The Captain Coder Podcast

You want your website to make you money, right?  Of course you do! If you want your website to generate revenue, it needs to be set up to convert. How do you do that? You have compelling copy that leads them to some kind of action. One of the best ways to write copy that converts is to focus on accessibility and inclusion. When your copy speaks to everyone, you can reach your entire audience. Let’...

If you’re in marketing, you’ve probably heard people talk about how your website needs to comply with ADA standards. Web accessibility isn’t just a buzzword. It’s a practice that everyone in the marketing world should follow—for their websites, social media, and all marketing. To be blunt, making your content more accessible can be an investment. Many businesses have put it off, thinking that it d...

For a business like yours, your website is your storefront, pitch, and even the gateway to building trust with potential clients. I’ve been building websites for decades, but distilling an entire business into just a few pages is hard. You want your potential customers to be able to learn enough about your business that they know who they might be working with, make it easy for them to reach out a...

Imagine a website that perfectly integrates with your marketing strategy and drives more leads. Does that feel impossible? It can be hard, especially when today’s trend seems to be cookie-cutter themes and everyone’s websites look the same. But what your website looks like matters. According to Stanford University , 75% of people judge a company's credibility based on its website's desig...

AI has made it easy to add some personalization to our marketing, be more efficient (which is great when you’re a one-person team), and create content far more quickly than we might have been used to. But how do we use AI and still keep that human touch? I’m not sure there will ever be a day that our use of AI doesn’t need oversight. After all, it’s only as good as the people training it. That can...

Can everyone use your website and the content you create, or are you excluding up to 27% of your audience ? When you focus on creating content that all people can access, regardless of their abilities, you’re working to improve your web accessibility. On the flip side, when you don’t follow some basic best practices, you’re not just excluding potential customers; you’re putting your business at le...

Have you heard this lately: “We need more leads.”  In marketing, we often focus on getting new leads and customers into your business, but what about the leads you already have? It’s time to think about boosting your customer retention and bringing them back over and over again. Keeping happy customers is the best way to grow a business. Repeat customers spend an average of 67% more than new custo...

Have you been asking yourself whether or not you’re cut out for entrepreneurship? Fun fact - everyone is cut out for it - if they want to be. I know that choosing to run your own business is not the easiest decision. Honestly, I think being a small business owner is one of the hardest things any of us could choose to do. But if you have a solid vision for your business and what entrepreneurship wi...

Having a blog for your business is a great way to bring targeted traffic to your website. However, the average blog (without AI assistance) takes about 5-6 hours to write and get on your website.  Want to get the most out of that investment? It’s time to repurpose your blog articles. Repurposing, or transforming your blog content into other formats like social media snippets, infographics, or vide...

The first result on Google gets 39.8% of the clicks, but that can feel like an impossible task in 2024. There’s so much competition. But there’s one thing you might be overlooking because it feels like “no one reads them” anymore - blogging. Blogging has long been and still is one of the most effective ways to improve your SEO and climb the Google rankings. Let’s talk about how you can make bloggi...

On a scale of one to “Why did I start a business,” how burned out are you right now? You started your business because you were GREAT at what you do. But you didn’t start it because you wanted to do all the admin work of running your business. Many entrepreneurs and business owners are convinced that even though they hate it, no one can do things in their business quite like they can.  Want to lov...

Unless you have a monopoly in what you do or you never want to grow your business beyond where you are right now, you need a website. Even if you’re rocking sales with DMs and simple landing pages, you need a website that builds trust in your business. Don’t believe me? I get it. I talk to people all day long who think they don’t need a website anymore. But let me tell you - without one, you’re pu...

Are people buying from your website? Selling online - even when you’re selling services - requires high-converting sales pages. Unlike many of the pages on your website, a sales page attempts to convert someone from a mere visitor to actual revenue. How do you take someone from voyeur to willing to hand over some of their cold-hard cash? You have to take them through a process that ends with them...

How do you keep growing and achieve sustainable growth online? How do those big gurus making a million plus keep their business growing, getting in front of more and more people? You need to follow the same best practices they do. If you want your business to grow online, it’s not about the tactics. It’s about the underlying choices of “why” you choose to do what you do. The online world changes s...

Have you been putting SEO on the back burner because it feels like it’s too hard to mess with? Let me tell you the secret about SEO - it’s one of the easiest things you can do for your business. It just takes a little bit of time but that’s well worth the investment. Generating consistent revenue in your business is possible when you’re investing a bit of time and energy into your SEO. In this epi...

Do you often find yourself working with clients that just aren’t the best fit for you but you take them because revenue is important? What if I told you that you could attract your dream clients instead? I know that might sound fanciful if you’ve been building your business for a while, but it doesn’t have to be a fantasy. You can attract the right leads and your dream clients to your business. In...

I can’t tell you how much doom and gloom I’ve seen about the state of marketing in 2024. With the shifts from AI, changes to Google’s algorithm, and the continued push to privacy (which means losing some data), I see a lot of experts claim that it’s going to become impossible to market effectively. What are they all forgetting? There are real, actual human beings on the other side of your marketin...

No one is honest about how it looks to run a business. Often, we see the shiny numbers of “Oh, I’m a 6 figure business owner", but we don’t share the reality of what running that business is. Growth doesn’t just happen overnight. Honestly, it’s easy to get distracted by something that doesn’t help grow your business, get some shiny object syndrome, and have some lulls you didn’t expect. But y...

A website should be an investment in your business, which means it absolutely should offer some kind of return. The way that many customers find us is so varied these days. They see us on social media, then maybe get an email, read a blog, or listen to a podcast before they may ever really explore our websites. Then of course some get to your website organically through Google and other search eng...

Can everyone - and I do mean everyone - use your website?  What a lot of business owners don’t understand is that there are common website trends that make it harder for some individuals to use their websites. That means you’re excluding a potentially huge chunk of your target audience - up to 27%. That’s the exact opposite of what you want to do right? The good news is that having an accessible w...

If you’ve been in business longer than 5 minutes, you know that there are a lot of things to pay attention to. It’s so easy for many of these things to hit the back burner throughout the year and even cause problems the longer you go without taking care of them. As this year winds down, this is a great chance to take a few simple steps to prep your marketing for 2024. Let’s take a look at the 7 st...

Hear a lot about marketing funnels but have no idea what that means?  Online experts often talk about funnels and how they can help your business grow, but they very often break it down so you understand where to start. Here’s why this is so frustrating to me - funnels don’t have to be overly complicated and they can be incredibly powerful to help you turn prospects into customers. With a marketin...

Where do you find people online that want to work with you? One of the easiest traps to fall into when you’re a service-based business is to rely on referrals only. While referrals can bring you some of the best-fit clients, you can’t control how consistently they come in. Take control of your leads and get the right people to your business - all with online strategies. In this week’s podcast, I’m...

Know you need a website, but you have no idea where you should put it? You’ve probably heard that Wix is easy, or Squarespace gives you beautiful templates, or you found a template that you like for ShowIt, or that WordPress is the best for SEO and flexibility (but has a steeper learning curve). So which one do you go with anyway? Where you build your website matters. We’re going to break down the...

An optimized website can help you grow your service-based business online, bringing in new leads and sales on autopilot. But how do you get people to come to your website in the first place? While you can use social media, email marketing, and ads to drive people to your website, you don’t want to have to work all the time to get those new leads. That’s where SEO comes in! When you want your websi...