For over 15 years, I have worked with business owners who want to learn how to sell services online.

I feel great empathy for these entrepreneurs, because the reality is that I’m in the same boat.

I have to make a confession, I’m my own guinea pig.

In other words I am the victim of my own experimentation.

Because the only way for me to know if my idea or strategy will work is to test them myself.

That’s was how my new service, the website audit was born.

What is a website audit?

The website audit is a personalized assessment that allows you to identify the problems and weaknesses of your website and even more important, it gives you suggestions to solve the problems.

It includes a detailed report and a step by step video that explains in a simple way the changes that you need to make.

Thanks to the website audit, I was forced to evaluate my website several times this year, which has allowed me to improve my website in a way that would not have been possible before.

In addition, I am happy to report, that I have been able to work closely with business owners all over the world and the website audit has helped them to improve their results dramatically.

I have also had the opportunity to evaluate dozens of service pages and have a clear idea of what are the most common mistakes service based businesses make when they create content for their service pages.

I want to share with you what I’ve learned about how to sell services online:

How to sell services online (3 ingredients that will skyrocket your sales)

1. The message

You probably already know by now that you can offer the best service in the world, but if you don’t communicate effectively what your service is all about, nobody will know.

The key to communicating what your service is all about

You must understand how to structure the message you are trying to communicate.

It’s not as complicated as you think and I’m going to show you what you need to do.

The problem and the solution

What is the problem that solves your service?

You must effectively communicate what problem your service solves. Think about how your potential client’s life is, what they are trying to do and where they are stuck in the process?

What is the solution offered by your service?

This is where your work begins, you need to talk about the problem and communicate effectively that you understand the problem, but even better, how you have the solution.

The promise of results

You must take this opportunity to communicate the benefits of your service and the results that your potential client can have thanks to your service.

Examples: how your service is the solution of your potential client’s problem

Some examples that illustrate how your services can be the solution to your potential client’s problems:

• A newly wed couple who is trying to design their own kitchen, but the process seems really complicated and eventually they get stuck because they do not know how to take the measurements, estimate actual costs or design the best space.
• The young family who is planning a vacation to a place they have never visited before, they do not have the time to do the necessary research, about the best activities to do, the destinations that should not be missed or where to stay.
• A new grad professional who is considering the idea of learning a new language, spends a lot of time evaluating all the options to start the process, but is still not sure which is the best option to maximize learning in the least amount of time.

In all these examples, people have a problem and they are not really sure what is the best way to solve it.

2. Trust

If you want to sell services online, you need to convert visitors to your services page into customers.

One way to do this is to fid ways to communicate trust and show why you or your business is the best alternative for your audience.

What do others think about your services?

An excellent way to communicate the benefit of your services is to use the experiences and stories of others who have experienced the benefit of your services.

How to inject trust in in your website?

The most effective way to inject confidence into your services page is through the use of testimonials.

The Power of Testimonials

Testimonials help your website visitors to decide if your services can really be useful to them.

At the same time, it serves as social proof to your potential.

Even more, stories in testimonials help your website visitor to identify with the story of your existing clients, allowing your visitor to envision the possibility of a solution to their problem.

Before moving on with ingredient # 3. I want to share with an infographic that illustrates the 3 ingredientes necessary to sell services online.

Please include attribution to netklik.com with this graphic or use the embed code below:

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Use this code if you want to share the graphics

<a href="https://www.netklik.com/website-design/how-to-sell-services-online/"><<img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-1115" src="https://www.netklik.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/how-to-sell-your-services-online-infographic.jpg" alt="how to sell your services online" width="500" height="3125" />
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Infographic By: 
<a href="https://www.netklik.com/website-design/how-to-sell-services-online/">Netklik</a>
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3. The audience

Again you can offer the best service in the world, but if you do not offer it to the right person, your service will go completely unnoticed.

When I refer to your audience, I am suggesting that you go deeper and look beyond the demographic details.

5 Questions you need to answer to have a clear vision of who your potential client really is

• What potential objections do your potential customers have regarding your service?
• Who is your service for and who is not?
• What other service alternatives similar to yours has your potential customer at your disposal?
• How does your ideal client feel about their problem?
• What will happen to your potential client if they do not take any action to solve your problem?

Converting your website Visitors into Clients

If you do a good job communicating how your service is the solution to your audience’s problem and you also include testimonials which share the story of how you have helped your past clients, you will a working system that will allow you to convert your website visitors into a clients.

