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Everyone wants to grow their business, but not everyone has the time or patience to learn all the ins and outs of marketing, sales enablement, and making the most out of a CRM such as HubSpot. Join the Web Canopy Studio team, a HubSpot Diamond Partner Agency, as they chat about various topics all designed to help you grow your B2B business.
(00:01):
HubSpot releases new free CMS tools. In today's episode, I'm gonna walk you through why that's important, what you need to know about it and how you can leverage that inside of your own business. My name is John Aikin. I'm the CEO of Web Canopy Studio, and this is the website conversion show.
(00:23):
Hey, what's up everybody. Thank you so much for tuning into this week's episode of the website conversion show. Big news coming out of, of HubSpot last week was the release of the new free CMS tools. This has been really cool to kind of see coming down the pike. It's been really interesting to see the reception and how people are adopting it. I have some insights into different ways that you can utilize this and different tools that that can be impacted by utilizing the free CMS, depending on how big your company is, what, what your market is, what you're trying to accomplish with your website. So we're gonna get into that, but I, I, I just kind of wanna preface this, um, with talking through a little bit of the features and talking through a little bit about what it means, because you know, a free CMS can kind of have this connotation of, or this context of it not being that cool, or it being kind of like lame and fluffy and, and not very secure and so on.
(01:16):
And it's really not the case here in this situation. I'm, I've been very impressed with what HubSpot has put into this release. I've been really impressed with the, the amount of features that are provided. I would've never thought that HubSpot would give this away for free. The other thing that I'll say to this is, is about the cost of this compared to WordPress, because it's a, you know, an agency owner, I, I talk to people all the time and, um, you know, we talk about the cost of what it, what it is to move your website to HubSpot, or to launch a HubSpot website compared to what the cost is of where they're at now, many times it's WordPress and the, the, the use case of, oh, well, you know, the argument of HubSpot costs money, WordPress doesn't, therefore there's not even a discussion point.
(02:01):
And of course that's not really the case. Like it costs a lot of money actually to maintain a WordPress website at the level that HubSpot does, but this just completely eliminates that from the discussion, at least at various levels, depending on, on what it is that you wanna do. Now, obviously WordPress is a, is a phenomenal platform. There's a lot of great uses for it, but in terms of lead generation and doing different things that HubSpot does just natively it, it's, it's hard to argue that point. And so what I wanna do is just kind of highlight a couple of the features, um, that really stand out to me. This is directly from HubSpot, these next few images, I'm gonna show you, it's talking about the security. I'm gonna put some of this in the show notes and a link to information that you can have access to, to review this.
(02:40):
But I, you know, I don't wanna bore you about the importance of, of why having a secure website is, is, is so high on my priority list. However, it's here. Like it's, it's a feature. It's awesome. It's something that you don't generally see at a free level SSL certificates, a hundred up time, roughly come on, uh, 24 hour, uh, seven security and threat monitoring. Like it's massive custom domains, like come on. This is not stuff that you're gonna see, uh, with, with free tools really anywhere else. At least I, I haven't yet. And I'm gonna be, you know, interested to see if other people follow suit and, and, you know, jump in with, with the way that HubSpot's running things. Because I think HubSpot is really, really making a smart move by providing this at this level. The other piece of this is around how efficiently you can build your website.
(03:33):
Now, WordPress is great. Uh, but again, you can't really use WordPress in the way that you would want to build a website without using third parties, without using other tools that have to plug in or have to do different things inside of your WordPress instance. And HubSpot has essentially changed the game there because we now, you know, with the adoption of themes back in, um, 2020 and, and the advent of, of CMS hub and how it's evolved in the last, really in the last year, it's just been keep, it's been constantly improving. Um, and it was awesome back then, like, it's, it's amazing today with what you can do, but having the free version now. Okay. You basically get all of the features that you would want in the, in the paid version. Now there's limits, of course, like you're gonna have HubSpot branding on the website.
