It breaks my heart when a small business owner comes to me and says they’ve spent $6,000 on their previous website and it does diddly squat to produce any leads. It’s so wrong. And yet so common. Online reports say that over 80% of small business websites fail.
They fail to produce traffic, leads and sales.
No ROI whatsoever. You see, we’re caught in this vicious cycle. As a small business owner you just naturally assume that if you’re website sucks, you need a new one. A new one will ‘fix’ everything. So you spend ages sourcing a new designer (because heck, your first designer obviously doesn’t know what they’re doing) and you think a new lick of paint will solve your problems. You spend months pouring your heart and soul into a shiny new website, you organise a photo shoot, you research your competitors to make sure everything is spot on (and you look way better!), then you launch…. ….to crickets. Again! You really thought that this time, SURELY, this time, you got it right. It looks awesome; the best one you’ve created yet. You thought for sure this design would be THE ONE. THE ONE to finally bring you those walk up start kinda leads that are begging to buy what you sell. Those ideal clients who pay what you’re worth and whip out their credit card before you’ve even written up the invoice. Those sales that you were sure would be waiting for you every morning when you check your phone still half asleep. Praying. Wishing. That today would be different. But it’s not. And it hurts, right? All that time and effort, all those long nights getting the words juuuuust right so people like you, all those hours spent agonising over which profile shot to use — not to mention the money — all for what? You’re not stupid. Naive. Lazy. Incapable. Or not smart enough to pull this off. It’s not your fault.
The truth is it’s not easy.
And it’s not really your designer’s fault either. They’re doing the best they can with limited resources, budgets and fierce competition from offshore freelancers. The web industry today is not what it used to be. Anyone can basically get a website for free these days but the problem still remains. How the heck do you get it to make money for you? How do you get leads while you sleep? Traffic? Buzz? Customers!!! And why the hell do you have website, after website, after website, that just keep getting your hopes up — all to come crashing down 3 months after you launch. WHY?!?!?! I’ll tell you why…
It’s because you lack the strategy.
Design is definitely important — but strategy is better. After 13 years in this game, over 3,000 web design projects and a website reseller program teaching other web designers what it takes to create ‘effective’ websites, I see firsthand the seriousness of this problem every day. And it genuinely breaks my heart. I’ve devoted my life to making websites easy and affordable for everyone but this is a new kind of epidemic. So much money is going down the drain on web designs that simply don’t work. In fact the latest IBIS report on the Australia web industry says about $2,800,000,000 will be spent on websites in 2014/2015. Designer’s profits are the lowest they’ve ever been. Currently the industry average is just 5.5%.
Largely due to the fact that websites are more accessible than they’ve ever been.
But yet savvy, smart, talented small business owners, just like you, are struggling to get their hands on an effective website that actually works. I mean yeah, they look ‘pretty’ but they just don’t make money. And what good is your website if it just sits there collecting dust? Exactly. So whether you call it a conversion strategy, marketing strategy, website strategy, lead capture strategy, lead magnet strategy, sales funnel, digital strategy or whatever — it’s where you’ve been going wrong this whole time. And whether your budget is $500 or $50,000 — it really doesn’t matter. You can still have a killer website generating you a ton of leads IF you know what to do. I could create a website on Wix for free and start making money tomorrow because I know how. I’ve seen clients who are struggling to make ends meet, with fine looking websites only a year old, but sadly they’re thinking of closing the doors because they just can’t get any new business. One in particular had tried search engine optimisation, pay-per-click advertising, direct mail — everything — until we helped him go from 1-2 leads per month… to 1-2 leads per day — just by implementing a really simple and inexpensive online strategy. Can you imagine what that would do for your business? It transformed his entire life. So I created a free strategy cheat sheet for you to turbocharge your home page success. To cut through the clutter and give you what you need to turn things around. It’s my ultimate 44-point conversion checklist and I want you to have it because I truly have made it my life’s mission to solve this problem. I’ve even invested all my life’s earnings into a new software platform called Foxley, which has a ton of marketing and strategy intelligence built into it; it’s where web design and marketing collide head on, so websites can be fun and easy for everyone. And we can end the worthless website epidemic that’s sweeping the small business community worldwide. Keep an eye out for it. But in the meantime, please go and download my free resource and start thinking about how to roll out an effective strategy on your existing site. At the very least, start with my free checklist and see where it takes you. Good luck!
