Getting Perspective for Online Business Success

Since the development of the World Wide Web considerably more businesses are conducting business online and like all new developments in life it can be many years before the realities of benefits and liabilities are realised.

Both my partner and I have been entrepreneurs now for fifteen years and we had some fabulously lucrative ventures and some serious learning curves which have been financially cripelling.

In the course of pursuing our businesses, we have had the opportunity to work with hundreds of entrepreneurs involved in startup and running a business which has given us some very valuable insights.

The most shocking breakthrough was looking at my own website and suddenly realising it was not even clear what I was doing for visitors!

Whilst being busy with other people’s business I had failed to focus on my own website and was doing the very thing that I had observed in many business owners.

I realised that the intention and mission of my business was not only unclear, a customer’s needs were not being met within that initial ten seconds of visiting my site. In short, I was not objective enough to see why it was a miracle my site was selling any products at all!

To this end I have provided the perspective below for you to become detached enough to gain a clear perspective from your prospective customers’ point of view and be more effective online before looking for ways to drive thousands more visitors to your site.

Please don’t shy away from reading on because of any irritations at the thought of making changes. I fully understand your position and have endeavoured to get you to look at the site carefully to make sure you see a few simple moves that can have the most impact as I will demonstrate with my example.

The Most Effective Online Perspective

Although a business is operating online the fundamental buying motivations and needs of customers are still the same. What has changed though is that people have less time and they can flit from one webpage to another with the click of a button.

It is time to stop distractions, stop buying into all kinds of business solutions which we believe will address the core problem which is converting visitors into customers when a simple but fundamental change in perspective can trouble-shoot very clearly a few moves that can address the site’s inadequacies.

It is time to see the solution in what you have already which is the focus of my whole teaching… unhappiness reigns in the world generally because we have all moved too far away from our mission.

This is the same for businesses with the introduction of the internet and the onset flood of differing opinions, ideas, views, sources of information and our ability to dip our heads into everyone else’s business so easily.

Adjust Your Vision

If you have a business online then the most successful perspective I encourage you to adopt is to start seeing your business as a highstreet shop.

Exercise

• Open up a browser of your website and imagine yourself as a prospective customer.
• As I have demonstrated in the picture below. Observe only what you can see onscreen without scrolling or clicking anywhere. Now, whilst sitting looking at the online page imagine this picture embedded into a bricked building on the high street.

• Keeping your eye on the webpage and imaging it is a shop you are standing infront of, ask yourself these questions (which you would want satisfying as a customer yourself):

Can I immediately see what this shop is selling?
Is it attractive and inviting, would I go in or is it boring and distracting?

This is a very important point to focus on, when you are walking along the high street you have the benefit of a third and fourth dimensional aspect of a shop in that you can:

1. Look through the window and see what they are also selling apart from the front window;

2. You can get a feel inside of the atmosphere by seeing how many people are in there, the attitude of the shop assistant, the quality of the shop etc.

With an online shop/webpage you are basing your purchasing decision on that space you first click on and the window of focus is usually a maximum of 10 seconds.

With regard to shops on the high street people will stay longer because the physical effort they imagine in going somewhere else motivates them to ponder a little longer but not when it is so easy to just click the mouse and go somewhere else.

Can I see how to buy easily (and have you actually tested your buying process to see how easy and obvious it is)?

One classic example of this is putting up a picture of a book and assuming that the customer knows to click on the picture. Never assume!

Can I see the owner (in other words is the contact page in an obvious place on the menu bar of the bottom of the page and do I have a name)?

If your shop is a book store, is it selling books or selling everything else. (Remember how attractive a book store looks on the high street; it is usually oozing books in the window and not adverts for other shop owners products or full of DVDs, movies etc.).

Have you identified and climbed into the hearts and minds of your prospective customer to know their needs, values and attitudes?

