Mistake #1: Believing that your website will increase your sales. 

Having a website won’t magically generate sales for you. Artisans who don’t yet know what generates sales, oftentimes believe that building a beautiful website is all that they need so they invest lots of time and money building the “perfect” website only to find that it didn’t affect their sales...at all. Not even a little bit. 

You need your ideal customers to come to your website in order to generate sales. It’s kind of like having a retail store that no one knows about. A store by itself is just a store. And if you don’t have an audience of your ideal customers to send to that store, it might as well be in Antarctica, because no one will just happen upon it simply because it exists.

Also, building a “better” website won’t increase your sales.

In my former business we had a kinda dark, not very inviting website for three years that we improved to a more beautiful website the third year and guess what happened… nothing. Our sales didn’t increase. But also the original website didn’t stop us from generating over $350k a year in sales. Those sales came from the fugly website. And look, we are all harsher on our own website than other people were. So I didn’t love our website but it probably wasn’t as ugly as I remember it, and  on some level even I knew it was good enough. When we had more bandwidth in our business, we improved it, and that’s the right way to approach your website. Because otherwise you risk losing yourself in perfectionism and at the end of the day yourwebsite is only one piece of building a successful business.

Can you generate sales without a website? Yes!

One of my clients, Charlotte from Honeydove Vintage was doing $10k a month selling off on Instagram and receiving payment with Venmo. She finally decided to build a website because it was a logistical nightmare and she needed to streamline her sales. Once she built her website she saved HOURS every week that she used to increase her sales to $20k. In this case building a website did increase her sales, because of the time saved from being able to passively receive orders.

Is building a website still worth doing? Yes, of course. 

There are many benefits to having a beautiful, functioning website. It’s just important to understand what they are so that you don’t think a website will magically create a successful business for you overnight. Because it won’t.

So what will your website do for you? Why is it important for you to have one right now?

Well, your website is the home of your business, it will give you authority and confidence–and without it your customers can’t buy your products as easily, but most importantly, having a website removes you from the sales transaction and frees up your time.

Mistake #2: Spending more than a week building your website. 

If you believe a website is going to increase your income then it makes sense you’d spend a lot of time perfecting it. But as you see, that’s not the case. And spending weeks or months perfecting your website can be at the expense of learning the skills that will help you grow your business such as: 

Identifying your ideal customer

Building an engaged audience of your ideal customers 

Communicating the FULL value of your products with words, photos, and videos

The art of selling authentically and effectively

These skills can take a few months to master, and if you’re spending weeks or months perfecting your website, instead of learning these skills then that’s going to delay your success. You can build a beautiful and fully functional website in a day. If it’s taking you more than a week, you're just delaying the success of your business.

Mistake #3 Hiring someone else to build your website for you. 

If you don’t consider yourself tech savvy it’s tempting to want to hire this out. I get it. I hate tech. 

But building a website is super easy. And hiring either a designer or a coder to help you build your website is a waste of money. 

And I’m not saying that because I think it’s okay for you to have an ugly website. I don’t think that’s okay, I think it’s important for you to have a beautiful website. But I also know that you have what it takes to build a beautiful, fully functional website by yourself. In a day. No matter how “tech adverse'' you think you are. 

This is often a mindset issue. If you believe it will be hard, then you will avoid it. But if you are open to hearing me when I tell you it’s very simple, easy, and quick to do, your experience can be just that.

Let me tell you a story about one of my clients who hired a friend who is a website developer to build her website. The project took over 9 months, because the friend agreed to give my client the “friend discount” but then kept prioritizing her other paid work and pushing back my clients website. When it was finally finished, it didn’t load properly on all platforms (phones vs desktop) and it took 17 seconds to load the homepage. I don’t know about you but I haven’t waited 17 seconds for any page to load since 1996.

This unfortunate situation is more common than you might think. In my former business I worked alongside a wonderful healer at the farmer’s market who paid $10k to have her website custom coded for her. Within 3 years the designs were completely obsolete, it only worked on desktop, not mobile, and looked very DIY in spite of the huge price tag.

Paying a designer, especially when you don’t know what you’re doing, is such a common way to not get what you want. Not only is it expensive the first time you have the website built but also every time you need to change something on your website you have to pay someone else to do it. 

All of this is avoidable if you do it yourself. 

If you’d like help building a gorgeous, fully functional  website, check out my Build Your Website in a Day course.

Identifying your ideal customer

Building an engaged audience of your ideal customers 

Communicating the FULL value of your products with words, photos, and videos

The art of selling authentically and effectively

These skills can take a few months to master, and if you’re spending weeks or months perfecting your website, instead of learning these skills then that’s going to delay your success. You can build a beautiful and fully functional website in a day. If it’s taking you more than a week, you're just delaying the success of your business.

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