Site Templates: Should You Use Them? | Chris Malta's EBiz Insider Podcast

Chris Malta's EBiz Insider Podcast

Here's a fun fact for you. If you want to build a product sales website, you cannot simply use an ECommerce website template straight out of the box, and ever expect to make any reasonable number of sales. And yet, guess what? There are tens of thousands of them out there. Why?

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EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Here's a fun fact for you. If you want to build a product sales website, you can't simply use an e-commerce website template straight out of the box, and ever expect to make any reasonable number of sales.

And yet, there are tens of thousands of them out there.

Why?

Because EASY. I say this over and over again in my podcasts, my articles, my books, my blog posts, my ECommerce courses...I repeat it so often, because it's so important. Whenever anybody tells you that anything in business is EASY, they're lying to you.

They just wanna to get into your wallet. Telling everybody that this business is easy is like having the master key to every wallet on the planet!

So because of EASY, every day more and more people get suckered into the idea that they can take a pre-designed website template full of random pretty pictures, slap some products on it, and start selling like there's no tomorrow.

No, no, NO.

This business is retail marketing. When retail marketing is done online, some of it is based in technology, yes. Hence websites. But about 90% of retail marketing, both offline and online, is based in Psychology. That's what marketing is. Psychology.

If you don't understand the psychology of retail marketing, you need to find someone legit who's willing to teach you. That's not easy, because there's only a very small handful of people in this business who are legit. Like me, for example.

This is important, because this stuff really is make-or-break, seriously. Here s just one of the many things you need to understand about retail Marketing in relation to psychology. We'll focus on this one because it relates to website templates.

Demographics. I'll bet you've never heard that word from the online con artists that wallpaper YouTube.

People like that don't even know this stuff. And if even if they did, they wouldn't teach you, because when you know what you're doing, you don't need their useless, over-priced apps, tools and amazing systems .

So anyway, demographics. It's not enough to just put products out there on a website with random pretty pictures, not by a long shot. What you really need to know is who is buying those products.

Why? Two reasons.

One. You can't sell the same product to all age and gender groups successfully at the same time. No professional marketer ever tries to do that.

Two. Different age and gender groups respond to different styles marketing.

So in order to be successful, you need to understand who your best, most likely customer is. This is called creating a Consumer Persona, or Avatar. It's a very important, detailed process. Creating that Consumer Persona through careful demographic research tells you what style of marketing that particular demographic responds to.

That allows you to properly create the style, graphics, typography, messaging, and social phraseology that you use to attract and communicate with your potential customers.

Look, I know that sounds all fancy and stuff. It really isn't. Owning a business isn't EASY, but this stuff isn't rocket science either. It's just learning the details, like anything else in life.

But it does illustrate the fact that you will never find a pre-designed e-commerce website template that is already built exactly right for the combination of the products you sell and the expectations of the demographic who buys them the most.

Fancy, pretty website templates are created by graphic designers. Graphic designers are not Retail Marketers. They're GRAPHIC DESIGNERS.

Don't get me wrong here. It's good to use a website template. There's so much coding in them that you don't want to build the site completely from scratch yourself. However, any website template you ever use for an e-commerce store will have to be modified visually and structurally to be an experience that your consumer demographic will respond to and buy from.

This means people like the bubbleheads on YouTube who bounce up and down and say things like "I just built a professional website in ten minutes with Stix!" are not going to be helpful to you. Not EVER.

So remember, templates in general are a good foundation to start with, but putting them online straight out of the box is very, very BAD.

If you want to learn a lot more about how this business REALLY works, check out my FREE EBiz Insider Video Series at Chris Malta.com.

Thanks for listening, and I'll catch you next time.