If you think of your website as a marketing and sales vehicle, then I must ask… is your website and your goals to build a muscle car or a moped?

In the featured image above, you will see a Dodge Challenger SRT. To me, this is a real thing of beauty. I love Challengers. They are sexy, but also a highly functioning powerhouse of a vehicle. The picture below is a moped that looks nice but in a race to the finish line, is there any question which would win in a race? Not really, right?

Here is the thing, life and business is not always about getting there first, but if we think of this analogy as your goals to success, would you prefer to get there as quick as possible and in style or would you rather know that you will arrive one day and slow and steady wins the race? I think there are a couple of ways to use this analogy so I will touch on a few of them.

Let’s talk about the bad side of the muscle car analogy. As sexy as the Challenger is, sexiness alone isn’t enough when it comes to websites. Sometimes I see websites that are also very “sexy” looking, but often they are missing the powerful engine that get’s results.

Sometimes owners spend a lot of time and money creating a sexy website, but forget one thing… a “sexy” website is useless unless it helps people.

So just like a muscle car with no gas, a website with no gas is just another expensive sexy object. What is the gas I am talking about here? Well, you see a website is not the field of dreams. You know the ol’ saying… “If you build it, they will come.”, yeah, that is a myth. Building a website is useless unless you give it “gas”. The gas that fuels a website is content, ongoing promotions and continual improvements to soup up the user experience. Most people look at a website design as a one time project and never commit to ongoing content or user improvements.

A website should be looked at as a living organism that evolves over time and continues to get tune-ups.

Think about the Challenger reference earlier. Would you run this vehicle without doing regular oil changes and tire rotations and replacement of the air filters or several other areas of maintenance to care for your vehicle so that it continues to run like a champ for as long as you own it? Doubtful. So why then do business owners and CEOs neglect their websites when this is the forward facing part of their customer experience? Well, mostly because they treat their website like an overloaded moped and try to work it to death wishing for muscle car power, but only committing to investing in a moped.

Can you haul a bunch of boxes on your moped?

Yes, of course, you can. Is it recommended? No. Is it realistic that any site can attract prospects, convert visitors into customers, and help you retain customers? Well, yes this should be the goal of a website, but in all honesty, a 5 to 20-page static website (meaning one that never changes and is more like a brochure than a publication) is not going to do this. A static website that is built and never touched for years is like the moped picture above. You are hoping it will be a workhorse, but you are not using the right tools for the expectations you have.

If you want the website to be a placeholder where you drive traffic via business cards, email, and personal sales calls, than a static website is perfect.

If however, you want your website to be a high-performance machine that continually builds traffic, converts visitors to leads, helps you convert leads into customers, and then adds value to your customers to create raving fans, well then, a static website isn’t going to cut it.

I am probably going to show my age here, but do you remember back in the day when people would have a vehicle they were working on and it was setting up on cinderblocks? A static website is like a car on cinderblocks in your driveway. It just isn’t doing you much good. It isn’t getting you from point A to point B, but you own it.

So how can you soup up your website?

Well, I’d start be thinking of your website as something you must continue to feed gas. Just like your car, a website doesn’t perform well if it is never given gas. The fuel of the website is content that speaks to your target audience and educates them regularly on things they want to be educated on. It is not promotional content, but content that helps them improve their life and business. If you think of this content as the regular cost of doing business just as gas is to a vehicle, then you will get a lot of mileage from your website. Keep in mind though, that the more miles you get from your website, the more you will be doing regular maintenance and edits to your site for continual improvements. This is like vehicle tune-ups and inspections.

Content can be blog articles, which are great for ranking well in search engines, by the way. Optimizing articles with SEO is like a turbo charge for your articles. SEO for those of you that do not know is Search Engine Optimization and includes using keywords and other tools/ideas to optimize blog titles, # of H1, H2, or other header content, Meta Data, Image Titles, Alt Text, etc. Other option for content could be Videos, Podcasts, and the like. If you do these things (videos and podcasts) it would be great if you could build an area on your site to deliver this content instead of having them on another platform’s site (YouTube channel as an example). It is okay building on other platforms as a way to drive traffic to your site, but I would try to get all your content in all it’s forms on your website and make this the hub of all your marketing efforts.

So realistically, what is a muscle car website going to cost, this is starting to sound expensive?

So yes, as I mentioned above, slow and steady is a good thing and if your budget is tight a moped is better than walking, but to be honest, you can get hosting for $250 a year or less, you can buy a domain name for like $35 a year or less. So hosting and a domain name might be $285 a year and you can probably hire a web designer to build a basic WordPress website with a blog for $800 to $1500. So to get a barebones website you can turn into a muscle car, you might need to pay a one-time fee of $1500 for the design and build and then $285 a year for hosting and domain renewal (let’s say $1785 for the first year). So for under $2000 you can build a pretty powerful marketing vehicle. Now if price is a concern, you can do your own blog content that might take you 2 to 8 hours a week depending on your writing and editing skills. SEO is important, but the consistent content is more important than SEO skills. Slowly you will start taking the moped you started with and start turning it into a muscle car. It does take commitment though. As I mentioned earlier, you must think of your website as you would your car. You wouldn’t get tired of filling your car with gas, so you can not get tired of fueling your website with content. You must fill up every week.

The more content the better, but for basics and just getting started, I would recommend you commit to 1 article every week.

Yes this is tough and yes, it takes time, but this is an investment that keeps on giving.

What kind of results can I expect from building a muscle car high-performance website?

Let me share some data… I’ve built several client’s websites over the last few years. Several of these clients just wanted sexy (well one wanted a blog as well but stopped blogging after the employ blogging left the company, another one went all in for a few years). One of the sexy static websites currently gets about 60 to 90 visits a month. The website that was blogging regularly was getting pretty consistently 800 visits per month and after a year or so of doing nothing, they are consistently getting around 200 visits a month. I have other clients that have gone from roughly 40 to 50 visits per month to consistently over 1500 visits a month after going after adding content regularly for a few years and it seems to be continuing to grow even after slowing down on content development. Then other clients have been able to go from next to zero to well over 8K visits per month by doing consistent content. Not all of these people were SEO experts, as a matter of fact, only the ones that hired me had solid SEO skills and consistency, but the point is they still got success by writing blog articles consistently compared to those that did nothing but build a “sexy” website. The ones that went all in, got an engine that actually is turning their website traffic into qualified sales leads that are turning into hundreds of thousands of dollars of new business coming directly from the website.

If you would like to learn other tips related to a website redesign or building your first website for the performance of a Dodge Challenger SRT muscle car, then have a look at this ebook. There are tips and checklists for CEOs and business owners. I hope you found this article helpful and we see you out on the internet racetrack in you fancy hot rod that is smokin’ up the track and just a lead generations machine. Good luck!

Dodge Challenger Photo by 246-You

Moped Photo by Aslak Raanes

Overloaded Moped Photo by Graeme Newcomb