Links Talked About In This EpisodeCMJ Music MarathonWorld Series Ad Spots Squarespace Website Planner TranscriptINTRODUCTION PRE-ROLL:How is one person supposed to dream up a compelling design, draft motivating verbiage, find inspiring photos, craft a lovable story, compile it all together and publish it all on a website? And then go out and find people who care?FULL INTRODUCTION:Hi I’m Greg Sargent and this is the Squarespace Guru show! This show is made possible by Dakine Creative. Consulting for the modern business; search engines, social media, email marketing, internet advertising and content publishing. Go to Dakine Creative dot com to get started. On this show we talk about everything Squarespace. News, tips, tricks, but more importantly we talk about what to do with the tools Squarespace has so cleanly created for us. This is an area where most people fall off the wagon. I’m really into talking about how to use Squarespace as the hub of your online efforts. It is Wednesday October 22nd 2014, and today we're going to talk about: niche sites, some Squarespace news, at the end of the show I’m going to try and sell you something...So if you are interested in that, hang around after the show ends and there will be more information for you.NEWS:If you are in New York City this week, be sure to stop by the CMJ Music Marathon going on all this week. Squarespace is sponsoring several days of the marathon, although they aren’t calling it sponsoring...they’re powering the show or presenting the shows. Not sure the right terminology there, but who cares. The reason I’m telling you about it is Squarespace will have some merchandise tables set up giving away cool stuff. Special vinyl album covers and silkscreened posters...and though they didn’t say it, I bet you’ll be able to find some Squarespace merch too. In the past at these types of events, Squarespace has had bandanas, guitar picks, t shirts and all sorts of cool stuff with the Squarespace logo on it. So if you are a big Squarespace nut like me, check out the events this week. At times like this I wish I was closer to New York. Very cool.The Next Web giveaway is still going on. I talked about it last week but they are giving away some really cool prizes including a dslr camera, $300 credit toward anything from MOO, the Pencil stylus from fiftythree and some 1-year subscriptions to Squarespace. I’ve got the link in the show notes for that. You can enter until the last day of October. From what it sounds like, Squarespace is giving The Next Web these prizes. I like it, Squarespace understands where their target audience spends their time and is reaching them in those spaces. That is a concept I talk a lot about. The marketing strategy by Squarespace is so far reaching it’s hard for us internet addicted people to not hear about the platform. They’ve got all the wordpress people in a frenzy. Just search twitter for Squarespace and look at all the wordpress and snooty programmers hating on Squarespace.Speaking of Squarespace ads, did you see the Squarespace ad air during the world series? Very cool. That climber guy is crazy. No ropes, no safety measures of any kind… that’s just nuts.Ok so last week I launched my new Squarespace Website Planner. And so far there’s been 91 people who have used the planner during the last week. I’m so glad you’ve been using the planner and had so many good things to say about it. It’s fully editable online through Google Docs, which is the biggest difference between the old one and this new one. It looks the same, but now instead of printing it off or editing a pdf with some other software, you can type directly into the planner within Google Docs. If you haven’t tried it yet, you should. Even if your website is up or been live for years, check it out I bet there’s something in there that can help you continue to build your online presence. I’ll have a link in the show notes.LISTENER QUESTIONS:If you have a Squarespace question, and would like me to answer that question here on the show, get out your iPhone, iPad or Apple device of choice and launch your messages app. Start a new message and this into the recipient field: greg@sqsp.guru. Don’t worry it will work. You’re likely used to just typing in someones phone number, but you can send messages to email addresses too. Send me a text message or better yet, a voice recording and I’ll do my best to provide an intelligent and helpful answer.Today’s question comes from Chris, let’s take a listen: [audio from Chris’ question]That’s a great question Chris, and something that doesn’t really get talked about much when you read stuff about niche sites or hear people discuss niche sites. The question is when creating a niche website, do you actually have to create an entire website or can it just be a niche page. In short, a niche page is what’s called a landing page. But a landing page is very different from a niche website. A niche website is made up of several landing pages. I don’t agree that the benefits of a niche website can be obtained by just a few niche pages or landing pages within an overall bigger website.Because it’s all about the signals, or the things that tell Google and humans the site is authoritative and valuable. Using a niche page is just not enough to convince Google that that content is authoritative. Yes Google indexes pages not websites, but Google does take note what those pages are linking to, and linking from. There are so many signals that a single page within a larger website cannot be loud enough to get Google’s attention in the same way a dedicated niche site can. When you have a separate and distinct website, with it’s own domain, it’s own seperate hosting, it’s own separate social media accounts and lots of articles all discussing the same area of interest or topic...then Google easily identifies that site as something of value and begins to offer the site in search results. That whole