Do It! Marketing Blog: Marketing for Smart People™

Marketing Concept: Your home page is your calling card. 

Question: Are you communicating everything that you need to on that all-important home page to get people engaged with you and your products and services? 

Let's back up one step. Before you can answer that question, a better marketing concept to explore is the key question: 

What IS the main purpose of your home page? 

Multiple choice answers for you to choose from: 

a. To create a cosmetically appealing "cover page" for the rest of your site

b. To concisely summarize all your product and service offerings

c. To showcase your primary offering that you want to highlight (your flagship product, current promotion, etc.)

d. To create an easy-to-navigate roadmap with multiple ways to access the key pages of your site

e. None of the above

And the answer is... 

Wait for it...

Hang on... 

Alright, you win - it's e. None of the above.

Why? Because the main purpose of your home page is to convey two (and only two) key marketing concepts:

1. We know what you (the prospect, reader, website visitor) are going through.

2. We can help.

Here are 12 home page must-haves according to our partners over at Hubspot: 

What do you think? Please share your insights in the COMMENTS section below and..

Are you a DO IT freak? Welcome to the club!! Please use the social media buttons at the top of this post to share it with your network. YOU are a rock star!

Are you are getting visitors, but Google Analytics are telling you that they are there one minute and gone the next? Getting traffic is only half the battle. Next you must convert them!

Here are some great ways to drive visitors AWAY!

1. Lose their trust right off by not having easy contact
information!

2. Offer so many choices to your customer they simply get
overloaded and leave.

3. Make a visitor click 18 times (well, 3 or 4 anyway) to get to the meat of what you are offering.

4. Have a great freebie to offer and require them to fill out more information than necessary... (their first name and email address is probably enough).

5. Create a really unique navigation system which no one has ever seen before. Have them figure out how to use your new whiz bang system.

6. Have a whole paragraph of instruction on how to perform a simple action...like ordering!

7. Go ahead and put some links on the page to some of your favorite sites so they will have a good excuse to click off your site. Who knows, they might want to check the weather while they are on your site!

8. Put several thousand words of text on your home page.

9. You have a great site about fixing computers and you can't wait to show a picture of your new puppy on the home page. Go ahead and put the picture on your computer site's home page along with a description of how smart the puppy is!

10. Create as many blinking gifs as possible and paste them all over the page to really make it stand out. While you are at it, use something like red font on a black background. Doesn't that look cool!

Don't let yourself go down these wrong design roads. Keep your site simple and focused!

Check at my radio show for more Internet Marketing Dos and Don'ts:
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/steve-weber

Happy Internet Marketing to You!

Steve Weber
http://www.StevesClassroom.com