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How People Buy From Your Website
Every now and then, someone comes to me with a question about how to improve their website.
I give them this same diagram:
Our current website header
I just re-did our own website after confusing people for the last year about what we do and ignoring my own advice.
If you’re finding people aren’t converting on your website, it’s because you’ve either:
Got the wrong visitor
Haven’t made it easy for the visitor to understand what you do
This formula should help make that simpler and get your more customers.
Momentum
I think about this all the time…
…a startup needs to get into a loop where it’s accruing more and more resources as it goes… qualified executives, technical employees, future downstream financing, positive brand momentum, public perception, customers, revenue, ability to throw weight in the government… you’re either a snowball rolling down the hill, picking up resources, gaining size and scope and scale, power, credibility as you go... or you’re not – you’re stuck at the top of the hill as a snowflake, and you’re just not going anywhere.
…the question becomes how do you get started? ...to the point where the next resource that you need is more likely to attach to your thing, as opposed to somebody else. That’s the mechanical process that drives the power law. Economists call it preferential attachment.
If there’s any simple metric to judge a business on, I think it’s what Marc’s describing above.
Momentum.
Either things are going your way, or they’re not.
Businesses don’t really hold steady. If someone says their business is going steady, they’re likely losing.
I suspect some people think momentum is increasing revenue. It’s not. I’ve seen enough businesses with increasing revenue fall over to know it’s a lot more than that.
It’s more like the sum direction of all the nodes in a business.
You don’t have to be across everything to know your momentum, just a reasonable amount of the important parts.
But you do want to know it, because losing momentum is very hard to turnaround.
Momentum is hard to get, harder to keep and impossibly hard to get it back.
The main way I’ve seen businesses lose it is by getting distracted. When things start attaching to a business, it’s hard to stay focused on the main things.
I guess that’s why I think about it all the time. I’ve been distracted by the wrong things and lost momentum. And it sucks. And it really sucks having to get it back.
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