Inside Small Business | Small Business & Home Business Marketing
Two Strategies For Website Home Page Copy to Make Visitors Stick Around
By Phyllis Zimbler Miller
A website’s home page is the most important real estate of that website. What copy you put on that home page may determine whether a visitor to the site will stick around — or instead immediately click away to a more “appealing” website home page.
What’s a more “appealing” website home page? One that follows these two basic but oh so important strategies:
1. On the web, less is more.
2. Tell people what’s in it for them, not what appeals to you.
Let’s look more closely at both of these strategies:
Less is more: On the web many people tend to skim copy looking for the highlights of a new site. If we don’t find something immediately that holds our attention it’s just too easy to click away.
The basic elements of this step are: — Short — and I mean short — paragraphs with a line of white space between each paragraph — Font size large enough to be read easily — Boldface subheads that provide important information by themselves — And a reduction of what you say to the most essential — leave much of the related copy for interior pages
Tell people what’s in it for them: Now this is for the actual text of your copy: You do not say how beautifully made are the hand-woven winter scarves you sell (even though this feature is something you really admire).
You do say that these scarves are especially woven to trap the cold air so that a person’s neck stays warm even in very cold weather. This is what a person buying a winter scarf for protection from the cold wants to know: How well will this scarf keep out the cold?
Many business owners do not want to accept this concept; they want to list all the great features of their product. But their prospective customers don’t care about the features — these prospective customers care about the benefits to them.
To write copy that attracts potential buyers, you must switch from talking about what interests you to talking about what interests the potential buyers.
Bonus tip: Use everyday language so people can get the important information easily. You do not want to create a mental stumbling block by using “sophisticated” words that may interrupt a person’s reading.
To recap, keep your website home page copy “simple” (brief, easy to read) and targeted to what your potential customers want to hear.
Posted on Tuesday, November 3rd, 2009 at 7:30 pm and is filed under Small Business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
