Whether you call them Website Safety Plans or Website Maintenance plans, one thing is for sure. The work done for these plans is necessary. If you don’t pay someone to do these things on your site, you need to be doing it yourself.
We cover the sales and the importance of Safety plans in this episode. Image optimization, database cleanup and nightly backups are just a few of the key points to discuss when selling a safety plan to your client.
Keegan 0:00
What’s up Divi Addicts? In today’s episode, we’re going to help you sell a website safety plan. Hey, how’s it going everybody? You know, in this episode, we told you in the intro, we’re going to kind of walk you through how to sell a website safety plan. And you know, before we really kick this episode off, I didn’t want to say, you know, thank you to those who have gone in and done a review, you know, wherever it is, you listen to podcasts, Apple podcast is definitely one, you know, we’d love to get a review from you for their, share it with any friends, you know, who, who really could use the content that’s here, if they’re looking to start their journey, do a little side hustle, make some money on the side, and ultimately try and create and take control of the life that they really want, you know, with the freedom and flexibility of the schedule for being a freelance web designer, the fact that you’re location, independent, all of those things.
Keegan 0:49
That brings a lot of benefits too. So share that with anybody who’s maybe unhappy in their job and has a creative bone in their body and really wants to do this, because it’s not even about necessarily always being creative. It’s about knowing how to operate a business. So you know, today, and a big part of operating that business we’ll talk about today is how to sell the website safety plan. Most people call it maintenance plan, some people call a service plans, we’ve recently changed our name, the way that we refer to it as a website safety plan, because I got to think and let’s put yourself in the mind of somebody on the other end, you know, if I, if I heard website maintenance plan, the first thing that comes to mind is cool, I don’t have to do anything to my website, if I have to update an image and copy you know, whatever it is, all I got to do, like I have a maintenance plan with you, you’re going to maintain my website, copy all of it, which is, you know, it’s you have to explain it, and you have to sell anything that you do, but make it very easy to understand from right at the beginning,
Keegan 1:51
I am selling a website safety plan, and includes hosts are hosting, which is nightly backups, it’s site optimization, it’s making sure that we’ve got things in place to make sure that the site stays safe, you know, from attacks, and that if anything really nasty does happen. We’ve got this plan in place that will allow us to bring the site back online. And essentially it’s it’s insurance, we thought around thought about website insurance plan, we thought about website safety plan, service plan, all these different things right. At the end of the day, they’re all the same no matter what you call it, the goal is to create a safety net for this website to where we can back it up. If anything goes crazy, we can revert back to a previous backup.
Keegan 2:35
We’ve got, you know, site optimization, image optimization, database cleanup, making sure the site WordPress, the theme and the plug in all stay up to date so that we can minimize the amount of security holes that might happen by some code that gets exposed. You know, there’s people out there who always want to do bad things to to different websites to further their agenda. And that could be trying to use your site as a way to generate spam or tons of other things that really hurt your website from being found. And it also, most cases, brings your site to a screeching halt, because you’re using web resources that there’s going to maximum out your site’s going to perform really, really, really poorly, which is gonna, in turn, continue to hurt your search engine availability, find ability search ability.
Keegan 3:25
So that’s the main points that I want to get across in this podcast is that number one, you shouldn’t have to sell it, what you should have to do is educate the people on the other side, this is what we’re doing, we’re going to keep your site backed up, we’re going to host it on a rock solid platform, we’re going to make sure that images are optimized so that they load quickly, we’re going to do those things and build this box. So that if something really bad does happen, if it gets attacked, and a hacker gets in, we can always have a plan in place to repair the site and to put it back into the state that it was before it got attacked.
Keegan 3:25
And that’s really that’s the key that’s the selling point is that you know, we’re here to create this safety net, it’s really an insurance policy for your site, so that we make sure we’re using best practices and that at the end of the day, we can bring this back so you know a lot of a lot of places will upsell a bunch of craziness and they’ll they’ll pull the wool over people’s eyes. I’ve always and will always operate under being very open very honest.
Keegan 4:36
And to me that’s a great long term strategy. It’s it is deeply right it’s it’s the way to do things correctly, rightly and and gain a great long term rapid reputation. And to me that means more than making a couple extra bucks this month. I believe doing things right? Believe in doing things quick and I believe being very efficient in the way that you operate things. So that’s why I’ll talk about it here right now is it but the hosting is the key point to this website safety plan, you have to have these sites on great hosting, they’re on a shared plan, they’re, they’re vulnerable, even if they do everything right, you’re vulnerable on a shared plan. And that’s the Go Daddy’s, you know, that’s Hostgator, those kinds of things. Most of the cheap ones that get marketed to you are the are the, there’s the cheap shared hosting plans, and they’re great to get started with, I’m not knocking them by any means.
