B (4:30)

You brought up a lot of really great things and things that I can relate to as someone who has A firm website and a separate personal, you know, brand or website blog. First, I want to make sure everyone heard you regarding the vanity URL and understand kind of what that means. So a good example of this is on Our firm website, definefinancial.com we have a page on there that outlines our sales process, which is also known as our free retirement assessment process. And if I am writing an email or I'm on a podcast as a guest or hosting my own podcast and I want someone to go to that page, it's a little confusing to say, you know, go to definefinancial.com retirement assessment. So instead, instead of building a whole separate website and managing a whole separate domain, just for this free retirement assessment, we have the landing page on defined financial.com site and we purchased a vanity URL freeretirementassessment.com and it just redirects to that landing page. So not a separate website to manage and maintain, but when I'm on a podcast or publishing my own podcast and I want to use it as a call to action, I'll say, go to freeretirementassessment.com to learn more. More. Much simpler, again, than definefinancial.com retirement assessment. So a good example of leveraging a vanity URL if you want to use something like that in your marketing. But I love what you shared about the complexity of managing these two brands, because it sounds really good on the surface to have my firm brand and my personal blog brand where I can let my freak flag fly. But you forget about. You forget about all the operational challenges that come along with it. Not only just the cost, but the time to manage both of these websites and the brands and keep them, you know, fresh. We talked earlier about redesigning your website, and it's this fluid, ongoing process, and now you're doing it for two separate websites. Do these two separate sites, do they feel connected right from a brand standpoint, how do you do that? How do you. How do you make them look and feel connected but not look identical? You mentioned building email lists. I've got this very problem on my hands right now, which is Define Financial is collecting email addresses on that website that goes to a newsletter that we send out. And then I've got the stay wealthy brand that also collects email addresses. We've got that newsletter. So I'm managing two separate email lists and two separate newsletters. It's a lot, and it doesn't really make a lot of sense. So I'm working through, you know, how to kind of tie all that together and fix it. But it just creates a lot of operational challenges. So I think this goes back, Kendra, to kind of, you know, answering our first question today about redesigning websites, which is why, why do you want to have a personal website in addition to your firm website? Because it's not a clear cut answer for everybody. A few reasons. And you touch them, I'll just kind of reiterate and highlight. One might be to mitigate compliance. So with a firm website, you might have stricter compliance rules. Talk to your compliance attorney right before you do anything. But it's common to hear from compliance attorneys that having an outside business activity, having a separate website that's an oba, requires less compliance tracking and archiving. And you have a little bit more flexibility and freedom as to what you can write and publish and what needs to be monitored and archived. So it might mitigate compliance for you. You might want to own a separate entity. Maybe you work for a larger firm and you want to have your own entity, your own content site that you personally own so that if you ever left this firm and went somewhere else, you can take this entity with you and you didn't just write and produce a bunch of content for this firm and their, and their website and you part ways and it has to stay there. So you might want to have this separate entity that you can own and take with you. And then, you know, lastly, people connect with people. It's sometimes hard for people to connect with a corporate or firm website. There's certainly some ways to overcome that. But still, I think it's no surprise that the stay wealthy website, the podcast, the email list, everything is much bigger than the firm and the firm website. People have connected more with that brand than the firm brand. So those are just a few reasons to consider having both. Maybe the last thing I'll say is if you own or work for a large RIA or a large wealth management firm, and there are multiple advisors and maybe multiple advisors that serve different demographics. Let's say you've got an advisor that specializes in working with dentists, you've got an advisor that specializes in working with retirees, and another one that specializes in working with young professionals. It can be hard for a single firm corporate website to try and speak to all of those different target demographics. So in that case, it might make sense to have just one solid, fairly generic firm corporate website and then each of those advisors having a separate personal branded website outside of the firm that specifically targets their niche. I don't know if this is a great Example, because they don't have multiple niches. But Ritholtz Wealth Management is a good example of having this very simple ritholtswealth.com, you know, hub of a website, and then, you know, a number of their advisors or employees having these separate blogs or separate personal brands. And if their audience wants to learn more about their firm and take action, all roads are gonna lead back to that Ritholtz website. I know my good friend Peter Lazaroff@plancorp.com they do something similar. But if I own and operated a large firm like that and had multiple advisors, I might start to, you know, encourage each one of them or some of them to go have these personal brands to really connect with their ideal. Their ideal client.

