’m just listening to it, I’m really just absorbing the message on a whole other level that is going to connect with that person on a deeper connectivity. So, I’m going to leave it at that Miles. Cause I do have something to do in 10 minutes, but if there’s any questions down there or something that I can help wrap up this point we’ll get into that. Otherwise, I’ll leave it at that.
Yeah. I think we’re probably going to have to come back to this in another show. Cause those were some real interesting points I’d love to get in on. But yeah, we’ll just use that as a wrap up for today’s show. If you have any other questions, you’re watching this later, please email us at askwildman@wildmanweb.com but yeah, we’ll come back to that whole Sonic branding idea next week.
It’s important stuff. All right. Thanks Miles. Thanks Mike. Okay, so that is it for us this week for ask wild, man. Thank you for tuning in again, if you are watching this later, you’re not watching live. You can still be part of the conversation by emailing us at askwildman@wildmanweb.com. I have that address scroll and below me as always.
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