Jason SurfrApp's Blog, page 6
February 12, 2020
A Simple 6-Part Formula for an Effective Homepage Design
Your website is not just a decorative accessory for your business. It’s often the first impression someone has of your business and it needs to be assisting you in making revenue. This starts with an effective homepage design.
We’ve spent years building websites for our service-based businesses (offering branding and website design) as well as for our digital product businesses (selling online courses, e-books, memberships, and more).
Optimizing your website to be more effective in support of your strategy is vital to making your business successful. Your website should be working on your behalf to reach your revenue goals. If you aren’t hitting your goals and you desire growth, you need to consider the possibility that your website isn’t doing its job.
In this article, we’re going to share with you the processes we use over and over again to design an effective homepage.
[image error]
Is your website missing the magic of effective web design?
You’re probably in one of these two categories right now:
#1 You feel somewhat confident in your website. Your product or service is selling (infrequently) but you know you haven’t spent time optimizing your website and you’re not even sure what to optimize or focus on.
#2 You don’t feel confident in your website at all. You may be selling your product or service but it’s mostly or entirely through word-of-mouth referrals. You feel constantly overwhelmed by what to change on your website and what to do next.
We’re here to BOOST that confidence and make sure your website is helping you hit your goals of owning and running a profitable business. We’re going to walk you through practical (and fun!) formulas for making your website speak more clearly to your client/customer and better support your ONE primary objective.
If you follow our advice you should absolutely see these results:
Your website will clearly speak to your target customer
You’ll have a boost in conversion rates (to email signups or sales)
You’ll feel confident continuing to tweak your homepage moving forward
The magic isn’t in rebuilding your site from scratch. It’s about making tiny, strategic changes to your site over time to improve its effectiveness.
We’re all about spending your precious hours on things that actually make a difference so you can devote the rest of your time to a life that brings you true fulfillment, rather than working tirelessly day after day wondering why you aren’t seeing progress.
Before you start on your homepage design, set YOUR objectives for building a profitable business
Before you can update your website to be more effective, you have to define what “more effective” means by setting your objective(s). Your site should have a primary, secondary and tertiary goal.
[image error]
Objective #1) SALES: Your primary goal is to sell your product or service. If you have multiple offerings, define ONE* clear winner among them to optimize for.
Objective #2) LEADS: Your secondary goal should be leads. “Leads” can come in many forms. Define what that looks like for your business. Is it to get people to join your email list? Sign up for a challenge? Contact you? Set up a consultation call? Be specific.
Objective #3) INTEREST / TRUST / AUTHORITY: Your ongoing goal with your website should be to deliver value to your ideal audience and have them coming back to your site consistently because they know you’re going to deliver for them.
*We know you may have multiple product offerings. Heck, we do too! But, your website’s homepage should sell your main offering. If you give people the Sizzler Buffet of things to buy from you, guess what will happen? They won’t buy anything. Pick your “product pony” and have that be the focus on your homepage. Create a Products or Work With Me page to share more of what folks can buy from you.
Process #1 to Gauge The Effectiveness of Your Homepage: 4 Questions Clarity Test
Before you go making changes to your site, you need to gauge how effectively your homepage is communicating with your customer at the moment. Start by climbing into the shoes of someone visiting your site for the first time who knows nothing about your business.
[image error]
Does your current homepage CLEARLY answer these 4 questions:
Q1: What do you do?
As a visitor, would you know immediately what kind of business your site promotes and what mental category to put it in? What’s the two-word category that your customer/client should put you in? You don’t want someone to be confused about what kind of business you run.
TIP: We call this your “two-word tango.” Someone should easily be able to identify you as a graphic designer, web developer, marketing consultant, business coach, fiction author, etc.
Q2: Are you for me?
As a visitor, would you be able to identify if this business was geared toward you? Would you recognize yourself in the copy or resonate with the design elements?
Your website homepage should explicitly state your audience somewhere. Your target audience should be able to say to themselves, “I’m in the right place!” It’s about showing them that your business, brand values and personality are a match for them.
It also helps you sort through who you want to be working with. What kind of customers or clients do you want to be spending your time with? You want your site design to speak to those people, even if it means people who don’t fit that bill will be turned off.
Q3: How can you help me?
As a visitor, would you know how your life would be improved by hiring this business or buying a product from this business? There should be a clear outcome stated for your client/customer. As Donald Miller from StoryBrand says, “make the customer the hero” and show them the journey they can go on with your business.
