Can You State Your Website’s Purpose In 30 Seconds Or Less?
If you can’t, there’s a good chance your readers won’t grasp it in the 2 seconds they may spend looking at it before hitting the back button. Think of it like the elevator speech you prepare to tell a potential client about you and how you can help them. If you can’t get your message across clearly and concisely your visitors will lose interest and move on. The kiss of death for your web presence and your business.
Three Questions To Ask About Your Website
- Is your purpose too broad? If you’re trying to capture too big of an audience you’ll just confuse and alienate people because your content won’t be targeted enough to interest them.
- Is your purpose too narrow? Have you excluded all but a very small group? The biggest risk here is that you’ll end up with a site of 20 highly responsive readers. 20 readers is still 2o readers.
- Have you done competition analysis? Until you have 20,000 daily visitors and the page rank to prove it, you need to be sure you have a chance to rank for your site’s keywords. Market Samurai and Wordtracker are great tools for checking how many searches are done for your keywords and how many other pages out there are targeting them. You’ll want to find a happy medium between search volume and competition.
The beginning of the year is the perfect time to look at your site or sites and ask these questions. What you’ll find is once you understand your website’s purpose you’ll be better able to communicate it to your readers.
Have you started looking at your sites already? Drop me a comment and let me know how you’re making out.
How things have changed in business. We used to teach that if a person had a 3 minute elevator ride with someone important, they had 3 minutes to pitch themselves, their product or whatever it is they wanted to pitch.
Now things have changed. Living in the internet world we have the 2 seconds you mention to impress a reader. There are so many things that a reader can dislike. On this page, someone may not like the red in the sidebars – back button. Advertisement too high on the page – back button. Too much (or too little) white space – back button. Page loads slowly – back button.
Make things more difficult, try to sell to people from different countries. We are on the internet, so we have visitors from everywhere. I've stopped counting, but at one point I had tracked over 70 country specific Google search engines that landed on my site. Google.fr or Google.vi for example.
Do people from different countries like your site? Can they understand it right away? Want to give them some help, add a translation widget high on your page. So many things to think about when you start looking at international markets, like the slower internet speeds that some countries have.
Hi Cindy,
You make some very good points.
If they are to be successful, an internet marketer needs to review
their site statistics to see where their audience is coming from and
make the necessary adjustments where possible. This is just the bare
minimum.
Then, they need to be studying their site hot spots to see where
people are clicking and what they're ignoring and make those
adjustments as well.
Testing, testing, testing is the new web mantra.
Thanks for your insightful comments and contribution.
Best,
Jeff
How things have changed in business. We used to teach that if a person had a 3 minute elevator ride with someone important, they had 3 minutes to pitch themselves, their product or whatever it is they wanted to pitch.
Now things have changed. Living in the internet world we have the 2 seconds you mention to impress a reader. There are so many things that a reader can dislike. On this page, someone may not like the red in the sidebars – back button. Advertisement too high on the page – back button. Too much (or too little) white space – back button. Page loads slowly – back button.
Make things more difficult, try to sell to people from different countries. We are on the internet, so we have visitors from everywhere. I've stopped counting, but at one point I had tracked over 70 country specific Google search engines that landed on my site. Google.fr or Google.vi for example.
Do people from different countries like your site? Can they understand it right away? Want to give them some help, add a translation widget high on your page. So many things to think about when you start looking at international markets, like the slower internet speeds that some countries have.
Hi Cindy,
You make some very good points.
If they are to be successful, an internet marketer needs to review
their site statistics to see where their audience is coming from and
make the necessary adjustments where possible. This is just the bare
minimum.
Then, they need to be studying their site hot spots to see where
people are clicking and what they're ignoring and make those
adjustments as well.
Testing, testing, testing is the new web mantra.
Thanks for your insightful comments and contribution.
Best,
Jeff