In This Lesson: Simplify the whole process into one manageable location.
If you complete this lesson you’ll feel much more in control of overhauling a website that isn’t working. It will be much easier to see how the whole process works in one place. And you’ll avoid feeling overwhelmed by lots of separate ideas.
The Challenge: Sales pitches spread thinly over too many pages.
Most of the websites people ask me to makeover could cut the number of pages they contain in half and instantly improve their sales results. With poor sales pitches spread thin over too many pages, most customers are simply never seeing the critical pieces of your sales message. Faced with a partial pitch, most will abandon your website after scanning the first one or two pages. They will not go digging deeper for the rest of the puzzle.
The Goal: A lean mean, selling machine.
Your website has one job – to sell for you! To do that you need to grab your customers attention instantly. You need to pull them in with your message, know how to perfectly solve their problems, communicate your value clearly, and compel them to buy our products and services, right now.
The Obstacle: It’s not how big it is…
Too many people are focused on making their website “look big” so people will think they are more professional and have been in business longer. Or, they pay someone for a website template. And the people who create the templates always try to make the sites “look big” so they can charge more for the templates. The result is lots of websites that have a poorly constructed sales pitch spread out over 5,6, or 7 pages.
The more pages our website has, the more intimidating it becomes when we need to overhaul things. I see people overhauling large websites every few years. The design changes, but the fundamental problems stay the same.
Reversal Of Perspective: …it’s how you use it!
It’s really not about “looking big”. In a world where there are sooo many distractions your customers just want to know how you can help improve their life. And they want to know NOW. When we design websites, we are in our own heads. We imagine OUR website is the only website in the world. And our customers are only looking at OUR website. That’s not what happens. We’re just 1 in a million options for them. And they are going to give us just a few seconds to grab their attention. We should remember why our website exists. Our website is a salesman. It’s there to sell on our behalf, at our customers leisure. It is NOT a puzzle for our customers to solve.
The Strategy: One pitch, all in one place.
Throughout this process we’re going to cover every aspect of the most important fundamentals that Entrepreneurs get wrong. There are lots of individual ideas to cover. But the beauty is, they can all fit onto a single page. And that’s how I want you to think about turning around your website. Don’t worry about all the existing pages you may already have. Focus on using the techniques in this program to master a One Page Website first.
Look at it from your customers point of view. If you can’t get them interested in just one page, you’re certainly not going to do it in 8 or 80.
By focusing on a one page website, you’ll have a manageable overview of how all the different pieces of the sales pitch fit together. The process will be super easy to manage. It will make things super easy to test and optimise. And when you’ve mastered the pitch, you can always choose to split your one page into more pages, if it makes sense to do so and the tests prove it makes you more sales. (Not on a whim).
If you happen to have lots of completely different products, you can still focus on mastering just one product page for now. Make this process doable and it will get done. You can roll it out to the rest of your products later. However you look at it, mastering one page, mastering one sales conversation, is all you need to focus on in this process.
Putting It Into Action: Create your one page canvas now.
I want you to create the blank HTML page that’s going to be your canvas for this process. When you have a page, prepare it for split testing using the software service from the previous lesson.
Your page should have no distractions whatsoever. No unnecessary navigation or sidebars or social media icons or anything. If you’re using WordPress or similar look at your page templates for a “landing page” template, which will usually be blank. If you don’t have one by default, Google “wordpress landing page template” and go download a free plugin.
Do It Now! Estimated time: 30 minutes.
Do whatever you have to do, but have your blank page ready to go and ready for split testing. Share your url in the comments when you’re done.
Further research: If you’re curious about one page websites, you can browse some of these One Page Websites.