In this episode, Daniel Bisett and Tricia Ulberg interview Brie Stockwell of the Creative Minds Coach and discuss the importance of having a personal story and building trust with potential clients.
During the conversation, Daniel suggests that having a story on your website about yourself can yield more results for your business because people who lack confidence often have a hard time trusting others. He goes on to say that many of these people lack trust in others and that if they don’t know your story or background, they may view you as just another business trying to sell something. However, if they know your story and background, they will start to build a connection and relationship with you, and this can lead to trust and comfort.
It is important for anyone in a coaching or counseling role to portray themselves as a trusted friend in their marketing efforts. Brie shares her recent discovery enjoying being on camera and making connections with people, and she is doing work on herself to overcome any internal blocks that may be preventing her from doing so.
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Daniel:
Here we go. Welcome to the We Rock DM podcast where we make kick ass stuff kick ass with your hosts, Daniel Bissett, that’s me, Patricia Olberg, that’s she. As we delve into the world of digital marketing and all things web related, it’s time to make your kick ass stuff even more kick ass with the We Rock DM podcast. Today we’re meeting with our guest, Brie Stockwell and the Creative Minds coach. Welcome Brie, we’re so glad to have you here.
Brie:
Thanks for having me! Super fun!
Daniel:
Well, Brie, one of the first things that I wanted to ask you today, now that you’ve had a week to kind of think through some of the things we talked about, was did you land on a special persona? over this last week that you think you should really target. And to recap, the persona that I was asking you to develop was based around whoever, whichever client success story, either made you the most money in the last year, or gave you the most satisfaction, or provided you with the most rewarding feeling. There are a lot of different motivators out there for your business. Money typically being like a prime mover, right? But it might not be the the one thing that you want to focus on. So it’s entirely up to you. But if you are to get more of the same type of client, who is that one client that you want lots and lots more of?
Brie:
Yeah. And you know what’s interesting, and Tricia had a good observation. And I think I observed this about myself, which is I am my own best client. And actually, actually in all of the work that I do, I’m always my first client, which I love. I always, I actually always make myself my first client. I’m like, I think my people need this. Let me go do that work on myself and see how that is. So, I always am the client that I want to serve. And I love thinking about that. And I want to say it’s not like a selfish thing. Like, this is all about me. This is like, I know my own head. I’m inside my own head. And that’s really interesting. So, because of that, I know that I just a little about me, like, I know that I needed that, well, the growth that I’ve done came from making a giant, you know, creative goal for myself. And what I learned through that is how to be like how to be more confident, how to do so many different things and how to work through so many different things in the process. And if I could, like, I have been thinking about this because here’s what Daniel’s getting at is if you go to my website, it’s creativemindscoach.com and you look on the front page right now, maybe by the time you hear this, it will be different. But it says, Turn your dreams into reality or something. And the reason I have that on there is because I haven’t figured out how to say all of this. stuff. And I think the more I do this work, truthfully, the more we’re in our businesses and the more we do the work and the more we get more clear, then we have this, these understandings. So I think this podcast conversation is super important for me right now because I’m feeling the pull to change this. So when you guys are like, this is not clear, I’m like, yeah, and it feels that way to me now, but I’m not quite sure where I want to go. So I want to creatives who want more confidence. And also I know how we do that is just by starting to do the things that are like a big project or a, or a some goal we’re working towards. We don’t need confidence to start it. We get confidence along the way.
Daniel:
So, Bree, what’s the TLDR about your company? You know, the too long didn’t read. And what I often try to get my clients to do when they summarize their business is pitch it to a 10-year-old in about seven to 10 words. That’s easy, right?
Tricia:
It is really hard.
Brie:
It is really hard, yeah.
Daniel:
So let’s imagine you’re speaking to a 10-year-old right now.
Brie:
Oh, wait, it’s like that game. My daughter gave this to me for Christmas. It’s called Poetry for Neanderthals. You have to say short words with single syllables.
Daniel:
So I imagine that you’re 10 or.that you’re the 10 year old? Okay. I’m the 10-year-old, bearded 10-year-old.
Brie:
Okay, all right, all right. So, but I can say multi-syllable words here. So for anyone who’s doing this, If you play along, this is actually kind of a fun game. So let’s see, if I was pitching, if I was telling you about my business, because I want to tell you this whole story right now, Daniel, I was like ready to launch into my whole story. Right. Um, but. I don’t know quite yet. And I don’t know if this is quite what I want to do, but hang on what I. What I want is, what I think my business is about now is help, no, or who I serve is I help, hang on, guys, this is really hard. Help creatives build confidence through goals. Something like that.
