What’s Your Website Saying About You?

The power of the internet is that it is ubiquitous – which can be a good thing if you are maximizing what your website says about you and your business. Does yours reflect Walking your Talk and Talking your Walk?

Often times during my seminars I ask for volunteers to allow me to demonstrate their sites effectiveness. Most cringe and avoid any eye contact with me. You can almost read them silently say: “please, not my site.” In fact, that may be just the reason why many become our clients since they know that they need to invest in getting their talk and walk in sync.

Your Walk is who you are, what you do, how you do it, why you do it and so forth. It is the action you convey. By being aware of what messages you are sending through your actions, you can adjust them in order to align them so that what you do also tells your customers how your products and services meet and/or exceed their needs and wants.

Your Talk is what you say, the language, that connects you and your customers with what you can do for them. One of the most powerful ways to talk about your business today is through your website so that it says what it needs to say and how it needs to say it. The quality of your website speaks volumes about your business through your powerful language, audio, video and visual messages. Another and probably even more powerful ways of talking about your business, is to let your customers do that through testimonials and commentary.

Here are a few tips to help you analyze both Your Walk and Your Talk online and offline. Go through each of the tips and individually consider Your Walk; and then repeat it with analyzing Your Talk. Make a list of action steps you can take to get them in sync so that your online and offline walk as well as your online and offline talk are synchronized through and through.

1. Is your value proposition (VP), which defines how your clients are better off by virtue of working with you, prominently displayed on your home page? What sections of your site demonstrate and prove your value proposition? If your VP talks about dramatic growth of your clients, you should incorporate testimonials and articles demonstrating and explaining such growth for you and your clients.
2. What is your vision and mission statement and how does your site substantiate them? A client investing six-figure investment with us shared with me that he felt we have similar philosophy. When I asked him to articulate further he said that it was based on similar vision and mission statements that he read on our web site.
3. Are you using effective language to increase credibility through your clients’ list, testimonials, case studies, client results and your intellectual property and expertise? Do your articles show examples and how-to tips based on successful track record with your clients?
4. Who is your audience and what is your market and what are the products and services that may greatly benefit them? Are you constantly adding new such products and services and receiving happy clients’ testimonials that are displayed on your site?

By refining and aligning what your website is saying about you and your business, not only will you eliminate the cringe, but you may find that you are finally proud for the whole world to see it.

© Chad Barr 2009. All rights reserved.