Do I Need A Website for my Online Business?

 A few weeks ago, someone asked me a question: "Carrie... do I even need a website anymore?" 

With social media, link-in-bio tools, online marketplaces, AI, course platforms, and Facebook groups, it's a fair question. Is a website still necessary? My answer may have surprised them because it wasn't automatically "yes." 

In this episode, we're going to talk about when you really need a website, when you might not, and the role a website should play in your business today. 

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Transcript

The Website Question

Carrie Saunders 0:00

A few weeks ago, someone asked me a question. They said, Kiri, do I even need a website anymore? With social media, Link and bio and tools, online marketplaces, AI, course platforms, Facebook groups, is the website still even necessary? And my answer may have surprised them because it wasn't automatically yes, especially if you're a course creator or coach. Today we're talking about when you really need a website, when you might not, and what role a website should play in your business today. Let's dive in. Struggling to turn website traffic into real sales, you're not alone and you don't have to figure it out all yourself. Welcome to Smarter Online Business, the podcast for course creators, coaches, and e-commerce entrepreneurs who want their websites to convert visitors into buyers without the tech overwhelm. I'm your host, Carrie Saunders, a website strategist and conversion expert with over 20 years of experience. Each episode delivers simple, proven strategies to help you generate more revenue and make your website your smartest sales tool. Welcome back to the show. Today's content is focused a little bit more on our course creator coach audience. However, if you're an e-commerce provider, you may find some really great tips in today's episode. I do want to caveat that since it's more about do you even need a website? Of course, if you have an e-commerce business, you need a website. But if you're a course creator coach, do you really need one? And what nuances of that do we actually need in the e-commerce business too? So we want to think about our website as not being our business. It's not technically our business,

Website As A Business Tool

Carrie Saunders 1:30

it's a business tool. And I see some people feel like their website is a business, but it's really a tool in their business, a mechanism for selling products, services, et cetera. Sometimes people will spend months building a website before they validate their offer. This could be for e-commerce too. Have you validated whether that product you've created, if you're creating products rather than selling somebody else's, have you validated that it's actually something other people want? You want to make sure you've already found customers. Have you clarified your message? So before we build a website, we want to validate our offer, find our customers, and clarify messages to our customers. A beautiful website can't fix an unclear business and an unclear business direction. So we want to have that first before we have the website to support it. So

Validate Offers Before You Build

Carrie Saunders 2:20

there are a few businesses that might not need a traditional website yet. And this may be something that might be surprising to you to hear from me who I've, you know, been doing websites and e-commerce and our business has been since 2002. So very long time. But some people might not need it quite yet. Somebody who's testing an idea. They may be still validating their offer. They may be selling just one digital product. They may be booking just a few consultation calls and are only doing, you know, consultation, things like that. So a simple landing pages for those may be enough. They could potentially even just use LinkedIn, a booking page, a course platform. Um, it could just be a simple sales page. I do want to caveat though that having a website, and we're going to go into this a little more detail, does build a bit more trust. I have had people approach me over the past few years that didn't have a website. They were coaches. And for me, it it left a little bit of um, you know, trust questions there just because they didn't, they weren't, they didn't seem established enough. We tend to feel like those with a website are a bit more established businesses. So keep that in mind when you're thinking about when you want to create that website or revise the website, because that's also important too. So basically, we don't want to build more than our business needs today. However, we do need to be looking future forward in what we may be needing in the future to make sure we are being attentive to when we need to grow that and grow our presence and grow our website

When Landing Pages Are Enough

Carrie Saunders 3:55

and make it a bit more of a um a great better sales mechanism. So, when should you have a website? And I will say that most businesses do need a website. It's really more for those people who are just starting up and just testing some things. They may not quite need a website yet. So most people do need a website. You are going to want one if you want to build credibility, you want to be found through Google and AI searches, you want to own your own content. This is very key. We are borrowing land when we're on social media, whether it's LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, wherever it might be. We are borrowing, you know, we're borrowing, we're renting from there. And they can kick us out at any time. It's a basic way that you can think about it. You want a website if you want to be collecting leads. If you want to be scaling your business, you definitely want a website. And if you want to be able to showcase your expertise in a bit more professional and more concise way, then a website can really help you with that. Also, a website can

