Websites are a vastly underutilised asset that will become more and more important as big brands sacrifice the core offering of their product to the gods of profit and greed.
 

From what I’ve seen, people don’t invest into websites because of:

• Fear and confusion surrounding SEO 
• Low confidence of investing into growth 
• The cost of building advanced websites
• Difficulty in finding capable experts 

There are three types of lead gen, they can all work, despite whatever bad experiences you or people you know have had, and your website is key to each of them.

• SEO – Great for scaling up and driving huge numbers of warm leads to your site, but takes 6-12 months and a TON of content creation for it all to feel worthwhile
  
• Paid Ads – Incredibly expensive and relies on very mature sales messaging and lead nurture strategies – never start with this
  
• Email / LinkedIn Outreach – Gives you a steady flow of cold leads (very, very difficult to convert enough of them to justify cost of marketing and sales) and requires expert salespeople 

Don’t make the mistake of many new to growth beyond word of mouth and referrals – cold leads are nothing like warm leads. Still new to this concept? Educate yourself on this and save thousands of £/$. 

Low quality no co-code website platforms like Wix, or any other drag and drop DIY site builder, isn’t enough. You need a web platform capable of supporting marketing and sales systems and processes. 

Paired with the right growth and lead nurture strategy, a good web platform can: 

• Convert SEO traffic into warm leads and enquiries 
• Automate the process of service presentation, sign-up and taking payment 
• Educate leads in the “info gathering” stage to produce warm leads in the future 
• Impress cold outreach leads and reduce the sales cycle duration by up to 50% 
• Automatically reply to all client and non-client queries 
• Automatically create lists of qualified leads for sales outreach 
• Track how many times specific users have interacted with your online assets 

It’s the difference between a lead booking a call (with a 30% chance of conversion) and a lead signing up to a service via your website (and the money’s already in your account). 

The problem is that big tech companies don’t care about us. Your priorities are not their priorities. 

Just look at Twitter…

Musk bought it, fired 80% of its employees, introduced radical change that led to advertising revenue to halve, almost overnight, then focused on charging users more for the same or a lesser level of service. 

If you’ve invested primarily into Twitter content and communities, it’s going to hurt – a lot – if/when Twitter falls apart. You’ll have to align yourself with a new big tech platform and hope it doesn’t happen again. 

This could create years of revenue chaos and many will simply never recover. 

By investing into your own small web platform and content, you can protect yourself from the whims of the mega-rich and big tech companies who care little about your success.