Tricia:
That is, so Bri, I’ve been watching you go through this journey for a while. And I know you have been trying to figure out this thing for a while. Like, what is it exactly? How can I describe, just like Daniel said, to a 10-year-old, very short and precise, what is it that I do? And the thing that’s interesting about your business is, you know, there’s lots of life coaching services out there, but you are specifically helping creatives. That’s what makes you different. but that’s also what confuses people. Because there’s not a lot, I think you’re the only person I know who does this and it’s a brilliant idea. I’ve been taking your course, so I’ve been listening to what you’re teaching and what you just said is exactly what you’re doing in your course. I’ve noticed that.
Brie:
Right?
Tricia:
So now you take that message, but refine it a little bit. And going back to your call to action on your homepage, that’s what’s a little bit confusing you have turn your creative dreams into reality, that can mean a lot of different things.
Brie:
yeah, because a creative dream could be a really big goal that you have.
Tricia:
: Exactly.
Brie:
So if you go to my website, you can find all that, right? But also like, how do you do that? I help you do that, but I wanna get more specific on how I help you do that or what you might need to do that. So yeah, and I am finding it difficult to navigate this. It’s not like I said, scenario, and everyone knows what that person does.
Brie:
Right. But when you have this space where like, I’m a photographer and a creative, I’ve done all kinds of that. And you know, I have this story that then connects me with my business. And then how do I merge these two together? Because when I’m talking to people, they’re like, I don’t understand what you do. And, and so it makes the marketing more, actually even more interesting, because on how I talk to people.
Daniel:
So that line on your website that we’re talking about, the turn your creative dreams into reality, something I like about that is there’s an action in that line. There’s a verb, right?
Daniel:
And I feel like you’re speaking to somebody and you’re moving them forward. So if somebody is stuck and they land on your website, we want this first line to move us towards what it is that we’re stuck with.
Daniel:
And so if you’re aiming to help creatives build confidence through goals, as you said, that’s wordy and muddy. And it’s not. speaking to me if I’m the creative. Now you did a good job describing, right? But you need to now convert this into some kind of actionable item that resonates with me, the potential creatives.
Brie:
I think that’s my trouble because this is how we do it. Like, this is kind of like what we do, but like, what is going to be the action? What’s going to get you from that initial
Daniel:
So, words that I’m taking away from this are confidence, creatives, goals, right? So what I might pitch would be something like, confidently achieve your creative goals today.
Tricia:
Mm-hmm. Yes, and you know what, Brie? Confidence is the word I was thinking of also based on what I see you teaching in your course. That is what you are teaching your students. The questions you’re asking them, you’re asking them what kind of blocks do you have to achieving your goals? What is it is making you feel like, you know, you have a creative block? That’s the questions I see you asking your students. So I think confidence is a really good word to focus on, like helping build confidence.
Brie:
The six-week program that I have going on is all about confidence, but we want confidence. The reason we want confidence is because we think it will help us achieve something. It’s not just like, I want confidence, but I want confidence because I want to do something. And having confidence helps us feel better about getting there too. And there’s all, of course, there’s… different reasons and all of the things. But like we there are there are things that we are passionate about as creatives and we want to do those things and what is standing in our way.
Tricia:
I do think it’s important to what you said that there needs to also be a goal attached to that. Because to be honest, that is what’s going to get people paying for your course. Right?
Tricia:
They have a goal they want to achieve and they’re going to hire you to help them achieve that goal. And it’s a goal that they’re unable to work through themselves. That’s why they’re looking for your service. So that’s the marketing perspective.
Brie:
Yes. And this is why people are taking my workshop right now. Because they have something they want to do, and they feel that they lack the confidence to do it.
Daniel:
But going back to the persona question that I asked at the very beginning of this was, who is this persona? And so now if we’ve got this actionable items, the takeaway, achieve your creative objectives with confidence today, or confidently achieve your creative objectives today, something in that realm. Now you said that. as far as you can tell, you’re your own best client because you do all the work on yourself as well. Would something like that resonate with you or would it miss? And taking this, that’s part one. The second part is building out your persona from a demographic perspective. Do you fit the demographic? gender, age, family income, number of children, location, be it in the United States or a specific state or place within the United States. Do you fit all of those or do you only fit like three of them based on how many, you know, the different people that you’ve been bringing into your course of life?
