Imagine for a moment that you’ve been working at becoming a good pastry chef. Every day for the last week you’ve made a chocolate cake. But each time, the cake looks flat and tastes horrible.
To fix it, you might work hard on your technique. How you whisk the batter, how you crack the eggs, mixing the dry ingredients before adding the wet, etc., but nothing seems to produce any better results. Finally, you give up in failure thinking, “I’m just not meant to be a cook.”
Then a friend stops by and looks at your recipe. Somehow the recipe you’ve been following calls for a cup of salt and a teaspoon of sugar instead of a cup of sugar and a teaspoon of salt. No wonder the cake turns out horrible! The problem is not you; it’s not your technique, and it’s not your oven. You’ve been working off of a bad recipe!
This happens to a lot of people when they build a website. There’s a lot of misinformation about how the process actually works. So many people are following a bad recipe. But they blame themselves for the result. It’s frustrating and demeaning. I think websites just don’t work in my industry. I’m a failure. I’m really bad at getting what I need in a website. I should just focus on networking or direct mail.
But if we see that it’s the recipe that’s at fault, we can let go of all our stories of failure.
I can tell myself the story that I’m a bad cook, or I can throw away my entire history of cake failure and simply upgrade the recipe. Your technique can be perfect, but if your recipe is wrong you’re going to fail every time.
We have a recipe that works for building an effective website. Without a good recipe, you might think that you’re just not cut out to have a good website. But having the right recipe makes all the difference in the world. If your website has never worked as well as you want it to, and you’re open to trying a new approach, send me an email and let’s talk.
Steve Johnsen is a marketing strategist, a business coach, and the Founder of Cloud Mountain Marketing. He is also the author of the Amazon #1 best-seller, 5 Easy Steps to Make Your Website Your #1 Employee.
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