Tripod, the Tricycle Creative podcast, is for anyone interested in being a better Digital + Content Marketer. Hosted by Ross Herosian (a Marketing coach, content creator, and entrepreneur) episodes are a mix of helpful Marketing tips, social media updates, inspiring interviews, and his own unique perspective on how to promote and grow your business.
In this episode of TriPod, Ross welcomes Mark Crowell, co-owner of Wicky Design. Mark and his wife Barbara provide professional WordPress websites for small business owners. During our conversation, we discuss website FAQ’s, the misconceptions people have about search engine optimization, and we go through the “Working With Wicky Design” document.
This episode was recorded as part of my Member Spotlight series inside of my free Marketing CLARITY Community. If you’re a solopreneur or small business marketer looking for help with your digital marketing, I’d love to have you join us!
In This Episode...
About Wicky Design
Excerpt from our conversation:
Mark Crowell: Wicky Design started full time back in about 2014. [my wife] Barbara was working kind of part-time doing web design and I was still working full time at a corporation doing website design and 3d animation. So she just wanted to go all-in on it because we were able to afford it where she could do it part-time. And I couldn’t quite yet so she went all-in in 2014 and then it took me about four more years. So around 2018, I was able to quit my full-time corporate job to run the business with her…
About the services Wicky Design offers:
Mark Crowell: So yeah, our main services, we just do branding and web design these days, we used to offer other services, like SEO, and social media management but now we’ve just gotten back to our core services, which is just the branding, custom web design. And then we can also do projects for e-commerce websites and membership websites. This past year or two, we kind of refocused just back on those core services, because we started to see that we were starting to offer too many things. And during the pandemic, in the beginning, we actually were doing pretty good. And we were offering like website maintenance for websites that we didn’t build, we tried all these different things, and it worked. And it did help out a lot of small businesses doing that. But then we started to notice that, hey, we need to kind of just go back to what we were doing…
The value of YouTube
Excerpt from our conversation:
Mark Crowell: We went heavy for a while, we were doing two or three videos a week, for about a year, and then we kind of scaled back. But um, yeah, we wanted to really kind of focus on that. And the great thing about making YouTube videos is once you get to a certain point, you can, of course, start to make a little bit of money off of you know, ads, and then we push just a few affiliates. You know, we only work with a couple of different companies or software, we push those affiliates. So it’s like a little bit of it’s almost like a part-time income just on the side.
Ross Herosian: It’s passive income stream. And I think for anyone out there, particularly if you are that solopreneur or creative, YouTube can be a very viable thing. But let me stress this, and I think you’ll agree, you have to come in creating valuable, helpful, insightful, entertaining, content first. That has to be your first priority. Monetization comes if you do that first step – would you agree?
Mark Crowell: Oh, yeah, for sure. In our situation, we don’t do like entertainment. We’re strictly like kind of just boring tutorials, but it works. So there’s an audience for that on YouTube. I’m huge into the organic ranking. I love that I can post a video on YouTube and have it rank way before my website will get indexed. So I can yes, once you become an authority with a certain topic, I’m not joking, you can post a video and it gets crawled and indexed in organic search, like pretty much instantly.
SEO Confusion
Excerpt from our conversation:
Mark Crowell: …I just had a call with a client a couple of days ago. We’re gonna build his website and then on that same call, he [asked], “Hey, how can I outrank my competitors?” I’m like, alright, first, we need to build the website. First, you can’t outrank someone unless you actually have something to rank.
Ross Herosian: As an SEO guy, who also deals with people who come to me who have no SEO experience, there’s connective tissue between the technical SEO and what has now become what could be called semantic SEO. And there’s a big shift, has been a big shift for the last two years, that SEO is driven a lot more by content on-site content, than by technical – not that technical is not a factor. It still is. But that the way that Google’s artificial intelligence, algorithm, indexing spiders, its whole mechanism, it understands language better, understands relationships better, understands conversation better. And so with all of those things evolving, the move has been towards the importance of improved on-site content. But these two things, function and content, go together, just like you said…
“Working With Wicky Design” Guide
Excerpt from our conversation:
Ross Herosian: I think any business, it’s valuable to have this type of document. So yeah, I reached out to you, and you replied with an email, but you also attached this document, and it gave me info about you…And I love this!…When you work with someone, this is how I look at it – It’s a collaboration, particularly with a website.
Mark Crowell: this document isn’t just saying, you know, oh, we agree we do this, it’s this. This is the process that is going to help you. This is what you can expect. This is more like setting the expectations upfront.
Ross Herosian: Yes. And I think that’s really important. Expectation setting is really, really important. Again, particularly with website, particularly with digital…I think it’s good to set boundaries, my therapist says is good for me to set boundaries. So I’m applying it to business to right?
Do You Need A Website?
Contact Wicky Design and mention Tricycle Creative to learn more about how they can help you and take advantage of the discount we’ve agreed to for listeners of TriPod.