WTF Is Happening With My Website?!

“Opportunities are never lost; someone will take the ones you miss.” -Andy Rooney

Think about that. If your potential customers don’t know about you, someone else is solving their problem and getting paid for it. If you aren’t feeding your pipeline with new leads every day, someone else is. I am assuming you have a product or service people want. If you do, those needs are going to get filled and it should drive you crazy to think that you’re missing those opportunities.

Every day. More missed opportunities.

Now imagine the opposite. Imagine your website traffic was exploding, and you could actually bank on new leads and sales from your Internet marketing every day, week and month.

I’m hoping you are highly disturbed by this point! Let’s take a look at what’s probably going on. An overwhelming majority of small businesses suffer from a frustrating problem I like to call Website Traffic Failure (WTF?!). And trust me, WTF?! is exactly what you should be saying if you invested time and money on a website and have no traffic.

Here are the core reasons your business is failing to get traffic:

• No plan
• No content
• No ownership
• Unsustainable expectations

Conversely, the companies that succeed have a plan, they generate relevant and interesting content for their customers, they place someone in charge of it and they start small and build over time. Talk to companies who are successful at marketing, and ask about their early marketing days. Nobody eats the elephant in one bite and certainly not by accident.

Now that you no longer have to ask WTF is happening, let’s break down each of these core issues so that you can begin to patch any holes you might have in your marketing plan.

No Plan And No Budget

I could be writing about any initiative here in life, but without goals, a plan and committed resources, how can you expect to succeed? Building a website is not marketing. Building a website is creating an asset to use in your marketing.

I recommend creating high level plans for six months to a year, and detailed plans for three months at a time. This is why we arm each client who hires us to build a website with a 90 day marketing plan. Building traffic and generating leads is going to take orchestrated work. Don’t waste money on a website if you are not going to factor it into your marketing. Once you create a plan, you are going to need to know who is going to implement it and how much you are going to spend.

Action item: identify which marketing methods (Ads, SEO, Social Media, Etc.) you will focus on to generate traffic and create a 90 day plan for your website. Set SMART goals to be achieved in those 90 days.

No Content

Advertising, search engine optimization, social media—they all require unique, interesting and relevant content to succeed. There is simply no way around it, if you want to market online, you need clear, compelling content that supports your value proposition. This can include blog posts, sharable content from others, white papers, webinars, ebooks and videos.

Ask yourself what you do most of the time you are online. You’re discovering new things on YouTube, Google, Facebook and Twitter. Why not create some of that content that everyone is out their sharing and consuming?

Action item: find a way to consistently create new content that will attract new customers to your products and services. Find inspiration here.

No ownership

One of my favorite business lessons is “what gets measured gets done.” Someone needs to be responsible for any effort that is important to your business. Assign someone responsibility, set goals and expectations and review progress regularly. Marketing will never take care of itself.

Action item: determine who will manage these efforts and how they will be held accountable.

Unsustainable Expectations

Marketing is a staircase, and you need to secure small victories and build on them. If you receive zero sales or leads today, then find a reliable way to generate ten, then one hundred, then one thousand per month. But don’t forget to secure the first stair before focusing on the second, otherwise you risk a serious fall.

This means you are going to need to remain focused for a long time on making this work. If you’ve placed someone in charge, created a plan and allocated a budget, make sure to see this through. Avoid unrealistic expectations along the lines of spending a few bucks and securing thousands of website visitors. Value in your business comes from securing replenishable sources of customers that you can count on for months and years to come.

Sustainable traffic generation is a marathon. The good news is that Internet marketing is very cost effective, it’s just not free.

Action item: review your marketing plan—possibly with an outsider who has done this before—and eliminate any unsustainable tactics and unreasonable expectations.

What to do about it?

If you are diagnosing your business with Website Traffic Failure (WTF?!), make sure to do something about it. Take action by assessing your business with the above four root causes and see which you are failing to address. The reward for doing so might be a steady stream of new customer opportunities.

For a professional review by our team, consider a Juicy Internet Marketing Review.

“The secret of success in business is early to bed, early to rise, work like hell and advertise.” – Ted Turner