AP 0690: Do I Need a Separate Website for Each Client Type?

AskPat 690 Episode Transcript

Pat Flynn: What's up everybody welcome to Episode 690 of AskPat, thank you so much for joining me today, as always I'm here to help you by answering your online business questions, five days a week.

We have a great question today from John but before we get to John's question I do want to thank today's sponsor, which is ZipRecruiter.com so if you're trying to expend your team or maybe you're a solo entrepreneur and you're trying to hire your first person. One of the best things you can do is go to ZipRecruiter.com because instead of posting a job description out there and posting it on those different job sites, I mean there's hundreds of them, you can just go to one spot ZipRecruiter.com and post it there and they will send it out to all those different job sites, over 100 different job sites for you to find the best candidates, they even have a huge database of potential candidates to do that work that you want. And they're going to give you the best candidates, that's the cool thing they do all the filtering for you, just makes it really easy to hire because hiring is, a difficult process. You definitely want to find the best people as quickly as possible and that's why they're called ZipRecruiter. So check it out for free today by going to ZipRecruiter.com/Pat. All right now heres today's question from John.

John: Hey Pat, my names John Naccarato, And I have a website called Naccarato Photography, I'm a professional photographer out here in Portland, Oregon. My question is, I have different specialties that I shoot, from high school seniors, to weddings, to head shots, to some corporate events, and I kind have that all crammed into my one website. I've heard recommendations that you should specialize and really only have one target on your website. But I want to shoot all of those things, so what would you recommend, would you recommend I have five or six different websites, since I'm the brand call them Naccarato seniors, Naccarato Head Shots, or completely break out to something different. Just kind of confused on where to go from here so that when they show up to the website it's all about what they are looking for. So any advice you have would be wonderful. Thank you for all you do and all the education you share with all of us, appreciate your time, take care.

Pat Flynn: Hey John, what's up? Thank you so much for the question. My answer for you is to stick with one website but have specific landing pages for each of those different specialties. So you would have something in the navigation menu at the top of your homepage, or some sort of menu where people can select, or you might even want to get to a point where on your homepage you have a really clear, easy call to action to say. “Hey, my name is John. I specialize in these types of photography. Which one is most interesting to you right now? Or, which one fits your current need?” They click on that and then they go to that particular landing page, which would then have your testimonials on it, your examples or portfolio and ways to get in contact with you and all that sort of stuff. And that's the way to do it, that way everything lives on one spot, it's going to be so much easier to manage.

Now I understand where these people are coming from by saying you should have separate sites because the more niche you are the better, and I would say that that advice is great if you are in a business that's not a personal brand. Especially if you're amongst all these different sort of sub niches in the photography space, it would make sense to … if you weren't the personal brand behind all of it, to have them be different, entities if you will. But this is all under you, John.

And I really feel like this is the correct answer there, it's going to make your life so much easier as far as tracking. And you know, I would recommend that perhaps you would also discover which ones are most popular for you. You know, I know a lot of photography is very seasonal especially for the weddings so maybe during when people typically hire wedding photographers you want to have that more prominent. The other cool thing about this is your email list, you're going to have one email list hopefully, and be able to segment that email list. And there's a lot of cool things you can do with photography, because I know, from my own personal experience. I've kept the same photographer through my engagement photos, to wedding photos, to baby pictures, and getting the new house, and now doing professional photography for me, the same photographer the whole time and it was nice that I only had to go to one spot to do that.

And the cool thing about this is if you have one email list but you segment that email list into different, sort of stages if you will. Because, you know all these things that you mentioned … maybe not the head shots, that could be a separate thing but still live on your website. They lead into other things, so people for example who get weddings, you do their wedding photography and you have them on a particular list, and you know that six months down the road you follow up with them to see how they're doing. Or you're likely to follow up with them anyway because you're delivering their photo's at that time or their negatives, or even after a year. And you can see … just mention, you know, just mention, this is a good time, I'm not saying that you should have a baby, but many people do at this time after a wedding and I'd love to hook you up with a discount, whatever happens even if it's in the future. If you want to do, you know pregnancy photos, or child photos, or baby photos or anything like that.

So there's a lot of cool things you can do with that, in terms of the timeline and again its just much easier to manage if you're doing that on your own. So yeah, just really really getting into the survey mode I would highly recommend with all the different sub niches that you have. Reading a book called Ask by Ryan Levesque.

There's some really really cool things he does on the very first transaction on the website. And I'm not talking about a monetary transaction I'm talking about the first interaction that people have on some of his websites, help him determine what pages to serve next, what messages to send, what emails to send, what language to use, what offers to send what products to sell. And it just makes your life so much easier when you know what people are most interested in, but I would keep it all on your one website it's just much easier to manage. Especially when it comes to social media, and sharing, I mean you are the authority here and by showing also that you have all these other aspects of your business, I don't think its diluting your efforts I think its making everything else stronger because it shows that you have this expertise, in all aspects of photography, and because people use the same photographer for a lot of other things to, it should all live on one place.

So John, thank you so much for the question, I appreciate you, where going to send you an AskPat t-shirt for having your question featured here on the show. And for those if you listening, if you have a question that you'd like potentially featured here on the show. Just head on over to AskPat.com you can ask right there on that page. And as always we finish of with a quote, and today's quote is from one of my favorite people, A definite huge inspiration to me, and this is Elon Musk. The founder of SpaceX, Tesla and Solar City, so here's his quote. He says, “If something is important enough, even if the odds are against you, you should do it.” Take care guys I'll see in the next episode of AskPat.