And now what?
Your site is now online, congrats! You can give yourself a pat on the back because you’ve earned it! Like the occasional fisherman who cast his line into the pond, you are now anxiously staring at your screen waiting for the first sale or the first call from a potential client. Unfortunately, making money with a website is not as straightforward as that. And it will take more than a little bit of text and some images to attract potential customers.
My Website Is now Online. Why aren’t customers already flocking?
Getting your website online is only half the job. Many business owners mistakenly expect that their website will automatically start attracting visitors as soon as it goes live. They think that since they’ve invested money in building a well-designed website, leads should naturally start flowing in. But it’s not that simple.
In reality, attracting website visitors takes a significant amount of time, skill, and resources. You need to focus on things like SEO, paid ads, guest posts, video ads. If you chose to build your website on WooCommerce (WordPress), you will also need to take care on a regular basis of less sexy aspects like website maintenance. That includes renewing your domain registration on time, protecting your website from hackers and viruses, updating its plugins, theme, and design to keep up with current trends, and investing in promotion, so people visit it.
It takes a lot to generate traffic for your site. But once you get started, you will find out which strategies work best for your website. The bottom line is, you have to take action; when you do, you will begin seeing an increase in traffic.
Search engine marketing and search engine optimization are critically important to online businesses. You can spend every penny you have on a website, but it will all be for nothing if nobody knows your site is there.
Marc Ostrofsky
In addition, some people think that their website design has more to do with the overall performance of their business than it actually does. A well-designed website is great for attracting potential customers and providing a pleasant user experience. But it won’t necessarily translate into increased sales.
If you are prioritizing the appearance of your website over providing quality products or services, you are on the wrong track. Never forget the purpose of your website. It’s the quality of your products or services and your reputation in the marketplace that really matter. You can’t hide your weaknesses behind a pretty website.
Aim for simplicity: the more features isn’t always the better
There is a misconception that having more features on your website will make it better. Sometimes people add features to their website without considering their value. They end up offering their audience a whole range of things that aren’t really necessary. More features mean more choices, and that only makes it harder for consumers to make decisions.
We recommend keeping your website simple. Your audience doesn’t care about bells and whistles. What they care about is the value they get from your products or services. Too many features on your website will distract from the main purpose of the site. Also, having too many plugins active negatively affect the performance of your website, particularly the page load time. It also translates into more maintenance work, and potentially more plugins conflicts. So it is best to leave out features that don’t add value to your visitors.
Conclusion
Having your own website will significantly boost your antique business, there is no doubt about it. On the other hand, it is not something that should be implemented lightly or with little time to spare. Sure a website can be created in a few hours with a solution like Shopify, but putting your inventory online alone can take you several days, even weeks of work. The optimization of the site to make it appear at the top of the search results is an ongoing work. So is the optimization of the technical performance of the site. Creating a website is a long term work, but it pays off in the long run. And the sooner you start, the faster your website will gain traction and have a positive effect on your business. It’s never too late to get started. And who knows, you may discover an unsuspected passion for e-commerce!