(04:25):
You, you can't really get around that. I think for the cost of what it is, you can't really complain about that either. Uh, you also have a, you know, a page limit count to what you're allowed to do, but you still get all of the added benefits of the editor, the drag and drop ability. You have the asset marketplace, you have app marketplace, you have all of these different tools at your fingertips that you just normally wouldn't get the opportunity to do at this level. And then the ability to leverage the full platform with other pieces of HubSpot. You know, it's, it's an all in one solution, there's all these different pieces of HubSpot that just when used together, make your CRM the back engine of your website, which is the front facing piece of your brand. And it is just so cool to have all of these, uh, pieces together in a free, in a free entity and the ability to, to produce this.
(05:17):
It's just awesome. So I'm gonna walk you through what some of these look like and what that might be here are 11 ways to leverage the free CMS tools inside of HubSpot. Let's start off. Number one, I, I gave this example already small business websites. If you are a small business owner, you don't have a ton of time. You don't have a ton of capacity, unless maybe you're, you know, well versed in like coding and developing and things like that. You don't have a ton of time to work on your website. The last thing you want is to spend time rolling up your sleeves, getting into code, trying to figure out why something works, but it's not live. And, but it's working on my test page. You don't want to play with integrations. Like there's all this stuff that you just don't want to deal with.
(06:01):
And for many of us that prevents us from even taking action, because we see our website as this thing down the road that we'll get to versus we could literally get started with the free CMS tools. I could go to the asset marketplace inside of HubSpot download awesome free themes to put into my free CMS, um, portal. And I can have a website up in the same day, very, very fast. Most of the themes in there are beautiful. We have several that are free, that you can, you can play with and, and get to feel, uh, what it's like to start using that there, of course are some limitations there's like page level amount. And then there's some other things with, uh, branding that you can't do. But all in all, this is everything that you need to get an awesome website up and running.
(06:47):
I would do this in a heartbeat if I was starting a new business and I didn't have any budget allocated to it. If you know anybody that is thinking of starting a side business, or they're thinking of doing something, this is where you would start. I would not go anywhere else. Okay. This is exactly where I'm spending my time. So you wanna start here if you're starting your new business, or if you're a small business and you're looking for maybe your first real website, this is the way to go, to get started next, a, another way to leverage this for your business, especially if you might be, you know, an established business or you have an established website already, and you're looking for better ways to differentiate, to give more dedication, to make, maybe make branded domains and branded pages around a product that you're selling.
(07:37):
You're. You can create a micro site that's specific to a product or to your services, or even to a campaign. Let's say you're having a pledge or a drive or something like that. You can utilize the free CMS to create a micro site for your product. You can have multiple pages about that product. It can be branded with its own logo. It can have its own domain. You can have blog posts about it. You can do all kinds of cool stuff inside of it. You can have landing pages, collect forms, uh, or collect contacts through forms. Like it's a great way to utilize the free CMS in order to, to promote your product and differentiate next. This one is probably, my bet is where this is. This is where most people are gonna use it, because if I had to guess, I, I see this the most when we're talking to different clients about things that they're hoping to do.
(08:30):
And I would see this as almost a no brainer to create a branded website around your podcast. Hey, maybe the website conversion show, right? So you have a branded podcast website that lists your episodes, that lists information about you. That lists how to get in touch. How do you become a guest on the podcast? Maybe you're an author, or you published a, a book that you've been writing or working on for business or, or for pleasure. Uh, but you have a new business book. You need a book with a branded domain, so you can send traffic to, and you can collect leads through there. And you can also publish blogs and updates and different things around that book title while the free CMS is exactly exactly what you would wanna do there. Um, another one conferences, this is probably the best example. Number of our clients have specific conferences, you know, or, or events that they put on throughout the year, celebrating that with a microsite is exactly where you probably wanna be.
(09:28):
And this is gonna be a huge resource for that. Cause you don't actually have to create, you don't have to leave your website. You don't have to create this entirely new, like big, giant website project. It's essentially utilizing the free tools to do just that next leveraging a resource center. Now, a lot of our clients do this already, but it can be a little bit cumbersome, especially if your website is not hosted on HubSpot. So what we don't wanna do is just have all these disparate landing pages and just things that are just floating around that are not connected in any way. We wanna make sure that we have a, a route, a living place online, that houses all of our resources that we wanna send people to, and that we can utilize for other campaigns. So for example, you might have 5, 10, 20, you know, checklists or webinars or, or things that you want people to sign up for or download.
