Latest / Healing Octopus Radio / Stop overthinking your website: Get over your tech blocks, make decisions, and take imperfect action
Transcript
- David: Welcome back to Healing Octopus Radio. I'm David Barbarisi. On this episode, I'm sharing an old presentation I did called Stop Overthinking Your Website. This is for entrepreneurs in the natural health and freedom space who are struggling with their technology and really just want a website. And so this workshop is to help you stop overthinking that. In the presentation, I go through Some of the blocks that I'm seeing as I'm talking to people about why they are not starting a website. And I go through that. I go through the decision paths of like, if you're doing this, then try this platform. If you're doing that, then try the other platform. and then I talk about some of the other considerations and about my membership called Tech Clarity, which is weekly office hours where entrepreneurs come and You ask me questions about technology, websites, email lists, community, course, podcasting, whatever you're doing. And I help you think through that and take action. So this is a presentation and I present from slides. I think you're gonna get most of it from the audio. So not a big deal if you're not watching the video, but there is extra info in the video that I didn't say out loud. so watch the video if you can. And yeah, the other piece the stops a little bit abruptly because originally I had a offer for founding members and then I like that's no longer the case. So I cut that out. So it just kind of stops. But I will come back in with the all the cool in details. So yeah, here's the presentation. stop overthinking your website. This is about moving forward, building your businesses online home. This you need a website, an email list, landing page, whatever, not a tech person. speaker-1: and David: At the same time, I don't necessarily want to bother other people to update my website every single time. So like changing a word or an image or something. So a little bit of the do it yourself mindset. And especially if you're in the health or space and speaker-1: Yeah. David: you want to have a conversation about big tech or privacy or whatever because you're doing some things that like the mainstream wouldn't like. all right. So yeah, you need a website email list landing page, something in the tech realm, not a tech person. Also want to learn how to do it yourself. And maybe have concerns that you don't necessarily want to bring to sort of more mainstream people. These are actual words that I've heard from people regarding dealing with tech. Which is. Feels exaggerated to me because I just I don't have that experience with this specifically, but I know that this is real for a number of people. So I just want to sort of bring attention to all of that. They're like, yeah, this is a real. Emotional thing. I speaker-1: and David: think there's like a deeper part to it. speaker-1: And. David: For me personally, like I get all stressed out and messed up about all the other entrepreneurial stuff. So like that part is not fun for me and that part I panic about, but the tech stuff is just. Straightforward to me or like I don't freak out about it. And so yeah, like I think there's a lot of underlying emotions and stuff that kind of shows up. as a tech block. Just because that's the most unknown or intimidating part. And so like, I do think there's like some deeper things there. And like, sometimes I help try to help people and give them the answers and they just don't do them. And so like, I don't know, I don't understand that. Like, it's harder for me to relate, although it's easier for me to relate on like the marketing and sales, like I can't stand. marketing, sales, and I kind of dragged my feet in all of that part. So I'm sure it's different for everyone, but. Yeah, this is the tech part. So like what I try to remember for myself is what am I even doing here in terms of the business, not the existential part, but like, why do you want a website? Why do you want the email list? What do you want to happen? What are your goals? So like for me, I want people to buy stuff and pay me money and like get some value and all of that. or maybe you want to grow your business. Maybe you're a thought leader and you have some ideas or something in your heart that you really want to get out there and so you need to build something for people to go to. like really getting clear on like why you're doing this, speaker-1: and David: what your goals are. one block that I see. So I'm going to go through like the blocks and patterns that I've seen. So the money thing is one of them. And I would see like both extremes of like things cost money. And then like, we try to do the free things and like do all the research and figure it all out on our own. And there's like an underlying like, okay, how valuable is my time, my sanity or my work? So, you know, There's a time and place for it. And also there's a like, okay, maybe I'm kind of done researching and I just want someone to tell me what to do without it being disempowering. And then I see the other extreme of like, let's buy the most expensive thing, the white glove service, use all the giant tools that like the big guys use, the bigger entrepreneurs and the like kind of thinking we won't have to deal with tech at all. That's speaker-1: And David: not really the case either. And so we're finding a balance in between these two things on the cost and the money issues. Yeah, the scope and the time frame. So this is like. Sometimes we want to build the big giant thing right at the start and it's like, I'm going to have 100 blog post and all these courses and these communities and like naming all the features and. speaker-1: And. David: Then it's like we won't accept a smaller scope. Or we need it to be perfect, like right from the start. And so like these are kind of my snarky reminders of like, we're not making buildings. like, it can be messy. It can be changed. You can scale and adapt to your dreams when you get there and that you don't need to build it out on day one. And so MVP is minimum viable product. And so this is like, what is the least thing you need to