Build Credibility With Owned Content

Carrie Saunders 4:55

build long-term assets. So this can be a high-leverage asset for you. And what I mean by that is you're going to get a bigger return on effort for the time you put in your website versus like the time you put in social. Our social posts go away in a few hours to a few days, depending upon the social media platform. A website is a high-leverage asset. You create a post, you create a blog post, you create a page, you create some sort of service or sales page that lasts for a very long time and can help support you for a very long time. So just to reiterate, social media is rented land. It's like you're renting from a landlord, and your website is a property you basically own and you can control it. And you can control what happens with it. So there are some big website mess, and we run into this in the past 20, almost 25 years now, is that we haven't cut have had customers that think that if they build a website, people will come. And that's not necessarily the case. A website isn't magic, it still needs traffic, it needs good messaging, it needs trust factors, which we talk about a lot on this podcast. It needs marketing. You need to drive traffic to the website initially to make it look important to Google and search engines and help it become more visible. And then that becomes a snowball effect if you've done a good job with your messaging and your pages, Google and AI will start picking

A Website Still Needs Marketing

Carrie Saunders 6:15

it up really quickly and start showing it to other people. So here's where I want you to really think about this. Instead of asking yourself, do I need a website? I want you to ask yourself, what job should my website do? Most people don't think of it from that framework. Should your website educate? Should it get quality leads? Should it answer questions? Should it build trust? Should it collect emails? Should it sell? Should it support customers? It's likely needs to do multiple ones of these. Every page on your website should have a specific purpose. We don't want to mix too many purposes for every single web page. It just becomes a bit too confusing to our customers. We talk about this a lot on the podcast, is that each page needs to have one purpose, whether it's a selling page, um, something that's a building trust type of page. So each page has a specific purpose in mind. So we want to be thinking about what's the purpose behind our website, not whether we need to have one. What do we need it to do for us and for our business? So I want to give you a website decision framework. I want you to ask yourself, how do customers currently find me? Where do I want them to find me next year? Am I building something I own or borrowing someone else's platform? Is my website supporting my business or just existing? It should support your business. And is what's my website's primary job? Is it to collect leads? Is it to bring in sales? If your e-commerce is definitely to bring in sales. If you're a course creator coach, it may be to bring in sales for your services. So what's my website's primary job? So in the

Define The Job Of Each Page

Carrie Saunders 7:55

end, I don't think every business needs a massive website, but I do think every growing business and every established business needs a place that's truly theirs, somewhere they control, somewhere their audience can always find them and find them easily, somewhere that that grows along with their business. That's the whole reason behind a website. So if you have a website and you're wondering if it does these things, I want you to ask yourself: if someone visited your website today, would they know who you help, what you offer, why would they trust you, and what should they do next? If not, your website may need to be a bit more revised, a bit bigger. It may simply just need to be a little bit smarter and have that messaging in there just right. So with all the changes in technology and AI and all the things out there in the world and the new social media is popping up here and there, technology changes, marketing changes, but still stays somewhat the same. Platforms can come and go, but one thing that hasn't changed is that people still need a place where they can learn about you, build trust, and decide whether they want to work with you or not. That's whether you have one page for your website or hundreds of pages of your website. Make sure your website has a purpose because when your website becomes one of your smartest business tools, everything else starts working a little bit

Decision Checklist And Closing

Carrie Saunders 9:20

better. That's all we have for this week's podcast episode. I hope you thoroughly enjoyed it. And if you would, be sure to rate and review us on your favorite podcast app and share with a business friend that helps get the word out so we can help other business owners just like you. And we'll see you next week.