Brie:
Well, I’ve coached some, I’ve coached older single women. I’ve coached, I mean, I’m just saying like, who’s come to me, you know, women my age, also men that are younger than me, that want to grow, that have, you know, that have some sort of block. my class, it’s kind of, I have people, and I have, I mean, this is a worldwide, I have worldwide clients, so they’re from everywhere. Right now, it’s because I’m a landscape photographer, and so the pool of landscape, it’s mostly landscape photographers, but I do have, I do have a writer in my class. So this is for all, you know, this is for all kinds of people that are putting their work out into the world for people to see, I mean, you know, but let me, let me answer your question is, I don’t know if I, I’m thinking back to my past self because back in 2019, I created this big, huge goal for myself that Trisha helped me with actually, cause we’re friends, but which was super fun.
Tricia:
It was fun.
Brie:
if I had to go backwards before I became a coach, when I made that, I don’t know if I needed that I wanted confidence. Cause I was like, how am I going to get there? I wasn’t quite sure. I just knew I needed help. However, sometimes we make these goals and then we see the whole, like I’m in so much self doubt. So this is what I’m thinking that then I wanna speak to people about, cause I remember getting coached about having so much self doubt, my inadequacy and all of that. And I remember going to and getting help with this stuff. So I think this is something that I have to then is what would have resonated with me when I was in that space. Deciding that, oh my gosh, I’m in this space. That’s exactly what I need to finish. I didn’t know that I wanted confidence to actually finish, that that is what was keeping me stuck. So that’s part of my message is, this might be what’s keeping you stuck is your lack of confidence.
Daniel:
Yeah, that tracks really well. You know, someone who’s sad doesn’t necessarily know that they’re sad,right? And so someone who’s lacking confidence might not necessarily know that they’re lacking confidence, that that’s the blocker. And so we might not want to include the word confidence in that, in that spot, because that might not resonate. Instead, it could just be.
Brie:
But I do want to say when people have come to me, they’re saying things like, I just lack the confidence. That’s actually what they’re saying. Yeah, and I don’t want to say move out of self doubt because I want you to move forward. I don’t want you to think about your self doubt. I want you to know that I can help you with your confidence part.
Daniel:
Well, it takes a lot of massaging and it’s very difficult.
Brie:
Yes!
Daniel:
I think that you’re connecting this value prop or the initial call to action on the hero portion, you know, above the fold of your website to the poetry for Neanderthals is brilliant, because while we do struggle to find the single syllable words to represent the thoughts that we have in our head. Those are quick and easy to read. And while a 10-year-old definitely knows multi-syllabic words, we’re not really speaking to a 10-year-old. We’re speaking to adults who need to process and digest within an instant. And that’s why we try to make it so simple. So I love your idea of connecting it to poetry for Neanderthals. And I think that I’m going to start using that moving forward.
Brie:
You’re welcome. It’s only because I have the game here, but there’s a fun little stick. There’s a fun little stick so you can have someone next to you and they can hit you if you say more than one. I’m just kidding. So do I need to like sit down? I think sometimes this is just sitting down too with yourself or with someone else and parsing out like sitting and going, what’s the word? What’s like? words or the one words that are the my like, I was going to say my buzzwords and just writing them all down and knowing that I need a call to action. Like I want to draw people into me and then and then just and really chewing on those and seeing how those all fall into line. Right? Like that is that the work?
Daniel:
Yeah, I mean, that’s definitely part of the work. When we write articles, I can write a 3,000 word article relatively quickly. But when I try to write the title for that article, it’s painful. It’s very, very difficult. And
Daniel:
So what I used to do when I had a lot more free time was I would try to write 20 different titles. for the same article. And then I would read through each of those 20 different articles. Sometimes I would A-B test the titles to see which ones got the most clicks or what have you. 20 is a big number. It’s really, really hard. But if you were to try and write 20 different headlines for that spot on your website, which is the prime real estate, it’s the one place where people come and make that decision to stay or to go. It deserves the work. And 20 might not even be enough, but 20 at least will hopefully get you something that works really well, much you may decide to do the work again in a year or two and see what what else you can come up with now that you’ve got more buzzwords to play with and what have you. The one thing I would recommend though is is avoid jargon in that spot. You know, you want to speak very, very plainly and clearly. And the jargon is to be found deeper within your website and the internal pages and your content where you’re getting hyper focused on things. Um, but it’s to be avoided at all costs on the homepage, especially in that spot. So a buzzword, sure, but nothing that’s jargon.
Brie:
And you know, this is such a, that is such a great activity. I was thinking, write the story of my business and what I do, and then write all those titles. That could be really interesting. I think I’m gonna do a blog post on it. Like, what is the story of my business? Why not have all of that in my website?