(10:22):
You should have like a home for that for people to go and, and check that out and see what that is and have at least some basic forms that you can collect for people to fill out this form, to download this 10 step checklist or this guide, or to sign up, to watch the recorded webinar. So using a resource center, if you don't have one, this is a great way to get started with the free CMS tools. You'll also be able to, again, upgrade whenever you're ready, but you know, as a starting point, it's a great way. If I'm a marketer, there's a great way for me to be like, Hey, I'm gonna go and build some value. I'm gonna create something. Then I'm gonna show it to my boss and let him or her see, you know, this is the potential. This is just with the free tools.
(11:03):
Can you imagine what's, what's gonna be the, the ability for us to do awesome stuff when we invest and we make this something that we're really committed to next quarter, for example, the next opportunity here that you can leverage for your business is around a short standalone blog that might be topic specific, or maybe it's, it's a pet project that you guys have been waiting to start. This is a great opportunity for you here. So a lot of the times we have clients that their CEO wants to share insights. So you could have a insights from CEO blog. We have other clients that do a lot of travel and they wanna highlight where they're going and what's happening and, and just where they're at in the world. And so a travel blog, perhaps maybe, uh, you want to isolate an entire website around PR and news releases and awards and different things that are going on.
(11:48):
You can literally have your own branded travel or branded news and PR related, um, website here. And on top of that, you can collect leads through landing pages and so on within that. So that's a really great way to leverage that as well. The, the next one would be around a knowledge base, a a resource center utilizing maybe support for your product. Okay. If you don't yet have a support center, you don't have a knowledge hub or anything like that at this point. And you don't really want to invest the time or invest the money into creating that this is a great way to start. So utilizing a knowledge base as, uh, a starter pack, if you will, on the free tools is gonna, it's gonna show you if number one, people are using it. Number two, if it's easy for you to use number three, if it's worth updating.
(12:35):
So inside of here, you have, um, you could create, you know, knowledge based articles about specific topics. You can tag them up to so many tags. You can have different authors, you can have, uh, support forms, you know, fill out a form to get a support request. And so on. Now I would refer you to service hub inside of HubSpot to do all of this for you as well. But again, this is a starter pack. This is a starter way to get into that for free. I probably shouldn't use starter cuz HubSpot has starter. Anyway, you get what I'm saying like this, this is the, uh, get your foot wet without spending money kind of idea here. Next, the idea of an internal company facing website is very much underutilized. Again, this is a public facing domain, so yeah, we can unlist it. So people can't find it via Google, but if somebody has the domain, let's say they could, you know, type it in and go to the website.
(13:26):
So you wanna be mindful about not sharing any private information. However, there's a big need for people to have. Let me just have a website or a place on my site that I can have what's going on in the company. What are some internal news things we're having the company picnic in July and we need to sign up for all the who's bringing potato salad and stuff like that. Like we need a place to have those conversations to submit information and to share what's happening. You could use an internal company facing website around that. You could do employee feedback, you could do staff directory and so on. So that's a great way to get started. And then again, it's, it's a way to feel it out. See if it's something that you want to keep doing, um, without making a big investment into a product or a tool set to see if this is where you wanna go.
(14:07):
And if it is then yeah, let's, let's take it to the next step and then really expand on it in something that's a little, little bit more secure, tied to the other pieces of the website and so on. And the similar boat we have the internal sales resource database. This is another underutilized idea that I see some sales teams starting to go towards. I'd love to see a lot more people head in this direction, but a very common complaint that we hear a lot of the times from other companies coming in is that all their sales team are they're kind of disassociated. They're running their own sales process. This person over here has tons of content and things that they just kind of keep in their inbox and in their Google drive and they don't share it with anybody else. And this person needs all that content, but has no place to, to, to grab it.
(14:52):
Doesn't even know it exists maybe. So we could essentially, if I'm running a sales team, we could create our own little sales website and I'd probably unlist it so that people can't find it via Google. But, uh, I could have this website that houses just some general content that I could use for one pagers demo, resources, scripts, and so on. And then as I'm ready, if I really like the way that's going, I'm going to transition into something like sales hub and look at some of the paid versions of that. So I could utilize things like playbooks and snippets and gosh, there's so much inside of here, templates and docs and all these different things that we could really utilize down the road. This is a great way to test that out and see if number one, you can get adoption and, uh, make sure it's something that you can really grow with your team before we make this big investment into jumping into something full time, next, a personal website.
