It’s amazing how we do this, even I do it! Most of us create websites to sell our products and services, so you would think that we would want to make buying from us really easy! But sometimes we just seem to make buying our thing, really, really hard for our customers. In this blog, I’ll be going over the Top 7 ways we sabotage our own website and prevent ourselves from making those sales.
So, why do we sabotage our own websites? Well it’s mostly down to mindset. If we’re feeling our products, services, course or widget isn’t good enough (or finished enough or big enough…) then we can tie ourselves up in knots trying to sell it.
I had a client a couple of years back who would apologize every single time she added her pricing onto her site. Not just to me, to her visitors! She even apologized for the inconsistency and randomness of her own newsletter in her own opt-in box! She was just so uncomfortable with putting herself out there and asking for something back – even an email address. And, she was really, really good at what she does!
We can get super scared of talking about exchange whether it’s for money or even contact details…
So many of us were brought up to believe that money was a bit of a dirty exchange, that we should never ask for money. When we’re creating a business all about asking for money in return for something, that can give us that icky feeling. Then, we sabotage. we apologise and we hide. Add on a bit of that old imposter syndrome and we’re ready to avoid doing anything to sell! We tell ourselves we aren’t good enough, we don’t know enough or think “who am I to teach this?”. We tell ourselves that that is why our course, products, or services aren’t selling when actually we’re throwing up big barriers to buy all over the place.
Top 7 ways we sabotage our own website
The trick is to recognize that we are doing it. Once we know what is going on, we can change it and some of those changes aren’t massive, technical or complicated.
Sabotage #1 Adding reams of text.
The first way that we sabotage our website is by adding reams and reams of text to persuade our website visitors that we know our stuff. Or to prove that we have a good product and are worthy. However, this means the main call to action just gets buried under information overload.
This happens to so many of my clients so when I design a website even though I leave them sections and guidelines of where and how much text should be used on each page. Still, so often they will insert an essay into that section even though they’re not actually adding anything much to the page. They’re just trying to make themselves feel better. Believing that they are going to have to persuade someone by talking and talking about their product. Whereas, on a website what you actually need is for people to very, very easily get your point and scan through the page so they can make the decision.
Sabotage #2 We don’t make it easy to find
Another way we sabotage our own website is by not adding our products to the places where people can find them. For example, like our menus! I did that once: I created a really lovely sales page for my big website course and I completely forgot to add it to any menus. I was focused on driving traffic over from Facebook and I’d forgotten that people need to find it in the right place on my website!
Sabotage #3 We don’t guide them to buy
The next thing form of sabotage is…we don’t guide people to the actual thing they can buy from the home page. That can be a mixture of what I did, which was completely forgetting how to use my own website (as a website developer that’s great isn’t it!) It just shows that it’s so easy to get wrong. We also don’t guide people through to the right place. We assume people know where things are, we assume that people are going to know to click on the right link. They don’t so we need to guide them through the websites.
Sabotage #4 We just hide it
There’s a little bit of hiding going on, we’re hiding our content just in case people don’t buy it! I get it, it can be quite a vulnerable thing putting things out on our website. Even if we’ve spent hours and hours creating that sales page for people to buy from. We also hide the thing that we want people to buy in the middle of loads of other information. Pages, posts, other products… information overload. This again is partly because we don’t have the confidence in that one particular thing that we’d like to sell on our website. We don’t have the confidence to make that the headline product and so it just gets hidden in all the noise. This goes back to a lot of the mindset around trying to persuade people that they do need this. Rather than focusing on offering a great solution to their problem.
Sabotage #5 Camouflage our buy buttons
We also camouflage our buy buttons and links! Whether that’s as images, titles, or tiny little words right at the end of the sales page. Nobody is going to find it, let alone click on it! Read here to learn more about sales buttons.
Sabotage #6 We ignore broken links
Even if we haven’t camouflaged our actual buy button, sometimes we just don’t check that the links actually work. Even links to sales pages, lead pages, landing pages, from ads, or even to our checkout. There have been instances with clients, where they’ve had inactive links and buttons on their website from calls to buy and they knew that those buttons didn’t work! But they had frozen…they were too scared to do something about it. Or maybe they just believed nobody would click there. Make sure all your links, all your calls to action and all of your buttons work.
Sabotage #7 No way to buy
Lastly, perhaps you don’t have a way for anybody to buy from you at all! Maybe you have a website that’s set up to sell your products or services but there’s actually no way that you’ve put on there for people to buy from you. I see all sorts of ways that my clients try to wriggle out of this one. They might have a contact form that’s hard to find at the end of sales pages. That can be quite good if it’s something that’s one-to-one or bespoke but not when they do it for something that’s really low ticket. That really shouldn’t need that interaction.
Again, this goes back to the “nobody’s going to click to buy it” or “I don’t trust people are going to buy something that’s right for them”. Or “I’ve got to persuade them to buy my products through a personal call”. So they have another hurdle that people have got to get over to buy. Make sure that you have somewhere where people can actually buy from you.
There are loads and loads of ways that we try to get out of feeling uncomfortable about selling on our websites. Are you guilty of any of these? Or do you have a sabotaging secret I haven’t listed? I’d love to know, just comment below this blog or check out the YouTube video here.
Understanding what’s going on with your website sabotage is the start of getting it all sorted. So, if you’re guilty of sabotaging your own website, this blog is made for you.
Kat x