Daniel:
yeah, and something like this, you know, if you go to your Instagram feed, which is just Creative Minds Coach, right, for anyone who’s listening, you’ll see that there’s, you’ve got some great quotes, you know, some inspirational quotes and what have you. You’ve also got some ideas for things to, for people to do. And then there’s you talking to the camera. I’m just giving little tips and tricks. And I would I would argue that whenever you’re speaking to the camera, you probably have a lot more traction, a lot more viewers, a lot more engagement because people aren’t just listening to your words. They’re reacting to you, your facial features, your facial expressions, the warmth that you give off. And so. Any story about you and where you came from on your website is going to yield so many more results because these people that are coming to you who lack confidence probably… And I don’t know nothing about nothing, but I would guess that many of them lack trust in others. Right? It’s like, who do I trust? Who do I know? And so if they don’t really know you and they don’t know your story, then you’re just another business slinging some, you know, snake oil. Whereas if they know your story, They now have this connection with you and they’ve started building a relationship with Bree Stockwell. And to you, you don’t know nothing about them, but they know who you are and they start building that trust. And the more that they communicate with you, even through just reading and accessing your story and your blog and your feed, the more and more trust and safe comfort. they’ll start to feel in you and they will eventually, if you’re selling what they need, they’ll come to you for that service rather than anyone else because they know you. You’re a friend.
Tricia:
I was going to say that is like a really good point and one that I think that anybody in any type of coaching or counseling role needs to really portray in your marketing. That people do need to see you as a friend, as a trusted friend. That is very good advice. Makes sense.
Brie:
Yeah. And I think it’s actually being, I’ve discovered over the past six months for myself that, you know, as even I build my own confidence that I actually enjoy being on camera and I love making the connection. So all of that is like, that comes naturally to me. What happens in there’s stuff that happens in my head. I’m like, maybe people don’t want to hear that. Right. So, so there is stuff, you know, like I am doing all of this work on my own self because there is stuff that blocks us from whatever we’re going to do. So, yeah, I love me. It’s not even just about selling. It’s about I love making the connections. So how
Brie:
Can I even like make, do more of that because that will connect me to others and I love it.
Tricia:
It’s something that you wanted for yourself and you’re learning through having the business and it’s, you know, you’re helping others through your work. So yeah, let’s start spreading that message.
Brie:
Yeah, It is important to know when you are, like when you’re doing something that you really love and you’re passionate about, you know, figuring out what you’re good at and what resonates with you personally. And all of that, you know, all of those things. So, super great. I’m going to do that. I’m going to write my story.
Daniel:
Well, something I typically start the digital marketing boot camp that we teach with is the statement that digital marketing isn’t about marketing, selling things. It’s about building relationships. And if you can build a successful relationship, then when, if somebody determines that they need a thing that you provide. they’re coming to you because they have that relationship with you. The price is hard, is hardly a factor in that decision. Um, you might out price yourself and. There is that conversation for pricing strategy to be had, but ultimately those decisions are moot. If I know that you’ve got a thing and your price is your price, but I know, and I trust you, then I also trust that the price that you’re pitching to me is fair because you’re fair. I’ve decided that we, you know, I can trust you. So building that relationship. any way, however you can, will have a knock-on effect of creating more opportunities for you from a business perspective, regardless. So go out there, be vulnerable, as Rene Brown would say, and be your true authentic self. And if people are attracted to the story that you have to say, then the chances are that they’ll come to you for whatever service you’re willing to provide them should they ever require it.
Tricia:
Yep. Yep. Good advice. And so now how do you go ahead?
Daniel:
if they don’t need your thing, but they have a friend who needs a thing, then they go, oh, I know somebody. And so they start marketing and advocating for you because they built this social relationship that could be completely one-sided, but they seem to trust you.
Tricia:
So now thinking about all this, everything we’ve said, trying to establish who your persona is, what your message should be, how you want to incorporate that in your marketing, your website, I know you have an email newsletter, your blog, your social media activity, how do you do that? That’s the trick, right? So you put some good thought into Now how do you execute? So should we take a look at your website and see what we see?
Brie:
I just want to say, like, this has been doing the website has been a super interesting journey for me because initially it looked totally different.
Tricia:
It did, I remember. It had a lot of dark colors and I felt like that wasn’t you.
Brie:
So I did a lot of work last summer to change a bunch of things and, and really just simplify and make things seem like to me, they seem really clean and it feels organized. I know that now there are some things I want to add and do, but I feel like there’s some good hone in on my messaging, but also all of the backend work, which is think we’re going to talk about now to then help refine it a little bit more. So now that I’ve done that, this is like all of this is such good timing for me. Seriously.