[image error]
We love this quote from April Dunford on positioning yourself and your product:
“Customers don’t care about your unique features, they care what those features can do for them. Your positioning needs to be centered on the value that you alone can deliver for customers.”
Q4: What’s my next step?
As a visitor, would you know what action you should take next if you were interested in this business? It should be super obvious, compelling and visually distinctive.
Please, for the love of Pete (whoever Pete is) stop burying your email signup form in the footer of your website, especially if that is one of your main objectives for your website. Also, don’t just say “sign up for my emails,” add a compelling statement as to WHY someone should give you their email address.
[image error]
4 Qs ACTION STEP
Pop open a new browser tab and go to your website’s homepage (we know you have about 17 others open 
February 8, 2020
Why You Should Focus on Enough Instead of More
Raise your hand if you’ve recently felt yourself falling into the trappings of more:
You’re trying to grow your business, so you’re doing more marketing, more sales, more content creation, maybe even thinking about hiring people
You have a big ambitious financial goal and you are pretty far from it right now
Your schedule is packed to the brim leaving no white space in your life
You constantly feel overwhelmed by all the things you can/want to do, but yet you feel like you’re never actually getting things done
We don’t bring these things up to make you feel bad about yourself or your choices, we bring them up because we’ve fallen prey to these ideals over the years.
Take a moment and ask yourself this simple question:
Are the goals and dreams I’m striving for my own or are they things I’m being told I SHOULD want?
That’s a powerful question to answer honestly, and one we took a really hard look at a few years ago when we found ourselves feeling overworked, overwhelmed, constantly stressed out, and even a tinge of shame for not being as “successful” as our peers.
Oh, hello by the way! We’re Caroline and Jason Zook 
February 6, 2020
14 Unique Instagram Post Ideas for Online Business Owners
We’ve been using Instagram since 2013 and oh how the times have changed.
Stories, filters, IGTV—it can be hard to keep up with all the new features (not to mention the algorithm). However, the first feature Instagram started with (Posts) has stood the test of time and will continue to be one of the most valuable parts of the platform.
In this article, you’ll find 14 unique Instagram post ideas that can help your content stand out from everyone else’s! Don’t know what to post to drum up engagement? Pick from this list and put your own spin on it to see what resonates with your audience.
Sound good? Let’s dive in!
Unique Instagram Post Idea #1: Embellished Photos
We had to start with the Instagram OG—photos! Want to bring more life to your photos? Try using the markup app on your phone or apps like Procreate and Over to add illustrations or layers to your photos.
We love the way Arabella adds fun embellishments to her photos which really make them stand out next to a see of other photos in the feed.
View this post on InstagramA post shared by a r a b e l l a (@arabella.rollison) on Jan 20, 2020 at 4:01pm PST
We love using the app Over to add embellishments, so unsurprisingly Over’s Instagram account is a great place to look for inspiration!
View this post on InstagramA post shared by Over (@over) on Jun 11, 2019 at 8:49am PDT
Unique Instagram Post Idea #2: Quote
Again, starting simple here because quotes are everywhere, but with good reason! Take a line from your best article or newsletter and turn it into a quote card with branded elements like we did here:
View this post on Instagram
December 15, 2019
10 Key Decisions That Doubled Our Business Growth During Our Toughest Year
Episode Summary
This was the toughest year of our lives and yet we were still able to double our business growth. We walk you through the 10 key decisions we made that allowed us to grow while navigating some rough mental health issues.
In January, Caroline
October 13, 2019
13 Marketing Ideas For Online Business Owners For 2019 and Beyond
If you’re anything like us, when you hear the word “Marketing,” it feels vague and a bit overwhelming.
If you run an online business, sure, you know marketing is important, but how can you improve your marketing efforts unless you break down that big word into more actionable pieces?
In this article, we want to share with your how we break down the broad idea of marketing into more digestible parts, plus we want to give you our proven marketing strategies that you can experiment with to boost revenue for your business.
Before we go any further, we want to make sure this article can actually benefit you. These are three critical pieces of the puzzle you need to have in place right now:
You have a product or service you sell and someone has purchased it before.
You have some traffic coming to your website or some audience on social media.
You are willing to have an experimenter’s mindset and you aren’t looking for silver bullets.
Did you say HELL YES! 
October 6, 2019
How Redefining Something In Your Life Can Help You Move Forward
Have you ever felt stuck in a situation and the only solution to move forward seemed out of alignment with your values?
