Your website is not a buffet…
Scott Elling :: April 15th, 2008I don’t care how much you love roast beef, garlic bread, square pizza, baby corns and cake for only $9.99, the eat anything and everything business model does not translate well online.
An easy target, Yahoo! is a confused company doing a little bit of everything (and not that well) while Google focuses on search and prints money to the tune of billions.
Recently, I had the privilege of consulting for a very sharp woman with a successful offline business who’s looking to take her success online.
To her credit, she contacted me before getting too deep and it’s a good thing, she was headed to buffet hell. After an hour I was finally able to wrap my head around the 6 things she was trying to do.
Online you have seconds to effectively communicate what you do and why I (the visitor) should do it.
The prospect of making money online is exciting and it’s easy to carried away with 20 products and 10 services. Each page of your site must have a clear purpose and the content must support this purpose, not distract.
Here’s a couple of quick solutions to getting focused -
a) Ask friends, family and enemies to play around on your site - observe what they are doing why they are doing it. Ask lots of questions and encourage brutal honesty. What you think is obvious, is not so obvious to another.
b) Don’t be too cute or smart. Get to the point and make it about me and how I stand to benefit!
If you wanna do well online, stay away from the buffet style site and focus on making the best damn meal ever.
Be the big fish in the small pond.
To your success,
Scott
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April 16th, 2008 at 2:56 pm
How about a bento box? A little chicken, a little sushi, a little salad? All taste great together.
April 24th, 2008 at 8:18 am
We see this all the time. Websites that are disorganized and go in too many directions are difficult to advertise, let alone understand. Look at the website as if you were a consumer trying to find what you are looking for. It needs to be easy to get to and even easier to get what you want.