Biggest website mistakes, Part 1: The Marketing Paradox Shift

You’re beaming. 

Your website is finally up and you feel like a proud parent. 

You’re excited future customers can know about your products’ amazingness and the story of your business.

Now, it’s just a matter of time before new leads come in. But after months pass without a single inquiry, the only thing your new website has brought is a monthly bill. What the hell?!

Has this happened to you?

It’s quite a common scenario. According to Ahrefs, a leading keyword research tool, 90.63% of web pages get 0 traffic. To put that in context, that’s literally billions of web pages. What’s the cause?

In the first of this three part series, we’ll cover a website mistake many business owners make. 

So let’s get started, and allow me to drop a website bombshell on you.

Your website is not about you or your business

Seriously. It’s not. 

Most business owners love to gush about their product, service or brand. Their intentions are good. They’re likely trying to spread their company’s message.

The reality is, few people will buy your product, like your social media pages or become rabid fans because you proclaim its awesomeness. Why? 

Well, it’s for the same reason you rave about your business whenever there’s a chance—people love to talk and think about themselves. Think about it. If you’re at a party and another guest joins your conversation, then goes on and on about his business, as if he’s boasting about his first born child, will you listen to him intently for 10 minutes? I doubt it. You’ll likely tune out or excuse yourself to the bathroom or to refill your beer. 

This happens because the proud business owner talked about himself—not the listeners. If you do this as well, don’t be ashamed. Everyone likes to focus on themselves and their needs. It’s human nature. Which is why you need to change your perspective and take advantage of this natural tendency.

The Marketing Paradox Shift—from me to you

Your website’s purpose is to market your business. And anyone who’s found some success online will know the simple truth I’m about to share with you. 

Marketing is all about the customer, fan, lead or even the party guest listening to you rave about your company. It’s not really about you or your business, it’s about what your business does for them. 

When you understand this, your focus shifts from talking about how great your business is, to talking about what your business can do for customers. Instead of looking at the customer through the eyes of your business, you look at your business through the eyes of your customers. 

For websites this is critical because your site must fulfill the needs of your customer. If it doesn’t, then they will bounce.

Action step—do this today

Go through your website and try to determine the ratio of how much you use the words “I”, “us” or “we” as opposed to “you.”

Is the focus predominantly on you and your business, or the customer?

While there isn’t a science to this, your website copy should use the words “you” or “your” 80% of the time and  “I”, “us” and “we” only 20% of the time. Really, you should be using “you” that much (Have you noticed how much I drop “you” in this post?)

So when re-reading your webcopy, every time you see an “I”, “us” or “we”, either delete it or see if you can change it to “you.” This will take a little bit of practice (it was difficult for me when I first did this exercise eight years ago) but it gets much easier with time. And it will make a big difference in terms of leads your website returns.

But this isn’t the only common website blunder...

While implementing the step above and following The Marketing Paradox Shift will help your website, we’re not finished yet. 

There are still two big blunders many new business owners make when they create a website. 

What are they? 

Stay tuned till later this month to find out the second one.