(15:43):
This is specifically for, you know, anybody who's looking for a job students, people who are out of work, people who just want to have their own personal brand. Why wouldn't you want to do this on HubSpot? Is, is the biggest question that I would have, you should have a digital resume, right? What a great opportunity to put a wonderful branded website about you for free utilizing some of the best resources around having the ability to share your portfolio, having the ability to share, um, blogs of like what you've been working on or where you've been or great case studies about the work. I mean, if somebody was coming to me and they sent me a, uh, uh, a, a branded website like this and they had in their blog on their branded website was almost like case studies of how they have solved problems or done really cool stuff at their previous employment.
(16:30):
I would be like, you are hired today. This is phenomenal. So there's a great opportunity here. Again, students, I would eat this up. I would totally be creating, uh, some, some major website, um, opportunities here for myself. Definitely utilize this on the personal level, number 10. And we've kind of talked about this amongst all of them, but maybe it deserves its own piece here utilizing the, the free CMS tools as your own testing grounds. And what I mean by that is specifically, I, I gave the example of a marketer earlier, who is, you know, maybe there's a lot of pressure. There's a lot of things going on. There's 15, you know, different things they have to get done in a day. Their CEO is bringing stuff to them and they have a lot of, uh, pet projects that they're also working on. So how does that marketer get to really provide value in new ideas and new new ways to, to grow without going and asking for permission, getting budgets and all these different things?
(17:27):
Well, that person could utilize the free CMS hub as a way to test new ideas, to MVP specific pages, specific kinds of website stuff. They could use that to build confidence in training, in what they're doing while also providing a valuable asset that the team could use. They could, uh, become more comfortable inside of HubSpot. I would use this as almost like a way of, uh, onboarding new staff too inside of this area, like utilizing it as a testing ground. So it looks professional. It's not just some, you know, random string of letters and a sandbox. It's something that's a legitimate way for you to grow. And then lastly, this is for all of my fellow agency friends out there. Um, and which, by the way, you know, we do a ton of work with other agencies. And I think I, when I, when I think of new things inside of HubSpot, one of the first places that my mind goes is how could an agency who's struggling utilize this tool to just take off and like help their brand go through the roof.
(18:28):
This is one of them. And so if I was in a, you know, a newer agency or a smaller agency role, and I was trying to figure out how do I expand my client base? I see this as a huge opportunity for agencies, especially who are trying to do cross-selling and upselling to their, their, their existing clients. This is a, a great opportunity for you to show ideas, show value, create opportunity where it doesn't naturally exist. And what I mean by that is, let's say you are helping somebody get their sales CRM set up, or let's say you're helping somebody with an ad campaign, or they're, you're doing something around marketing and you're using HubSpot. You can take, obviously you have to show this right. You'd have to put a little bit of effort into it, but sometimes that's, that's all it takes to get this across the finish line.
(19:19):
You can create a free website using their portal. You could use your portal, you could create a website using a free theme, showing them the positioning and the messaging. You could create new assets for them and, and show them what that's gonna do for their company and kind of go the next step, provide something of value and give them literally a live demo on their, on their stuff, without having to ask them for money or ask them for, uh, doing all kinds of like, you know, time intensive workshops and so on. Because number one, I'm gonna build it way cooler than whatever their website is today. So I know that I'm gonna make it way easier to use number two, and then number three, it's going to be valuable. It's going to actually deliver the things that it should, which is leads and have the ability to nurture those leads.
(20:10):
Because I guarantee they probably are not doing anything like that today, or it's not doing it right. At least you could literally use this as a means of, of getting more sales. Now don't go and just start building stuff with people's portals, without permission, not advocating that whatsoever. Get permission to do that and say, Hey, I've got a couple ideas. If it's okay with you, I'd love to turn this feature on. It's free. Uh, I wanna show you what I've got go and, uh, and get some work done with my team and then come back and see if, if it makes sense. Um, you know, especially if it's talking about lead generation, adding revenue, getting some kind of return on investment, increasing the value of ads and so on, like, you're, it's gonna be rare that you find somebody who says, no, don't help me grow my business for free.
