Hard Truths About Your Online Business Presence

Busting the Fairy Tales, You Keep Being Told to Do

We’ve been living in a fairy tale this past week. Well, more like a nightmare with this scorching heat that has engulfed the Southeast with record-breaking temperatures!

When I was younger, I couldn’t handle the heat at all. I was prone to heat exhaustion – and that was in temperatures nowhere near the heat we just experienced!

Back then, it was standard to earn a summer income picking berries at a local farm. I wasn’t too fond of picking strawberries because we’d have to crawl on our knees all day. But raspberries were great – as long as you came prepared with long-sleeved shirts to avoid the prickly bushes.

My first-year picking wasn’t so great. It was a hot summer, and I often had to leave by noon, feeling the heat exhaustion kick in. I’d spend the afternoon laying on the couch with a cold compress on my head, feeling sick to my stomach and trying to tame my raging headache.

It only took a few days like that for me to figure out a way to stop losing half a day of picking money. And that was to get up at dawn and be at the patch long before anyone else showed up … including the hot sun!

I was quite proud of how I had a couple of flats all set to get weighed before the raspberry boss showed up. They didn’t make up for all of the time lost, but at least some of it was salvaged by not doing what everyone else was doing.

Are there things you are doing in your business that everyone else is doing… but just aren’t working out? Every day I read on social media or watch a video of someone telling entrepreneurs what they “should” be doing to make a lot of money in their business.

I cringe every time I see these bold statements of fact. Because they rarely are true for everyone.

 

So today, I’m sharing 3 of these online business fairy tales that need to be busted wide open!

Fairy Tale #1 SINGLE-PAGE WEBSITES OR LANDING PAGES WILL GET YOU A SIX-FIGURE INCOME

The Busted Truth: • Maybe true, perhaps if you spend several thousand marketing dollars to continuously promote them. And if the ads aren’t done right or the landing page isn’t perfect, you won’t get conversions and you’ll be out of a lot of time, effort and money.

• This model is not sustainable. It’s feast or famine and only works when your marketing engine is revved high and you have a large following who will buy anything you come up with because you’re just that good.
• This tactic will not get you to the place of running a business. It’s simply a tactic the ‘gurus’ use to get you to believe that landing pages and single-page websites will grow your business.

 

Fairy Tale #2 YOU’LL GET TO THE TOP OF THE SEARCH ENGINES, GUARANTEED!

The Busted Truth:

• No, never believe anyone who promises you this. It’s something no one should promise because no one knows what the Google algorithms are that make a site rise to the top (except, of course, for employees themselves). The people who are making those promises are desperate for your business and will tell you anything to get a sale. Would you do business with anyone who does not include their business domain name or phone number in their correspondence?

• They think you have ‘sucker’ written across your forehead and you are easy prey for their false promises.
• If they were so good at SEO, then they would have droves of qualified traffic going to their website. They’d be so busy they would never need to cold call or cold email you with those fake promises, to begin with!
• SEO is complex and it’s hard to find people who know what they are doing.
• The best thing to do is to vet the people you’re considering hiring. Ask for referrals and speak with their happy clients to get a good sense of the integrity of that person or agency.

 

Fairy Tale #3 SAVE YOUR MONEY ON AN EXPENSIVE WEBSITE – ANYONE CAN BUILD A SITE NOWADAYS!

The Busted Truth:

• Sorry but… knowing how to use a calculator doesn’t make you a mathematician. Meaning, just because someone (or you) knows how to install a WordPress theme, doesn’t make them a qualified website developer.

 

There’s so much more to creating a website that will get you the sales and conversions you want and need than just installing a WordPress theme, changing out the colors and photos, and calling it a day.

• Namely, your website must address these critical components: brand design, user experience, layout elements, copywriting, and brand messaging and SEO. Each of these areas requires an expert who understands them to deliver you a website that gets you the results you want.
• And if you think setting up a 3rd party (cheap) website will do the trick, it won’t. They are horrible with SEO, and more importantly, you don’t own your website with them! You will end up paying more in the long run than if you had built a proper website, to begin with.

The Moral of this fairy tale story is; Hire a full-service agency that has all of those experts working for you as a team, and you will get way further ahead than if you try to go the cheap route.

Branding – to ensure the right impression is given to the ideal target audience, right away. Messaging – to ensure the right headlines and text are written in a way that will assure the visitor they are in the right place, and also get them excited they found the perfect solution to their challenge.

SEO – to ensure those looking for solutions to their challenges on Google and other search engines will find your website listing in their search results.

Performance – to ensure while the visitor is on the website, they don’t get frustrated by a slow rendering site, it fails miserably on their phone, or there are broken links that take them nowhere. Credibility on your website matters. These subtle nuances are often completely missed by the non-professional web developer who wants to build their website themselves or hire someone with little experience, all to save some money.

The opposite happens, the website ends up giving the wrong impression to those visiting it, so they end up leaving right away.

Or the website doesn’t convey the right message to reflect how much your business can help those visitors.

Or the website is never found in the first place because it landed on page 20 in the search results.

Or the site was awkward, clunky, and frustrating to use, so the users give up and move on to a competitor’s website.

So, if you built your website yourself, or had a non-professional build it for you, it would be wise to take a step back and look at it through the lens of your prospective client.

Four Clarifying Website Questions that will Save you Time, Energy, and Money

Is it as amazing as you think? Get opinions from others?

Is it truly conveying the right message to the right people?

Is it SEO optimized so your target audience will find it?

Is it frustrating for new users who aren’t as familiar with it as you are?

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