Straight from the PopUp Reading Event in The Oracle, Alan is in charge of this weeks Website Wednesday. He talks about how a famous phrase might be wrong and how publishing your website isn’t as scary as you might think.
Note: This transcription has been generated with AI and there may be errors present.
Have you heard the saying, If you build it, they will come. It was made famous by Field of Dreams and then later ripped off by Wayne’s World. I’d have to say, this is the biggest load of rubbish ever. If you build it, no one will come until you tell the world about it. No one comes you can you know how many websites there are in the world? Billions. No one will come to your website until you tell them about it. So this morning, we’re going to be building websites, and then we’re going to be telling the world about it because you have to market it. No one will turn up to your website to start with. So that that also gives you a little bit of confidence. Because if you do publish something this morning, and it’s not quite right, it doesn’t really matter, because no one’s going to see it until you start promoting it. Does that make sense? So we’re going to have a go, we’re going to get you going. This was the first ever website we created for the pop up business school. I built it for free on this thing called Weebly, you can see me I look marginally younger and slimmer there. You can see Simon, who looks a lot younger and slimmer there. And we built this first thing. And people started to come and we started to sell tickets. And that free website has generated more business than the money. I’ve generated me a fortune in business compared to the websites that I paid a lot of money for and did nothing. So we’re going to be building free websites today. First question, though, is why do you visit a website? Because actually, this is a really important one. If we can work out why you visit websites, then we can work out why your customers would visit your website, because there’s actually lots of reasons why people go to websites. They go for price comparisons. They go to find local products, they go for reviews, there’s all sorts of things they’re going to websites for if you have some of those things on your website and start sharing it, you’re more likely to get traffic.