Tricia:
Good. Well, since we started talking about the design, let’s talk about design a little bit more here. So you’re incorporating a lot of your photography, which is good because that very much speaks to you. There are some, we’ve talked about the CTA, we need to think about that. From an organization standpoint, so your top nav is missing a nav item that And I told you about this at one point and I think it is a contact nav item. There’s no contact page. And it’s because you were thinking, I understand, you were thinking you wanted people to try to fill out your work with me form, and then you would contact them. But sometimes people just want to quickly contact you. They don’t want to fill out your form. They just want to know how to get ahold of you. Right? So you do need that.
Brie:
I actually had a thought. Here’s this. I haven’t told you the story, but a little side story to that is when we do these things, and especially me as like I am a photographer, so I house that on my site, and I have different things going on. I don’t have a ton of different things, I think, but I had someone contact me because they Camera Club and they contacted someone else and said, Hey, do you have Bree’s email? Because I can’t find it on her website. And they tracked my email down. Look at all the things that they had to do. They had to track my email down and then email me and then ask me. Like my friend, I can’t remember, or my friend forwarded it to me. So I think I just want to make it easy for people to do that in case there’s some interesting opportunities come up that I have no idea are out there. So yeah, it’s a good thing.
Daniel:
it’s interesting that you say they couldn’t find your email. They shouldn’t. You should not have your email on file. Chrome extensions that we can use to pull emails out to try and track them down. But if you’re using Chrome, you can use Chrome. Yeah, you need a contact form that’s not your e-newsletter subscription and that’s not your come work with me form. It’s a, I need to, I have a question to ask you or, you know, I want to tell you something’s broken on your website, something that doesn’t fit into either of those two boxes. We don’t want to put our email address anywhere on the website because of spam bots, right? You just create a contact form and on a dedicated contact page. Um, and if you have, in some cases, some, some clients of mine have, uh, multiple people that they want you, the visitor to be able to contact. So we just have different forms or a selector tool within the form that says contact me for this, this, this, or this, and then it can get segmented, you know, filtered into the right inbox accordingly. But you have a contact form that will go to your email. And then when you respond, you respond in email, right? But then that’s your choice, your decision to make and your power to withhold.
Tricia:
So, all right. So some other things about your nav. So when I look at a nav, I feel like it needs to make sense in the order of people want to learn about you. You have worked with me as your first nav item after home page. I don’t know, Brie. I almost feel like that should go at the end. You want people to learn about you first. That’s just my opinion. is a little bit confusing, just going back to your message, is so you have a lot of things about you here, work with me about your blog, your podcast portfolio. So you should have your portfolio on there, but then sometimes I think people might think this is your artist website. Does that make sense? I kind of wonder if you should create a different, maybe that should be a sub nav somewhere. Maybe you have a nav item.
Daniel:
I feel like your portfolio needs to be off the website. It needs to be somewhere else. You need to have your own website for your photography.
Tricia:
I agree. It confuses your message.
Brie:
But I know photographers and they will come to my website to look at my portfolio and then they will be like, what else does she do? So I have people come to my website. If I put them off, if I put them on another page, it dead ends there. And so because I’m trying to, I wanted my website to be a one stop every day. So that if people come and look at my portfolio, they’re like, so I have like prints, like I do sell prints, but that’s in a sub nav underneath my portfolio. Right. So it’s not like my main thing. But I mean, there’s I guess there’s a lot of arguments, but I do have people coming to my site to look at my portfolio.
Tricia:
Could you just link off to your portfolio? I don’t know, or maybe it’s just, it’s gonna make it more hard to market you when you’ve got multiple things you’re doing on one page.
Daniel:
When you’re hired as a photographer and they sign a check over to you to pay you, who do they sign it over to?
Brie:
So this is what I’m navigating right now, because in the past, my photography started as like a serious hobby. That’s why I have like my, the only money I’ve made on my photography has been through prints or someone contact me to speak and that’s it. Like that’s not a thing on my website, but now I’m going to be running photography workshops. that goes, like, because I want people to see the page for it, you know? So now I have to figure out where all those things go.
