I was asked recently how I took my business global. This is of particular interest for new people, new web developers and new web designers entering the market and also to people in my home country, South Africa, who offer services that they think might be able to be translatable or sellable in a global market and aren't quite sure how to actually go about doing that. So I am talking you through the same steps that I followed to take my business to a global market

Nine out of 10 times, if I see people that have a wonderful product that I think would do well internationally and the only thing holding them back is typically their mindset. So here is how to change that:

Really, what you need to do is get yourself a...

Read more about my journey here.

Hi, this is Chantal from one day webs. And this is your shamelessly quick check podcast. You asked me about my story about how I took my business, my web design business and went global with it. This is of particular interest for new people, new web developers and new web designers entering the market, but also to people in my home country, South Africa, who offer services that they think might be able to be translatable or sell-able in a global market and aren't quite sure how to actually go about doing that. So my story is really quite simple. First of all, I have an online business so that is a big benefit when you wanting to go global certainly is Very easy to do to change to a global model and to attract global clients. But really what it boils down to at the end of the day, if you do have a product that is sell-able in the global market is mindset. Nine out of 10 times, if I see people that have a wonderful product that I think would do well internationally, the only thing holding them back is typically their mindset. And really, what you need to do is get yourself a very good coach, talk through it with a good coach or a sounding board, somebody that's a good sounding board and has a good business head on their shoulders, make the decision and just go for it. You know, not so long ago, maybe four years ago, my target clients, my ideal clients and my typical clients were in the South African market, often in the town that I live in or the city that I live in Durban and so was a very small and very focused market.

Our exchange rate is not very favorable against the dollar. So at the time, I was building websites full on websites for in the region of C300, which sounds absolutely nuts to anyone in the international market listening to this, nobody would spend their time and wouldn't be able to spend very much time at all building a website for you know, $300 or even less than that. And that's really what my rate was in the South African market. Fast forward to today and a very basic five page brochure style website I now charge over $1500 for so that's quite a big difference. And I am busier now than I was then the work is easier to get now than it was then. It's really quite crazy when you think about it, but it's not that difficult to go global. Here are my top steps of what I would recommend if you're considering taking your business global, whether it's an online business, whether it's a web business or whether it's something else you feel you can take global. First of all, obviously, get your mindset right, as I said, believe that you can do it believe that your product is something that will have appeal internationally and go for it. Number two, put yourself in the places where your ideal clients are on an international level. So the easiest way to do this is facebook, facebook groups, Facebook pages, go and hang out in the places where your ideal clients, your ideal international clients are hanging out and start helping there, spend a couple of hours a day yes, it needs a time investment. Spend a couple of...

Let's talk about the worst case scenario ... being hacked. We spoke recently about whether or not you need to keep your website up to date. And something I didn't focus on was what can happen if you don't keep your website up to date. I try not to scare monger when it comes to clients and I try not to make you know the worst case scenario sound like a likely scenario because it really isn't. But it does happen. It just happened over the weekend to one of my clients. So I'm going to talk a little bit about the worst case scenario so that you know exactly why you need to do those updates.

How bad would it be for your business if not only did your website go down, but your emails started being blocked?

Pretty bad, right? Please prioritise updating your website, it is your first line of defence and very necessary.

Links to things mentioned in this podcast:

• Get the free Website Care Plan guide to get information about how to update your website ... https://www.1daywebs.com/website-care-plan/
• Sign-up for a Website Care Plan here ... https://www.1daywebs.com/website-care-plan-start/

Hi, this is Chantal from one day webs. And this is your shamelessly quick check podcast. Let's talk about the worst case scenario - being hacked. We spoke recently about whether or not you need to keep your website up to date. And something I didn't focus on was what can happen if you don't keep your website up to date. I try not to scare monger when it comes to clients and I try not to make the worst case scenario sound like a likely scenario because it really isn't. But it does happen. It just happened over the weekend to one of my clients. So I'm going to talk a little bit about the worst case scenario so that you know exactly why you need to do those updates. Why you need to prioritize that. And if you don't have the time or the skill to prioritize it, why you need to outsource it. So this is a a scenario, I wouldn't say it's a likely scenario. Again, it's not something that's guaranteed to happen if you don't keep your website up to date. I'm not here to scare monger you. But it is a possible outcome. So worst case scenario, you haven't been keeping your website up to date, and what happens, you get hacked. You may not even know you've been hacked until it happens a few weeks later. And what can happen is your website can go down or it can start redirecting to some random website selling some sort of medical whatever. Basically, it can just do some really undesirable things. Now imagine if you've got a membership site, you've got people logging into your website, and they can't access the content that they're paying you for. This is an awful, awful outcome. This is what happened to one of my clients this weekend. So you really, really need to keep your website up to date. And most especially if you have an e commerce store or you have a membership website, or you have a website, you're blogging on often.