Recently I’ve run into a mental roadblock and discovered a way through it. My hope is in sharing how I’ve figured out how to redefine my problem, you can do the same in your life.
To add a little context here, it would be helpful for you to know that my wife and I just passed one year of running our combined business together (Wandering Aimfully).
You have to start somewhere…
When we first started Wandering Aimfully, we described our core business offering as a “membership community” but that always felt a bit vague. Sure, we had/have an awesome Slack channel where our customers/members hang out, but to say we run a membership community in the way you immediately think of it would be a stretch.
Start ugly, and figure it out from there, right?
We knew we simply had to get started with Wandering Aimfully (MVP, anyone?) so we did what all aspiring biz owners do, we made revenue projections for our membership community. During the projections meeting, we also assumed we’d be testing different sales funnels, marketing plans, promotion strategies, and everything would get figured out along the way (as it tends to do).
But… as you can guess and as you may have experienced in your own life and business, things didn’t go to plan.
The creation and launch of Wandering Aimfully took 10x longer than we thought (we planned for 5 weeks, it took 5 months… 
July 28, 2019
A Simple Guide to Naming Your Business
The whole thing feels so… permanent, doesn’t it?
Believe me, I’ve been there. But the goal of this guide is to lead you through a simple step-by-step process that will eliminate that pressure as much as possible.
If you invest the time in each section of this guide, it will provide you with the prompts necessary to come up with a name that offers a meaningful, clever and timeless foundation for your brand.
Let’s look at four tips for making the most of this naming process…
Naming Your Business Tip #1: Set The Mood
Make sure that you’re in a motivated, energized state when you sit down to begin. We want those creative juices to be flowing like crazy, and if you’re trying to tackle this guide after a 12-hour workday when your mind feels fried, you may not be in the best frame of mind to reap its benefits.
Naming Your Business Tip #2: Go Easy On Yourself
In order for ideas to thrive, they need to feel free to roam. As you dive in, try to limit the pressure you put on yourself to come up with the Best Business Name Of All Time – at least at first. This open-minded approach will give your brain the safe space it needs to form connections and set fire to sparks of inspiration.
Naming Your Business Tip #3: Give Ideas The Time They Need To Marinate
There may be times during this guide that you feel you’ve hit a creative wall. That’s okay. Don’t try to force it. If you find yourself stuck, walk away for a bit and let your ideas marinate. You want to build in the necessary time to let your mind mull things over and to sit with your ideas so that you feel you’re making the best decision for your business.
Naming Your Business Tip #4: HAVE FUN!
This is YOUR business after all. It’s your idea that you’re ushering into existence and this should be an exciting part of that process, so enjoy it!
Before we dive in and start brainstorming, let’s briefly review WHY coming up with a great name is so vital to your business and your brand.
Why coming up with an effective name for your business is important
Your business name is the foundation of your brand. It’s one of the most important ways you can make a first impression on your potential clients or customers.
When people hear or see the name of your business, they’ll begin forming an immediate perception of your company.
Are you trendy and cool, or trusted and professional?
Is it easy for someone to understand right away what you sell or what service you provide?
Is your name memorable and something they can recall (or Google) later?
A great name can also contribute to the marketing of your business.
Is it catchy? Easy to remember?
A name is important because it’s the foundation that you lay everything else in your brand over top of. In fact, it’s likely the single most defining element of your brand because it informs all other parts.
Once you’ve decided on a name, it can be extremely difficult to change down the road, and if you do, you run the risk of losing any brand equity that you might have built up over time. That’s all the more reason to come up with the right name right off the bat – one that not only feels aligned with the business you want to build, but one that can grow and adapt to your various business goals in the future.
The good news is, this guide will walk you through these important considerations, and many more. The result will be a name that provides you that excellent foundation and first impression you’re looking for.
Naming Your Business Part One: Brainstorm Bonanza
In order to arrive at that perfect name – whether it be for your business, your product, or your latest e-course – you want to start with as much relevant inspiration as you can.
To provide you with that inspiration, we’re going to come up with as many words as possible as potential jumping-off points. Think of these words as little seedlings that will hopefully grow into one fully mature, grand oak of a name.
The important part here in allowing your brain to get its creative juices flowing is to take the pressure off.
You want to create an environment without criticism or judgment. So, as you move through this phase, don’t worry about which words you like or dislike right now or what sounds like a great business name and what doesn’t. This stage is one of those rare instances when quantity outweighs quality.
At this stage, there is no such thing as a bad idea.
