There is a fundamental flaw in how we sell and create websites and it’s causing us to lose clients and not charge them enough. We’re going to cover exactly how to make a website profitable and how to help your customers understand that websites need to be profitable.
This might sound mental, but your customers might not understand just how important a website is to their business's profit.
So many businesses resign themselves to just paying for a website because they feel it’s something they’re supposed to have. Their competitors have websites, other businesses have websites. It’s just something that businesses are supposed to have and pay for.
I presented a webinar recently on Agency Mavericks about the importance of creating a profitable website for your customers. We explored how to physically build them with landing pages and email marketing.
I want to share with you five key points from that webinar that make your job of making a website profitable, much easier.
Websites That Don’t Build Profit Cause Resentment
If you had to pay $10,000 for a car and every month – you had to continue to pay for fuel, tax, insurance and servicing, but it never got out of your driveway, would you consider that a smart investment?
What about a shop that you had on the high-street, where you had to pay rent, bills, staff and stock replenishment? But all the people who wanted to come in off the street either couldn’t find you, or struggled to open the door?
Okay, so my metaphors are a little on the nose, but your business wouldn’t last long if it ran like this. You’d run out of money and you’d have a burning hatred towards anyone who recommended taking these steps.
All to often this is what’s happening with websites and website design/development businesses. We’re all guilty of it, even I am – the King of WordPress Marketing Funnels!
We build a site, release it and it fails to live up to the customers expectations. They’ve heard of orders rolling in non-stop; customers placing orders 24/7, even when you’re asleep; leads and database lists filling up with those to market to…
There’s a lot of hype in our world and it’s a shame, because it gives us ‘proper website businesses’ a bad name.
The truth is that we’re all a little guilty of leaving customers to fend for themselves. Once a website is live, we kind of see it as “not our problem anymore,” and that’s toxic to a business relationship.
How to Start a Website Profit Journey
Building a website to be profitable requires you to start setting expectations for your customers. Without a sizeable investment, they won’t see results overnight.
Below is one of the slides from my webinar on building profitable website funnels. It shows the high level process behind generating sales, revenue and profit from a website.
At a very high level, this is what you need to be selling to your customers. This is where the expectations are set.
Customers need traffic to a site to start everything. I agree with Ryan from Digital Marketer that you don’t have a traffic problem. It’s also the easiest problem to solve. However it all starts with driving traffic to a website.
Then, we look at how we capture leads on the website.
How are we capturing email addresses, names and contact details of people who visit our site and are interested in our products and services?
Sales conversion is all about talking to those leads and showing them how we can help them. That’s all that is. It can be done with a call, face to face, email marketing and more.
When we’re doing this, we can explore marketing automation to automate and speed up the whole process and make sure that each customer is profitable.
In summary, most websites have a problem with at least one of these points. Their expectations will be sky-high for the end results, but it might be something earlier on that’s choking the funnel.
Talking to Customers About Profit
So we can open up discussion with our customers, both new and legacy, and look at how they want their website to act.
Below is a screen that shows the types of customers we’re going to talk to. Before Agency Mavericks, your customers might not have profitable websites, and they might have a tepid relationship with you.
Newer customers have slightly different approaches and require coaching through the process. Talk to them about what they want their website to do and what the realistic achievements are for the level of investment they’re willing to commit.
Profitable websites require regular investment
“You’re only going to get leads if you drive traffic to your website. And to drive traffic, you need to either post content (very) regularly, or invest in paid traffic”.
Simple as that. Most website businesses recoil in horror at the idea of regular paid traffic. But we’re not most website businesses. The first reason they don’t like the idea of PPC (Pay Per Click) is because they feel people don't want to pay regularly for traffic to come to their site.
I can assure you, if you ask a business owner if they could treat traffic like a tap and guarantee a certain number of visitors to their business a day, and that the traffic is targeted and more likely to buy, they’ll happily invest.
The second reason website businesses are reluctant to sell PPC is because they want organic SEO and social media sharing to be at the top of the traffic sources. While that’s admirable and certainly true to an extent, that takes a long time to develop, and often as much investment as PPC anyway.
At the end of the day, a website is part of the journey that a customer should interact with.
We put a paid advert in front of them and show them a piece of free blog post content that could help them.
They show their interest for more help and sign up, giving us a lead. We can market and sell to them to generate profit and before you know it, the website investment and traffic investment has paid off.
If you can tell your customers that an initial investment of a website and a regular monthly payment WILL generate them customers, you’ll be very hard to turn down. But, just like any investment, profit from a website takes time to grow and requires a little upfront capital.
Takeaway
Look, I do this for a living. I build funnels and profit journeys with WordPress websites every day.
I’ve had to learn the hard way that my customers expect results.
We’ve talked today about the number one reason customers aren’t happy with you – expectation setting. We’ve looked at how you can manage this and open up the conversation towards generating leads and sales from a website.
I presented my ideas on how to build and sell a profitable website to the Agency Mavericks members. The biggest takeaway for them was that it isn’t as complicated as they thought.
Am I over-simplifying it? Have you built profitable websites with happy customers? Or are you unsure of how this would work? Let me know in the comments below.
