Working for free

I’m currently working with a friend of mine to build her brand without engaging in advertising or spending any money other than website hosting. So far, we’re doing well. But we’re both in it for different reasons - for her, she’d like to increase her brand awareness and convert that into leads. For me - I’d like to learn and her success is my success.

Mind you, I am doing this for her for free. I don’t want anything in return. Ok, maybe that’s a lie. What I actually want is to be known for helping people, to help tell the story of their brands. The reality is that I am still learning, and I will always be learning. I feel badly to ask for money in exchange for my learning. I know a lot of people would say that this is my time, but I actually think I am already getting paid.

The currency for me is DOING. It’s the only way to learn and grow. That is far more valuable to me than money. In saying that, I am in a very lucky position where I’m in a marriage where only one of us needs to work to keep up our lifestyle. I am very grateful for this opportunity, and I know my place. Maybe one day, I will feel confident enough to charge. However, that’s a long term goal.

Back in the day, when I was young and still trying to figure out what it is that I wanted to do with my life, I realised that web design was an avenue that I could go down and ask people for a shit tonne of money, because they didn’t exactly know what they were doing but I did. In no way did I cheat people out of money, but I certainly charged for websites and projects where now, looking back, I probably would have told my young self just to take on these jobs for nothing and then build up my business.

However, here I am. 32 years old and I’m starting again, which is fine. I have plenty of time to build. I wouldn’t have been able to build if I didn’t learn from mistakes of the past. I know that I certainly won’t be making these errors in the future.

This advice isn’t necessarily for young folk. It’s for any folk who is starting out, no matter where they are in their lives. The only way you will ever truly learn is to actually work on whatever it is that you want to get close to doing. Find a 9-5 that’s pretty close to it, so you’re earning money while you’re building. In your 5-9 is when you want to build whatever it is that you eventually want for yourself. If that means that you need to reach out to people you want to work for and with, the best thing you can do is bring them value by asking them to work with them for free. The biggest value you’re going to get is the hours on working on something pretty close to where you want to be.

Case of the Mondays on a Tuesday.

NY Mag wrote a piece last year about how people struggle on a Tuesday more than Monday, giving “Case of the Monday’s” a run for its money. I think I’m a little odd, because I don’t ever suffer from a either case, but I certainly have my off days and it doesn’t really matter what day of the week it is. 

It’s normal to have an off day and I think it’s a bit silly to pretend that everything is always ok, and we’re always on top of our A-game. It’s just impossible. Sometimes there are other things going on that are distracting and throw you off. For instance - I had a nice weekend planned which was thrown into complete disarray when we realised both our cats had fleas and they’d never had them before. The entire house was thrown into chaos, plans cancelled, money spent on flea-killing products (and they’re not cheap) and doing 12 hour cleaning stints. It was exhausting and continued all day yesterday. As we continue on into Tuesday, there are no signs of it slowing down. I’m tired and not exactly focused. 

I do realise, however, that it’s in my best interest to pull it all together because while it’s ok to take a little time and feel a bit low (it makes the highs so much sweeter), we can’t really stay there. We gotta come back with a bang. It’s important take the take for yourself and get focused to get back on track. 

I like to use my commute time as the time for myself. It’s the only real time I am truly alone, even if I am surrounded by hundreds of my fellow comrades, begrudgingly making their way to work. Or, I don’t know, maybe they’re enjoying it as much as I am. The West Australian (while it’s still alive) likes to write articles about how there’s an EPIDEMIC in Perth, that we all ride to work on our own, causing so much pollution and why don’t we like to carpool? Years have gone by and we still don’t have a carpool lane like they have in LA, which was one of the recommendations. This is what I think: we just really like our time in the car by ourselves. Sometimes at the end of the day, going to my car is a nice refuge. I can put on my own music and not be judged. I can sing and not be judged. I can take my belt off so I can breathe properly and not be judged or ruin an amazing outfit. It’s my time. 

So in this time, I like to do things, particularly in the morning to help get me focused. I might swing them in the afternoon if I’m particularly feeling shaky, but the morning usually sets me off right.

Also, most of these tips are from the man, Tony Robbins (15 minutes to fulfilment) and worked it into my own routine. I cannot take any credit for them other than to say I have been doing it for 2 years now, and I have found a remarkable change in my behaviour, my perception and my drive.

