Laine Cunningham is an author and professional speaker on native cultures and ways. It all started when Laine Cunningham spent six months camping alone in the Australian outback.
She has been featured in MSNBC, Women’s Day, and the Sydney Morning Herald and a variety of other media outlets. She identified these three challenges for Sales Rescue Team members to take a look at.
From Laine: My top challenges:
1. Finding a way to have more detailed information on the workshops and seminars to interest people without ending up with a messy website.
2. Driving “buyer” traffic to the site: Organizations who will want to book the speaking engagements/workshops/seminars.
3. Finding ANYONE who does publicity work who actually has connections in my field (metaphysical/self-help). This doesn’t sound like it’s web related but that means I’m having trouble getting the right kind of media contacts to go to the website. I have had some very small successes and have been quoted in national name-cache outlets (MSNBC, Psychology Today, some women’s mags) but those are all coming through separate efforts. I don’t know how to get shows to consider my website as a resource when they need a talking head or a quote.
{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
Hi Laine,
The site is attractive and well done. It is clear you know a lot about native and aboriginal cultures and how ancient traditions matter to how we live in contemporary society. My sense is that you can help a group understand how oral storytelling traditions can help them in their daily lives.
From a sales perspective, my immediate reaction is that you need a call to action box right up in the top left of the site. You need to answer the question for the prospect — “Why am I here? Where should I go next?” The question you can answer is this: How does my customer view my website?
As a prospect, I have to hunt to figure out what you do and what you are offering. If you are selling a book, say so. A DVD? The workshops, presentations or seminars? Make it easier for me as a prospect to understand what’s available. There are lots of resources and ideas you have to share: I would make those available by PDF for download and make sure each one has your contact info in the footer or somewhere.
I might suggest that you make the podcast, music an option for a listener rather than have it automatically. That’s a personal preference. You may have feedback otherwise, so keep it if that’s the case.
More thoughts to come. Feel free to converse with us here as we work on this. Thanks.
Hmm, very good point about “why am I here?” I had put that text on the landing page as an overview of my approach, rather than focusing on the services/products.
If I retool the first page, though, I’m worried about the landing site not having enough text to attract crawlers. I’ve been told they like text-heavy landing pages. Is this true? Can I cut down to a news-style format where they “click here for more” instead of using the pulldown menus and still not have crawler issues?
Another issue, which has been driving me nuts: When the site was first set up, somehow the crawlers got a description that has typoes in it. So now whenever anyone looks for my site, they get that description popping up. My web designer can’t find anything on the actual site that has the description stored, and thinks it was the draft version of what was originally placeholding material on the primary landing site. We have changed that and did some resubmission work to crawlers in the hopes that it would refresh with the search engines.
This week I did a Bing search and found the same metadata with the typoes there, too! The website went up last November so it was long before Bing existed. Please help me change this unprofessional and embarrassing metadata!
Hi Laine,
An interesting site and concept. I visited a couple of time to get a flavour for what it is you do. As a visitor to the site I think you have to persevere to understand your offerings. Are you looking for public engagements, to sell books, workshops, seminars etc.? It looks like all of the above but as TJ mentioned, sometimes you have to be up front and centre about what you trying to achieve. Don’t be shy as you typically don’t have long to grab and keep the attention of us low attention span surfers!
I see you are using Twitter and the like to get yourself out there. This is a good thing, but an observation is that I don’t see you driving people to your site or posting enough items relevant to what it is you’re about. It goes without saying that you can’t just keep hitting people with your URL but you can post linked and relevant content that helps you build an identity that links back to you and your business concepts. Incidentally, if you’re using Facebook for business you might want to open it up as I only got your photo and everything else is locked. Nice photo by the way!
I would encourage you to have very clean and uncluttered pages for each selling point. Then when you Tweet or post you can push people to specific, relevant, easy to view pages. And don’t forget calls to action and special offers..
You mentioned having a problem finding someone for publicity who has connections to your fields. My view on this is that a good PR needs to have an understanding to be effective. However, they would get this from spending time with you, whilst agreeing the brief. At that point, they then engage with their network and likely suspects to get you out there. It can be really useful to have an objective PR agent that can engage with all levels of the media, whether it’s MSNBC, glossies or serious ‘high brow’ journals.
Keep going, I’m sure with some tweaks you’ll get there! Incidentally, your intro music scared the hell out me – speaker volume left up from yesterday!
Regards,
Andrew
Thanks TJ and Andrew for your input. Looking at your suggestions and the site, I think we can make some simple changes that will make things much clearer. Wanted to throw a few suggestions out there to see if they are along the lines of what you were thinking.
Because Laine is building her identity through her individual name and not a company name or logo, it doesn’t give visitors much to go on, as would The Juice Shop or Writer’s Resource, etc. I was thinking if we add a simple tag line under her name in her heading… even if it was something like Author, Shaman, Public Speaker as an example, it would immediately identify who and what Laine Cunningham is.
I was also thinking we could move the copy on the landing page and replace it with a sort of mission statement, a paragraph long that stated who she is, what she does and why she is here. Then we can link the text or direct them to the more detailed pages of all of the different aspects she has to offer. This should clear things up and catch their attention.
Is this on the same lines of what you both were thinking and Laine is this a direction you may want to go in? Do you think these changes would resolve the issues you both saw and accomplish Laine’s desired results?
Thanks again for both of your help,
Michelle