In this interview series by Website Planet, I talk to executives from the best digital companies, who share their stories, tips and perspectives on what it really takes to create a successful website and online business.
A deep dive into decades of hands-on experience and technical expertise to learn untold truths and practical advice that will immediately help you build and grow your website.
Alexander Toth is the Founder and CEO of ClearBrand, a marketing agency that has helped hundreds of growth-oriented companies across various industries raise their ROI up to 25X.
He’s been a StoryBrand Certified Guide for over six years, where he coached businesses on effective messaging and branding techniques.
To start, tell us briefly about you. What is your current role at your company, and what are the measurable achievements you are most proud of?
The achievements I am most proud of are the results we get for our clients.
We’ve helped companies double (sometimes even quadruple) their revenue.
We’ve brought in hundreds of leads per month for clients.
Our clients count on us to keep their companies growing, and we deliver.
What pain point(s) do you solve for your customers? What was the “aha Moment” that led to the idea? Can you share that story with us?
Most websites don’t bring in leads. Some are so bad that the owners are embarrassed by them.
We solve both of these problems by making beautiful websites that rank on Google and actually bring in leads for our clients through data-driven marketing strategies that prioritize booking meetings and generating leads rather than vanity metrics like web traffic. In fact, when we launch a website, it typically doubles conversions.
From your experience, what are the most important things to build a highly successful website and online business? Please explain each in detail.
Consistency and perseverance. You need to show up and do the work every day, even when it’s hard. It doesn’t matter if you’re into it that day or if you are sick or if you don’t want to. You have to consistently show up and do the work.
If there were one part of the website development process you would have spent 50% more time on, what would it be and why? What made you realize the importance of this step?
One thing we’ve decided to spend more time on is the initial design phase. Most of our clients are happy with the content when they receive it, but web design is so much more personal. Even if what we design is amazing, the client likes to leave their own mark on it. So we’ve extended that initial design phase to give them the time and the space to do that.
What’s the one key lesson you’ve learned about building a website and business that you wish you knew when you started? What’s the story behind this realization?
Recently, I read an article where AI had evaluated thousands of chess matches. One of the things they learned is that, generally speaking, people do not win in chess, they lose. What I mean is when a person makes a mistake, that’s the turning point in the game. As long as the other person notices…
But when you’re in those high-ranking matches, everyone is so good that being perfect is not what makes you win. But a mistake is what makes you lose. I think business is similar.
If you are generating revenue, you are already in the successful minority. What I found is that mistakes are the main thing that can break a business. Just like in chess, you really have to get almost every decision right. When you make a mistake, you need to fix it quickly and it needs to be small enough that it doesn’t cause you to lose the game.
What are the most common mistakes you have seen people making when building their website and online business? What can be done to avoid those errors?
People put too much value on their budget. A website is a lot like a car. Yes, you want the outside to look good, but you also want it to run well. The trade-off with going with a low budget option is that, regardless of how it looks, it’s not going to run well.
For example, many web design freelancers and agencies don’t know how to do SEO. They can design a beautiful website, but it won’t rank on Google. Similarly, a lot of people who design beautiful websites can’t make them fast.
Making a solid website that runs well takes more time than most people think. Even if the end result looks the same, that time is going to the nuts and bolts and the engine. It’s making sure that things are set up correctly, that you can rank on Google, that it’s written well, and it’s fast. Most of these things are invisible in the end result — at least for a couple months. But six months after you’ve launched and that money is long gone, you’re going to realize whether or not you wasted all that money.
Is there any advice you’ve received in your career that you now wish you never followed? What happened?
Yes, we worked with an online coach who was thinking like those Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and he wanted us to get out of services. He thought we should launch an online course and a coaching business so that we could scale bigger with fewer employees. We tested this out and ended up wasting a whole bunch of money on it.
My perspective is that services are good and necessary for society. I like them and I want to keep doing them. Even if our profit margin is smaller, it doesn’t make it a bad business. Look at the massive companies in the world and in the United States: many of them have very, very small profit margins, but they’re very good businesses.
What strategy has been particularly effective in growing your website audience this year?
Really good SEO is probably the simplest way to grow website traffic. We’ve also seen a lot of success in using YouTube videos. Creating authoritative content that intrigues people and drives them to the website.
If I asked you to share the key ingredient in your “secret sauce” for inbound marketing, what would it be?
Being authoritative. You can’t just create AI blog articles and think that you’re going to rank well. You need to use smart people to create good content. Whether that’s blog articles, podcasts, or YouTube videos, it has to be truly good content.
Based on your experiences, what trends and technologies are currently underestimated or overlooked, but can significantly impact your industry? How are you going to adapt?
I think AI is being overused as a replacement for hard work and underused as an accelerant for hard work. We do use AI to write blog articles, but a human has to be involved. AI is not good at writing and it is often wrong in the facts that it puts in the articles. So we have to fact check and go through the article to make the writing better.
But using AI allows us to cut the time of writing a blog article in half. So what we’ve done with our clients is we charge the same amount and spend the same amount of time on each article, but we create an article that is twice as long and twice as authoritative.
With over 13 years of experience in SEO and managing content websites, he has coordinated over 5000 product reviews and interviews with the biggest names in eCommerce, web hosting, cybersecurity, SaaS, AI, and online marketing, to provide newbies and experts with untapped, actionable insights from the top experts in the industry on how to build and grow websites.
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