1) Breathing - Tony Robbins likes to start this by walking and breathing. However, I have found that I cannot get up at 5am to go for a walk. I’ve tried this for many years and I’m 32 now, the jig is up. Instead, I do it in the car on the way to work. It’s essentially 4 breaths in and 4 breaths out, continuing that for a couple of minutes. It helps to awaken my mind and get me focused. It’s also really important to breath deeply, down to your belly. I find it very easy to FORGET TO BREATHE during my day, and I breathe too shallow. Deep belly breaths help to relieve stress and tension.

2) Being grateful - For the next few minutes, I mention all the things I’m grateful for, out loud. Yes, you can do it in your mind but it doesn’t have the same effect as actually saying it aloud. Don’t you find that things make total sense when you’re saying them out loud? Gratitude is the number one thing that can completely turn your life around in an instant, because you’re focusing on things that you already have in your life that you’re thankful for, rather than focusing on all the things you don’t have or all the things you think you have to worry about. It helps to give you perspective. When you do this for the long term, you will start to find that things that used to bother you no longer bother you at all because they mean nothing as opposed to the things that really matter to you.

3) Set 3 goals - I like to set three goals to accomplish during the day. They don’t have to be work goals and they don’t have to relate to each other. It’s just three simple, achievable things that you can accomplish during the day. This will help to focus your energy and it always feels good to end the day feeling as though you accomplished something, which will prime you for tomorrow.

4) Listen to a motivating podcast - I love Tim Ferris and Gary V - they certainly help keep me focused after I do all of those little exercises. It’s almost like a coach encouraging me before I get out of the car. If I don’t feel like podcasts, I’ll usually head straight to music that puts me in party mode, further boosting my mood.

Do you guys have any tips on how to turn your mood around? Let me know!

Showing the ROI of a website

I’ve had the experience of working in a corporate environment, an agency environment and for myself, so I have a good understanding of the value of a website to different groups of people. It’s difficult to ignore the fact that a website is seen as the online home of any business or brand, with other channels used to direct traffic to it at any stage of their buyer cycle. But what is the ROI of a website? And how can its value be measured?

You cannot simply create a website with the sole purpose of set-and-forget. It just doesn’t work that way anymore. Nor does simply having a website as the only channel for people to connect to your business going to cut it these days. A website now only plays a smaller part in the larger digital strategy, and its value should be demonstrated. The trick is to keep a website affordable on both time and money, whilst spending the rest of those assets on telling your story on other platforms. 

This is the leanest way I can think of creating a website that will show your client ROI. 

Before starting a brand new design, you should invite your client around for a coffee or a casual chat. It may be a geting-to-know-you kind of thing, but what you’re really trying to do is pinpoint your clients:

• understanding of their own business’ positioning
• understanding their goals 
• understanding of the need for their business and its offerings and services
• understanding their target audiences and creating basic persona’s
• understanding the user journey

Both you and the client should leave the meeting with enough notes to form a marketing plan. If your client is unsure of any of these points, it’s your job to help them understand this better and the best way to do this is to keep asking questions. This can range from just a casual chat to a full on branding workshop if that’s what they see the value in but we’re focusing on the extremely lean product for now. This helps to serve the purpose of your shared understanding of goals, but also you’ve reached out to the client and helped them refine their goals and understand their target audience a little better. 

My recommendation for this meeting is an ammalgamation of Bernadette Jiwa’s resources from Marketing: a Love Story and Difference , especially if you’re like me: a web designer trying to make it in the world of digital marketing. These books will give you the basic tools to be able to help your client understand their business better, by adding value to their clients. 

