3 Reasons to Prioritise Your Business Website This Year

If you have set yourself some big goals for your business in 2021 then you need to prioritise your website to help you achieve them. To drive your business forward you need a marketing tool that you are fully in control of. There are so many reasons why you should use your website as that marketing tool and here are our top three reasons to prioritise your business website this year.

1. It Sets You Apart as a True Professional

If we are planning on working with someone, whether that’s as part of a collaboration or to buy a service or product from them, we check their website out first. If they have spent time and money investing in a website then we feel they are taking their business seriously and are planning on staying around for a while, which gives us that confidence to commit to working with them. This is only the case if their website is good, mind you. Just having any old website isn’t enough. Their website should be easy to use, easy to find what we are looking for. They need to be getting their message across well on their website and there should be evidence on there, such as testimonials, to show that their work or products are high quality.

We wrote a blog post last year about the amazing quick changes people saw in the number of leads they were getting just by having a new business website. These were cold leads, people who didn’t know them but wanted to get in touch because of the quick trust they had in the business through seeing a good website.

If someone is relying purely on social media for their online presence, we need a lot more convincing to work with them. Anyone can chuck up a page on Facebook without much time, effort or any financial commitment to their business, so they are going to have to work a lot harder to gain our trust.

We know a podcast owner who won’t even consider guests for her podcast unless they have a website. She wants to be able to link off to a professional looking website when she’s promoting her guests. So, if one of your goals for 2021 is to get more visible and you were thinking of doing interviews or guest expert slots and you don’t have a website yet, then this is worth thinking about.

Sticking with the social media train of thought, we come on to reason number two for why you should prioritise your business website this year.

2. You Are in Control of It (or should be)

A major problem of relying on social media is the lack of control you have over it. We have been in business for 10 years this year and so many times we have seen the cycle of a self-titled business coach telling everyone that they don’t need a website, they can create a six-figure business by having a Facebook page and a really engaged Facebook group. Then six months down the line, that business coach is telling everyone about their new website and how it’s helping them to grow their business and how they’ve become an affiliate for the website service and everyone should have a website too.

The reason they make this sudden about turn is because Facebook was great for them for a while but suddenly engagement dropped off in their group or they sent too many similar messenger messages and got locked out of their account and couldn’t access their content or contact anyone, or Facebook ads just stopped delivering for them and they thought, perhaps, just maybe, relying on a free platform that they have no control over isn’t the best business strategy. (Don’t get me wrong, Facebook is a useful tool it just shouldn’t be your sole tool.)

When you create a website make sure it is on a platform that you are in control off, that you can easily add new content too and that ideally, you have control over optimising so you can improve page speed because this is becoming a bigger factor in search engine rankings at the moment.

3. It Enables You to Easily Build an Email List

An email list of potential ideal clients who are interested in what you do and are engaged is invaluable when it comes to building your business. It’s easy to build your email list through your website. You can create free resources that people can get if they sign up to be emailed. You can use a quiz and people give their email to sign up to get the results or more in-depth results. You can just give people the option to sign up to your newsletter and they hear about new blog posts you’ve written or exciting developments that might interest them.

Having a list is much more valuable than having a social media following. You know that most of the people in there will see your email hit their inbox. Whether they open it or not, it’s a reminder that you’re there. You have no idea how many people will see a social media post.

When we ran our last challenge Facebook ads completely flopped for us, but we still had over 100 people on the challenge, which was our target number and that’s because we had an email list. People from our list signed up. Our referral partners on our list spread the word to others. So do use social media but use your website and your list as well to give you a solid foundation for growing your business from.

Where to Start Creating or Improving Your Website

If you have read this and you’re now wondering whether your website is as good as it should be or you know you need to create your first website then we can support you with that.

We have a number of free resources and some courses to support you plan and improve your website. We are also running a new challenge starting on Monday 18^th January. It’s our 567 Website Challenge which runs for five days and we give you six actions to take that will help you plan or improve your website so that it generates more business leads. The challenge costs £7 because by parting with cash we know people are much more likely to actually commit and take action and the learning you will take away from it is much more valuable than £7. Hopefully we will see you there!