Keegan 5:30
But if you’re serious about your business, you absolutely have to be serious about your hosting. And I’ll take that’s not I can’t take credit for that one. That’s, that’s a line from a buddy Tim Strifler of Divi life. So he’s one thing that he said, and it’s stuck with me through a lot of the information I’ve read from him a lot of the podcasts and courses I’ve done with him taken from, you know, his from his, from his company. And, you know, at the end of the day, if you’re going to, if you’re going to be doing business, and you’re going to be building a website, ultimately you want, you’re going to want to convert people, right. So this website safety plan is meant to make that conversion fast. If your site doesn’t load quickly, if your site’s not up, you can’t convert. And so that’s that’s another point in here, you know, to so to just kind of recap this whole thing, I’m just a jumped on here just to talk, you know, and I’ll quickly recap this thing for you guys.
Keegan 6:25
Number one, is sell the benefits of this plan. in case something happens like this is an insurance policy, no different than your phone, no different than your car, no different than your house, this part of your business is supposed to be important, you need to have a backup plan, you know, number two is that we need this site to be fast. And this safety plan should be designed to make that site quick, should be on great premium hosting, you should have optimization in place to clean the database to absolutely optimize images to lazy load to do all the things that you need to do to make your site quick. And those are pretty much the quick points of saying and you can upsell as much as you want on this safety plan. You can tell like you can add on additional services if you need.
Keegan 7:13
And it could be, you know, maybe we do offer content updates for an additional certain amount of month, money per month, you can say I’ll jump in and change the images, I’ll jump in and change the copy if you provide them to me and they’ll be done within 12 hours or 24 hours or whatever that timeframe is for you. That can be an upsell. But the core of this thing, and the core of a website safety plan, insurance plan maintenance plan, whatever it is, is that they have to have the peace of mind they being the customer, they have to have the peace of mind that if something just goes crazy, their site will will be backed up can be retrieved. And they need to know that in most cases, if they don’t have this going on, their site is vulnerable. And their site will probably not be able to be brought back if somebody doesn’t have a safety plan in this. In this on a story.
Keegan 8:04
I had a client early on who had their own hosting, and did not sign up for the maintenance plans that I had at the time of the safety plan. And their site got hacked. And it was it was a really nasty, nasty hack. And I had an initial backup from when we first did the site. But because they did not have the plan with me, we weren’t they didn’t and they had their own hosting. It just was not being backed up properly. So their site and all the work that we did, and all the money they paid me to build their site to begin with was essentially gone because their site got hacked so bad. And it had gone unnoticed for quite a while, like at least 30 or 45 days. And the host that they were with just did not have a backup, they had no way of bringing it back to what it was beforehand.
Keegan 8:50
I think they had up to seven days that was kind of built in that they could have rolled back. Again, it was a very cheap post, it would have cost them a good bit of money to do that to them. And it would also cost them a lot of money for me to recreate the site. So we just we were not able to get their site back online. It was it was an ugly thing, you know, and they felt they felt like they got shortchanged, and they but they had the opportunity to buy into the safety plan and they did not. And so that that right there, it was something where I said I’d never want to go through this again. So let me figure out how to properly explain what this is, why they need it and why it’s an expense that they can’t afford not to have. And so once you get those points together, the safety, the insurance, the bringing it back in case anything happens, the optimization, the speed for conversion, all those points. That’s that’s the selling right there. That’s how you make them know that they need this.
Keegan 9:47
So I think we’ve I think I’ve definitely hit this point home. I hope that this brings you some value and if you have anybody out out there in your community who’s who is looking to jump into web development or is currently developing sites now and isn’t offering this, please point them to this episode, point them to this exact one so that we can talk through this thing they can listen to what we’re saying, you can hit me up on any of the socials, go to Keegan Lanier media.com and hit message me or the Facebook icon in the bottom right hand corner. And let’s talk about this because I’m happy to help anyone out there, make a little bit more money, serve their clients much better and give them a product that they definitely need but probably don’t even know that they need.
Keegan 10:33
So I thank you for for being here for listening to another episode. And you know, we’ll be right back here next Tuesday with another episode of Divi, Divi addicts podcast. Wow, I’m having a hard time speaking today. So in either way. Thanks, guys. I appreciate you. I hope you’re staying safe amidst all of this craziness. And yeah, check out the website, Keegan Lanier media.com Let me know some of the things you think about this, this new update that we’ve done. So appreciate you have an awesome day. And we’re out.
Keegan 11:06
So thanks for being here for another episode. And this one was an important one. And I know I probably rambled a little bit there. But I wanted to get the point across and make those points over and over and over again, that this is such a critical service that you can offer to clients. And if you’re somebody who’s just in business, and you’re listening to this right now, and you don’t want the headache, feel free to reach out to us man, I will migrate your site over to my hosting for free put you on the website safety plan. And I promise you, you’re going to be able to sleep easier at night knowing that your site is quick. And that it’s optimized because we’re going to drop some things, some processes in place and give you reporting and all kinds of great things.