🎙️ I'M ON THE MARKETING MENTOR PODCAST AGAIN

Ilise Benun had me back for episode 562, and this one is the episode you voted for. Before recording, we each polled our newsletter readers on what we should talk about, "Will AI find and recommend me?" or "Does your website actually help you get hired?", and the website question won by 110 votes to 102. So that's where most of the conversation went, with the AI side folded in near the end.

Two things from it you can do this week: add a "how did you find me?" question to your contact form, and when you ask a past client for a testimonial, ask what almost stopped them from reaching out. I find those answers more useful than anything in Analytics (2 clients once copy-pasted a single line from my FAQ page into their inquiry, and it had nothing to do with pricing or deliverables).

We also got into why a first-time visitor, with about 5 seconds of patience and three competitor tabs open, needs something different from your homepage than someone who already knows you, and how two numbers you already have tell you whether you've got a traffic problem or a website problem.

Listen or read the full transcript »

QUICK TIPS

One website scam is aimed straight at photographers. A "photographer" writes, sometimes through your own contact form, to say you've used their images without permission, threatens to report you to your host, and links to a document with "the evidence".

It works because a lot of you have had your own photos lifted, so an accusation like that lands harder than it should, and the instinct is to open the file and see what they mean.

Don't. PetaPixel wrote about this one in 2021 after copies reached their inbox and a photographer's contact form, and the link pointed to a file to download, which they assumed was malware. The whole email exists to get that download onto your computer.

Real image claims exist, of course, and one day you might be the one sending them. But a genuine claim tells you which image and which page, and you can check both on your own site without downloading anything. If the email won't say which photo without a download, delete it.

Same tell as every other scary website email, by the way: look at what it asks you to do. A payment, a file, a plugin or a password, from someone you've never dealt with, is bait.

Has one of these ever landed in YOUR contact form?

You're the worst person to judge how fast your website is.

Your browser has already saved your homepage, video included, on your computer and your phone. So every time you check the site, it loads from that local copy and feels instant. A stranger on their phone downloads all of it from scratch, often on a so-so connection.

The problem is worst with an autoplay video at the top of the homepage. Before anything plays, the page has to load the player and its scripts, then start downloading the video itself.

To see what a stranger sees, use Chrome:

I've watched a video homepage still buffering after 10 seconds on that setting. I'd guess most people go somewhere else long before that.

The fix is to swap the autoplay video for a still frame from it, with a play button on top. The video only loads for people who click, and everyone else gets your work on screen straight away.

How long does YOUR homepage take on Slow 4G?