What can happen if your website is hacked? Well, you can lose it. If it's a bad enough hack and it can't be cleaned. You can lose your website - all those months, weeks years of work can go away. If your hack can’t be cleaned. That would be an awful outcome. What else can go wrong? Your domain can be blacklisted because Google pics up that there are all sorts of untoward malware, etc. on your website, and you get blacklisted. They are loads and loads of blacklisting companies and one by one, they add your website to it. Okay, so your website goes down because it's blacklisted. What's the big deal? Well, this affects your email as well, because now your whole domain is blacklisted. So suddenly you emails on going through to clients, because when you try and send them an email, their email hosting...

Not knowing who your ideal client is, and who you talking to, in what voice, before you even begin your project. If you don't know who your client is, and you don't know what they want to hear from you, the chances are you going to go completely down the wrong road with your DIY website.

No clear call to action. What do you want the person to do on your website. If you don't know who you're talking to, you probably don't know what you want them to do either. These are things you have to think about before you even start trying to DIY your website.

Thinking your website is about you! Oh my goodness… Unfortunately we all fall into this trap. We all want our website to be all about us. We want it to be everything we love, the colors we love, the fonts we love, the beautiful words we love, etc. But it's not about you. It's all about your clients. It's a common common mistake people building websites for themselves and not thinking about what the clients want and who their clients are.

Choosing the wrong base. So this can happen quite frequently, especially if you haven't given thought to your medium term goals or your long term goals for your online business. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) - What are you going to do about that? How easy will it be for your VA to edit once you grow your business and you have a team of VAs working underneath you? All these sorts of questions needs to be thought about before you decide what base you're going to build your website on. So before you jump into that Squarespace landing page, think about where you're going with your business and whether the square space website will be able to actually achieve those goals you think you may be wanting to achieve in a year's time.

Taking advice from the wrong people or not doing your own research. Whilst I love your auntie Sue or cousin Bob's nephew who's building amazing websites from his garage, he may not be the correct person to take advice from when it comes to building your coaching website, for example. So definitely do some research and take advice from people who are already doing what you want to be doing, or who service people who are doing what you want to be doing.

Being distracted by shiny things. Oh my goodness, I'm very much guilty of this one. I love all the new shiny things. I'm constantly trolling Facebook groups and finding all sorts of new shiny things to try out. Much like the old adage of before you walk out the door, take something off, The same applies in your website. So don't go down the trap of installing every new shiny tool that you come across. Give it some thought and only install what you really, really need because the last thing you want is a slow website that's bloated and overloaded with shiny things that are not necessary for your clients.

Bad or no copy. So this is the last thing that many many people think about. You'll often see people going and having amazing branding shoots done coming up with great products or services that they're offering. And they don't pay any attention to the copy. Or even worse, they have a homepage or a sales page that's really just made up of images and headings. You need to add copy, you need to sell your service, you need to tell your story, and you need to make it appealing for everybody to read.

Talking about features over benefits. Do not talk about all the features that you are going to offer in your service or your product. People don't really care about features, they care about the benefit to them. So what do I mean by that? They don't care that they're getting a free PDF that teaches them XYZ. They care that the PDF is going t...

Let's get a tech question answered.

Common questions ...

• Do I need to do updates on my website?
• What are all these notifications about my theme or WordPress or plugins being out of date?
• And what do I need to do about that?

Well, much like your car needs gas to keep going and needs a regular service to keep going in the long term, your website is exactly the same. So yes, absolutely, you need to keep your website up to date.

There are three things in your website that needs updating WordPress itself, the theme that you're using, and all the plugins that you're using.

There's a specific order you need to do these updates. And I would always recommend that you update the plugins first. Once all the plugins are up to date, you need to update your theme. Once your theme and your plugins are up to date, so you can then go ahead and update WordPress.

Is it always seamless?

No, sometimes they may be some tech problems. Sometimes one of the plugins you're using may have an issue when you run an update. And Heaven forbid worst case scenario, you get a WordPress white screen of death, as we not so affectionately call it.