A (10:01)

Yeah. And I think a great question for you to ask yourself, if you're an advisor, is what do you want to get out of this personal brand setup that you cannot get out of your current setup? Like, get very clear about it and kind of run through that list and understand also, you know, I've also seen some advisors where they're like, oh, yeah, I want this personal brand. And then they go to set that up, and then later they realize they're hiding. Like we kind of mentioned earlier, they're hiding in the appeal of building it out. But then, like, the hard part starts, right? Creating the content. So you might also try. If you go back and you listen to our first episode of this podcast, we talk about how we did all the hard stuff first. We recorded, like, 20 episodes of this podcast before we chose a name. And I'm telling you, that was some hard work. So if you're thinking about that, also make sure you're going out there, and if you want to, you know, potentially create content, you know, you have to look at what your compliance guidelines are, but maybe just test and see if you like it first before you go down that path. Because I've also seen that happened where someone thought, hey, I really want to do this personal brand avenue. And then the personal brand avenue. It's a lot of work. It's a lot of work.

B (11:07)

Well, let's mention that we have this podcast that's grown substantially since we've launched it, and we don't even have a website, Right. How many advisors start a podcast or talk about starting a podcast, and the first thing you think about is like, oh, I need a website for my podcast. We launched this podcast without a name. We recorded. I forget how many episodes before having a name, and we didn't have a website. We still don't have a website and it's grown substantially now. The platform that we host the podcast on gives us this free kind of, you know, this free landing page for the podcast. So something out there exists. I don't even know what the exact URL is because it's, you know, so confusing and. Right. We don't own the actual domain. So you don't necessarily have to have a website or a separate website for a blog or a podcast. Last thing I'll just add here in case it's helpful. A good example of a company that does not have separate websites for their blog or podcast is actually a firm here in San Diego called Pure Financial. And they do a lot of stuff in the media, a lot of writing content, video, big retirement podcasts, and everything is housed within their firm brand. So if you go to the Pure Financial website, you'll see everything all on that website. There is no separate podcast website or separate blog, blog website, which is a good example of a large, multi billion dollar firm producing a lot of great content. But it's all under the firm's umbrella.

A (12:28)

Awesome. Love that example there too where you know, there's not a right or wrong answer. There's just the best answer for you. So moving on to the next question we have here. This is a big one. How do I convert more website visitors to email subscribers? Taylor, what you got?

B (12:43)

