Important message of the day, and here it comes in all caps:
STOP TREATING YOUR WEBSITE LIKE AN AFTERTHOUGHT.
Wouldn’t it be nice if a potential customer–anywhere in the world–could teleport instantly to the front lobby of your business?
After all, isn’t it infinitely easier to get them to take the next step (whatever it may be) once they’re already standing in your front lobby, ready to listen to what you have to say?
Spoiler alert, dear readers, but YOUR WEBSITE IS AN INSTANT TELEPORTATION DEVICE THAT ALLOWS A POTENTIAL CUSTOMER TO VISIT YOUR LOBBY!
Your website is the only place you have 100% control over how your lobby looks, what your lobby shows to visitors and what the next step is (beyond the lobby).
Your website is a lobby that you can spend zero dollars on (with a free website tool) or billions of dollars on (like Amazon has spent on the lobby you arrive at when you type in amazon.com).
This lobby of yours serves as the “instant transportation station” between anyone who visits your site and anything your business does, anywhere.
Yes, you should be promoting on social media. Yes, you should be running ads. Yes, you should be working on your search engine rankings.
But why is it that so many brilliant businesspeople are treating their website like a cute little poster that stays in the corner of the room, away from where the adults are working? Why are they not seeing their site for what it should be: the central, high-traffic communications hub for anyone and everyone that ever has anything to do with your business?
Want to sign up as a customer? Go to our website. Want to apply to work here? Go to our website. Want to find out if we’re open at 9am on Saturday? Go to our website. Want to read about/watch videos about/listen to podcasts about/see our client testimonials about what we do? GO TO OUR WEBSITE. How do I use the product I bought from you? How do I get help from customer support? How do I log into my client portal again? Who do I ask about……. GO. TO. OUR. WEBSITE.
My dear readers, I have to express my utter disbelief at some of the OUTRAGEOUS things I am hearing from some of you about this.
- “We just don’t need a website for what we do.”
- “Nah, we’re good. We get business from word of mouth.”
- “Haha. We’re so embarrassed by our website right now, we aren’t even telling people about it.”
- “Yeah, I know we need to update it but we just haven’t gotten around to it. Super busy.”
- “A website is not going to help me with new business. We don’t have the resources to invest in that right now.”
- “If we have a website, we’re going to get too much business–more than we can handle right now.”
- “We’re just focusing on ads right now–I know our site doesn’t look great at the moment but I think we’re going to see better results if we just get more traffic to it”.
For the life of me, I just haven’t been able to make any sense of these answers. Old website. Confusing website. Website with errors and broken items. NO website. WHAT IS GOING ON? It took me some time, but I finally realized it: “they don’t see a website as the vital, central hub of communication for their whole business; they only see it as an afterthought”.
So, my friends, my second important message of the day (again in all caps), is this:
YOUR WEBSITE IS THE SINGLE MOST IMPORTANT ASSET OF YOUR ENTIRE BUSINESS.
It is the only asset that allows you to be reached by anyone in the entire world–instantly–in the exact way you want them to reach you. You cannot control Instagram. You cannot control Facebook, LinkedIn, X. You cannot control the country your business is in, whether or not the power stays on, nor the weather, nor the economy. My friends, you CAN CONTROL YOUR WEBSITE. 100% control. Nobody can force you to put ads on it or make you “wait for approval” to say what you want to say. They can’t lock you out of it nor can they take it away. Your business can accept all the money it needs to through it (and all without ever making your customers leave their desk).
My friends: your website should NOT be an afterthought. Make it the central hub of communications of your entire business and watch everything you do start expanding as a result.