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Making a success of yourself as an entrepreneur takes a good deal of work. Not only do you have to identify your niche with great precision, and then work on optimising your product or service according to the demands of the client or customer, but you?ve also got to manage the various ?small pieces? that keep the whole thing together and ticking along.
Although it may be frustrating, making a success of yourself as an entrepreneur requires a lot of technical sophistication that doesn?t necessarily have much ? if anything ? to do with the particular service you offer.
Rarely is this as true, as when it comes to your website. Being a successful entrepreneur in 2019, requires that you have a slick, sophisticated, easily accessible, and visually appealing website. This is as true if you are a furniture restoration expert, as if you are a web-based SEO guru.
Since your website is such an essential part of your professional life as an entrepreneur of any type ? here are some basic tips for getting an effective website up and running.
Understand the purpose of your website, from the get go
Your website is ? first and foremost ? a tool designed to effectively communicate your services and products to prospective clients. Of course, you also want to communicate those services and products in a way that increases the odds of people deciding to spend some money with you.
To communicate anything effectively, efficiently, and appealingly, you have to first have a very clear idea of what it is you are trying to communicate.
The websites of many entrepreneurs end up becoming rambling catalogues of just about anything, and everything that the entrepreneur in question finds interesting about his or her life and work.
But spare your prospective clients the three-page rundown of your entire back story, the list of things you like to do on weekends, and all your professional experience in areas not directly relevant to your current business venture.
Instead, focus everything around the subject of what it is you?re trying to convey and sell with your current business. Keep in mind; you should not just think about ways of describing the services you offer or the things you do, either.
First and foremost, you should be clearly conveying the ways you in which you can help your clients resolve a particular problem that he or she might be facing. If, for example, you have an in-depth knowledge of software development life cycle, explain explicitly how this knowledge can be used to make your client's life easier, or more fulfilling.
Include professional headshots of yourself
New entrepreneurs are often so excited to get ?cracking? with their projects and business ideas, that they allow their haste to cause them to become sloppy in certain areas.
Often, photographs on newly minted websites, are extremely lacklustre due to this very reason. But understand that the photos you display on your website are not just there to let everyone know what you look like, or to present your best side.
Instead, the photographs you display on your website are meant to underline the fact that you are a real (read: accountable) person, as well as a professional. In order to get the ?professional? part across, it is imperative that you do not use a photo from your Instagram feed in order to sell yourself and your business.
Instead, any photos that you include on your website should be professional headshots, that ? at the very least ? convey the sense that you are professionallysavvy, and successful enough, to warrant having your photo taken by an expert photographer.
This may seem ?shallow? in some regard, but keep in mind that your prospective clients will not know anything about you when you first burst upon the scene. Therefore, they will seek to protect themselves by avoiding anyone whose web presentation looks overtly amateurish.
Go for a sleek, reactive, clean and professional look with your site
Carrying on from the point of ?professionalism? mentioned under the previous subheading ? having a sleek, reactive, clean and professional looking site will certainly go a long way to ensuring that you look like a consummate professional.
The best part about that, is that with the myriad number of tools and services available online, you can easily get a website professionally done up to look as good as that of a much larger company ? at a fraction of the price.
Other than just helping to safeguard your professional appearance, though, having a sleek, reactive, clean and professional site will also make the visitors experience that much more pleasurable, and effortless.
Research indicates that people do not have much patience when scanning websites, or simply when surfing the web, in general. Any mild form of resistance they encounter, is likely to send them in the opposite direction. ?Bounce rate? is one of the key analytics measured by businesses who are attempting to improve their SEO and site engagement. It refers to the amount of time that the average visitor spends on a given page.
It is not at all uncommon for the ?bounce rate? for a page to be no more than a couple of seconds.
Try and reduce, if not eliminate, as much potential frustration as you can from your prospective client's experience of visiting your website. Make sure that the site can be easily and comfortably viewed from a smartphone. Don?t have obnoxious video ads that pop up, unsolicited, and start auto-playing. Keep things balanced.
Touch on your USPs in your web writing
?USPs? are your ?Unique Selling Points? ? and refer to those things that differentiate you from your competition (in a positive sense).
No matter how able you are to paint a picture of successfully addressing a client need, the likelihood is that there will be various competitor companies in your industry who can make the same claims.
Prospective clients and customers are often mindful of this fact, and will look out for factors that can sway the balance in favour of one company, rather than another.
The better able you are to identify, and reference your USPs in your web writing, the more likely you are to convince the client that you?re the company to go for.