Daniel:
so it’s something that we often call a silo. When you think of maybe some of the best providers of digital marketing tools and content and all the things is a company called HubSpot. And when you go to HubSpot, they do a lot. They have their own software as a service, which is their customer relationship management tool, phenomenal tool, very expensive, but a phenomenal tool in and of its own right. But they also have lots of other offerings. So they create a silo. If you’re here to learn about the tool, you’re going to go to this space. But if you’re here to get free marketing advice, you’re going to end up on their blog and the blog for marketing. If you want to go into advice for sales, you’re going to end up on their blog, but their blog for sales. And it’s a totally separate silo. And while you can navigate from one to the other, you’re in different places and it feels a little bit different. So that doesn’t translate perfectly over to here, but when you are doing your taxes and you’ve got prints that you sold, are they going under the LLC of Creative Minds Coach? Or are they going under NDA? And it gets really confusing. Are you a photographer? That’s an awkward name for a photographer. Are you a consultant? Are you a speaker? Are you a coach? What are you? And the name suggests coach. So anything else. makes it really confusing. And the last thing you want to do is make somebody confused. Now, the people who are coming to your website are probably coming through referrals, right? They’re coming through people who they’ve spoken to. I haven’t done a Google search to find out where you land recently, but I don’t imagine that you land on the first page. So they’re not coming through search. They’re coming through referral, which means that they’re coming to do an informative background check basically. Are you as legit as the person suggests you are? And so it’s okay to see these different things, but as your business grows and scales and they start coming in through search. there are going to be a lot more questions. And so maybe what you need to do is silo things. You need your portfolio. Yes, you want people to find it from here, but it’s a separate thing. And so it needs to go into a separate sub domain even, just portfolio.creativemindscoach, but then we’re still under that name. And so it muddies the water and gets really confusing.
Brie:
So like, I’m curious, and I think this might be directed towards Tricia, would I just have on my nav something that says photography or? I don’t know. And here’s the thing is you guys, and you guys I’m talking to like to everybody who’s out there listening is, our businesses grow and change and evolve. When we were setting up my website, whenever this was not really a thing, like I wanted a little piece for my portfolio, but a lot of this stuff was not a thing yet. And so figuring out where it all lands is then, as you move forward is the work.
Tricia:
Okay, so these are good questions. And you’re right, like as your business grows and you start adding things, it starts, you start, I have the same problem with my website. I do a lot of different things. So here’s what I see you doing. And first of all, Brie, this is, when I look at your homepage, everything you have on here is advertising your coaching business. I have a client who also does a lot of different things. She’s an author. a course up at UT, she has art, she’s an artist. And we have the same kind of challenge with her. How do we put all these things on one website? Her homepage looks different than yours. On her homepage, we have different buckets that talk about what all the different things she does, right? You, your homepage, you are advertising your consulting business.
Daniel:
So, Brie, what occurs to me is you’re an artist. So, portfolio works, right? That makes sense. But it’s Brie’s art. It’s not the portfolio of creative dreams. Brie. Right. Yes. Daniel. That, to me, would be case studies. Okay?
Tricia:
Yes!
Daniel:
So, under about, I would have… our story or my story. I would have our work or my work or my art or my photography or whatever, because it’s about you. And so then it’s a natural segue to the other website, Brie Stockwell Photography. And from over there. You would also need a link back over to Creative Minds Coach, but one that’s a more natural kind of link, maybe in your About section. These are the things that I do alongside the photography. This is just my side hustle. And then this is my day job. And over here, it navigates you back to this space. So they can see… Oh, you’re talented too. This is awesome. You can have a note. All of the images on this site. I shot them, you know, you can put that somewhere. I’m super proud. Cause I can see that you’re a creative artist yourself and they can connect with you on another level, but it’s this is your business and that’s your other business and they need to be separate.
Brie:
Okay, pause real quick. If I had to guess, there’s quite a few people listening to this that have these different buckets because if we’re talking about like not a giant business, but even like if we’re like, you know, these entrepreneurs that like to do all kinds of different things like you, Tricia, like both of you do different things.
Tricia:
Yeah.
Brie:
How do you merge that and make it make sense on your website so people don’t get confused? So that all of that about my photography and all of that is, is, it’s a really good point.
Tricia:
I agree with Daniel what he said. That’s exactly what I would do. I would put it under your about as a side and Bree’s portfolio. Don’t have it be about the coaching,because everything else is coaching.
Daniel:
And here’s who I helped and here’s a link to their stuff.And it’s multi-beneficial because if you’re linking to their website, then it’s an opportunity for more people to find them as well. Not all of your clients obviously will have a website. Not all of them will want you to link to them yet. Maybe they’re still struggling with confidence, but the minute they have busted through that confidence blocker, and they’re ready to put themselves out there, wouldn’t it be great if the coach was celebrating with them by turning them into a case study and
Daniel:
From a performance perspective, your score is perhaps average. Yeah, it’s not shocking. Your accessibility score is quite high. Your best practice score is in the green, so that’s great. Your SEO score is green, so that’s good. The SEO score is kind of misleading, in my opinion. Let me go back just a minute for anyone who’s listening and not actually looking at watching this.
Daniel:
And even Microsoft Edge uses this tool, even though it’s built by Google. It’s called the Lighthouse tool. So what you need to do in order to access the Lighthouse tool is you open an incognito browser in Chrome. you go navigate to the website, you right mouse click on the website, and then you select Inspect down at the bottom of your choices. That pulls up the Inspector tool.