After this meeting, I would suggest heading back to your workspace and spending a little bit of time refining those notes and establishing your action plan or strategy, if you will. This should outline:

1. The business, their services and offerings
2. Their goals 
3. Their target audiences outlined using brief personas
4. The different thoughts that a user might have throughout their buyer cycle from awareness, consideration, decision 
5. Your proposed strategy
1. Website details
1. CONTENT - this is massive, because it’s going to drive a lot of things. Ensuring that you have enough and adequate content to connect to the user. At the very least, I recommend creating a simple document that will outline the content required and the keywords to be used, with notes to the client on how to create the content if they’re doing it themselves
2. Design & development - this can be as lean or as complex as possible. It could be a simple design from a squarespace theme to something off-the-shelf from wordpress. Either way, the point is to keep your client focused on their end user and what they would want and use, rather than thinking they need a fully custom solution. Remember: this is about maximising THEIR budget. You need to help them help themselves. 
2. Other components that fit within their budget to maximise their spend, allowing you to spend enough time as support and to give recommendations. For example:
1. Basic SEO - Keyword research selecting 3 keywords, along with a content plan to map those keywords to pages and a report
2. Reporting for 3 months and a meeting after that time to review growth/recommend changes to the strategy
3. Ongoing support and reports outlined, with clear goals to meet
6. A timeline for this strategy, outlining the immediate processes in place for the “strategy” timeline, plus a rough outline for the future

In my experience, a lot of my own clients do not read their reports. It is only when I call them to ask if they’d like to go through it, do they ask questions and sometimes it’s not about the report itself. Sometimes, 6 months down the track and long after I’ve asked about their report, they’ll ask me to show them how the website is performing for them.  You must remember that a lot of clients are on a different wave-length to you, and they’re not always going to be ready to talk about a report that may be incredibly important to you but not important to them at the time. I recommend regularly keeping them up to date with what is happening on their website. This does not have to be a phone call, but can be a simple email to say they increased in rankings for a particular keyword, outside of the general reporting time. This comes from a genuine place PLEASE. It takes a few minutes to do, you’re not asking for anything, but you’re just letting them know how well it’s going because you’re creating value and you’re building a partnership. 

This is something I’ve been kicking around in my head, so I”m most probably going to come back and refine this post when I get some more time and can put this into practice. 

Guys, if you have any thoughts on this, please let me know!

Pitch Day Today

It’s the day that I have not been waiting for - it’s Pitch Day today and I’m not really feeling much about it. I kind of just want to go inside, make myself a cup of coffee and get on with my day.

I was thrown a curveball late yesterday, when the terms of the presentation had changed. I tried not to freak out about it, because not too much has changed but it is also indicative to me that the prospective client can’t quite agree on what their requirements are, even this late in the game. I realise that I’m relying on my 5-9 of learning about digital strategy, so it makes me a little nervous.

I have recently finished reading Marketing, a Love Story by Bernadette Jiwa. It was so incredibly helpful to me in the lead up to this presentation. She covers the true understanding of a business and the way to make connections with target markets, to help it grow into a brand. I recommend this book to anyone interested in expanding upon their business case, or going back to square one.

Designing with empathy

You want to know what makes a truly great design and a successful product? It’s empathy. It’s not only caring about your clients’ objectives, but it’s really about their customers, the end-user. And it’s not just about caring, it’s about understanding. That’s what is going to build trust and that’s what is going to make a successful product.

Get to know your client

When a client comes in and says they just want a website because they think they need one, you need to ask them the questions that are going to get inside their head so you understand why it is that they actually want a website.

If you’re a designer like me, you’re already an observer. You’re maybe even a good listener. That doesn’t mean listening to the words that someone is saying, it means listening to the words that they’re not saying, the words they’re using, the way they’re saying them, their facial expressions, the way they interact with others in the room. That’s going to give you a really good indication of who your client is, how they run their business and what their product is. They’re also going to be a key (not the key) in your understanding of their customers.

Become obsessed with their business, their customers, their product, their ethics, their work methods, as if you are actually working in their office. Know all the ins and outs. If you don’t know it, learn. Google. Watch YouTube videos. Without the understanding and the care, you won’t be able to give the client’s customer what they want and ultimately, you won’t be able to give the client what they want. That understanding and that care is what builds trust. Without that trust, your client won’t be able to place their faith in you to go off and create their winning product.

Make empathy part of the process

It doesn’t matter what photographs you use, if the design style is “brutalist”, or if your content is above the fold. None of those things are going to sell the product if it’s not suited to the end-user. Everything that you design and everything that you create, must have purpose.

Empathy should be guiding you throughout the research process, the design discovery process and the UX process. I know what I want, as someone who breathes the web, but does the target market know that? It’s likely that we don’t want the same things, or we’re not going to interpret things the same way.