build to get to website or email list or whatever? Yeah. And you might be best served by something that gets the job done now, and then you can change it later. You can build a bigger scope later. speaker-1: yeah. David: Yeah, like just the like don't let this. Get you hung up on building something. And you might not be in love with it right now. You know it's going to be messy. It's going to be a public thing. You know, maybe later as you're scaling up, you can build the thing that you love or purchase the thing that you love. And then the other thing, like if you try to do a giant launch, like on the same day. You might be asking for trouble because there's going to be so many moving parts. Something's not going to work. And it might not even be something that people want is kind of another thing. this, especially with like apps and platforms and things needing to build the MVP, seeing what's there or what people actually use or not. And kind of going from there. And I think this applies to practitioners, coaches, consultants, healers, and all of you there as well of like, you don't need the complete blog to be ready. You don't need, you know, a hundred episodes in the podcast. You don't need like, it doesn't need to entirely be built out before going public with it. and then people in my spaces are concerned about big tech surveillance, censorship, privacy, de-platforming. These are all real concerns, but we need to balance them with getting stuff done. And so, you know, if these things block you like right from the start of like, I don't want to use that platform because it's this and that, then whoever you're afraid of that they are kind of winning anyway. speaker-1: Okay. David: And if you want to fall down that slippery slope, then the internet was a DARPA project. You know, you can't be pure with the like, not wanting to support the surveillance stuff or big tech or whatever. Most of the internet infrastructure is Google and Amazon and a few others. So like, there's a balance there. And I think that's going to be the recurring theme is balance. Regarding deplatforming and censorship My guess is if you're not a huge name and you're not like being Crazy controversial then you're probably not gonna run into a ton of censorship or deplatforming I do have friends who've lost YouTube channels. I do have friends who's gotten strikes on YouTube People who've lost social media accounts like all that kind of stuff There are strategies to mitigate this and you just adapt if it happens So like don't be, you know, it's like don't be afraid so much that you don't start with any of this. The privacy stuff. Yeah, you're putting your name in your face when your business people are going to know who you are, what you're up to. So like I think the privacy stuff is maybe less of a concern in the business space than it is in the personal space. And you know, most of the big names are the people that I know or work with. Like they're still using the easier tools to get stuff done. So like most people are still using zoom and I also tend to advise people practitioners. If you're working with people who are maybe not tech savvy or whatever, like Zoom is the option. That's all they know. Don't try to use Meaden and have all the problems that I'm having. So yeah, you can make informed decisions about where your line is and we can have those kinds of conversations. social media and AI. These are tools, they suck and they're useful. And hint, having the email list can mitigate some of the social media stuff because you're talking directly to your people. AI is useful and trashy. can help you with building your website. Please, please, please still think, still discern. That is my ask of you. So you can use something like levelable.dev to build landing pages, websites, or an app. AI can help with website building, can help with copywriting, can help with a lot of business things. It's really tricky because you can either, sometimes you can spend a lot of time in these tools and there's an illusion of progress. Like I would yell at AI for hours and then at the end go, I don't know that that helped anything. So. Yeah, be really conscious of tool usage. Maybe a website isn't a priority for you or maybe scaling it out or building more tools there isn't awesome if that's the case. You know, there's the questions of is this a priority, not a priority because there's a fear there's an unknown. Is it the learning curve, the expense? You know, what are your business goals? How does this help with those goals? So kind of like asking those questions if you're not if you haven't made it a priority or you're not feeling like it's a priority now. So all of this, these are patterns and blocks that I've seen. I think they're different versions of like wanting to make the right decisions and kind of getting stuck in a loop there. So the goal is to make educated but imperfect decisions and take imperfect action. And I'm going to help you with the educated part. It may be the imperfect decision part. And then you get to take the imperfect action. So text part of your blocks. Here's what decisions could look like. So this is the like different paths you could take depending on what you need for your website. Pick the thing that matches what you need right now, not necessarily what you'll need in five years. So you can migrate platforms eventually, and yes, there's going to be a cost to those. But also, if you pick the bigger thing or the wrong thing, the thing that's not appropriate in the beginning, you're going to be paying for that. So, you know, there's just a different thought process there. So I wanted to start with really, really simple. what I would call a business card website or a brochure website where it's just the maybe you're at an event and people want to know more about you and you give them a URL and here's a page of maybe your profile, your photo stuff about you and then some links to your social media and speaker-1: and David: subscribing to your email list. So for that, you can go with kit, which is they have a free plan. You can set up a profile page. It's like the Lincoln bio thing. And you start your email list. think starting the email list is