All of my clients have homework. They all do.
This is a collaborative effort. I’m doing the building, the development and the refinement, and a lot of insight is going to be required from your end. What I hear most often afterward is that clients didn’t realize how much would be needed from them, and for some projects it’s more than others.
If you’re about to start one, here’s the honest version of what it asks of you.
Everything else gets built from your answers
Every project starts with a discovery questionnaire.
Nobody wants to write. I know that. Write them out if that’s easiest, or record your answers on your phone or in a Loom video, whichever one you’ll sit down and do. You don’t have to write them. You just have to share them.
Tidied into marketing language, an answer stops being about your business specifically. The rough version is where the words I can use come from.
Take your time and be specific. The more specific you are, the less I have to guess. Those answers are what your brand story and your voice get built from, and they are the one input I cannot write for you.
It’s worth making the time for.
Your feedback, from the vision board to the last page
The vision board isn’t our first meeting. A lot happens before we get there: the questionnaire, the research, the conversations about where the business is. By the time you see a direction, it’s been built from things you already told me.
When you do see it, you’re seeing the direction before anything gets applied, and we adjust until it feels right.
Nothing is being signed off. There’s no right answer you’re supposed to land on. “I don’t like that” is a complete and useful sentence, and I mean that.
I set it up this way on purpose. Asking for approval invites a polite answer, and a polite answer early costs both of us a revision round later.
Just react. That’s all I need from that meeting.
And this holds for the whole project, not just that one conversation. From the vision board to the design concepts to finalizing every page, you’ll need to devote time along the way. Be honest with your feedback. This is your brand. We work together until it’s right, so never hesitate to tell me what isn’t landing.
The two things that hold projects up
Copywriting and media production. Those are the two, and neither one of them is the design.
Copy first, and it’s the real one. Copy is the one thing that puts our work on pause, because it has to be settled before we can wrap. I support with copy development. I am not a copywriter. One thing you’ll learn about me is that I’m very dyslexic. For some projects I have the pleasure of partnering with a copywriter. For others I highly encourage my clients to cross their t’s and dot their i’s. Either way, your words need your time.
In practice it doesn’t postpone things much. A month at most, then we finalize, and you can keep improving the verbiage on your own after that. Nothing about it has to be perfect before we close the project.
Then media production. Photography is one clients don’t expect to be a homework item.
At some point a project needs images of the real thing. Your space, your work, your products, you.
Stock will cover some of it and I’ll use it where it fits. It won’t cover the pages where somebody is deciding whether to trust you, and those are the pages that matter.
That means a shoot, which means your calendar, your location, and decisions about what’s getting photographed and who’s in it. I can support the production planning and I do that gladly. What I can’t do is schedule your life.
Let me be precise about what the shoot does and doesn’t do, because it isn’t the same as the copy. It does not pause our work. We finish the project either way. What it can delay is your site going live, and that’s usually a month or two.
And I’m still here afterward. If you need help updating the media once the shoot happens, that’s what I’m for.
If there’s one thing to start early, it’s the shoot.
Remember whose opinion counts
Yours. It’s your business and your name.
Don’t worry about hurting my feelings. I would much rather hear that something isn’t working than have you live with it because you didn’t want to be difficult.
The more useful question is who else you’re planning to ask.
I want you gathering feedback, and for a lot of the businesses I work with, the people closest to you are also your market. That’s an advantage.
Ask early and ask often. I have never had feedback come too early.
And take the time you need. I give my clients wiggle room on purpose. I don’t penalize anybody for needing to sit with their site, gather testing, or come back with revisions.
Once we do a soft launch, share it widely. Your family, your community, the people in your target market you know. The people close to you will tell you whether it sounds like you, which nobody else can. The people who could buy from you will tell you whether it makes sense.
Two timelines, and they are not the same thing
The first is how long the work takes to build. A branding project runs about a month. Website development runs one to two months. Marketing strategy development runs about a month. All of it is contingent on feedback and revision requests coming back.
That is not the only timeline you need to consider.
The second is your launch runway. We do a soft launch once the site is complete, and I recommend a three month buffer before your hard launch.
Every client rushes. That’s not a flaw in any particular client, it’s what happens to all of them, and the runway is what absorbs it.
And if your date is genuinely fixed, a season, an event, a launch you can’t move, say so in the first conversation. I’d much rather build a real plan around a real date than hand you the normal one and watch it not fit. That’s a different plan, and it works.
What the months after your soft launch are for
Month one. Revisions, and planning your go-to-market strategy. Share the site with your family and your community for feedback. This is also when you want to refine your customer journey and solidify your email workflow. Your marketing budget frequently gets set this month too.
Month two. Content development. This is where you begin executing on your annual marketing plan. You start with a content calendar, plan out partnership development, and begin building your affiliate network. Most people prefer to plan content about a month ahead, which is why it usually starts going out in month three.
Month three. Content is going out. Your email marketing is already running, articles are posting consistently, and social media starts. Some people move faster than this. This is what’s typical.
After that, the remaining three months go to organic growth and strengthening your platforms. I typically don’t recommend paid advertising in this stretch. It’s about building reputation and taking advantage of the free opportunities out there. There are a lot of articles and platforms you can get your site listed on and marketplaces you can join, and this is the time to do it.
Plan your advertising budget for later in the year. If you do have spend before then, I’d put it toward affiliate and nano influencers before anything else.
Devoting the first six months to organic growth puts you in a very strong position when you do start putting money behind your brand.
Almost all of this is cheap if it happens early and expensive if it happens late.
The honest question is whether you’ve got the hours over the next couple of months to be in it properly. That one’s worth answering before the budget one, and only you can.