(20:52):
I don't think it's a good idea. So that being said, that's, uh, you know, the, the really impactful pieces here of, of the different ways to leverage HubSpot that I, I think that's just scratching the surface of leveraging the free CMS tools. There's a ton more that we could do. There's a ton of other ways. Um, I was actually getting two or three other ideas around the podcast and book thing as I was talking, because that's what we're doing. So anyway, there'll probably be a part two down the road. I would love to know what other ways you are utilizing this. So if you're testing this out and you're trying different things, please send us the links. We'll be happy to share it and talk about it and, and give feedback. So how can I get help? How do you get going on this today?
(21:32):
So first off you can use the tools. Now you can go to HubSpot, you can start using the free CMS tools, get access to themes inside of the marketplace. We have several free themes available to you that you can get started with and test the waters here. Can't recommend that enough, get in, uh, get into HubSpot and start playing with that. But if you want to go to the next level, we actually have a new program that you can jump on our website and learn about called the website accelerator inside the website accelerator. It's, there's a ton of cool stuff inside of this. We're, we're essentially, we're gonna guide you through all the ins and outs of building a high converting website inside of your HubSpot portal that generates clients that generates leads. We're gonna teach you how to nurture those leads as well. Okay.
(22:16):
So it really is an end to end solution. And it's, it's extremely valuable. The first several people who have gone through this have already generated tons of revenue just from what we've produced for them or with them. And it's, it's a no code solution. So literally not one of the people that have worked through this with us have had to even touch a line of code it's all inside of the drag and drop elements. And it's just awesome. And so inside, here's what we're doing. We're, we're essentially, we're gonna give you everything that you need to design and build a beautiful conversion focused website inside of HubSpot. We're gonna give you all of our copy templates for landing pages, how we think about what we say, and, and what's the psychology behind saying the things that that need to be said on specific pages. We're gonna give you all of that.
(23:01):
We're gonna give you all of the templates that we use for emails and the, and the, the copy templates for emails. We're gonna give you our HubSpot themes that we use. That's very proprietary to the internal facing, uh, teams that we work with. We're giving you our swipe files, all the video training, you'll have audio training, you're gonna have PDFs and checklists and all kinds of guides to literally take all of that pressure off of your plate. And we've condensed all of this stuff down to just one, uh, six to eight week long program for you. And it is just awesome. And on top of that, you're also going to do this with our team. Okay? So it's not just a course where you're gonna go through it on your own. This is one to one coaching. You're gonna work with our team. We're gonna be able to talk with you as, as much as you need us to.
(23:47):
We're gonna set a roadmap with you. And we also have group training components for Q and a as well. I can't recommend this enough. So if you are interested, please, please, uh, take a look at the information on the website. We have limited spots. We have limited amount of people that we can, uh, go through this at one time, obviously for capacity. But if you are interested, please go to web canopy, studio.com/start and book your call with me. I will be glad to chat with you. Um, you can find tons of information on that page, by the way, if you're curious about what's included, you know, you want more details, what are the different bonus features and so on? So can't recommend that enough if you are interested, definitely jump in and, um, let's just have a conversation. See if it works. Okay. So at the end of each episode, I like to give a highlight of what we talked about.
(24:36):
What are the major takeaways. If I could just put a nice bow on everything and at the end of the day, with what we've been talking about today, number one, the free tools are awesome. Okay. This is providing you with free CMS tools on literally the best all-in-one platform that you could find today. It is a great resource. I can't urge you enough to get started and to, to hop in and, and test this out. Number two, these are creating massive opportunities for growing your business. If you guys can't see that yet, even if you have a, a full website. Now, if you can't see that this is a great opportunity to try new things, to try something a little bit, um, off to the side on a separate domain, this is the perfect way to test the waters, create microsites and so on. And then number three, the all in one solution aspect of this makes this so, so valuable to me, all the other things that go into the different tools inside of HubSpot landing pages forms and so on. It's just awesome. So I think that's it. That's the main stuff today. Guys, make sure that you go to, we cany studio.com/start, check out the information on the website accelerator. If you're interested, we'd love to have a conversation and chat through what that might look like until then we'll catch you next time.