Yeah, so converting website visitors to email subscribers. Specific question for somebody who wants to grow an email list and use email, use email marketing as the middle of their their marketing funnel. So I think first step here is to set realistic goals and expectations. And this is why Kendra, you and I talk so much about the marketing funnel. Because knowing where an activity fits in the marketing funnel allows you to set proper expectations and be able to measure the results of that activity. I've always used the example of know. Search engine optimization is a top of funnel activity. Its job is not to convert people into clients. So I can measure search engine optimization in isolation and determine if it's working or not. But I'm not judging whether or not SEO is driving clients. I'm measuring it differently because of its role in my marketing funnel. So set realistic goals and expectations first before we answer this question. So for example, how many monthly site visitors do you currently have? Where are these site visitors coming from? What's the intent of these site visitors? Are they, are they coming to your site organically through Google Search and reading your blog posts and your educational content? Or are they landing on your website because their CPA or their neighbor said, hey, you need to go talk to Kendra and you know, reach out to Kendra because she specializes in helping people just like you. They may not be coming to your site because they want more. They may not be coming to your site because they want to learn from you. They're coming to your site just to maybe just check you out, read your bio, learn more about you before actually picking up the phone and calling. So where are they coming from? How many people? What's their intent? Are they reading things or are they just visiting because they want more information from there identifying whether or not you, you know, do you need more site visitors, do you need more traffic or do you need to improve the conversion rate of existing site visitors? So if it's the former, if you need more site visitors, if you determine I only have three people per month coming to my website, well, maybe before we talk about converting people into email subscribers, we need to talk about improving the top of funnel, improving traffic to your website. So if you identify that I just need more site visitors first, then you can start to identify improvements to make before you start to work on that email capture process. Now you might want to do these things simultaneously because if people start to show up and you don't have a good email capture process in place, well, you're missing out on opportunities. So those two things might need to be done in tandem where I'm working on that top of funnel, getting more traffic and simultaneously I'm working on improving my email capture process. So two step process there. And in the early days there's going to be a lot of testing and iterating. As you get more and more traffic to your site, you're going to have better data on those people converting and what helps them convert. But let's assume that the person who's asking this question has a sufficient number of site visitors. Sure, maybe they want more, but as it stands right now, they have a sufficient number of site visitors. The first thing to share here is that the typical conversion rate from a site visitor to an email subscriber is somewhere between 2 and 5%. 2% is kind of minimum and 5% is, you're doing pretty good there. So typical conversion rate of somebody on your website joining your email list between 2 and 5%. So identify what that number is. And if it's less than 2%, then improvements to your email capture process are absolutely needed. If it's within that range, maybe you're at 3% or 4%. Maybe more email subscribers isn't better. Right? Maybe it's not trying to optimize every little thing to try and boost the quantity of email subscribers. Maybe it's higher quality people, maybe you want the same number or even you're okay with a fewer number but higher quality people joining your email list. So focus on improving your copy, your content. The lead magnet that you're offering to improve the quality of your traffic or the quality of your conversion rates, not necessarily the quantity. If you're struggling here and your conversion rate is less than 2%, so very few people are opting into your email list or email newsletter. Let's take inventory of how and where on your website you're asking for email opt ins. I think a lot of advisors, just a lot of people in general mistakenly assume if I just put a join my newsletter field at the bottom of my website, you know, my website's so beautiful and I know I'm such a great advisor that people are going to join, they're just going to want to join my newsletter, right? If there's just one form at the bottom of your newsletter, it just says and I joined my newsletter, it's probably not too surprising that, you know, you don't have many people converting. So how and where are you asking for email opt ins? Is there just one form at the very bottom? Do you have a pop up? If you have a pop up, is that pop up on a timer? When does it appear? Where does it appear? Is the pop up intrusive to the reader? We talked earlier about user experience, so there's all these little things to take into consideration. And going back to that join my newsletter example, which I think a lot of website owners revert to, very different than five little known tips for lowering taxes in retirement in 2025. Drop your email here and get my free guide. A lot more, you know, interesting to me as a site visitor than join my retirement newsletter. So thinking about all these little things as you work to make these improvements can be really helpful in boosting that conversion rate. Last thing I'll mention here, love them or hate them, pop ups perform very well. I fought this for a long time. I don't love pop ups on a website. I very rarely respond to a pop up on a brand new website. But love them or hate them, they do work very well. We do need to be thoughtful about where these pop ups exist when they show up on our website, ensuring that they're not too intrusive. So for example, on my site, I think you have to be on the page for 20 or 30 seconds before the pop up shows up. And it's actually not like a pop up that's in your face. It just kind of slides in from the bottom right hand corner. So it's not intrusive. You're on my page for 20 or 30 seconds, which tells me you're interested in what you're seeing and reading. So I'm going to put this pop up or slide in in front of you to add some more value and try to convert you to an email subscriber. And to my last point there, complimenting what's on the page. So if they're reading a blog post about Medicare IRMAA surcharges and how to navigate Medicare irmaa, and I've got this pop up that says learn how to invest smarter in retirement, those two things are a little bit disconnected. Or if it says join my email newsletter doesn't really complement what's on the page. But if they're reading about Medicare IRMAA this surcharge in retirement, they're learning about the different tax brackets and how to better manage their taxable income in retirement. And then I've got this pop up. It's like, here's a tax cheat sheet for this year. Download this tax cheat sheet. It complements the text and the copy on that, that page. So thinking about complimenting your email offer or your lead magnet or your pop up with the page that that user.

A (19:45)

Is on, you said something that I thought was really brilliant. Do you have a traffic problem or do you have a conversion problem? And I know from some data that I've seen that the average advisor's website gets about 3, 300 visits. And I'm kind of curious if there is an inflection point because, you know, at 2 to 5%, you can kind of do the math on that. I'm not a math whiz, so I can't do that off top of my head. But is there a certain point in your opinion, Taylor, it makes sense to start to shift into email list growth. So, you know, is it 300 visitors a month? 500? A thousand? Do you have any thoughts around that piece?

B (20:19)

I don't know if it really matters. I mean, it depends on your, your, your target demographic. I mean there, there are some niches where getting 3, 4, 500 people a month to your site, you know, might be great. That might be the exact volume that you're looking for. So it, it really depends. And let's also be clear too that your website is not the only path to growing your email newsletter. It might be One of five different, you know, strategies for growing your email newsletter. So maybe you don't have a ton of website traffic, a few hundred people per month and you're doing your best to capture those people, but you're leveraging other strategies to grow your email list at the same time. Maybe you're advertising in other email newsletters or you're guessing on podcasts and throwing out your email lead magnet with your vanity URL and those podcasts you're guessing on. So you know, don't, don't, you know, restrict yourself to just thinking about your website. And I wouldn't get too caught up in the volume or the exact site traffic. But again, going back to setting realistic goals and expectations, you know, if you only have five or ten people showing up to your website and you're upset about not having enough email subscribers, well again, we have more of a top of funnel issue here. We might need to improve our site traffic before we start worrying about our conversion rates to email list.

