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The Weekly Variable
Client work, development work, design work, the right kind of work, all kinds of work this week, and the importance of finding the right audience.
Here’s the topics:
divs.delivered
The first website for my first client is now live!
Last night I brought the website for Sacramento NeuroPsych Associates, sacnpa.com, online with the Webflow page I built for them as part of divs.design.
As with any go-live, I naturally ran into a last minute issue, not realizing that domain.com doesn’t offer CNAME flattening, which I had never heard of CNAME flattening until Webflow told me there was an issue when connecting the domain to Webflow. I had to quickly pivot to using a free Cloudflare account to manage the domain instead, which resolved the issue thankfully.
I’ve been meaning to check out Cloudflare after reading how it saved BannerBear’s service from a DDoS attack and this was the perfect time to learn on the fly. I now know that it’s quite easy to setup a Cloudflare account for free with domain management, and have DDoS protection ready to go in the event I need it, but hopefully won’t need it anytime soon.
But sacnpa.com is now live and I’ll be monitoring it this weekend for any other unexpected issues. If you happen to click the link and see anything that doesn’t look right, please let me know at [email protected]!
99 Applications
Ok just 3 applications… for now.
As I slowly continue experimenting with marketing efforts for divs.design, I had a plan to apply as an expert in a few places:
Webflow Expert requires I submit 3 live client sites, which as of yesterday, I have 1, so I’ll have to come back to that one.
Relume had me fill out a profile on contra.com which I did. I created a profile and submitted 3 projects to Relume to await their approval of my expert status, but I’m still waiting on that one.
And finally, I also filled out a profile for 99designs.com, and my application was approved on Wednesday! I can participate in their design “contests” where a client requests a new design and anyone can submit a new design for free. If the client selects your design, then you get paid! I like the model since it gives the client multiple options to work with, and it gives the designer experience with the chance of getting paid but not having to pay to connect.
I originally signed up for Thumbtack expecting something more along those lines, but Thumbtack charges you for every connection, which I’m not to the point of being able to properly capitalize on that kind of system.
For now I’ll stick with participating in design contests on 99designs to get a feel for what people typically look for on there and see if I win a contest or two. Maybe I’ll shoot to submit 99 designs… 🤔
Auto Alt Text
Another marketing tactic for divs.design I’ve been otherthinking about is a combination of YouTube tutorials and helpful content that occasionally mentions Webflow plugins I built.
Payton Clark Smith uses this exact model for Semflow. He makes helpful Webflow videos, and occasionally mentions he has a Webflow plugin that improves SEO.
I plan on doing something similar with Webflow tutorial videos and offering Webflow plugins that simplify certain steps in the tutorial.
The first on the list is Auto Alt Text.
After building 10 websites, I quickly grew frustrated with being ready to publish a site, but seeing I had 50+ issues to resolve, most of which were images that needed alt text.
Luckily, this is a tool well suited for ChatGPT. It can easily analyze an image and provide an alternate text description of the content.
It could be done manually, either by quickly writing a short description for each image, or uploading 10 images at a time into ChatGPT and copy pasting each description, OR this plugin would have 1 button to click and send them all off to get descriptions and be updated automatically.
Automatic alternate text will be part of all platforms in the future, or just automatically read by AI in the future, but for now I’ll do my part to help out with the issue.
I have the initial framework of the plugin working, but I still need to hook in ChatGPT for descriptions. I was happy to get a plugin prototype working in Webflow within just a few hours, though!
More updates on this to come, but I’ll be sure to let you know once I publish my first Webflow Plugin!
Simplifying Business
Matt Gray is another up-and-coming business expert building an online brand like Alex Hormozi has done, Codie Sanchez blowing-up recently, as well as a number of others, and Matt’s video spoke to me pretty clearly.
He talks about limiting beliefs, and #1 on the list was “Lack of Clarity” or overthinking.
I certainly have the capacity to overthink things, so I found this particularly poignant.
He recommends to “just start”. You can overplan forever when it comes to starting a business, but at some point you have to start. And really you only need a product or service and a customer and that’s it.
The other part of this though is finding your “whole-body calling”. A business that aligns with your mind, body, spirit and soul.
A little esoteric for me, but I appreciate the message. Find something that gives you energy, rather than drains it, when you work on it.
For both points, I really appreciate the simplicity. Ironically for as much as I overthink, the overthinking ultimately leads to simplifying. Do what you want to do and find someone you can help by doing what you want to do.
Beyond that, I personally vibe with Matt’s focus on systems: taking a complex process and making it simple enough for someone else to do or to automate it. I believe that is key to the kind of success I’d like to have.
The rest of the video dives into his other systems and more of his business advice so it’s worth a watch if you have the time. A good reminder to keep things simple and just get started:
The Right Audience
Alex Hormozi changed his content strategy recently based off an interesting metric.
Rather than looking at “vanity metrics” like view counts and subscribers, he and his team started paying attention to the advertising rates for their YouTube videos and comparing it to the sign-ups on their website.
If the rates were higher, they could assume their content is targeting the audience they want to be targeting, rather than going for big broad audience videos that are more entertaining and less specific.
Everything is a game of percentages. Here it’s get a certain percentage of viewers to become customers, and there’s usually 2 approaches: go wide or go targeted.
.004% of 1,000,000 is 40 customers
2% of 2000 is 40 customers
40% of 100 is 40 customers
If you are finding the right people, you don’t have to go nearly as wide. While a .004% conversion rate sounds easy, it takes considerably more time and effort to get in front of 1,000,000 viewers to get that .004% rate. It’s much easier to get in front of 100 targeted viewers and have a 40% conversion rate because you’ve researched them and know what they are looking for.
In Alex’s case, by not going as wide, he doesn’t have to put as much effort into post-production for his videos. Less graphics, less editing, less time to create a video. As a result he’s posting multiple times a week now as opposed to posting maybe once a week, and getting better client connections and better ad results on top of less effort.
He breaks it all down in the video below and also dives even further into an example where a woman is making nearly $1 million a year by only talking specifically to dietitians and how they should file insurance coding. When you find the right people, the chances of you helping them is significantly higher.
And that’s it for this week! Another newsletter all about the future: streaming, AI, crypto and divs.
Those are the links that stuck with me throughout the week and a glimpse into what I personally worked on.
If you want to start a newsletter like this on beehiiv and support me in the process, here’s my referral link: https://www.beehiiv.com/?via=jay-peters. Otherwise, let me know what you think at @jaypetersdotdev or email [email protected], I’d love to hear your feedback. Thanks for reading!