We don’t mind “bad ideas” at this stage of the process (brainstorming). Bad ideas can often spark the inspiration necessary for good ideas, so try to keep an open mind with yourself!
To get this brainstorm party started, write down a list of words based on the following prompts. If you can, try to come up with at least 20-30 per list!
A. List words that come to mind when you think of the products you want to sell, the service you want to provide, or WHAT your business does. As many as you can! (Example: Are you a coffee shop? Some words that come to mind: beans, hot, brew, pour, mug, foam, grounds, roast, cup, etc.)
B. List adjectives and attributes that you want people to associate with your business. (Example: Is your coffee shop all about quality coffee sourced from around the globe and giving back to those farm communities? In that case, your words might be: caring, kind, good, giving, helpful, grateful, delicious, global, quality, craft, etc.)
C. (Optional): Is your business personal to you? Maybe it’s a personal brand or a family business? Also write down words that have personal meaning to you. (ie. names, nicknames, street names you grew up on, areas of your hometown, words that have significance from your childhood, etc.)
Warning! If you choose to incorporate a personal name or place into your business name, be careful. Do you plan to sell your company in the future or transfer ownership? What happens to Uncle Bert’s Bistro when Uncle Bert wants to retire? If you’re a video production company in Michigan and want to go by “Michigan Media House” are you limiting your potential customer base? If you decide you’re willing to travel for projects, will customers think you only service the Michigan area? These are things you want to be mindful of if you decide to include these personal elements in your name.
D. Now go one step further and think of metaphors or related words for some of the words you wrote in A + B above. Think of what other words come to mind when you think of those words (eg. quick >> rabbit; jewel >> precious; cute >> button.) Let your brain run wild! (Based on my coffee shop example: craft >> maker, blacksmith, apprentice. Giving >> hands, heart. etc.)
Pro tip! Don’t be afraid to use Thesaurus.com or The Free Dictionary’s Idiom Search tool. They can lead you to unexpected words and phrases you may not have thought of!
Naming Your Business Part Two: Playing Favorites
Remember how in Part One there were no bad ideas and everyone was welcome at the party? Well, Part Two is when we hire a bouncer to work the door and bad ideas start being asked to leave. This stage is when we take your list of words and narrow it down.
Revisit your list of words from Part One and pick out the ones that stand out to you.
Pay attention to the gut reaction you have when you hear a word or read it.
Does it feel interesting or familiar to you?
Does it give you a good feeling when you say it out loud?
Does it have positive images and connotations that immediately come to mind?
If so, circle those words on your list, and re-write them down!
Naming Your Business Part Three: Creative Combinations
Once you have a solid list of words that you feel good about, then it’s time to take those seeds and finagle/arrange/combine/transform them into a business name.
Imagine that your words from Part Two are your Legos — they’re the building blocks of your name. Now it’s time for us to put them together in different ways and see what we can create.
Explore each of the following prompts using your “building block” words and write down potential names that you can form:
Combine two separate words to make a compound business name. (Ex. SkillShare; Salesforce;)
Take just parts from two separate words to make a one-word business name (Ex. Groupon [group+coupon])
Adjoin two words with a “+” or “&” to come up with something more unique. (Ex. Wit & Delight; Crate + Barrel;)
Combine one or two of your words with a more descriptive, business-related word to give people an idea of what you do. (Ex. Rifle Paper Co.; 9th Letterpress;)
Heads-up! Make sure that if you go this route, your business name is conceptually sound and not overly trendy. (For instance, even though I’m a coffee shop that sells high-quality coffee, “QualiCof” is probably not the most timeless brand name.) Put yourself in the shoes of your consumer and ask, would I scoff or roll my eyes at this name? If the answer is yes, then don’t choose it!
Naming Your Business Part Four: Picking “The One”
Once you have some different potential names written down from Part Three, go through each one using the following questions to narrow down your list even further:
A. Does this name sound good to me when I say it out loud?
B. Does this name align with the mission of my business and how I want people to perceive it?
C. If I told people this name in passing, would they find it easy to remember/easy to spell?
D. Do I plan to expand my business to include other products or services in the future, and if so, does this name give me the flexibility to do so?
As you go through your list, prioritize your favorite names by writing a 1, 2, 3, and so on next to them. You’ll want multiple options in case your name’s domain isn’t available or your social media handles are taken. These are important factors that we’ll go through in Part Five.
But first, take a moment to look back at your list.
Do you still feel like you haven’t found “the one?” when it comes to naming your business?
