Myth: If You Build It, They Will Come

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Myth: If you build it, they will come.

Absolutely not true. When you launch a website, there are a lot of things that need to happen in order to get your website found by the people that need to connect with you.

Hi, I’m Steve Johnsen, and I want to talk to you today about a common myth related to websites, and that is this idea that if you build it and launch it, they’re going to come to you. Well, many, many business owners have discovered that this just isn’t the case.

Now, we all know that this is not true in the offline world, but somehow we imagine that it’s going to be true in the online world, that all I need to do is get my website built and launched and then automatically I’m going to have people finding it and get customers from that website.

Your website is just a collection of files that sits on a computer somewhere in the world. Once that website is launched, nobody knows that it exists, and it really takes a lot of work to get people to find your website. Expecting that you’re going to launch a website and automatically have people finding it is sort of like opening a new business, printing up a whole bunch of business cards, and sitting at your new desk with your business cards waiting for people to show up. It’s just not going to happen. At a minimum, you need a sign out on the street that says what kind of business you’re in so that people can walk in.

But more than that, when you launch a new business, most people understand that you need some advertising. You need to send out some flyers and maybe need to make some phone calls. You want to do something to get people to learn about your new business and come and seek you out.

Well, this is also true with your website. Your website is a great way to get people to find you, but once the site is launched, it does take a fair amount of effort to get it found by the people who are likely to become your best customers. In fact, the effort involved in getting your website found by the right people is usually a lot greater than the effort in getting your website built and launched in the first place.

When we’re sitting down with new clients working on their web design, one of the things that we do differently from many other designers is figure out the long-term strategy for how their website is going to grow their business so that this strategy can actually be incorporated into the design process. But even when your site is already built and launched, you can always go back and develop a plan for getting your site found and for making the site effective as your number 1 employee.