6. The successful business website cheat sheet — 30 Days of Medium
Welcome back to 30 Days Of Medium
Today I’m going to be giving you a little cheat sheet you can use to build a simple, successful website for your business.
You can catch up on the first 5 days of my Medium challenge below if you missed them:
0. 30 Days Of Medium
1. What do you need to build your own website? — 30 Days Of Medium
2. How to find a business you love — 30 Days Of Medium
3. How to build your own website — 30 Days Of Medium
4. How to measure your website’s performance — 30 Days Of Medium
5. How to get more customers by answering their questions -30 Days Of Medium
6. The successful business website cheat sheet — 30 Days Of Medium
7. How to measure success — 30 Days Of Medium
8. Understanding the Online Sales Funnel — 30 Days Of Medium
9. What is traffic and why is it important? — 30 Days Of Medium
10. What is Google URL Builder and why should you use it? — 30 Days Of Medium
11. Double your traffic by automating your social media schedule — 30 Days Of Medium
12. How to tell what sells — 30 Days Of Medium
13. How I grew my Medium following 6,500% — 30 Days Of Medium
14. How you look at things matters — 30 Days Of Medium
15. How to SELL services to small businesses — 30 Days Of Medium
16. How to win more deals with effective proposals — 30 Days Of Medium
17. How to setup an online store in 10 minutes — 30 Days Of Medium
18. How to work from anywhere — 30 Days Of Medium
19. Why your website is sabotaging your sales — 30 Days Of Medium
20. Where does your traffic come from? — 30 Days Of Medium
21. How to actually recognise burnout — 30 Days Of Medium
22. How to hack your schedule and get twice as much done — 30 Days Of Medium
23. Don’t copy your competitors — 30 Days Of Medium
24. How to SEO optimise a blog post — 30 Days Of Medium
25. Be unique or be forgotten — 30 Days Of Medium
26. Going with your gut — 30 Days Of Medium
27. People don’t pay for average — 30 Days Of Medium
28. How to do keyword research — 30 Days Of Medium
29. Why The Pareto Principle is the world’s biggest hack — 30 Days Of Medium
30. Your content is more profitable than your telephone — 30 Days Of Medium
Keep it simple, stupid
Your website needs to be simple.
A new visitor needs to be able to figure out who you are, what you do and be given a reason to keep scrolling within the first 10 seconds, or you’ve lost them.
Avoid jargon, use simple language and make sure it’s easy to figure out what you do. Like Hubspot do.
Be consistent
The main reason some do it yourself websites look so bad is because there’s no consistency.
Use 1–2 colours on the website and one font. Use the same layout for service pages, use your typography in the same way consistently, etc etc the list goes on.
Be understandable
That ‘mission statement’ you and the team are sitting round the table obsessing over? Bin it. Nobody cares. Nobody has ever cared, in the history of universe, about a mission statement.
Big corporate businesses can afford to waste money on this sort of stuff, as a small business you can’t.
People care about what you do, how you do it, and how it can help them. Use simple language and be relatable to your customers.
Be mobile friendly
Do I really need to say anything about this point? You’ve probably heard it before, from every marketing blog ever.
I will say that only you care about your business as much as you.
There’s plenty of other people who do what you do, and if your site isn’t mobile friendly and thus easy to use for business people on the go, they will quite happily close your tab and go on to the next one. They won’t spend precious time trying to navigate your tiny non mobile friendly website with their fingers.
Have a blog
You might not understand the importance of blogging now, but you will!
Google loves fresh content, and as I discussed in my last post How To Get More Customers By Answering Their Questions, you can acquire customers by answering their questions through blog posts and content.
Have a resources section
Create ebooks, check lists, quick quides and other gated downloadable content.
90% of the people who visit your website will not be ready to purchase or contact you, so you need to be able to convert them into leads through free valuable content, so you can nurture them until they are ready to do business.
Use calls to action
Prompt visitors to take action and watch your list explode.
It’s crazy the impact using well placed calls to action, popups and slide ins can have for your pipeline.
Don’t be slow
Your website doesn’t have to be lightning quick, but it does have to be not super slow.
If your website takes forever to load, people will leave.
Don’t bloat your website with too many plugins or scripts, aim for a healthy balance of speed and effectiveness.
Use social proof
Everybody wants what everybody wants, but nobody wants what nobody wants.
Testimonials, case studies and success stories are essential for generating B2B leads online.
Make sure you have testimonials, case studies, customer logos, reviews all over your website, especially on pages prompting customers to contact you or download a resource.
Who, what, how, why?
Your site structure should be simple and include the following pages or sections:
Who we are (about us)
What we do (products/services)
How we do it
Why use us
Contact details (contact page)
That’s all you need to start growing online, alongside a blog and good content strategy.
Hopefully you found this helpful. I’ve written a more detailed web design guide here you might also find handy.
Any questions on this topic? Let me know in the comments.
You might also like this:
Why WordPress Is The BEST Platform To Build Your Business or Startup Website On
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