Ahhhh – Seth Godin. If only you knew how much you’ve changed my life.

I’ve been reading Seth’s books for years now, and I can’t stop being amazed at how incredibly profound and emotionally intelligent this person actually is.

This book – is actually one of the first books I’ve ever read by Seth. Read it immediately after I founded my company – Website Voodoo.

So let’s get to it:

What is this book about, anyway?

If you have a business, or want to start one, one of the first things you need – is a website. A good one, preferably.

What this book will do – is show you how to make your website better… 

…by teaching you some raw, basic psychology that will help you understand how your website’s visitors think… so you can adjust your website accordingly… and make more money.

The simple, ‘duh’ type logic you’ll learn here will help drop some major pennies that will change your marketing (and your business) forever.

The #1 A-Ha moment I’ve had from this book / The main message

In order for your website to work and make you money (cuz that’s why it’s there for, after all) –

you need to stop thinking like an engineer or a computer, and start thinking like a human.

Cuz here’s the problem that’s probably happening in your website right now:

[divider style=”0″]

When most peeps who build a website for their business –

They think that the people who will visit their website are smart, logical, know exactly what they want, and have all the time (and patience) in the world to find it.

They think all they gotta do to get business through their website it so list everything they have to offer in it, and then the visitors – they’ll simply locate what they need… and decide to do business with them.

Yeah. It doesn’t really work that way.

Cuz in reality –

we are neither smart, or logical. we don’t know exactly what we want, and we def don’t have the time to look for it.

WE ARE BUSY. spoiled. lazy. and impatient.

We’re human, and your website should fit how we think… and not the other way around.

How to implement this A-Ha principle in real life?

In the previous, ‘A-ha’ section – I told you that your website should fit how we, humans, think… and not how a logical, put-together, patience (and totally unrealistic) version of a human would think.

But how do you implement this?

….

The easiest way it to compare each of your site’s visitors (that’s you, me, and every other ideal customer you want to buy from you) – to a monkey in the big, red fez.

Imagine this monkey is in some sort of a psychological-experiment, that’s meant to get him to do something you want him to do – like climb a ladder.

…

Now –

how would you go about making the monkey do what you want…?

If it were me – I’d offer the monkey a prize he wants – a banana.

So whenever I get the monkey into a new room, with a new task – all that monkey cares about is “where’s the banana?”.

Once it’ll locate the banana – it will try and get it – by fulfilling the task I gave him.

Now, here’s the secret:

If we make the banana super simple to recognize and easy enough to get – the monkey will do what we want. If not – it’ll lose interest pretty quickly and go someplace else.

And the same works for us, humans.

If you’ll give us too many choices and options and expect us to figure it out – you’re done. We’ll hit that ‘Back’ button, and you’ll never see us (or our money) again.

Why..? Cuz we just don’t have the time or patience to figure it out on our own. The web is big, and thre’s loads to see.

So instead of making us work hard – do the job for us.

And here’s how:

Make sure each of your website’s pages has only 1 banana for us:

One objective. one goal. one thing you want your human-visitor to do.

Then – use this banana to get your human-visitor to do what you want: To subscribe. Comment. Buy. Share.

It doesn’t matter what you want us to do. What matters is – that we’ll have one task, and one very good reason to do it.

[divider style=”0″]

Hope you liked this book summary!

– xoxo, Nataliya.