Why websites are still “a thing”

Welcome to another EBWS blog. At EBWS, we don’t sell apparel. We sell Statements. We sell ideas, aspirations, inspiration, and beliefs. Wearing our apparel serves as a reaffirmation of your greatness. At EBWS, every design has a story. We don’t create our apparel only to look good. We want our designs to mean something. Simply put, our swag is designed to serve as a mindset changer. Check out our hottest selling statements.

We interrupt our regularly scheduled programming to give you some food for thought. Onlyfans dropped a gold nugget of a topic on my lap last week, and I would be remiss if I didn’t take the opportunity to write about it. First, I want to send a big ass shoutout to the people over there at Onlyfans because all entrepreneurs owe them a debt of gratitude. There is an old saying by George Bernard Shaw that goes, “if history repeats itself and the unexpected always happens, only a fool has to learn from experience.”  For those that don’t know, Onlyfans is a site where content creators can provide subscription-based services to allow their customers a way to view their content, obviously for a fee. From my understanding, content creators who specialized in the ass & titties industry were using the site to produce adult content.  Welp, Onlyfans decided to crack down on the amount of adult content running on the site, and that meant a lot of folks who peddled in ass & titties were about to be ass-ed out (sorry, no pun intended) come October. Since then, Onlyfans have backtracked and figured out a way to keep adult content on the site, but the lesson still applies.  If anything, Onlyfans has taught us all a valuable lesson about entrepreneurship, and that is, if your business is entirely dependent on something outside of your control sooner than later, you are going to get screwed.  Get it…adult content…screwed.  Wow, tough crowd. 

The moral of the story is every business needs a website that they have complete control over. There are several reasons to own a website, but the two obvious ones are that it is cheap as hell to have a website, and with the use of a wizard, they are effortless to set up. I did a quick web hosting search and came up with several affordable web hosting services, with some starting at as little as $3.00 a month. In addition, domain names can be purchased for about $15.00 a year, so for as little as $50.00, you can have more control over your company’s exposure. It is almost a no-brainer.  Outside of the obvious reasons of cost and ease, there are more “not so obvious” reasons to own your website.  Here are the top five other reasons all small businesses should have a website.

Coming in at number five: Control, control, control.  

Control is the name of the game in entrepreneurship. Remember, companies are always out to make a profit. For platforms like FB, Etsy, Onlyfans, if changing a third-party branding, selling, or marketing policy positively affects their bottom line, they will do it in a heartbeat and screw you. You don’t want to be at the mercy of that.  Although big companies like FB and Onlyfans have multi-million dollar budgets to invest in tech, most small businesses will be fine having a small website with a decent amount of bandwidth and storage.    

Number four: Helps to establish brand credibility, and you are accessible.

I always giggle when someone gives me a business card with the contact email address of yourname@gmail.com unless you actually work for Google. I mean, come on, bruh, at least have an email address with your business domain. Websites help to establish credibility and longevity. If you are unwilling to invest in designing and developing a solid website, what is your company’s staying power anyway?  If I buy something from you and the shit doesn’t work will you be around to honor the warranty.  A website offers people a way to find you.   Think about it, when you are looking for a company the first question you ask is “do they have a website.”  Would you want to buy a $200.00 product from someone with only an IG page.  “Got a website?” “Naw, shawty but you can get it off my IG page.”  Not a good look right?  By having a website potential customers can favorite your page.  Studies show the average person visits a page 9.5 times before actually buying a product.   

Number three: analytics is everything.  

Want to get to know people, study their patterns. Companies spend millions to use analytics to analyze people’s patterns. The interesting thing about humans is that we are creatures of habit. If we can capture people’s responses enough times, then over time, we can predict what their response will be to a similar situation. Having a website in conjunction with Google Analytics or some other click tracking will allow small businesses to understand their customer buying and searching patterns.  For example, everyone has experience with looking at a product and then all of a sudden you start seeing constant ads for similar products.  An analytics company tracked your click.  Okay, I am going to put you all on to the game, don’t say I ain’t never give you anything.  In Google Chrome, do the following

1. Search for any products
2. Right-click and select inspect
3. Click on Network
4. Click current screen(circle with a line through it)
5. Now click on any product
6. in the Seach type in analytics
7. the lines you see left is the code that is doing the tracking that is happening while you shop

Boom…now you look like a genius!!

Number two: product control.  

You can sell what you want(within reason). Facebook would have screwed me about 9 months ago during the whole COVID thing if I didn’t have my own website. On one of my brands, I was selling masks, but Facebook would not allow anybody to sell masks unless they were a certified mask distributor. Fortunately for me, I was able to direct customers to my website via other promotions like “Hey, visit https://gdswagshop.com/collections/tee-and-mask-combos/) if you want to purchase mask and tee combos. So although I wasn’t able to sell masks directly on FB, I was indirectly able to push traffic to my E-commerce site where I could sell my mask products. 

And the big dawg, coming in at number one. Exclusive brand attention. 

Everybody and their momma are selling shit online nowadays, and I mean errbody. You can go on Etsy and type in just about anything, and you will find dozens of vendors selling… just about anything…really, I tried it. My point is websites offer you exclusive brand attention. You don’t have to worry about someone’s ad popping up trying to sell the same thing but at a lower price. 

 So, in conclusion, channels like FB and IG should be auxiliary channels with the goal of not only extending your reach but pushing more traffic to your site. They are the proverbial icing on the cake and should not be considered the whole damn cake. So, as I tell my children, “don’t fuck around and get caught slipping, trusting these businesses to do right by you and yours” because trust me, your business profitability is not their concern. If you are reading this blog, then you can never say you weren’t warned. 

Welp that is it. Until next time peeps, deuces. If you like my content, please sign up for my newsletter so you can stay in the loop.