I get it. Cash is tight. You’ve barely any budget to play with and what you do have, you don’t want to waste on a strategy that won’t deliver quantifiable results, am I right? You want to just focus on putting up regular quality content on social media and growing your audience to build your business. You don’t need a website for that, ey?

1. Trust is Gold

Wa-wa-oops! Operating a business without a few essential tools like a website and an email system is an absolute no-no. Why? Firstly, because the ONLY thing you can sell in business is TRUST.

No matter who or what type of business you are. If there’s no trust, there’s no business. If your consumers, clients, patients or fans don’t trust you, they won’t buy from you.

2. Online Friend or Advisor?

Secondly, as an unknown startup business, you can defo gain a big following but if you haven’t hard-wired sales into the relationship, there will be zero sales forthcoming. 

Take the Instagram superstar who built up a stonking 2.6m fans then tried to sell tshirts. Nightmare! The tshirts didn’t fit with her brand. She barely promoted them. The price point was off. And the positioning was misaligned.

3. Build a Robust Sales Funnel

Thirdly, when you’re online, attention is fleeting. You have literally seconds to make an impression or people will just scroll on by. Grabbing their attention, making an offer, securing their email and nurturing the relationship via social media, emails, retargeting ads and offers is the only sure way to build a sustained business. You cannot possibly achieve all of this at scale without a website.

4. Retargeting Pixels

For example, in order to grab attention, it’s not enough to stick up some social media posts or blogs. You need pixels and retargeting ads so that when that small percentage of people who see your content and value it then want to check you out on your website to see if you’re kosher, then the pixels will always be able to track them forevermore.

This means that when someone has been on your website, even for a fleeting moment, you can still retarget them 6 months or a even year later with a special offer, knowing full well that they are already further down the sales funnel than the randoms on social media and therefore a much more promising prospect who can be persuaded to take up your offer.

But here’s the kicker … there are plenty of DIY sites that won’t let you put a pixel in their website!!! I’m not going to name names but suffice to say if you have a website created on platforms like Teachable, GoDaddy, Squarespace, Wix, etc you will either not have the functionality at all or you may have to upgrade in order to secure it.

5. Blogs Provide Value

Why put all the effort into social media content when you don’t update your website? The only way the Google algorithms KNOW your website is providing value and therefore should be ranked higher is because more and more people are turning up at your website door and consuming more and more content for longer. 

Therefore, just putting up a basic website that says “This is who we are, this is what we do” just doesn’t cut it any more. A weekly blog is the MINIMUM activity you should have on your website. The more you do to get people onto the website, the more the algorithms learn to trust your content as objectively speaking quality content, the more the website will be ranked higher in SEARCH. It’s a no-brainer so get on it!

6. Responsive Design

Your website is not built for an optimised mobile experience? Bin it! 

There’s nothing more to be said about it. If 85% of people appreciate the value you bring on social media via their mobile phone and then click through to a website that isn’t built for mobile, you might as well pack up and go home. They won’t spend 3 minutes pinching and squeezing to read the content, they’ll just click away in a flash.

Not only that, but even if the content is so fantastic that it attracts the Search Engine algorithms, it will automatically be discounted since none of the search engines will send their customers to an inhospitable environment so your brilliant content will never be found.

7. Security builds Trust

Check in the address bar of every website you visit. If there isn’t a wee closed padlock in the corner, then objectively speaking, the website is unsafe. What’s more, the website won’t be discovered in Search because it will once again be demoted due to security issues.

 If you click on the padlock, it will tell you that it is safe to tread here and leave a footprint, and hand over credit card details or email addresses because the website host has invested in proper security to ensure your details won’t be stolen, hacked or compromised. It’s the least your business can do to make sure surfers feel safe when they’re on your turf. 

Any compromised websites will be screaming more and more loudly at visitors that their details are not safe.

8. Speed is King

Your website is not fit for purpose if that wee wheel is birling around in the middle of the screen when visitors click on to a page. In other words, the website is loading too slowly and is damaging progress. Website visitors won’t hang around and wait for the birling wheel to stop, they’ll just click away.

There are plenty of free tools that can be deployed to tell if the website is loading quickly or not. All too many web designers are only interested in how the whole thing looks rather than speed and performance. So if you don’t have optimum speed times laid out in the contract, they can’t be blamed for producing a slow loading website that actually damages your coaching business.

Say, for example, you have a fantastic social media marketing campaign that is driving thousands of traffic to the website to redeem the voucher, or sign up for the free webinar, or download the amazing pdf … and they can’t get onto the website because of that birling wheel of fire! That whole marketing campaign has been ruined because of the website performance. The website is literally dead meat and need to be dumped or rapidly upgraded before any further marketing campaigns can take place.

In Conclusion

As you can see, a quality website that’s optimised for speed, keywords and mobile is the minimum activities you need to have to ensure it is not harming your coaching or consulting business. Security, pixels and sales funnels are of vital importance too. 

So what is holding you back? As a result of consuming this blog, what three steps will you take to improve your current or future website performance? Let me know below in the comments. Also, we’d be delighted to make some solid recommendations from award-winning and reasonably priced web designers that we regularly work with to ensure you get results from your website presence.