process can happen in just a few days even. It all depends on the competition level in your chosen niche.If you have just one page talking about widget a, and another page talking about widget b and another page talking about widget c...then when someone searches for widget b, Google will be more likely to provide a reference to a website that only talks about widget b.Take my Squarespace Guru site for example. Sure I could blog about Squarespace on my company website. And I could talk about Squarespace through a podcast branded under my company name. Or I could share Squarespace related content through social media, but the audience that my company has just wouldn’t care. The point of a niche site is to drill down and focus on one topic and become an authority on that one topic. If you all the sudden discovered that I had a WordPress Guru blog and podcast, my value as a Squarespace Guru would likely go down in your eyes. I don’t by the way...can’t stand Wordpress. So by keeping your niche sites separated, you are establishing your authority in the eyes of Google and humans. Keeping it all together under one website would dilute your ability to connect with those niche markets.To answer the second part of your question, yes it does get sometimes a little confusing and requires a little extra work to maintain a few different brands. What I do is I have my main company with a phone number, mailing address and a brick and mortar location, then each niche site that I create is not presented as a business, but presented as an individual providing information about that topic. Because the goal is to create authority, and to reach people that you wouldn’t have reached otherwise.Using my Squarespace Guru niche site as an example, if I were to run into at a networking event and say “Hey I’m Greg from Dakine Creative. We help businesses create an online presence” then you would immediately put up this wall, because you don’t want to be sold anything. But if I were to say to you “Hey I’m Greg, I run a blog called Squarespace Guru. I share information about Squarespace websites.” This is a little different. The tone of the conversation turns from hey I want to sell you something, to hey I’ve got really specific information that will help your day be more awesome.That’s a offline example, now here’s an online example. Say I never created the Squarespace Guru blog, and I published all the same content in exactly the same way, but through my company website instead. Would you have found my content? Chances are no. There’s a thousand other consultants and web developers out there talking about Squarespace, but you found my content because I focused on a niche audience and created a niche brand. So now, when people type “Squarespace tips & tricks” into Google, guess what comes up first? My Squarespace Guru niche site. My company site is buried down on page like 25 or something.In part, a niche site is also there to gain trust. Over time, you are able to grow an audience with that trust, and before long you’ve become an authority in that field. You were already an authority in that field before you started the niche site, but nobody knew about it...or nobody really cared. But with a niche site, you are giving people a reason to care about what it is you are doing. And big picture strategy is you give away information and be extremely helpful through your niche sites, and in turn more business comes your way. And if you’ve set the niche site up correctly, then people will know about your actual business and it won’t be uncomfortable or weird.So ABC plumbing could be your actual business, with the infinity pool guy dot com being a niche site. Or the pool guy dot com a niche site. Or diy water features dot com a niche site. Each one of those websites should have an about page that says, my name is Greg and in my day job I run ABC Plumbing in Dallas, TX. We offer blah blah blah services. And everyone you’ve reached through your niche sites, when it comes time for them to need a plumber, the first person on their minds is ABC plumbing.So to wrap up that big long answer, it’s my opinion that a niche website does need to be it’s own website, with it’s own domain and portfolio of signals that grabs the attention of both search engines and humans. But it doesn’t need to be established as a separate business entity or have a separate phone number or address. A niche site is about the person providing the authoritative information, while a regular business website is about selling something.So you have to be creative and look at your market and figure out how you can create a niche site about a topic that people will respond to.That was such a good question that I just decided to make that the entire show today. I really love it when you ask questions, because there’s just so much to building an online presence and it’s easy for me to skip over something that needs more explanation. So keep sending in those questions.MAIN WRAP UP:After the show ends I’ll have a short advertisement for my Squarespace tutorials I’m slowly releasing. So if you are interested in that, hang around for a second. If my show is helping you build your online presence, and making you think about things you wouldn’t have otherwise, would you consider writing a review in iTunes? It takes just a few seconds, just click the note icon at the bottom of my website and it will open the podcast profile in iTunes. Then just give a star rating and a quick one or two sentence review. I would definitely appreciate that. It’s good to see those reviews come in because it helps others make the decision to listen or subscribe to the show. Those reviews are sort of a social verification that the podcast isn’t a waste of time or low quality. I love all the feedback I’m getting, and thank you so much for listening, and I hope you have a great rest of the week.
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