The 3 Fundamental Rules to Keep Your Website Goal Orientated

It's easy to get paralyzed thinking about all the ways you can improve your business or website. The list of potential things you can do goes on forever.

You can get caught up wasting time trying new ideas, tools, sections, and systems that you think might drastically change your website or business. In the end, a lot of these additions can end up getting tried, and then tossed aside.

I want to reiterate the most important questions I believe you should think about to keep your website goal orientated:

1. What do you want to get out of your website?
2. Therefore, what do you want your customers to do on your website?
3. Therefore, how can you convince them to do it?

That's it. Think it sounds too simple to be true? Well, okay it might be a little oversimplified, but most websites on the internet are built around these principals to make sure they are always capturing their customers.

When you look at websites down to their core of what their goal is, it makes it much it easier to understand what kind of content should be on them.

Let's dive into each question individually.

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What do you want to get out of your website?

Before anyone starts a project, it's always important to grasp what they intend to get out of it.

It's no different for a website project, you still want to figure out your exact goals before you get started to make sure you stay focused on the "why". If you don't, the project can easily go off the rails, which is usually in the form of constantly thinking you need to add feature after feature.

Should you add a page for each of your services?

Should you add in a chatbot?

Should you redesign your homepage?

Well, will it bring you closer to the goals you have for your business? If it doesn't, then the answer is no.

Let's look at some super basic goals that you might want your website to do so you make sure you're approaching it with the right mindset.

• I want my website to get me more product sales
• I want my website to position me as an authority figure in a certain space
• I want my website to get me more client leads
• I want my website more customer sign-ups

With your goal in mind, the step is to figure out how that goal translates into something you want your customer to do on your website, which is the next step.

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What do you want your customers to do on your website?

Your website doesn't have information for the sake of information, it has information to push customers towards a certain outcome.

If you now know that your goal is to get more product sales, that means you want to move website visitors to eventually buy through your checkout. If your goal is to get more client leads, you want to move website visitors to eventually fill out a contact form.

This may be a simple point, but make no mistake, it is one of the most important aspects to remember.

Now that you know what you want your customers to do, you want to do everything in your power to make sure your content pushes them towards this outcome, which is the next step.

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How can you convince them to do it?

A lot of businesses who have websites focus too much on talking about themselves and overlook exactly what customers need to know to convince them to take a certain action.

• Why should they contact you?
• Why should they opt into your email newsletter?
• Why should they fork over $80 for your product or $8,000 for a project with you?

Just because your customer needs a copywriter and you are a copywriter, doesn't mean you have a sale. Keep in mind that customers will usually be looking at several different options for services or products to compare them before they buy.

You need to be able to answer every burning question they might have and convince them that out of all the options they have, you or your product comes out on top.

There are a whole bunch of different methods to convince customers (a FAQ section, free resources, blog posts, case studies, testimonials), but if you summed them up, they are built on these key points:

• Trust - Before you can get anything from a customer you have to build trust with them. Usually, this trust needs to be in the conveyed in the form of "I've done this before", meaning you're showing that previous customers or clients have been in your customer's shoes, and have come out positively. This is where reviews or testimonials come in handy because they show your customer that your services or product has already been used by many customers before, and can be trusted.
• Value - It doesn't matter how expensive what you're offering is, it's about whether that price will translate into enough value to justify the price. Even if that "price" is their email, you need to prove the value that they get from you sending them emails is higher then the price of them giving away their email address. No one is going to give their over if they think you are going to pitch to them every day when they open their inbox.
• Authority - Proving that you're an authority figure is tough as you have to back up that you have the knowledge or expertise. Someone who says they know their stuff is nothing without the content to prove it, so some ways that you can do this is by hosting a meetup, consistently writing articles, giving talks at conferences, making podcast episodes, or writing a weekly newsletter. Anything you can do to help prove that know what you're talking about will build on your authority.

Remember to try to get into your customers head and think about what they are worried about when they come to your website, and how you can prove to them that you have the best answer.

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The takeaway

Let me rehash those 3 questions that bring you closer to your goals one more time.

1. What do you want to get out of your website?
2. Therefore, what do you want your customers to do on your website?
3. Therefore, how can you convince them to do it?

Everything update you make to your website should be centred around these points. If you want to reach your business goals then you need to stay focused on what's important and forget about everything that is a time-waster or money pit.