Recently I had a client ring me the day after we launched her website. She rang to tell me that after all that hard work we had put into building the site, adding beautiful images, and setting up her store to buy her fabulous products, no one had bought a single thing.
She was devastated. As they whisper in the Field Of Dream movie – “Build it and they will come“, this is not the case with your website. Building it requires search engine optimisation, some google friendly code to help the search engines find and recognise your site, images good enough to view on any device – but small enough to not slow the load or speed of your site, testing that all your products can be shipped to Melbourne or to Timbuktoo, designing for a mobile device, and about 100 other “behind the scenes” requirements to build a good, solid, converting website.
Once you have done all of that, you then need to market it. Tell your friends, family, facebook friends, twitter and instagram followers and as many people a you can. If you don’t tell anyone, then no will know about your website. Just because its now on the WORLD WIDE WEB doesn’t mean that when you search for that keyword you have peppered throughout your site, you will come up on page 1 in google.
Think of it this way.. you need to go on some dates, then get married. Not go straight to the Alter. People want to get to know you first, then like you before they trust you, and buy from you. So do what you can do work on this. Imagine going to Amazon the very first day they launched… Had you bought book or a kindle book before then? Did you know what the process to buy was? Did you trust that the site was secure? No. But at some stage you bought anyway.
So by creating a website you have made the first step on your journey to online success. Now you have to promote and market the bejesus out of it.