The following is a proposal for rebuilding the website for the Yaron Brook Show.
The main main purpose for the site is to:
- Serve as a hub that provides information and background on Yaron and the show (in that order of priority).
- Direct visitors to the podcast or video platforms of the show.
- Offer a sampling of popular, recent, or ‘best of’ shows. These samples would be Youtube embeds that would stream on the site (people could also go directly to the video on Youtube).
- Provide a way to reach out to Yaron for speaking opportunities and provide a digital press kit for download.
- Encourage visitors to subscribe to a membership level using either Paypal or Patreon. (What is the preferred way for Yaron?)
- Capture visitors’ names and emails and automatically add them to the Mailchimp email list.
The site navigation would be: 1. Home, 2. About Yaron, 3. Membership, 4. Contact & Press
1. Home: The home page will feature a ‘hero’ image of Yaron with a short tag or description of him. It will contain a front and center ‘Featured talk’ chosen based on popularity or news relevance or some other criteria. Below that it will have a small selection of various shows, lectures, or live talks organized based on their popularity or news relevance. This selection will be organized by categories such as ‘On Israel’, ‘Live talks’ (perhaps instead of ‘lectures’), ‘Rules for Life’, and ‘popular Live Streams’.
The page will also contain links to upcoming talks and news that will be regularly updated by Angela.
2. About: This page will feature a photo of Yaron and background on him including description of the show, his mission that leads to talks throughout the world on a variety of topics, and a link to subscribe. A select video could serve a purpose here as well.
As a menu dropdown under About Yaron could be “Books.” This page would show Yaron’s authored books along with short compelling descriptions that link to their Amazon page. I also suggest a ‘Recommended Reading’ as part of that page as well. Not only the writings of Ayn Rand and other Objectivists, but also important classics in history, economics, and fiction. No descriptions are needed for those individual books. They would simply link to their respective Amazon pages.
3. Membership: The Membership page will explain the various levels and the benefits of each similar to how they are currently described within Patreon. Beyond that, however, emphasis should be given to the benefits subscribers receive beyond the mechanics of regular updates, ability to ask questions, or the details of Zoom hangouts, etc.
Descriptions of member benefits are crucial to getting people to part with their money and they should include selfish advantages such as becoming smarter about what is truly going on in the world that effects them personally, arming themselves intellectually against the ubiquitous media narrative that is wrong, simply taking sides, or amplifying surface level details. The message is something along the lines of, “I help you more clearly understand the events occurring around the world and those personally effecting you, which will improve your life and well-being.”
My strongest advice for tweaking the Yaron Brook brand is to emphasize the intellectual ammunition the show provides in this complicated and confusing world where actual principled thinking is all too rare.
4. Contact & Press: This page should contain a sample video of Yaron in front of an audience performing at his best. Included is a contact form for people wishing to communicate with Yaron. The page should describe the various types of events and guest appearances Yaron can be part of and hired for.
The page will feature a link for downloading a digital press kit in the form of a PDF. I can design that press kit once I have the final written content.
We did not discuss this, but perhaps consider an FAQ page. Questions with brief essentialized answers could include: What is Objectivism?, Who is Ayn Rand?, What is the Ayn Rand Institute?, Can Objectivism help me be happier and more successful? How can I learn more about Objectivism?, and other questions that might whet people’s appetite to learn more.
A footer should be created that appears on every page. The footer will contain site navigation links, the list of sponsors, the copyright, and links to internal legal pages for ‘Terms of Service’ and ‘Privacy Policy. Google is currently penalizing the site for not having those legal links.
A pop-up and/or page form will be created that offers a piece of content in exchange for leaving a name and email address. This is known as a ‘lead magnet.’ As discussed, this is more effective than a simple “Leave your name and address to receive my newsletter.” An example of this is my ‘Reluctant Marketer’ download on the right of this page.
If provided with the raw content, I will create the final designed Lead Magnet PDF. The content should be geared toward a value for visitors that relate to Yaron and his brand of ideas. Examples could include brand one new ‘Rules for Life’ or “Three key considerations for choosing the best political candidate – regardless of party” or “Three things you must stop doing in order to make good life decisions.”
Once someone submits the form, they will immediately receive the download and their name and email will be added to Mailchimp.
I can help organize Mailchimp by connecting Patreon subscribers (Zapier can make a live connection to Mailchimp) and properly tagging people based on their criteria (Patreon, site download, etc.) If you go above 100 subscribers transferred to Mailchimp in one month you will need a paid subscription to Zapier for $20/mo. But with 100+ new subscribers/mo, that is a good ROI.
I encourage using Mailchimp to send weekly or at least bi-weekly updates such as Yaron’s travels, talks, important shows, show guests, etc.
The redesigned site will be created on a staging area within your GoDaddy hosting account. To access a staging area, you must have a Deluxe level account or above from GoDaddy. ‘Basic’ accounts do not have this staging feature. The price difference between ‘Basic’ and ‘Deluxe’ is only $4 per month. Besides staging, the other advantage to ‘Deluxe’ is an increase in speed since it allows the use of a free Cloudflare account.
Once the site is approved by Yaron, it will be placed on the main area of the server for connection to the yaronbrookshow.com domain.
The main deliverables needed to begin work is login access to the GoDaddy Deluxe account and login access to the Mailchimp account. Soon thereafter I will need:
- A number of color photographs showing Yaron in various poses and environments.
- Text for About page and member benefits at each level.
- Videos chosen for the Home, About, and Contact pages.
- Initial representative events listed for the Homepage
- The content for the lead magnet give-a-way described above, of which I will design once I receive the text from Yaron.
- Login access to Patreon and Paypal accounts. If Yaron is uncomfortable with my access, we can probably work something out using Angela as a go-between to provide me with the necessary links and APIs codes.
This is the time to think about your visual branding. The Return on Ideas agency recommended selecting additional colors based off the teal/blue colors. My recommendation is to replace teal with the dark blue found on your Youtube thumbnails. The color teal is not associated with the strongest values. Adobe defines teal this way:
For many people, teal symbolizes decency and renovation. A shy color, it’s composed of shades of blue and green. Its reserved nature promotes clarity, open communication, and practical thinking. Not too evocative, teal is helpful for applications designed for stress relief.
While clarity, open communication, and practical thinking are good values, the color seems passive and a change to a stronger color is warranted given the other changes being made to strengthen the brand. Dark blue is associated with power and authority. Think dark blue power suit. The other three colors below are good secondary color contrasts to the dark blue. I suggest choosing just one:
Your use of whatever colors you choose should be applied consistently across your website, social media branding, branded video thumbnails, and throughout the website.
Your current logo is used very little from what I can see so making the minor change from teal on your logo to blue should not be difficult. It could look like this (also tying in the microphone to the blue).
Payment for my work will be in exchange for 1-hour monthly one-on-one conversations with Yaron. The number of these conversations should roughly depend on the amount of time taken to build the site and marketing elements to Yaron’s satisfaction. Let’s consider the precise number of conversations to be determined by mutual reasonable agreement.
