This is a customer waiting for your site. Very sad.
Today I’m going to talk about an example of counterproductive client behavior, or CCB. Most people don’t know CCB is the leading cause of client frustration, missed goals and premature business closure in America.
Today’s example is a subset of CCB called afraid-to-look-bad-itis. This business owner would rather potential customers not see his website at all, than see it and encounter a mistake or an error.
For a very peculiar type of business owner, the thought of driving traffic to a site before it’s “finished” inspires nothing short of terror.
I’ve got news for these site owners: your site should never be finished. The web is not print. You don’t agonize over a page until it’s perfect and then never look at it again. Actually the opposite is true. To be successful online, you should be willing to throw something up there, and then continually add to it, while continually removing the stuff that’s not working for you.
Online, perfectionism is deadly. Waiting to drive traffic to your site before every “i” is dotted and “t” crossed will cost you dearly. Rest assured that while you’re adjusting the leading on your body copy, your competitor is racking up crazy sales with a half broken, incredibly ugly page, because they could find it, and they couldn’t find yours.
Every second you spend arguing with your designer about background color, your competitor is testing to see which background color racks up the most sales, and every iteration is making him or her more money.
The cure for afraid-to-look-bad-itis is a healthy dose of slap-it-up-there-and-test-it. Take two and call me in the morning.
Oh my Joanna, it is as if you reached into my soul and saw elxatcy what I have been feeling for the past several weeks. I am sitting here with tears in my eyes and yet wanting to laugh with relief because finally my condition has a name. I have known for about a month that I was burnt out on go big, live your dream, monetize, productize, magnetize messages. I shut down and tuned out to try and find my own voice and motivation. I got depressed and felt that perhaps I was a non-ambitious loser who just had nothing to offer. Slowly, I have been working my way through to find the answers and now you have neatly laid them out in a nice numbered post. I cannot even begin to express how much I want to hug you for lighting the way out of this dark tunnel. Thank you Joanna, thank you! xo