Your website is fantastic, right? You really believe your website is brilliant, agreed? Your are in no doubt that your website can change the world, yes?

Oh…maybe not a resounding “yes” for these questions, then. Whoops…!

If you don’t believe in your website, how can you expect your visitors to do so?

Every day I meet people who say “We’re not very happy with our website, but it does the job for the moment”, or “My website is just a holding site really until I get something better”, or even worse, “We don’t do as much with our website as we should, but we just don’t like it ourselves.”

Oh dear. Goodness me. And other statements of wonder.

Get real. If you and your colleagues do not “buy in” to your website and what it is trying to achieve, then you may as well not have a website.

New research confirms the importance of “believing” in something. The study from the Brigham Young University, Utah, USA, found that in the workplace the true believers are the ones who get on. People who did not truly and deeply believe in their company’s strategy tended not to get promoted. They also had fewer friends within the business and generally just did not “get on”. The research underlines the importance of belief.

When you “believe” you change your behaviour. If you believe in your company’s goals, you tend to do things which help achieve them. If you don’t really believe in them, but see it as “a job”, you do what you need to do, take your salary and go home. When you believe, you also commit yourself to that belief and undertake activities which help confirm that belief. In other words, “believing” changes what you do. That, in turn, leads to a change in the results you get.

If you believed in your website you would behave differently with it and towards it. You would do different activities, such as more Tweeting or Facebook posting to bring your website to the attention of more people. But what you say in those posts would reflect your belief and passion for your website and that would lead to more followers because people like believers. As a result, you get more people interested in your website which confirms your belief in it which makes your behaviour even more positive, confirming you were right to believe.

If you want true website success, you have to believe in your website. So the question is, have you seen the light?