Take data that you will have accumulated between the time of launch and review, and see how the end-user is using the product (or, how they aren’t). Empathy should guide the review process and the changes you make to improve the product. Your product should be growing and changing with your end-users, too.

Get to know your client’s client

Get in the mind of your customer and think about what they would want, how they would get from A to B, what kind of language they would most connect with, what kind of photographs they would most connect with. You see, it’s all about empathy on their side of things, as well.

We all connect with someone or something that speaks to us, that we understand more than the person next to us. This is why it’s imperative that every action and every element must be thought of with the end-user in mind.

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I wrote this post for the Bam Creative blog, which was originally published 19/04/17

Working on a pitch

Today I am working on a presentation pitch for a client of ours who have decided that their website needs to be more person-centric. As a designer I find this to be very strange because the whole purpose of a website is to talk to the targeted end-user. However, I can understand how it can get out of control, especially when you have a lot of cooks in the kitchen, and you’re trying to appease everyone’s needs. You can easily arrive at a website that solves all internal issues, but doesn’t speak to your end-user at all.

I have worked on a lot of projects like this where it’s long-winded. You think you get final approval, until you realise that you’re chasing up the final FINAL FINAL approval. It’s never ending. There really is no advice for this, it’s a losing battle.

What I find interesting is that our competition is probably going to go in and pitch quite aggressively, possibly with full on concepts. I personally don’t think that’s the most effective way. It almost shows that you’re so desperate to land a job that you’ve basically done it all before you even got it, and you didn’t even really listen to your client, you just did what you thought was best. There’s solving a problem and then there’s just being a bit too self-assured. The client misses out on the valuable education and collaboration during the website design process, which I feel a job of this scale actually needs.

What I actually want to do is give the skeleton of our strategy, because I want to tell a story of the client’s users and how the components of our strategy is going to hopefully answer their requests. Fingers crossed.

Where do websites fit?

I’ve been wondering a lot about websites for small business and whether or not they still need them. There are other ways a small business or startup can get online, quickly and using affordable options. Some of them would rather start using another platform such as Instagram or Facebook because it’s just a lot easier to manage. 

Platforms like Squarespace and Wix have risen in the face of agencies and freelancers. I realise that we may have kind of screwed ourselves a little bit and here’s why. 

Back in the day (20 years ago) when suddenly, you NEEDED a website and if you had one, it was like you were ahead of everyone on the planet Earth, only a few people really knew how to make websites. We had the education, it wasn’t exactly quick and easy but the more we did it, the faster we got at it. But it seemed like our pricing still stayed the same. Whatever the issue, there was a clear miscommunication between the client and the webdev. I’ve had a few instances in the past where a client would quiz me on why things cost what they did or why things were taking as long as they did. I don’t think I was the only one who received these questions because then, it was too late. Squarespace came out. Wix came out. The good times were over.

These platforms take websites, package them up into neat (and sometimes attractive) looking products and hands them right over to the client. What is it? It’s the SOLUTION to all of their time and money woes. Until…

Look, some websites are not too bad. But I’m a designer. I have an eagle eye. i can tell when:

a) there were too many cooks in the web design kitchen

b) someone with little experience has made the website themselves

c) when whoever made the website just gave up on the website. and life. 

For agencies and freelancers to exist, we need to refine our process. We can no longer assume that a client will want to spend 10k on a website when they can go somewhere else and maybe someone who is up with the times can tweak a Squarespace website to their liking for a fraction of the cost. 

The secret is going to be the customer experience. No. Not CX or some bullshit acronym that people don’t care about. As if trying to take your clients and their experience and putting a label on it like IA, CS, UX, UI or whatever, is going to put a label on something and solve the issue. It’s just Customer Experience. What is that? A genuine care for the client and their business will shine through and become more valuable. 

That means a clear onboarding process. Guidance through the content phase (which most clients struggle with). Clear communication of the process, often with visuals. Clients need to be treated as though they were your business partner. If you think they won’t understand why you’ve decided to do something, you need to communicate why, rather than slip it in and think they won’t notice. They do. They just now feel very uncomfortable asking.

<3 clients. It’s going to save agencies. 

delta-breezes:

Niklas Kiesling | @imperfec1ion

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