important. I come from an email marketing background and. We would in my corporate job and we would have websites and we'd have to do all the SEO and play the games with Google to like change our search results so that more people would come to the website through search engines. But because we had email lists, we already had people and aside from dealing with likes, know, deliverability stuff, you're getting people directly to your, you know, you're talking directly to your audience. You're not. having to play with the algorithms as much. So I think the email list is important. Other people are going to have different thoughts on that. But yeah, and then if you want something that's more than just the one page thing, the business card website. Mailer Lite looks really good. It looks really affordable and I was looking at this and has website pages and landing pages in addition to the email marketing. So you could build a whole website on that. you know, the basics I'm talking about. speaker-1: you David: Homepage about page services. Testimonials and maybe like a few other pages like that's really. If you're a practitioner, think that might even be the minimum viable product that you need. Stepping up to more paths. If you're an artist, musician, poet, other kind of creative writer. I think Substack is really good for starting. free. It's easy. It includes podcasts, includes videos, and it has a custom page option. So you can build like an about page or a services page. The design is going to be great, like not really customizable, but it is another like get the job done kind of thing. And it handles the email list for you because people subscribe to your sub stack. People can find you. There's like a social media sort of built in, but it's not as trashy as other social media. And if you're a content creator, there's paid options. like you could totally build a website off of Substack and just point people there and like forget all the other stuff. If you're a coach, practitioner, consultant, things like that, you want booking payments and even a client portal. I've looked at paper bell. speaker-1: Bye. David: Like it's built for coaches and it has those tools integrated in. and it gets the job done. You're probably not going to get a great design on it. It looks kind of cookie cutter, but it gets the functionality there and doesn't require a whole lot of integrations. So I feel like that's one of the easier choices if that fits with your business model. If you're more into the design, but you still want to do it yourself, I recommend Squarespace. It also has a ton of functionality. Like you could run email marketing there. You could do your community and courses. speaker-1: and David: I haven't really seen people use it that way. It does have e-commerce. And there's an additional thing here that my friend John does called speaker-1: us. David: the Easy AF website workshop. where she's an expert copywriter and business coach and yeah, everything. And she has templates and guidance and things like props for writing your copy for your website. So like, here's what a services page looks like and here's what you write on it. And it's very detailed. I've been through it. I haven't built my website with it, but. I think it's a really great addition. And then on top of that, you can also add tech support for me if you really want more hand holding. So yeah, and Dawn is doing more of the Easy AF website workshop. She's launching another cohort of that soon. if you want a beautiful website with really well thought out templates, that's an option. Especially if you still want to do it yourself. Yeah, and then if you have one central need, like if you're only doing courses, but maybe some of the other pieces are only doing communities, there's specialized platforms. So I recently looked at Thinkific for courses. And it's really, really good at courses. And it's not as good at some other things. Like the landing pages aren't as customizable and it doesn't really include email marketing. So you still have to hook it up to other things. But if you're like, I'm only focused on courses and that's an option. School is another option for courses and communities. Circle is really good at communities, but also has courses. speaker-1: Thanks David: Shopify for e-commerce. So there's all kinds of things like that. So if you're focused on one thing and you want one thing done really well. Specialized platforms are an option. Just keep in mind there's going to be integrations, which don't have to be difficult. I can help you with those. But that's the thing. That's also something to consider with pricing. Some of the platforms that do more things, they seem expensive, but once you start to add up all the multiple tiny platforms, the prices start to balance out. And more, heavy duty does all the thing platforms, Kajabi, Go High Level, some others. These are what feel expensive. They're kind of intense if you're not using all the features and there's a steep learning curve and they're not specialized to what you're doing. So they're kind of the giant Lego set and maybe without the instructions. So they can do a whole other things, but you got to put the Legos together or you have to have someone put the Legos together for you. I get reluctant to recommend those kinds of platforms to people starting out. I think those are the things that you would scale into or if you had a really giant dream and you knew you were doing this. So if you were going to have, I don't know, 100 courses and, know, community with thousands of people and like you knew that was happening at the start, then that's... starts to change that decision. If you don't want to do any of the tech and you want super fancy, there's high end pay someone to do all the things. And I'm realizing it's not even that high end, like I'm talking like four figure kind of things. speaker-1: pricing. David: And that's something I can give you referrals for that. So if you know that that's what you want to do. I can make some recommendations there. If you want full control, this is for the like total privacy, total whatever. There's self hosted WordPress and I do not recommend this unless you're getting a