How not building your website is wasting your time and losing you customers.
You’ve talked about it. You’ve thought about it. You’ve made excuses of why you can’t do it. But all you are doing is wasting time, and losing customers.
Procrastinating affects all of us, whether we are trying to write a blog post or make a change to our business. The bottom line is, if you’ve been thinking about it and avoiding it, it should most definitely be done. The problem is getting over that first hurdle and remembering that the hurdle isn’t the perfected and completed job. It is only the first step.
Time and time again you will find that if you drop the excuses and just make 1 small tiny movement towards the change you want.. the rest sort of follows suit.
Things to keep in mind when you know you should change or create your website but you don’t.
1. It does not have to be perfect.
That means, it doesn’t have to look perfect, act perfect, or even accurately fulfil the job you intended. Going in with a rough start is sometimes better as you don’t hold it as precious and are willing to make changes as you go. Changes that can and will work better for your customers. You just have to listen to their feedback.
2. You can change it.
In fact, as stated in one, you should be ready to change. If you wait and wait to create the perfect booking system on your website and then finally create something that took months of painstaking analysis, how likely are you going to be to want to change it? What if you find out within 24 hours of making it live that your actual customer’s don’t like it and won’t use it. Sh*t, that is month’s of work, worry, and time wasted. Get you idea out there and test it in the real world. Make it better as you go along.
3. You can throw it out and start again.
The benefit of trying new ideas if finding out which ones do and don’t work before you invest to much into them. There is nothing wrong with putting a Paypal buy now button on your site to purchase a product. It may look a bit ugly and not offer many options, but it does allow you to see if people want to buy your ‘awesome thing’ and trust you enough to do it. Taking payments this way is quick and pretty painless and you can get an idea if what you are selling is wanted. Then throw out the ugly blue button and build something a little more savvy.
4. Something is indeed better then nothing.
I know designers, branding and marketing specialist will tell you not to build a quick and dirty website. “You’re image will be ruined!!” they shout. But what is worse, a slightly amateur first step to get you out there, or never making your presence known at all? Or worse, spending thousands to create the marketing dream of a website to find out that you judged your market wrong at the start? Especially if you are a new business, your first step into a web presence doesn’t have to be slick, or shouting the perfect message. As in the above instances, get your site and your message out there. Test it a bit and let your customer’s lead you where you need to go.
5. Get to know your customers.
Customer feedback is great and necessary. Without it how can you be fure you are offering what people want. What if your customers have no way of feeding back to you. Doh!! I can’t say it enough, get the first version of your site out there. Get feedback literally and virtually. If you have a form form for customers to fill out great, but at the very least you should be keeping an eye on Google analytics and see if your website is drawing people in. If it’s not, tweak and watch some more.
6. If you don’t do something, nothing will happen.
This is so obvious, but we are blind to the obvious sometimes. If we have nothing to show the world we have nothing to come back. Whether it be customers, sales, feedback, or simple satisfaction of doing a job well. Let your idea (and website) out into the world. What is the worst that could happen??
Leave a Reply