So it's not a seamless process. It's not always perfect, but 99% of the time, you can safely update your website if you're doing the web site updates in the order I mentioned before.

So do you have to do this yourself?

If you haven't tasked anyone else with doing it, then yes, it's your responsibility. If you don't want the responsibility, there is always the option of outsourcing this task. One of the things that I offer within my business is a website care plan. So if this is something that really drives you nuts, and you really don't want to know about updates, you don't want to be doing them. And you certainly don't want to be fixing any problems when you run the updates and something happens, just hop onto my website and go into my website care plan. You can sign up it's a monthly fee and I'll take care of your website for you.

You will find that there are much better ways to spend your time then updating your website for most people. But if you are new with your website or you're a DIYer and you're trying to maintain or handle keep a handle on your costs, then by all means go ahead and DIY this.

As I mentioned at the beginning, I'm going to recap you need to update plugins first, followed by your themes and then by WordPress. Do this at least once a week and if you have any problems don't hesitate to get hold of me.

I recently posted my redesigned website on a forum for designers and came under some quite heavy criticism from some of the men on the group who felt that using the term "chick" on my website was very disrespectful, alienating and unprofessional.

I hope you can hear the smile and my voice because to me, chick is a real term of endearment. All of the women in my life who I love, get called chick. If I am trying to get my point across to somebody I normally preface or end off with "chick". So by no means is chick derogatory in my language and that's something that is VERY important to understand when you look at my website and when you get to know me and when you work with me, you will know that you hear me using the term "chick". And it's normally only in cases of really extreme empathy with you, or really wanting to get across that I really "feel you". I'll use the term "chick".

So each to their own.

I hope that using the term chick is not alienating you from me or my podcast. But dare I say, if it is, you probably aren't my ideal client. And I'll say that very, very carefully.

So normally, the people that I work with are female entrepreneurs, often serial entrepreneurs, successful creative woman. We aren't threatened by each other. And normally we are in similar boats. We are often mothers, we are often juggling homes and businesses and trying to juggle that elusive work-life-balance as much as we can. So there's a lot of similarity for me and my clients. And so I hope that if you're listening to this, it is speaking to you and feel free to just, you know, not listen, if it's not speaking to you.

I'm not for everyone. I don't pretend to be. But for the right people, I have no filter. This is a good and a bad thing. I will be honest, I will give excellent feedback. And normally I will give you a lot of education and information to go along with the feedback I'm giving you.

So if you hear me say Chick, please don't be offended. This chick just really loves using the word chick.

It's as simple as that.

So who is this chick?

So this chick lives in Durban, South Africa. You will have heard me perhaps refer to it, if you've heard me on other podcasts over time, as living on the ass-end of Africa. And it is a little bit. It's a seaside town on the east coast of South Africa, right at the bottom of Africa. And it's not even one of the most well known cities in South Africa. Most people will know about Johannesburg or Cape Town. But Durban is a gorgeous place to live and a gorgeous place to grow up. I was born and bred here. And although I have worked in other places in the world, this is where I've chosen to make my home and where my family still lives, most of them, and where we raising my daughter, Charlotte.

So I am in my mid 40s *eek*, and I've had quite an interesting career. I've done lots of different things which probably makes me quite versatile in terms of the knowledge that I can share. I've done everything from working for corporate flipping houses, owning a retail store and developing it into a franchise operation and owning a web design house. So my experience and the businesses I've had and run of various and all very exciting and the sort of common thread throughout all of them is that they all were in some way creative.

And I would definitely say I call myself a creative entrepreneur and I work best with other creative entrepreneurs, because I get it.

I get that your branding is important to you.

I get that you love a scripty font. I get that you love a bit of glitter, or whatever the case is and I don't judge you for it and I don't think it's unprofessional and I do understand that you will clients may love it just as much as you do and may not think it...

Well, if you know me at all or you know my business model at all, it is all about getting out of analytical-decision-making and getting into action. And anything can be achieved in a day actually. I can build a website in a day, you can set up a podcast in a day, you can do anything really in one day if you just sit down, focus and get on with it.

So this podcast is really aimed at creative entrepreneurs, mainly females (that's mainly who I work with these days). And it's really not limited only to web experts, although some of the things I will be sharing are specific to web, but also just generally small business ownership, entrepreneurship, serial entrepreneurship and all things online business.

So get ready to find out how to get some things done shamelessly quick in your business.