I recently met with a small business owner and the topic came back around to growing our respective businesses. He has been in business for a few years and I have been in business for over 14 years, 11 of those full time. He asked me how I managed to grow my business? “What works for you?”, he said. “How quickly did you grow?”. As I began to reflect on the years, I thought of the many challenges I faced, as well as the successes I’ve had, but my mind kept pointing back to hard work.
As a small business owner, you have to dedicate yourself to your business, to its’ success, and to its’ commitments. It takes hard work, long hours, late night appointments, weekend phone calls, and even weekends in the office. It’s a grind, but if done right…it’s a very rewarding grind!
As I meet with many small business owners about their websites, I find that they often want quick success, however that is not the reality. Site traffic builds over time, and it may eventually level off. Conversion rates build over time, and that too may level off. Your website isn’t all that different from you in the sense of how long it takes to be efficient and effective. The goal however is to build something that has the potential to grow.
Your website needs the following:
- A strong base or good bones, as I like to say
- The ability to provide value
- A strong call to action
- A commitment from the business owner to nurture the site along
- A business owner that cares about the success of the website, enough care to ensure it’s not neglected
If you have the right mentality about your website, and it matches your focus for your own business, then your site will grow with you. It’s going to be a slow, thoughtful grind though. As you grind out the days in your business to make it more successful, consider your website and ask yourself, “Am I giving enough attention to my site?”, if the answer is yes, then smile and continue the grind! 🙂 However, if the answer is no, you need to apply some more attention to your website, to be sure it doesn’t fall behind. Attention doesn’t always mean money, sometimes it does, but more often it just means time. Content revisions, graphic updates, new blogs, product and service updates, pdf spec sheet updates…..etc. There are many ways to give some love to your site…..either way, your website should be part of your success and you should not ignore the grind of small business websites.