Do you have a few good leads but nothing that feels completely right? That’s okay! Sometimes these things need a little bit of time to marinate.
Try walking away for a while and letting your subconscious stew on your list from Part Three. Play a game, do some exercise or tackle an art project. Allowing your mind to activate different areas will give your creative muscles a rest, and it’s likely that when you come back to this guide, you’ll have a renewed perspective on things.
[image error]
Tip: We recommend getting out in nature if you’re hitting a mental roadblock. It ALWAYS helps us!
You may even want to go back to Part One and start the process over again.
Try adding new words to your list. Are there words that continue to come back up over and over again?
As I mentioned in the beginning of this guide, your name is the foundation for your brand so you want to make sure it feels right. Have patience and keep the ideas flowing until you reach a conclusion that feels like it fits.
If you DO feel like you’ve found the right fit, continue to on!
Naming Your Business Part Five: The Final Checklist
Now that you have a name you feel confident about, you want to make sure that it’s viable in terms of intellectual property, marketing, and social media. Here is an important list of factors to consider when making sure your business name is available for marketing purposes:
Is your domain name available?
You can use a free tool like Lean Domain Search to search for your business name and several other domains including your desired name.
Is your business name available on social media?
Is your new name or a version of it available across popular social media platforms in case you want to use them to promote? to easily check ALL social media sites in one spot (pretty neat, huh?)
Does your business name already have a trademark?
Search in the federal database if you’re in the US to check the trademark database (wow that website is awful!) You can also Google your business name to make sure that another popular business isn’t using it even if they don’t have a trademark.
Lastly, does this name differentiate you from your competition?
Is it memorable and different enough that you will stand out? Does it feel like it can stand on its own above anything similar? For us, there are other sites that use the phrase “Wandering Aimfully” but it’s verrrry far and few between.
And guess what, if you make it through all those questions unscathed?
Congratulations, you’ve succeeded in naming your business or product!
You’ve put in the work necessary to create the best possible foundation for your business and brand. Now it’s time to buy your domain, grab your social media handles and launch your business!
If this guide was helpful, consider sharing it using the “T’it” or “F’it” buttons below 
July 23, 2019
FaceApp Old Age Photos, Societal Norms, and Small Business Attacked by Big Business
Episode Summary
Last week FaceApp took over the Internet and we rode the wave along with it (you can see Jason as an old man here). What are the implications of uploading our photos to a random app and should we be concerned about the privacy implications?
What about the societal norms of men and women when it comes to aging? Can we do something to counteract the stigmas associated with getting older?
We also chat about Cat & Cloud Coffee getting sued by Caterpillar (yes, the billion-dollar construction company is suing a small neighborhood coffee company over a trademark). It’s pretty crappy when a small business gets attacked by a big business so we wanted to share our thoughts and ask for your support too. You can listen to Episode One and Episode Two from the Cat & Cloud founders talking about the lawsuit.
We hope you enjoyed this more random episode. Should we do more episodes like this?
July 16, 2019
Our Weirdest and Most Helpful Rituals
Episode Summary
When it comes to weird rituals, we have a bunch! As weird as some of our daily rituals are, they are also some of the most helpful things we do to stay grounded and productive.
One of Jason’s weird rituals has gone on for over 1,000 (nearly) straight days and it took him from feeling negative throughout each day to creating a ripple effect of positivity as soon as he opened his eyes each morning.
Caroline’s most important rituals have evolved over the past six months as she’s been willing to try any new habits to overcome her bout with anxiety. Her latest morning ritual has been extremely beneficial!
Have a listen as we chat about the rituals we’ve created, the habits we’ve formed, and how we think about making positive changes in our daily lives.
July 7, 2019
How We Fix Work Friction and Create Project Values
Episode Summary
One of the things we try to be really honest around Wandering Aimfully is when it comes to the truth about working together. It’s not all sunshine, rainbows, and unicorns shooting glitter out of their butts (we wish!) Unfortunately, we do hit friction and this week we share how we work through it.
While working on a Building A Squarespace Site from Start to Finish (BASSSF) project, we had a couple of tough conversations. This isn’t the first time we’ve experienced friction while working together but we wanted to flip on the camera/mic and record it for you.
Have a listen as we try to develop a process, real-time, and figure out a way to make project collaboration go a bit smoother moving forward.
We really hope you enjoy being a fly on the wall of conversations like these. We rarely see couples, let alone couples that work together, sharing this honestly and openly!
