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5 things to do before creating your website

When you’re starting your business, it’s so tempting to start creating a website right away! Nothing complicated, just put several web pages together, propose my services, and make money.

Actually, that’s what I did, when I started my first language mentoring business. I didn’t realize back then what exactly I want to offer, to whom, at what price, and how I want my design to look like. So as you can guess the website looked very messy and lacked clearness.

Now I realize that there were easier ways to find clients and start making money right away.  But I was resisting and didn’t search for clients until my website was built. Even after it was built, it didn’t bring me the results I wanted, surprise! 

Don’t get me wrong, the website is a very powerful tool that you should absolutely use for your business. It’s an online version of you 24/7. But often, when we especially build a website by ourselves, we search for perfection,  we hide behind the research and don’t do the actual things that help us to get clients and get paid before our website is ready.

I learned all these things the hard way. I wasted months doing research, learning about the tech staff, and trying to put everything together by myself. It was stressful, overwhelming, and created a lot of anxiety. Only when I did profound work on my brand foundation and me as a person, I was able to put a website that was clear and that was a total reflection of me and my business.

Define who you are, how do you want to show up, what are your values and your strengths

If you decide you create your business, probably you already know what you want to offer. Although, it’s so important to take your time to learn more about your values, strengths, and you as a person. What drives you? What keeps you awake at night? What is important to you and why? What are you really good at? You should always focus on your strengths. Although, I believe that in today’s world it’s possible to master any domain even if you have never worked in this field before.

It’s very easy when you just start out to get intimidated by other people, who have been in the field for many years. It’s also very easy to start comparing yourself to others. But it leads to nowhere, you can lose your voice, and before even finding it, imitate what other ” successful” people are doing, even if it feels not like you. Be very careful when it happens.

I personally had really hard times with all this, when I started. I saw all these “successful” entrepreneurs with beautiful websites, and strong personal brand, who were showing up consistently and so easily on social media. I was intimidated, created a lot of negative emotions with my thoughts, tried to please everybody, worried about what others will say, and had hardly anything done.

So I would recommend sitting down and writing your why’s values, strengths, and things that will love to do and that will feel like authentic to you. When you have a strong inner foundation, you’re more likely to create extraordinary work and express your voice confidently.

As soon as you’re clear about all this, it will be so much easier to write a copy for your website, choose or create images, step into your power and show up in the world as your authentic self.

Define your business why and purpose

This one is huge! Why did you decide to create your business in the first place? Why is it important for you? What problems do you want to solve?

The strongest your personal whys, the easier it will be to keep going when it gets hard. Your whys prevent you from quitting. Very often your whys are basically your values. What do you value and why? It is freedom, community, honesty, creativity, learning, purpose, self-expression, and beauty? Or maybe something else? Think about it.

In the same way, you need to define your business values. As soon as you are clear about your business’s values and purpose, it will be very easy to explain what you do. Being clear on the purpose of your business is vital. It will help you to write a web copy so much easier too. And what is even more essential, you will be able to attract the right people and make people who are not the right fit for you leave.

Define who do you want to serve

I didn’t realize the importance of this one for so long! I tried to serve everybody, please everybody which is basically equal serves nobody. I thought, well I need to offer many different services to all different kinds of people, and it will help me attract more clients. How wrong was I!

People are tired of too generic products, and services that speak and serve anybody and nobody. Maybe it still worked in the middle of 20 century, but not today.

I know that going narrow and being specific is scary, our lizard brand doesn’t want that. Because it means being more personal, more open, and more vulnerable, creating connections with people you want to serve, providing value, and making these people your fans who won’t help but buy from you. But only if you genuinely care and provide free value.

100 true fans and really specific people who LOVE  and follow what you do can is so much more valuable and can bring more profit than 10000 people who don’t care or are not interested in what you do.

Can you imagine how much easier it will be to write your sales pages, create products, and services, and create content and web copy for your website? You will have this one ideal person in your head and every time, you will know exactly what you want to say and how.

Define what exactly do you want to offer

When you’re clear about your ideal client, your business purpose and your own value, you need to decide what exactly you want to offer. Is it a service, a digital or maybe a physical product?

If it’s a service, what exactly is included in your offer, you need to be very specific, people like when it’s specific, it builds trust. Create a detailed description of it, for who is it, what are the benefits, and what problem it helps to solve? What will be the price? Per hour? Per service? Will you offer any packages and discounts?

Or maybe you have enough time to create a digital product like a course or a program or a monthly subscription? Although, I wouldn’t recommend going with something like that in the beginning unless you have a lot of time to invest or don’t need to make make money right away. It’s still a great possibility to make passive income in the future. So, to mind in the term, it can something that you will eventually want to do.

Selling physical products can be a bit more challenging sometimes, as well as creating an e-commerce website. You need to have a storage place,  think about how you will handle shipping, payment, what type of packaging will you use and so much more. Creating an e-commerce website can take a lot of time as well, primarily because of adding all the products, their description and so on.

Find your brand visual style

Finally, last, but not least – your brand’s visual style. Do you have your brand style guide ready? Is your website, social media, packaging, emails, and graphics have a consistent visual style? Do you use the same colours, fonts, elements, and image style over and over again? Do all these elements go nicely together and create an authentic style of your brand that reflects you and your business?

When you don’t have a consistent visual style, it creates confusion, bad user experience, lack of trust, and lack of professionalism. It makes people leave your website and don’t take action. Our brain likes when everything is consistent and predictable when it doesn’t need to spend too much energy and to find what it looks for. People don’t have time, when they cannot find what they need, they leave.

The best way to build a converting website is to mix strategy with aesthetics, and what is most important it should reflect you and your business.

If you don’t know what style do you like, make some research. Find the style, the images, and the colours you really love. Check what is doing your competitors, what is the layout of their websites and why? Does it work for them?

Of course, your web designer can do that for you, if you prefer don’t spend any time on research. But I still find that it’s important that you like it and that your visual style feels like a reflection of you.

Examples of brand boards or brand style guides

Final thoughts

Building a website can be fun and easy. You can even do it by yourself if you decide to. Although, if you want to have a website that converts and builds it faster, there is some preparation work required

Even if you spend some time in the beginning, the process of building a website will be so much easier and stress-free.

You will need:

  • Do some self-development work about discovering your true self, finding your voice, and defining your core values and strengths.
  • Define your business whys and your business purpose
  • Define the people you want to serve with your business
  • Define your product or service
  • Find your visual brand style

Book recommendations

There were many valuable resources that helped me to do all this work. I would like to recommend some of them. Of course, it’s a very close one-to-one work with my branding coach. If you’re still hesitant about whether it’s worth the investment, it’s so worth it!

To work on my values, strengths and my life purpose in general I bought a great and not very expensive course – a life purpose course.

And of course, there are many great books that you should absolutely read. I will mention just some of them:

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