Your website should make you money

Hi friend,

You’re reading Kindling, a weekly newsletter from Wildfire sharing insights from the world of branding and design. Subscribe via email.

A thought from me

If your website isn’t a revenue generator, you don’t have a good website.

So many businesses elect to turn their websites into business cards or brochures. I have seen websites that neglect to include an address or a phone number for a brick-and-mortar business. These mistakes cost untold millions of dollars in revenue.

I’ve worked with a lot of businesses in a lot of industries to help them develop or accelerate their online sales pipeline. It is possible to make a beautiful website that converts.

A good website could and should:

• Generate high-quality leads.
• Increase the time spent on the website by several times.
• Increase conversion rates.
• Save your marketing team hundreds of hours in manual labour over the course of each year.
• Generate millions of dollars in revenue.

Just the other week, I saw that one client I worked with five years ago went from making under $50k in donations every year to making over seven figures last year. And that was for a small Canadian nonprofit! Imagine the millions your brilliant business is leaving on the table with a bad website.

A good website is a system. It should be easy to edit. It should be easy to update. You should be able to use it to make campaign pages, new product pages, improve itself regularly, and increase the visibility of your brand. This all becomes possible when your website is a complete system with modules, components, tokens, and a ruleset that binds it all together and makes it coherent for your team. 

If you don’t have a system, you have a brochure. And if you have a brochure site, my experience is that you probably don’t have a brand. You might have a logo, some fancy colours, and probably not much else. You’re not leveraging what you have.

It’s time to rethink your brand’s biggest wasted opportunity.

Things worth sharing

1. You’ve seen this before, but you might not have realized what it is. This is the A.I.-design aesthetic that’s taking over the internet. (Your brand has the perfect opportunity to look different.)
2. The indomitable Naz Hamid has rebooted his photo blog, Absenter. The photos and website are gorgeous. I always wanted to make something like this for myself as an alternative to the Instagram hamster wheel, but never found the time.
3. An interesting branding and communications problem: Netflix viewers are abandoning shows after one season. What’s the problem here? And if you were in charge, how would you fix it? (Ted, if you’re reading this: please invest in better programming.)

A question to ponder

What is one thing your organization could make 10% better that would make you look better than 90% of your competition?

Until next week,

Nathan

What you should do next…

1. For more insights like this, subscribe to the weekly Kindling newsletter.
2. To see people walk the talk, explore my case studies.
3. Schedule a free call to review your brand and website. Get a one hour consultation where we discuss your brand, your current marketing problems, and potential next steps. If you’re not ready to work with me, I won’t attempt to sell you, but I’ll point you to the right next step.