Daniel:
So with the inspector tool open the Inspector Tools section has its own navigation items and they read something like elements, console, sources, network, performance, memory. One of those is Lighthouse, the Lighthouse tool. So you select the Lighthouse tool and then you just click Analyze Page Load. And this will perform an emulated experience. on the website, getting it to load, and it pulls out these CWV, the Core Web Vitals. And these are basically statistics on things that are done well and things that are not done so well. There are four categories, performance, accessibility, best practices, and SEO. As I was saying a moment ago, the SEO is kind of misleading. It should never really be anything less than 100. Anything green is supposed to be good, but even if you have 100, that doesn’t mean that anyone is ever gonna find you on Google. It just means that you’ve done the bare minimum standards in order to be found, okay?
Daniel:
The accessibility is really, really important for a group of individuals who, no pun intended, often get overlooked in the web space. And those are the visually impaired individuals. Accessibility also attends to more than just visual impairment. But that’s a key, key factor. Your accessibility score should be nothing less than 100. Even when it’s 100, it doesn’t mean that a visually impaired person can access every aspect of your website. But at least you’ve done the best within the parameters that you have available being a non-developer. Best practices, yeah, those are hard to get 100 sometimes. So 92, kudos. So. All of the green, yeah, if you do one of these Lighthouse reports on, you know, any random website that you find on the internet from page five and a Google search, for example, they’re going to be terrible. Typically they’ll be yellow or red. Like your performance is currently red. Um, a 41 because this is an emulator, it’s not using real world data. There hasn’t been enough real world data, um, for us to get that kind of granular information about how fast your page actually loads. So it runs it on an emulator, uh, to kind of pretend. And so these numbers change. And what I do for my clients is I usually run it three, four, five times. And I’ll find the. average score. However, the best score that you might run could be truly the standard, right? The average. It could be because this is just an emulator. So the worst score as well could also be. So you try to find something that’s reasonable when I’m selling I’ll probably take the lowest score because it’s the easiest one to fix quickly.
Daniel:
But a 41 really means that your page takes 10 and a half seconds for it to load before people can start engaging with your website. That’s… that’s a long time. We have the attention span shorter than a goldfish these days. And so while that probably doesn’t impact someone living in the city who has Google Fiber or something like that, it won’t take 10 and a half seconds for your website to load. It’ll load practically instantly because they have the best type of connection available. But someone living out in the Texas Hill country who has patchy internet service, it could take them 10 to 20 seconds for this page to load. And that means they just never came, right? They just didn’t do it. Even with a strong referral, people are not likely to stick around for more than. five to seven seconds, right? So these numbers really mean that whoever’s coming to your website, well, sweet, they’re dedicated. They’re really interested because they waited this long ass time for your page to load, right? So that’s good news.
Tricia:
We want more clients. That’s the whole point, right?
Daniel:
Right.
Brie:
Yes, yes. Yeah, I need that. I need people to be able to find me and tell me this.
Brie:
Tell me this. When your page, when Chrome, when they detect that it takes so long for it to load, that does not give you the… Google does not like that, right?
Daniel:
Oh no, that will negatively impact your page load speed. Excuse me, your search engine result page score. So page load speed and it’s particularly mobile, that’s the key indicator for your search result. If you have bad performance in your CWVs, your core web vitals, then you get pushed lower and lower and lower down the search results. Now,that’s not to say that it’s the only factor. There are plenty of number one ranking websites that have terrible performance, but they also have 250,000 visitors a day going to their website, accessing their stuff, who clearly don’t care that it takes these seconds to load. And they’re clicking in deeper pages, they are not performing the same search or a similar search moments after leaving the website. So this tells Google that they found what they were looking for, right? So this is not the only factor, but when you’re a nobody, and we don’t have 250,000 people coming to our website every single day, then we better tick all of the boxes possible in order to try to compete, even to get on page two or three. And so, yeah, your performance being a 41, while it’s average, it just means your average, you can be on page five results. Good luck with that.
Daniel:
YouTube is growing because they’ve added shorts and they’re trying to compete with TikTok as well. But YouTube is Google, so that does have an overlap effect. But if you’re creating videos, shorts that can go onto YouTube and or TikTok. talking to people about people, trying to help people. I had this conversation with someone. I was inspired to do this two minute video. Here’s what happened. Here’s the background. Here’s what I advised. If you fit into that category, maybe this little piece of advice will help you. Let me know in the comments.