A (21:29)

Definitely. And it's funny you mentioned that there are other areas to pull awareness from. I have a client that I've worked with and their podcast has like 6 to 10 times the traffic and visibility in their website. And it's really interesting because we've actually shifted our conversion strategy very heavily on the podcast this year and we're testing a lot of really unique things there. So don't forget that it's not just the website that you can send people to for an email opt in, you can put up a simple landing page. If you're doing something like, you know, YouTube or podcasts, you can set up that vanity URL. That's another great way to, you know, convert email subscribers. I don't have a lot more to say here. Taylor. I feel like you really nailed most of the things. One thing I just want to say about lead magnets, we see this come up quite a bit. We really need to make sure when you are creating some kind of lead magnet or white paper or checklist that is relevant to your ideal client and their core pain points. Also, people tend to be more motivated by avoiding pain than seeking pleasure. So if you go back and you listen to our episode with Elliot, he asked a lot of questions around email subscribe conversion rates and what we, what we realized when we look at his website, he had good traffic and the challenge was that his ideal client was like widows and caretakers and his opt in offer was a seven step guide to your financial health checkup. And so if I were to maybe just remix that you know, I might create an offer that's something like 10 costly mistakes widows make in Their First Year and How to avoid them. Or something like the Widow's Emergency Financial Checklist, what to do and what not to do in the first 90 days. So you can see how that just is going to hyper target into your ideal client. It also kind of plays off the avoidance of pain over seeking pleasure. So just something to think about if you do have that traffic is that offer actually really good? And I like to keep a list of like, all the random stuff that they get me. I'm like, oh, I opted in for that. That was good. And then I try to think, why did I opt in? And what was really fascinating is I went back and I looked at my. I literally keep a list of the titles of the lead magnets I opt in for. This is so dumb. This is what I do outside of recording with Taylor. It's really nerdy. And I noticed that 80% of the titles were pain oriented. So that's something that you can test to improve, you know, potentially that conversion rate if you do have good traffic.

B (23:57)

Yeah, really good stuff. Kendra, are you ready for our last and most fun question?

A (24:02)

Oh, let's do it.

B (24:05)

What are your favorite website marketing tools or plugins?

A (24:11)

Okay, so I have a few. And the first one we get asked a lot, like, how do I know if my website is working or effective? And that's really squishy. There's a few different ways you can approach that, but one is using this tool called hotjar for what's called heat mapping. And it's pretty gangster. You basically install this really simple plugin and it'll show you you can basically heat map a page and you can see how far down people scroll where they click. You can learn where they kind of fall off. And I find it to be pretty eye opening. And for example, we have a client, we're right in the middle of redesigning their homepage right now, and there were some questions about this particular section of their homepage. And you know, should we handle it this way, should we handle it that way, blah, blah, blah. And I said, let me just look at hotjar. And I looked at their homepage, heat map, and nobody like 50% of people, 75% of people had already dropped off the page. Like, we're talking about a section of the homepage that very few people are even seeing. So it's a really cool way to just see the success of certain pages. And you can also install that on the other kind of Big three pages we look at, which is the about page and the services pages. And what's interesting too is you can see, like, are people clicking on things? Are they not? Like, what are they clicking on? Isn't. So that kind of speaks to some of that user experience. My second tool, I'm like, super nerdy on this one, man. There's this new tool came out called Whisper Flow, and it's essentially like a transcription tool. And I use it constantly to write and ideate. You know, if you're trying to rewrite your website homepage, you can literally use this tool and you hit like a. The function or you can. You can do any keyboard shortcut. But I double click my function, little key, and I just talk. I talk about, here's my client's ideal client, here's their voice, here's their tone, here's their concerns. And I use it to write headlines, emails, email copy. It's totally nutty. I think, based off my usage of it. I just started using it recently and I've already transcribed like 60,000 words, which is like the equivalent of a full nonfiction book or maybe more. So that one's been just total game changer on just ideation and being able to use different tools. So that one I really love. And then the third one, this one isn't a website tool, but it is really helpful for me in how I approach marketing and strategy. And it's called Readwise. And it's this tool where basically it's kind of like something like Pocket, where you can save articles you want to read, however, you can go through them and you can highlight them and you can add comments, and you can save all these different details and you can share it with people. So very commonly, I'll mark up an article and I'll even leave comments, and then I'll send it to, you know, my clients or my team. I'm like, hey, look at this. I think we could apply this here. What do you think? So it's just very helpful from a strategic standpoint, and it's also really helpful for recalling data. Like, I found the intro stat for this conversation based off of past website redesign, you know, articles I'd save. So those are the three I love. Whisper, AI, Readwise, and hotjar.

