A Pleading Letter to You from Your Website

By Stephen Palmer • March 30th, 2009 • Email This Post • Print This Post

Dear Business Owner,

Please forgive me if I sound ungrateful. I love my new look, I really do. I love to strut in front of your clients, my colors shimmering, my navigation sharp as an army regiment, my product store organized flawlessly. It’s just that…

To be candid, I want to know when I can be a real website. I don’t mind being your puppet, and I love that you’re my owner. But I can do so much more for you if you just give me the chance! I know I can! Just provide that one missing element and you’re going to see my power unleashed in ways you never dreamed were possible.

I want to run and skip and jump and sell like the real websites! I want to be liberated to display to your customers who you really are and how you make their lives easier. I want to be empowered to increase your sales. I’m craving for the chance to embrace my viewers with all the comfort of your success stories. I’m wishing upon a star for the chance to show up on search engines.

But alas, until you finish me, I’ll just be discarded as the good-looking marionette that I am. Ahh, if only…

If only my content were written professionally like a real website. Then people could see the truth beyond the naked, bland copy. I need to be much more than a pretty face — I need to be dressed in the tuxedo of sharp copywriting. I need to have the substance and persuasive power that only professional writing can provide. I need people to pay rapt attention to me and spend quality time with me! I’m begging you to save me before I get eaten by the whale of predictability.

Please, please hire a professional copywriter to infuse me with the piercing light of persuasion! I don’t want be a donkey of a website like all my competitors — I want to be a real website!

My text seems like such a small part of me, which is why so many business owners ignore it. Yet it’s the intelligence behind my good looks, the spirit that makes my body move and my voice sing. It is the core of what makes me interact with your customers like a best friend and a trusted expert.

The world was created with words. All I’m asking for is the opportunity to magnify and explode the world of your business with the addition of the right words, carefully placed by a master craftsman. Is that too much to ask?

What? Is it the price you’re worried about? But what about the cost of leaving me naked, exposed in my mediocrity? I promise you that the price will seem miniscule compared to what I can do for you once I’m completed.

It’s time for you and I to escape from Mediocre Island. It’s time for you to hire a Fairy Copywriter and make me a real website. It’s time for you to cut away my limitations and breathe life into me. A well-designed but poorly-written website is like a puppet on a string — it may look good, but you’ll never access the full power of what it could be.

Thanks for listening, and I can’t wait to be real!

Earnestly,
Your Website

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Stephen Palmer is a marketing consultant and persuasive writer with KGaps Consulting, a co-founder of The Center for Social Leadership, and the New York Times best-selling co-author of Killing Sacred Cows: Overcoming the Financial Myths that are Destroying Your Prosperity.

He is a liberal-arts graduate of George Wythe University and a graduate of the “non-traditional business school” Wizard Academy.

Stephen resides in Round Rock, Texas with his gorgeous wife Karina, awesome son Alex, and princess daughters Libby, Avery, and Laela. Stephen and Karina blog about their magical life on Palmer Journeys.