Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about how important it is to keep pushing ourselves. I believe the single most beneficial thing I’ve done for my career is to learn and push my skills every single day. Sometimes, I can’t even believe the doors that have opened up for me just because of this.

In the past 10 years, I’ve went from zero (hey, I was still soul-searching back then) to making a career that I truly love. When I say “make”, I mean it. I’ve built it, piece-by-piece. Blood, sweat, tears and all. Now I can say that I look forward to each day and get to do the work I love to do and help others. I think that’s something to be proud of.

I know, it’s not easy to learn new things.

It’s hard to find the time, especially if you’re running or managing a business. Or if you have a family to take care of. Or if you have one of the other hundreds of other little things that need to be done in a day competing for your  time.

I know, putting yourself out there makes you feel vulnerable.

It’s so much easier to just stick with what you’re good at and what you know. It’s comfortable. You’ve already pushed through the learning curve and paid your dues. Now you’re coasting along, fast and fancy-free. Until you’re not.

Times Have Changed

And they’ll keep changing still. It’s no longer enough to do what you’ve always done, if it ever really was. Especially if you do business on the internet. In 3 years, things can be almost as different as night and day.

Over the years, it’s been especially painful for me to see a lot of close friends and colleagues with serious difficulties because they couldn’t or just wouldn’t stretch their comfort zone a little.

All of the time, I get asked things like, “Should I learn xxxx?” or people tell me things like, “My profits were down xx% last year, but I didn’t change anything. I don’t understand why.”.

My standard answer: Figure out how to be more valuable to your clients or company, figure out if that’s the type of work you’d like to do and would be good at, and then figure out how to do it. You don’t need permission from anyone. You just need a plan on how to get there and start moving forward. Even just a little bit will get your further than you can imagine.

Because continuous learning has always been such a big factor for me in my own progress, I was honored to be invited to be one of the instructors at Marketing Profs University Websites that Work course starting in April.

Websites That Work

Marketing Profs knows what’s going on. Besides the fact that they share large amount of free content daily on their main site, I believe they are one of the few educational resources on the internet that understands how important it is to provide up-to-date information to get people ahead. The information they share isn’t just helpful. It’s actually useful, in a real, tangible, hands-on way.

My own class is titled “Landing Page Deep Dive”. I’ll be covering exactly how to plan and design your landing pages. Even if you aren’t a designer and you’ve never done a landing page before, this is for you if you work on or need to start making your own landing pages. Why landing pages? Because their a vital part of the website experience and one of the best ways to directly speak to your customer.

And once you understand how landing pages work and how to plan them out, you’ll always have a great foundation to start with. No more staring at a blank page trying to figure out what to put on it. Hooray!

Other fantastic experts are also contributing to this course. I’ve personally learned a lot of highly valuable information from several of them the past few years, including some of the information they’re sharing in the course. I know you will learn a lot from them too!

Click here to learn more about the course. If you decide to sign up, make sure to use the code SHIFTFWD to receive $200 off. That’s a 33% savings, so it’s quite a deal.

Viva learning!

The Mummified Wood graphic novel project itself will be a 3 volume series. It isn’t set for release for a while and we haven’t determined what exact format the end work will be in yet.

It might digital, it might be print, it might be animated, or it might be something else altogether…. Needless to say, we’re excited to see what direction it heads in. Or should we say, the creatures of the wood lead us in.

For now, we hope you enjoy this glimpse of what’s to come! 
Visit Koldo’s site to read more about it.

If you’re like me, maybe you like to start planning for the new year asap. So, I’ve put together this free website planner for you. Would you rather be braving the crowds at the mall or planning for your business’s future? *wink*

Here are just a few of the areas that this planner looks at:

• Website re-alignment
• All about you
• Your brand
• Innovation
• Tools/Software
• Website content
• Conversion optimization
• Metrics
• Outreach
• Fires! (putting them out, that is)
• Your blog
• and more….

The download is a 36 page pdf file (no opt-in required). Just click on the big button below to download it immediately. The best way to use the planner is to print it out and fill it out by hand when you have some quiet time away from the computer.

Or, if you’d prefer a high-quality version printed and bound for you magazine-style, and you don’t mind waiting a few more days, you can order one on Magcloud for $9 (or $7.20 if you buy today, Cyber Monday, courtesy of MagCloud).

~Happy Soon to Be New Year to You!~

Most people don’t realize that there are alternatives to redesigning and there are actually only a few cases where it’s a justified investment.

In fact, a website redesign can be unhelpful and maybe even dangerous. This is because, unless you redesign from a highly informed standpoint, you effectively risk throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

This is because you throw out everything to start fresh, both bad and good. Or, you exchange one set of problems for another set. It’s not your web designer’s fault. They’re doing the best and working with the information they have. It just tends to happen that way.

Here’s an example of one type of scenario: Let’s say that Greg’s website isn’t bringing in enough sales. His assumption is that it’s because his website doesn’t look professional enough. So, he invests in a very nice and sleek design and afterward his sales actually go down. The reason? When he changed the website, there was actually less content than there was before and now he doesn’t get so many visitors from organic search, which was his best source of converting traffic before.

So, when is a website redesign justified?

Here are the instances where a full redesign makes sense:

• You’re changing your brand
• You’re changing your business model
• Your site is extremely outdated (5 years is pushing it, 10 years is dinosaur age)
• Your site is so unusable that fixing it would cost more than redesigning it
• You feel so embarrassed by your site that you hesitate to share it with others

Those are the only cases where a full website redesign can be justified. In all other cases, your site can be well served with a website audit or just regular continuous improvements.

Here’s an  assessment that I put together to help you determine whether you need a website redesign, an audit, or neither. If you have further questions, let me know in the comments below and I’ll be glad to answer them.

The big news is that we have now decided to expand outward so that we can help more businesses on a deeper level.

Help where small businesses need it

I came to the realization that small businesses needed much more help than just optimizing their sites for conversions. Since we started the service in July, I’ve practically done more website audits than my schedule allows. It’s been an enlightening experience.

As I worked on the audits, some common themes kept emerging. Even though our agency was focused on conversion optimization, it was vividly apparent that low conversions were only a symptom of greater issues.

Since I’ve always believed that my number one job is to help businesses in the best way I can, I advised on a number of things that I saw were the bigger issues that needed to be addressed first. Things like branding, business models, analytics, customer personas, design, usability, behavioral analysis, psychology, funnel analysis, marketing, and more.

As an outsider, it was immediately apparent to me that if the bigger problems didn’t get solved first, there wasn’t enough room for either a strong conversion rate or for a sustainable business in the long-term.

Our own redesign

When we launched shiftfwd early this year, we focused the design, services, and branding very heavily on our ideal client persona that we developed. This was a good strategy at the time. But, as time went on, we realized the branding didn’t reflect us as individuals.

I personally started feeling stiffed by the dark colors and wanted to do something more positive. More open. More free.

I craved some white-space, shapes, and bright colors!

Here’s the mood board that I put together while working on the look and feel of how I wanted the new shiftfwd to be. If you don’t know what a website mood board is, it’s basically a visual representation of the look and feel of a website, without a lot of structure. It’s good for exploring colors, typography, graphics, textures, etc.

The website you are seeing now is the first version as we roll-out the new shiftfwd. In the future, we will be adding more services and products as we finish developing them over the next few months.

For now, we hope you enjoy the blog posts and stay along with us for the ride!