developer for ongoing maintenance. So this is like if you're totally in the freedom space and you don't want to be on someone else's platform and like all that. If those are like the values and you're not going to compromise on those, like these are the options there. There's also hosted WordPress, which is better. because you're not maintaining all the stuff. Like, yeah, I've done some work for people with self hosted WordPress and it's kind of a pain in the butt and it's going to get expensive. But just laying that out as an option if your dreams align with that. Those are that. Everyone hates some part of their chosen platforms. There's no single one that like does all the things amazing. So that's kind of why I laid out all these options. And even when you pick one, you're going to hate some part of it. That's just kind of how it goes. So this is why I was like saying, you're going to pick a website that you don't hate. So another consideration, maintenance. You can do it yourself. Simple website updates, know, change some words, change some images, that kind of stuff. Maybe get some occasional help from someone when you can't figure it out. AKA me. so like you run into a problem, you ask for help and then you handle it yourself. You can have someone else do the updates like a virtual assistant and I have recommendations for this as well, where you just send them what you want to happen and they do it. And then there's like these and even more hands off approach where you hire an agency and like, you don't think about this. I won't say it all, but for the most part. So consider that as you're like picking your platform. Alright, so these are areas where people get stuck. The patterns I've seen. Hopefully I've added some things to think about and maybe. Given some unstuckness there. then I laid out decision paths of like, pick this if you're doing that. can also be very personalized of like if you have very specific needs, then we need to drill down a little more, but those are some options. If that's all you need, then great, go build your thing, take imperfect action. Or if you want some more support, you're making decisions or you want some more handholding, guess what? I've got you. If you're down for the do it yourself building, or you don't want to spend a ton of money on the fancy options, which I'm talking like four or five figure pricing, but you want to avoid doing all the research and being in indecision mode, then this is what I'm offering. I'm calling it Tech Clarity. This is a package of weekly group office hours with me. So the way it's going to work is I'll have a weekly hour long call, group call, And if you have a tech business tech issue or you want to talk through something kind of the way that I've been talking through things here. So it can be strategy as well or troubleshooting or the platform selection or integrations like all the business tech things. You can reserve a slot for the next call and I'm doing this reservation system so you'll know that you can you'll get an opportunity on the call. And then we can talk through it on the call and I'll give some advice, my thoughts on things, kind of like what I'm doing here. And then you'll have a decision and you can just go do the thing. So this is sort of the DIY option. There's going be a group chat. I'm not calling it a community because we don't need to. We can be friends. I do want us to be friends, but we don't need to like. There's not like a whole obligation. There is what I'm getting at. It's just kind of pop in, ask questions and I'll respond if it's something quick. You know I can point you somewhere. Or speaker-1: or David: if it's something we need to talk about, I can say OK, you're will talk about this on the next call. You hop on the call and you know. spend maybe 15 to 30 minutes or whatever doing that. And it'll be in the group. So different people will get to learn from your challenges as well. And you'll get to learn from other people's challenges. So ideally, as long as I keep these up every week, you won't have to wait longer than a week to get an answer. And if it's in chat and it's a quick thing, maybe I'll do something quicker. I'm also building up a resource library of these different pieces. So as we get common issues, you know, maybe I'll do a voice note or a video demo. On the topic and you can reference that at any time. So I think some of some of the options are going to be the website conversation related to what I was just talking about or like the how to start your email list. And you know how to do tagging segmenting and. Email sequences and all those kind of fun jargony things so like you'll get to learn some of the marketing jargon or the tech jargon as well. So this is instead of doing the YouTube AI web search loop, trying to piece together all the different info, you just bring your problem to the next office hour. This is meant for healers, coaches, practitioners, teachers, especially in the natural health and freedom space who are still getting started. Although even after you've started, you can definitely come to this as well. You know this again, this is sort of meant to be a place where you can bring concerns specific to I would say the health and freedom space. That maybe you know wouldn't get addressed through other tech help. Alright, so that's the presentation. Thanks for listening or watching. If you're interested in tech clarity, check out healingoctopus.com or visit the links in the show notes. we've been running for about four months now, so I've been doing the weekly office hours, answering questions in the forums, and I've been recording more and more content for the resource library. So that's all in there. if you'd like some 101 help, I also do tech consults and I will do project work as well. So yeah, just get in touch with me if any of that sounds like something that would be helpful and we can have those conversations. I'm on Instagram and the socials as Healing Octopus, and you can send me an email, david at healingoctopus.com. Please like and subscribe and click all the buttons for the podcast and leave reviews and stuff. So that would help me out. Appreciate it. And yeah, until next time, take care.