Conclusion
Working on designing my new service, the website audit, allowed me to put myself in the position of my ideal client. But beyond that, it allowed me to find the time to work in my own business and audit my website several times(in one year).

Once again, this is another great example, when knowing the answer is not enough, if we don’t take action and do something about it.

It’s better to take action, even if the timing is not ideal or things are not perfect. Than to wait for the perfect moment that never arrives.

The reality is that it’s better to do something than NOTHING.

If there is someone that enjoys good design, that’s me.

I don’t only enjoy visual design, I love design in general.

I definately think that website design is important,  but it’s important to understand why good website design is not the only that matters.

Why good website design is important (but is not the only thing that matters)

It’s a mistake to see your website as a work of art.

Instead you should think about your website as sales machine, because the goal of your website should be to work for your business.

Your website design should reflect your brand’s identity, but it should also offer an amazing visual experience.

At the same time, it’s important to balance the text and images and be consistent with colors and fonts.

Nevertheless, in my opinion there are other key factors to consider in addition to website design.

Good website design is not enough to produce traffic or salesClick To Tweet

Let’s talk about website traffic

When we talk about traffic, we need to think about how we expect our website to be found.

In general we can talk about 2 types of traffic: organic and paid.

Organic traffic, is traffic that you do not need to pay for. It takes time to build up and you need to consider it as a long term marketing strategy. An example of organic traffic are the search results that you see on the left hand side of Google Results.

When you pay for traffic, the advantage is that you get traffic instantly. The disadvantage is that as soon as you stop paying for it, you loose traffic inmediately. Examples of paid traffic are: Google Adwords, Facebook paid ads, etc.

Common Sources of Traffic

Search engines such as: Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc.
Social Media:Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, Youtube, etc.

Search engines and social media allow you to generate traffic to your website organically and by paying for traffic.

The point that I want to make is that you can have the best website design, but it’s useless if it does not generate traffic to your website.

Let’s talk about content

In order to get traffic to your website, you need to have useful content that attracts your audience

You need to make sure that the content that you include on your website solves your audience’s problems and answers their questions.

Additionally, you need to consider Search Engine Optimization (SEO). You must include in your content that keywords that people use to search for your products and services.

This will allow your website to be included in Google’s results and other Search Engines, when people do searches related to your products or services.

The process that search engines use to index your website pages can be slow, so it’s important that you consider other sources of traffic.

This is why social media plays is key to promote your content.

Let’s talk about Social Media

You probably have realized that the traffic that you receive from Google and other search engines is not enough.

Social media can work as an alternative traffic source.

It’s important to choose the best social media platform for your business. The one that your audience uses the most.

The main purpose of the content that you share in social media should to engage and start the conversation with your audience.

Online Marketing Strategy

A website with a good design, excellent content and traffic is also not enough, because it will no produce results if you don’t have a strategy.

The 5 keys to a successful of your website

I have created an infographic that illustrates the 5 keys to a successful website.

1. Clear Goals

Always think about what is your website’s goal, what do you want your visitor to do next .

2. Know your audience

You must know who your audience is. There is no point to driving traffic to your website if you are attracting the wrong audience. Once you have a clear of the problem that your product or service solves for your audience, you will be able to communicate effectively with your audience.

3.Plan to generate website traffic

You need to know what you are going to do so people can find your website and what will be your plan to drive traffic to your website.

4.Measure results

You need to understand what you will track to measure the results of your strategy. For example if your goal is that your website visitors buy a product or fill out a questionnaire, you need to track every time someone buys a product or fills out the questionnaire.

5.Experimentation

This is the where you nee to focus most of your time. Experimenting is key in online marketing.

You must be able to adjust and measure results, this will allow you to know what’s working and what’s not working.

It’s important to understand that your website will never be completed and that will always be making changes and adjustments to improve your results.

I have included an infographic that illustrates the 5 keys to the success of your website

Infographic Embed Code

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<a href="https://www.netklik.com/website-design/website-design-important/">
<img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-2866" src="https://www.netklik.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/website-design-is-important-infographic.png" alt="website design is important"
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Infographic by: 
<a href="http://https://www.netklik.com/website-design/website-design-important/">Netklik</a>
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Conclusion

Business owners invest a lot of time and resources on their website design with the hope that their new design improves their website results. It’s important to avoid the common mistake of investing all your efforts only on the design of your website.

A successful website requires strategy and systems that allow you to measure, experiment and test ideas so you have a better understanding of what is working and what is not working.

If you website is not producing the results you expected, it’s important to take the time to review your goals and what you need to do to achieve them.