Brie:
That’s what I meant. Yeah, the Google search versus other searches. Like if someone comes to my social media, like Instagram, they can, they’re interested. They see what, you know, they see what they think I offer and then they can go and click, right?
Daniel:
You want to take whatever steps you can take, not having access to the back end. I can’t tell without doing some heavy lift, how heavy your images are, you know, how we could compress them.
Brie:
Pretty heavy.
Daniel:
I would imagine that there’s a little bit of work that can be done. But that’s probably not your heavy lift. The heavy lift is maybe who’s your hosting service provider and ultimately what theme are you using in WordPress because your theme is probably creating a lot of bloat. If you’ve got one of these bigger themes, hello, Elementor or Divi or what have you,
Brie:
It’s a Genesis theme.
Daniel:
Okay, then it’s probably full of stuff that you’re not using. But it still gets called. It still gets delivered. And all of that is a time sap on the speed at which your page can load. So if you want to really enhance your performance, you should probably consider using a lightweight theme without a page builder. And then you can probably get some things to go faster.
Tricia:
It’s very hard to achieve a perfect lighthouse score with themes that are kind of pre-built without building something from scratch because it does add a lot of extra stuff in there you don’t need bells and whistles that weigh it down. So really it’s just about what can you do to improve it a little bit.
Daniel:
Right, so under the accessibility score in your Lighthouse result, it says links do not have a discernible name, and heading elements are not in sequentially descending order. These two issues are very easy to fix, so they should be. And then you’ll have 100 for the accessibility. So you can click on many of these items that get pulled up, and it’ll take you directly to that within the code. So links do not have a discernible name. You click it, and it takes you to an item which has no name. And inside it, it has some kind of icon. It takes you to the shopping cart. But there is no shopping cart on your. homepage that I can find, right? So that’s being injected somewhere. Maybe it’s in the footer?
Tricia:
So speaking of that, Bri, I’m in your portfolio right now, because it’s like struggling to load and I’m on a very fast internet connection.
Brie:
And so now I need to figure out like now with that, I need to figure out what’s like, because I want some great image quality. But also, also, what’s the fine line that I can have the least amount of the most compression with the best like without compromising a lot of the image quality, right? Because it is photography.
Tricia:
Yes, and this is totally a challenge with artists. I was just talking about this in our course last night, our WordPress course. Yeah, when you’re an artist, you want your images to look better than the average person. You care about that because of the detail.
Tricia:
I get it. However, I can already tell that you don’t need to have them as big as they are. So it really is about going to Photoshop. I know you know how to use Photoshop and just playing with it, Bri. See how it played with that slider, the image quality slider for JPEGs. See how low you can get it without losing enough, too much quality. And also pay attention to your file size.
Daniel:
The rendered size on your web page is 710 by 887 pixels. That’s as big as it is on my screen. The original is 4,800 and change. So if you want to make it 1,200, That’s going to make a significant impact in that 17 megs. And then you reduce the quality down to, in Photoshop, down to a four maybe. And now we’re talking like 250, 300 kilobytes. It’ll be beautiful.
Brie:
A significant difference. Yeah.
Tricia:
Huge.
Daniel:
Is there anything that you wanna say or you would like our listeners to do after listening to this podcast with Brie Stockwell from the Creative Minds Coach?
Brie:
All right, well, if you want to know more about what a creative mindset and confidence coach does, then you can go to my website. But also, I want to invite you to do two things. One is first, sign up for and join my creative circle. This is what I call my email newsletter. I want everyone to come and join me and talk about, you know, creativity and, and all the things, but especially because I do, uh, every Monday I do a newsletter called Monday motivation. And I talk about all things that will help you get motivated to do your week. So, and I have really loved doing this. This has been one of my favorite things. And it was actually spurred, spurred by a, um, a colleague who I said, what do you have the most problems with? want to be motivated. I’m like, we can do that. So, so anyway, so come join me for my Monday motivation. And if you want to see I do I right now doing I have a waitlist going for my April creative confidence workshop. It’s six weeks. Tricia’s joined me. It’s really, it’s really so site and find out more. It really is huge for anyone that’s in the creative space on how you can build confidence. You can make all the things that you do easier with more confidence. And that brie is what I love. So come join me.
Tricia:
Yes, thank you, Brie. I have really been enjoying your course, by the way. It’s been you’ve been teaching me some things.
Brie:
Thanks. I just want to say, I think this course is so much more than just building confidence. There’s so much more wrapped up in how like understanding our minds and how we work. And there’s just so much to learn in the world. I just love it. And thanks for having me, Daniel and Tricia.
Daniel:
Well, thank you for joining us again and taking the time away from your family and everything. Again, it was really much appreciated.
Tricia:
Bye, Brie!