B (27:29)

Well, you've told me about hotjar before, but now I've got two more shiny objects to play with, which is probably why we hesitated to ask this question, because these are shiny objects. They can be avoidance behavior, they are fun. That some can be certainly effective. But we have to be careful, you know, going down these rabbit holes and spending time on these things when we really should be focused on some of the harder things that we've discussed here today. And as well on this podcast, a few of my favorites I'll throw out there and then we'll wrap up. One is OptinMonster. I've mentioned it before, but it's the plugin that I use to manage the different email opt ins and pop ups on my website. Tons of customizations, tons of options. Just a phenomenal platform to ensure that you are collecting email addresses properly. They're not intrusive, they're providing a good user experience. I will share that. It's not cheap, there are certainly cheaper solutions out there, but that's the one that I use. Yoast SEO is a very popular SEO tool that most people know about, but just sharing sharing it today. In case somebody is not familiar with Yoast SEO, they do have a a free option which is more than sufficient. So if you're working on your SEO, you want to use a tool to help the free version of us SEO is one to consider. I host a podcast and instead of embedding the Spotify Player or the Apple Podcast Player on my site, I use a podcast player called Fusebox and Fuse Box allows me to embed a specific episode on a blog or on my website and include a call to Action button on there that can either lead them to a landing page to select their podcast app of their choice or maybe a call to action to my free retirement assessment. So I have a little bit more customization ability in terms of where to send people while they're potentially listening to my podcast in the browser. So Fuse Box and I think their new one's called fuse box 2.0. For any bloggers out there, Easy Table of Contents is a table of contents plugin. Table of contents on your blog posts, especially those long ones, can help improve user experience and certainly help with SEO. So Easy Table of Contents has been a great plugin that we've adopted in recent years. TablePress if any of your blogs have tables, like my Medicare IRMAA blog post that has the new tax brackets every single year, we use Table Press to populate those tables and those tax brackets and then Typeform is the form plugin we use to collect information from prospects before getting them on our calendar for an intro call. And then lastly, kind of a fun one that I don't think a lot of people know about, not something that I personally use, but it's called Programmable Search engine. This is a Google product that allows you to add a Google search bar to your own website, allowing people to use the search bar to search for information on your website only. So let's say you have a bunch of content on your website. You're, you know, Michael Kitces 2.0. You have all these blog posts, all this information. You want to make it easy for people to find your article on Roth conversions. They can use this programmable search engine, Google search bar, to type in Roth Conversions, and it'll pull up very quickly the pages or posts on your site about Roth conversions. A good example of this is Roger Whitney rogerwhitney.com blog. You'll see this custom Google search bar right there at the top of his page. So kind of a fun one to throw out there.

A (30:46)

Now, I got a few too many tools I'm about to go nerd out on. I know advisors are excited. We're going to link all those up in the description so you can take a quick, easy look at those. Now, we covered a lot today about websites, and we hope that we gave you a few different ideas on where to go next. And maybe, maybe you don't even have to redesign your website. Maybe it just needs some improvement or maybe there's a, you know, you'll, you'll simplify your approach. Maybe a personal brand website isn't a great fit for you, or maybe it is. Uh, but at the end of the day, I hope that we answered some of your top advisor questions. Um, if you have more of these, send them all away. We will collect them up and save them. But for everyone listening, I have a question for you. Are you tired of listening to the podcast and you really just wish? Man, I wish I could hang out with Taylor and Kendra for 30 minutes, 45 minutes, and just have them tell me what to do. Well, if so, make sure you click the link in the show description. We have a place where you can apply to be on the show. We have some new advice on recordings that are going to be coming out soon. We're going to be asking advisors who wants to come on with us and get their marketing questions answered. And then also, if you're just not quite ready yet to come on the show with us, you can also sign up for the email list in there. So there's a few different ways to, you know, kind of get updates and understand how you can connect with us here on the show, and we'd love to have you. Thanks, everyone, for listening and we'll see you next week. We hope you enjoyed today's episode to get the resources shared or sign up to join us as a guest on one of our advice line episodes, check out the links in the show notes. Thanks for listening and we'll see you next week.

B (32:27)

Sa.