You can flay me with accusations of nepotistic myopia but, I will deny them to the death in praising my daughter for her breakout web business putting up custom Wordpress sites.

Rachael is an artist, trained by the Art Institutes of Denver and Phoenix who had a dandy business making web graphics, but wasn’t having fun, so she sold it. Now, after a hard headed hiatus into the joys of working a J.O.B (just above broke) and attempting to drink the Kool Aid of the “employee class” she began running ads on Craigslist to get some side business putting up Wordpress sites.

The side business quickly eclipsed her paycheck, and in a lot less time, so she had the nerve wracking “I think we need to talk” with her boss and took the leap back into entrepreneurship.

The Anti-USP/Tagline

Open her site at RachaelButts.com and the first thing you see is this amazing photograph of Rachael sitting on a skateboard hacking away at her laptop. Then, watch as the animated .gif she created rolls down text into the empty banner to the right of her picture to see a very clever way of getting a much more effective message across.

The photo establishes her membership in the cool kids club instantly. Rebel, artist, creative, non-conformist, what words come to mind for you just from the photo? The biggest punch for me is in the subtle way she communicates what she does, with an attitude that is so far from the fawning, reaching, nearly begging for business I see on most sites. She appears unconcerned about getting new business – a powerful positioning message – that is not based on price.

(By the way – she IS busy because she does excellent custom work.)

Let’s Make a Deal!

The text that drops from the top into her banner says: “I will professionally install and configure your Wordpress blog and personally show you how to use it” is what I call “the deal” she is making with her customers. A new visitor can tell in just seconds the exact nature of her site, her business, as an offer (not in dollars but in deliverable) is handed to them, to accept or decline.

If you ARE looking for someone to install, configure, or explain the use of a self-hosted Wordpress site, even if you weren’t thinking about it at the time, your brain instantly engages. If she were using some fanciful moniker like “Blogging Diva” the specificity of “the deal” would be invisible.

Come Up to the Lab and See What’s On the Slab?

The rest of her top copy using both recognizable graphics that serve as big league endorsements and seductive but clear copy to invite you into the site further. When you hover over her navigation bars you see drop downs inviting you into an impressive array of galleries of web graphics, ebook covers, and cool sites she’s created.

By using a static home page she can get her message across fast and keep the focus on her business. By publishing her /blog (available through her navigation bar) she is able to guide new visitors through her store first, and not present them with the dizzying array of bloggy click-aways.

Search Engine Optimization Services

I had no idea my daughter had become such a geek. She joined Michelle MacPhearson’s Crowd Mountain and learned how to use a keyword tool to find highly targeted keywords – which she then preloads into her client’s blogs as drafts. All they need to do is go into their dashboard and write a post on that keyphrase and publish it to began to get traffic and Google love on their theme.

This gives her clients a huge jump-start in both the confusing questions around what do I write about, and she’s gotten some impressive search engine #1 Google rankings for her customers. This is an immense benefit to a new site and a valuable service I don’t see any regular designer types offering.

Pretty or Profitable?

I’d like to brag and say that Dad told her to do all this stuff, but I did not. I did suggest she use “the deal” instead of a moniker or usp, but she wrote the text. The rest is 100% Rachael Butts.

When you use Rachael to put your business online you get not only a great designer, and SEO preloaded, you can be sure she’ll build the fundamentals of how you will make money right into the layout. This means squeeze pages, email optins, confirmations, offers, and presenting your business first.

Dad is very, very, proud…

2 Videos About Rachael:

Impromptu Interview with Rachael during a pirate Ustream webcast

While asking Rachael an off the wall question she revealed something I’d never heard her say and it moved me so much, I made this video around it…