Your Website is not a Magic Easy Button

Has this ever happened to you?

Business is slow. You’re frustrated. You want to fix it. So you start looking around.

You check out the so-called business gurus, look to your friends and colleagues. Tell me how you did it, you silently plead. Tell me how I’m supposed to do it. Tell me what I need to do to get my business making money and filling my dreams!!

The longer you search the more you feel your chest clench, your breathing shallow, your throat tighten, your head spin.

Anxiety.

Desperation.

Googling at 2am you stumble upon articles proclaiming the solution lies in your website:

If you have the perfect SEO and copy that follows all the psychological ploys and a fancy website built on Wordpress and beautiful branding photos and the fancy logo with layers of symbolism you too can have a thriving business!!!

YES! THAT’S IT!

So you spend the money you don’t have on the professionals that sell you their answer. Or you spend the hours you don’t have trying to learn how to do everything yourself and send your mind into triple handsprings because if you can just do everything ‘RIGHT’ you’ll finally be a success.

Then you don’t like what the professionals do.

Or you hit a wall and your DIY project remains unfinished for the next two years.

The clients don’t come. The business doesn’t grow.

You slump in despondency, defeated and think you should just give up. Business is clearly not for you.

What happened?

As someone who fell in this trap years ago and has gently guided potential clients away from it, here’s what I see:

In thinking that the perfect website and/or all that goes into it - branding, copy, etc. - was the primary solution to the problem, other critical factors may have been overlooked. You tried to find the easy button - that magical solution that will suddenly make everything come into focus and work like a charm. You focused on finding an outside solution to what is more likely an inside query filled with complexity.

When business, or life for that matter, isn’t working, there is not generally one outside solution.

Your website is not an easy button to success.

Your branding is not an easy button to success.

There IS NO easy button to success.

The yearning for the easy button is what we’ve been indoctrinated to believe exists through a culture of endless marketing. Just yesterday, I saw an ad for Lumify, the eyelash serum. “Get your perfect eyes” it claimed.

Excuse me??

This claim not only implies that my eyes, and therefore me since they’re mine and I can’t really change them, are imperfect, it also dares to assert that perfection is only achieved through a product that makes your lashes longer, perpetuating standards of beauty that take up precious time and energy better spent on my loves.

Can it help me see the soft downy hairs on my young child’s skin? Can it show me the pain or joy in another’s face? Can it reveal the beauty of colors or serenity of night? And for whom are these ‘perfect eyes’, really? I can’t see my own eyelashes!! Those who love me are more interested in what my eyes are communicating, not what frames them!

Rant over.

My point is that marketing such as this leads us to believe, over a lifetime, that we are less than and that the answers lie outside ourselves. Patterns adopted as coping mechanisms from childhood trauma can exacerbate this looking, this yearning for external guidance and validation, as well.

And so when things get hard, we go looking. There’s no shame in it, we are not bad and wrong. We are simply unconscious and following the cultural programming (here in the United States, anyway) we’ve been given. So I pose this as an invitation to notice.

Notice what it feels like in your body when you go searching for the easy button. Notice what it feels like when you think you need something. Is it a reaching? Grabbing? Or a down and in hell yes? Is it coming from the mind, or the core?

And choose how to move forward with intention and awareness.

Yes, your website matters. And in the 21st century every business needs one. But there is no perfect website or logo or branding that will magically have people knocking down your proverbial door.

Yes, you may very well need an updated or new website to best communicate and display your offerings. But the display case can’t make money out of desperation.

IMHO, the most effective websites are those that are in integrity, where the outsides match the insides. Where the business owner has healed (or is healing - are we ever done?!) and embarked on a journey of discovery to know themselves, their ideal client, and their business first, and then they speak authentically to and through that knowing.

Business growth is a marathon of learning and implementing and growing at all levels.

And if you’re still hoping for an easy button? No shame. Truly. You’re in good company. :)

© Angela Winter