Your website should be your #1 employee.
While you’re busy doing a million other things for your business, your website is bringing in new clients, telling them how awesome you are, answering their questions, publishing blog posts, launching new products and closing sales.
In other words, your website should be working its ass off 24/7.
Imagine you’re hiring your first employee. You have a general idea of what you want the employee to do, but you don’t want to be all corporate-y and write an official job description. You meet a few people and hire the person that seems like the best fit.
Fast forward six months.
It’s clearly not working out for either of you. The employee isn’t doing her best work because she’s unsure of exactly what she’s supposed to be doing. And you’re frustrated at having to pay someone who’s not doing what you expect of them.
After a long chat with the employee, you decide to write that job description after all.
You write down exactly what’s expected of the employee—specific tasks she needs to perform, goals she should be striving towards and information she should be gathering from customer interactions.
Fast forward another six months.
Now that she knows what’s expected of her, the employee is crushing it and surpassing your expectations. You’re no longer frustrated with her work and, best of all, business is booming because of her improved performance.
Your website needs a job description so that it can be your best employee.
Determine Your Website Goals
Your website goals are its job description. They spell out exactly what you want your website to do for you. Goals also give you something to measure your website’s performance against, so you know what’s working and what needs improvement.
What is the main goal of your website?
What do you want your website to do for you? If visitors could only do one thing on your website, what should that one thing be?
Here are some examples of website goals:
- contact me for a quote
- sign up for my newsletter
- buy my ebook
- follow me on Twitter
- subscribe to my blog
Obviously, all those things would be awesome. But what is the main thing you want people to do on your website?
What are two secondary goals for your website?
What are two things you want visitors to do after they’ve completed the main website goal? You might be thinking “I want them to do EVERYTHING”. Narrow that down and pick the two next most important things.
Boom. You just gave your website a job description. Now you can start tracking its performance to see what’s working and what isn’t.