Your homepage is one of the most highly visited pages on your website.
The way people get there differs, of course. Sometimes they see the homepage first. Many other times they’ll find a content page and quickly browse to the homepage.
What matters is that in most cases, people will quickly navigate there because it gives them (or SHOULD, at least) a quick summary of who you are and how you can help them.
And in this article I’m going to show you how to turn your homepage into the ULTIMATE selling tool.
The Purpose Of Your Homepage
If you know about copywriting, you know that the purpose of the headline isn’t to make the sale. It’s to get the person to read the first line of the page.
Your homepage is the same.
The purpose of your homepage is NOT necessarily to make a sale. And it’s NOT to get a lead (unless you’re using the feature box, of course).
Instead, the purpose of your homepage is to funnel people DEEPER into your website and show how you can help them. It’s to weed out people who shouldn’t be there, and funnel the correct prospects into the correct area of your website.
(Editor’s note: That’s one of the reasons why we love Resource Pages here at DIYthemes. That lets your visitors find the pages they want the most).
For example, let’s say you’re a service professional like me and have services… products… and free reports.
What you need to do is very quickly show your different target audience how you can help them, and allow them to self-select the area of the site you want them to go.
So if you have products, services and free gifts to build your list… you quickly say what you do and then follow that by giving them the options of getting more information about your products, services or free gifts.
Think about when you walk into a grocery store. They don’t have everything in the store piled into a giant mountain of products. They have aisles which let you self-select what you’re there for.
If you’re there for fruits, you go into that section. If you’re there for meats, you go to that section. And so forth and so on.
And, of course, if that store can help you in more ways than one (like if you need fruits AND vegetables), you’ll end up getting your fruits, then going back to the vegetable aisle.
Setting up your homepage this way aligns you with the way humans naturally think… in terms of broadly categorizing and then narrowing down.
Competing Objectives
On ANY page with a call to action, you must figure out what the MAIN goal is. Maybe it’s to buy your product. Maybe it’s to sign up for a free report. Or maybe it’s to fill out a form to get a free consultation.
Whatever the case is, you should keep your calls to action to a minimum. Even on the homepage. If you offer too many choices, people will get shell-shocked, and slip into analysis paralysis. That’s why categorizing them into the next step is such a powerful way to drive people through your website.
But let’s say you have three very different, but very important objectives. Again we’ll go back to the service professional who has services, products and free reports.
What you have to do is prioritize your objectives, and present them in a way that showcases your #1 objective and makes the other two slightly less noticeable.
You can do this in various ways, including…
- Having a bigger, brighter call to action for your main objective
- Having smaller, less noticeable calls to action for your other objectives
- Placing your main objective first, followed by #2 and #3
- Adding arrows, pointing to your main objective
- Using callout images to highlight that objective
Remember… no two objectives are ever completely equal. That’s why you must know your numbers, as well as what type of traffic is hitting your site. If you know that your services bring in 85% of your revenue… you may want to focus more on your services than your products.
However, if you’re funneling people to your products and upselling them to your services… you might want to focus on your products. It all depends. The better you know your metrics, the better decision you’ll be able to make.
Keeping The Focus On The Visitor
Most homepages talk about “me, me, me“. I do this, I do that, I’ve gotten these results.
That’s a mistake.
Of course you’re sometimes forced to mention yourself when talking about what you do. However you have to then quickly spin that into the benefit for the visitor.
For example instead of saying “I’ve gotten X, X and X results”…
You say… “I’ve gotten X, X and X results for my clients due to a specific formula I developed for creating reliable results each and every time. That makes it risk-free for you, and just in case something happens and you don’t get X result, you’re still backed by my full money back guarantee.
See the difference?
The first was “me” focused. The second was “you” focused.
If you’ve ever read the book “How To Win Friends And Influence People”, you know that the secret to persuasion and being instantly likable is being interested versus interesting.
You-focused selling is the equivalent of being interested… instead of trying to flaunt yourself and be interesting.
Armed with that knowledge, I want to give you a little homework. I want you to go take a good, hard look at your homepage and see how closely it comes to modeling what I’ve described above. If you’re not even close, that’s fine. Take a good 30-60 minutes and plan out what you think would be the perfect homepage for your website.
Then, get it implemented and of course track your results. I think you’ll be delighted by the increase in conversions đŸ™‚
