In general, there are three different kinds of “websites”:

• The Digital Brochure
• The Online Store
• The Publication Hub

It’s quite possible that your website has elements of all three, depending on your business. Let’s unpack the three levels of good websites.

The digital brochure

A digital brochure website shows off the services or products you offer, and adds a ton of validity to your brand online. It might not be the first entry point to your brand, but should help you close the sale. If you are just getting a website up and running for your business, start with a solid digital brochure.

Examples of a digital brochure:

• National Museum of Natural History (naturalhistory.si.edu) 
• American Red Cross (redcross.org)

The general public will judge you, your business, and your value based upon how well your site looks put together, speaks to their needs and is easy to engage with.

Businesses that benefit: small business, restaurant owner, lawn mowing business, a plumber, or consultant, or coach, any service-oriented business.

The online store

The online store gives the customer the option to buy directly from the site. I love the idea of sitting on the proverbial beach and making passive income by helping people purchase a solution that we’ve already developed.

For me, the ultimate goal in business is to have people buying from our company without me having to directly sell it! Creating an online store is a major step towards achieving that goal. If people have to go through YOU (or any human) to purchase, you have created a major bottleneck in the potential growth of your business.

Examples of an online store: 

• Target (target.com) 
• Amazon (amazon.com)

Can you imagine if Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon.com still took every customer order? What a s#!t show that would be! Okay, I’m not saying that you are going to be generating billions of dollars per year with your store, but if you don’t productize your offering and offer it for sale online, then what chance do you have?!

This is why every website should sell something directly through its interface. In 2020 alone, e-commerce more than doubled in the U.S. More and more people are shopping online.

Positioning your company to be where the people are, with less friction to exchange your solutions for their money, is necessary for business growth.

The publication hub

Finally, the last major “type” or characteristic of a successful website is being a publication hub. This is vital because one major tool to bring visitors to your website is to create valuable and engaging content.

If you consistently post new content, you will quickly have a robust website with lots of content on it that can be searched and indexed by search engines like Google and Bing.

Examples of a publication hub: 

• Buzzfeed (buzzfeed.com)
• NPR (npr.org)

This is what marketing experts refer to as SEO, or search engine optimization. SEO is a fancy way for a search engine like Google to rank how helpful your website will be when a user types in different search terms. When your website is home to a wealth of high-quality content that is relevant to your brand and product offerings, you will have better content for Google and other search engines to rank your site.

There are plenty of additional strategies and tools you can use to rank higher in search results. Work with a SEO specialist to bring your content to the people who need it.

Creating additional content for your website will help further the value it provides as a digital brochure.

Download a copy of our free team marketing worksheets here. Want to learn even more? Check out our book and video course, Unify Your Marketing.