Examples:

• If your market is predominantly men do you have a ‘search’ button. The search button is effectively a ‘Shop Assistant’ and men generally want to go straight to the product as fast as possible, pay and get out.
• If your market is predominantly women do you observe whether your site/promotional material is colourful, vibrant and allows them to ‘shop around’ looking at/reading things. Women have more patience and will still walk miles back to the first shop they went in if it has what they want. If your shop satisfies their needs they will come back to you.
• You want to help Joe Average become a Millionnaire. You already know that:

1. He will probably have low self-esteem; it is fair to say that putting up videos of a perfect image of you in an Armani suit and sparkling white teeth WITHOUT instantly connecting with him enough to let him know that you know how to cry, be scared, be overweight, out of control, in debt etc., is not going to leave him feeling he can become what you are promoting.
2. This front page must provide a connection with him in a way that Joe can see himself benefiting from your product/service.
3. He will have to make changes in his life and so you do not need to take care of every detail for him. If you have a simple request for his name and email and he doesn’t want to go there then he is saying that he is not serious so no need to try to make it easier for him (great intention but you cannot compensate for the part the customer has to play). Keep in mind whether you are helping the customer – don’t try to sell him anything just because you can make a sale.

Simple and Effective Solution

As a business owner I appreciate the investment you make online and how once a web business is established it is not so easily changed. Either because of finances or because the good will of traffic and Google’s relationship has been established and so not wise to disturb what has been built up.

With these challenges in mind I realised that without having to re-create my site which would mean reproducing a huge amount of pages I decided that I had to find a way to address the needs of my prospective customers very effectively and simply right now.

A website is essentially the same as a bricked building in terms of investment and effort in that you can’t just take down a site and build a new one, there are costly consequences so we have to be smart and think before acting.

When I looked at my own site I realised that if I clearly added a Mission Statement I could compensate for some inadequacies. As my site was colourful I had to make the Mission very bold and recognisable instantly. I also added ‘Click’ text to my books and removed any links that was not relevant to my customers.

I realised that the confusion within my site was dynamically the confusion within me. It doesn’t matter how clear we are within our minds, the outside world must match what we want to achieve. It’s one thing to be aware of something but it is another to have that awareness put into practice in a physical way.

In fact, this clear mission statement alone lead to a whole new level of my life. The repercussions were tenfold; it birthed three new books, a whole new Online Center which I am now building and cleared up contradictions that had been withholding success in so many areas.

When I sat down and focused I realised that I had known for a while that I was very dissatisfied with my website as it was and when I started undertaking changes I began to feel the full truth of how often I had been running the words “…it’s not good enough, it’s not going to sell” through my mind.

Conclusion

• Start by writing out your Mission Statement if you haven’t already.
• Make sure you do the exercise above with your website(s) and see where you can make simple adjustments to address any points I raised earlier.
• Don’t give control to webbuilders or designers in that they will only be as effective as your brief. Furthermore, many webdesigners/builders can be employees and don’t know the true value of your invested money. When undertaking web services make sure those assisting you dig into who you are, your values, your mission, your market, your intended goals etc.

So many business owners whom I have have helped with mockups have no idea what they want at the onset but are happy to tell you what they don’t want once you spend days building something. Everyone’s time is wasted. In the past we have spent tens of thousands of dollars to have a project done and key questions have never been asked from us so we paid the price of not being in control as Project Managers of our business; it was our fault.

• Before investing in business online or undertaking more projects stop and think. It is time to slow down, get clear and shut out the distraction and insane amount of information from your world. Simply climb into the shoes of the customer and see your webpage from their perspective. Test your site with people around you who you know to be prospective customers but don’t ask people’s opinion because they will always have one and it will probably contradict yours every time!
  
• You are the genius in your business, you can get all kinds of help (in fact you are wise to source out any skills you are not good at) but if you are not clear about what precisely you want to achieve and are not in control of making sure what you invest in can produce the results you hoped for you will be disappointed, disillusioned and exhausted.

As much of business is now conducted online we have generally lost touch with the essential ingredients of the buying and selling process; in focusing on statistics we have lost sight of the core human aspect of a shopper.

As many new business owners have started up online the conversion from visitors to customers has stayed relatively unsuccessful causing them to look at all manner of solutions that actually could be solved by looking at the site as a human and not basing all the decisions on hearsay, statistics and what other people are doing. This is not to discredit the wealth of wonderful business helpers out there but to make sure as a business owner you are thinking about what you are doing more carefully BEFORE you make moves so you choose the most effective solutions when you invest.

Always keep in mind that a business is a mirror of the thoughts and feelings of the owner so take a look at your mission, values, passions and real goals before making any moves.

If you really want to know what is in your subconscious as opposed to what you think you are thinking, download yourself a copy of Home Your Wealth and regain control as Project Manager.