 

I can understand why sometimes the process of creating a website can be overwhelming for clients. The decision of creating a website is usually followed by a new set of responsibilities; one needs to answer questions, collect information and make decisions such as:

1. What is the right domain name for my website?
2. Do I need a logo? In case a logo already exists, is it in the right format?
3. How many pages does my new website need?
4. What is the right content for the selected pages?
5. How do I want the website to look like?
6. How am I going to market this new website?

I could go on and on with this list. The process of creating a website requires a lot of energy from all parties involved, but especially from the business owner.

I always explain to my clients that in a way, the process of building a website is never completely done. The moment a website is completed is precisely when they need to start thinking about their website in a whole new way and website maintenance becomes vital . Below is a list of things that I suggest clients keep in mind once their website is launched:

1. New content on your website gives visitors a reason to visit and return to your site.
2. Always keep your website updated, keep content and photos current.
3. Your website can help you implement and test new business ideas.
4. Get a blog and post frequently relevant business and industry information. This is a great and affordable way to add new content to your small business website.
5. Find new ways to engage clients, for example add videos, use surveys, request client testimonials, etc.
6. Test your website strategies, use google analytics to track changes and additions to your website, review results and continue to make changes to improve your results.

At Netklik, we understand the importance of providing honest and affordable website maintenance services for our clients. Our website maintenance fees are on a per minute basis. So, if a small business website owner is requesting a change of their adress on their website pages, and this takes 8 minutes to do, the client will be charged for 8 minutes. It’s as simple and affordable as that!

We also provide web maintenance services to websites that have not been created by us, remember, let us help you in your online journey, contact us for more information about Affordable Website Maintenance Services

Many of you have asked me about how we came up with our new website design, so I have decided to write a post about it.

The website redesign was in our TO DO List since the beginning of last year, and it was very important for me that we were able to check this off our list.

As some of you know, I like to paint and illustrate in my free time, yes, your heard right, I said free time, you might be thinking who has free time?. Since this is something that I truly enjoy doing, I make a point of allocating special time for it.

I decided to give this project a twist by starting it the old fashioned way, and by this I mean the very old fashioned way! With a pencil and paper.

I was happy with our current logo and we knew we did not want to change it, so choosing the Space theme was straight forward.

Sketches

After the first round of sketches I came up with the following drawing. We knew it had several graphic elements that could be used in different parts of the website.

Digital Illustration

After completing the sketch, I knew I was ready to make a digital version and work on the colors on the computer. After a few tweaks here and there, this is what we came up with.

Header Design

We were happy with the illustration design but it was really not the right proportion for us to use on the website header. By working with the illustration in Photoshop we created the following header design.

At this point, we where happy with how the website was starting to look. We decided to pause our design efforts to work on the technical and marketing aspects of the website.

As you all know this is our day to do work, but it’s very different to work on a client’s website then it’s to work on your own business website.

Below are some questions that we needed to be answered:

1. How do we want to present our information to our visitors and how do we want to organize this information ?
2. How many website pages do we need?
3. Which are the minimum required pages for us to launch our website?
4. How do can we add to the website Spanish, how should integrate it to the website?
5. Which keyword phrases should we use for both English and Spanish?

We worked on answering these questions and we came up with a plan and requirements for launching the website.
While going through this process it was important to be able to define which was a required need and which was a desired need.
Once we had gone over this process we where ready to continue to work on completing website design process.

Website Content

Once we knew how we wanted to organize the information on our website, we knew exactly for which pages we needed to create content.
It was necessary to work our Keyword Research and choose the best phrases to market those pages.

Creating a WordPress Website

Our step by step process and making sure we answered all the questions before continuing to the next phase made easier the actual process of building the website.
Since we started the website design project We knew that we wanted to work with wordpress.
At this point the goal was to put together all the pieces of the puzzle, which is precisely what we are good at.

New Year Card

After we completed the website! I thought the project would not be completed without a hand painted version of the illustration which many of you received, we hoped you enjoyed it.

Lessons we Learned

1. It’s difficult to work on your own website when you are very busy taking care of your business.
2. You need be able to separate your basic website needs and your desired website wish list. In other words it’s important to break up the project in smaller projects, this will help you to accomplish your goals as you go.
3. It’s also important to plan each phase and make sure you do not move to the next phase until you are ready.
4. Sometimes we need to take small breaks when we are moving between stages of the project. This allows us to have a better view of the entire project, helps us make changes and also assures us that we are on the right track.