One of the problems with having a site ranking highly in the SERPs or being popular because of your activity and exposure on the various Social Media platforms is you get loads of traffic… but while it’s relevant to the overall theme of your site it’s not well matched in any specific way with your home page. In other words it’s trying to be all things to all visitors and so ends up being not particularly compelling for anyone.
Let me illustrate it with an example using a business like my own, say a site aimed at “Small Business Marketing”.
If my site is mature and well put-together with lots of great content and incoming links, etc. then it’s likely I’ll get traffic to my home-page from people looking for all sorts of different topics connected with small business marketing but not necessarily specific to the general theme of the site.
For example, they’d likely be looking for information on:
- Copywriting
- Direct mail
- Adwords and PPC
- Banner advertising
- Advertising
- PR
- Telemarketing
- Sales
- Social Media Marketing
- Etc, etc.
Now, lots of traffic might seem like a great problem to have, but it’s not — because if the page people land on doesn’t accurately match their intention and desire, they’re gone. And this can be a huge problem for website owners because most of the time your home page is by far and away the busiest page on the whole site… and you could have loads of potentially valuable traffic just bouncing right off it.
So what’s the answer?
Well, one answer is to take the top three or four most profitable sub-themes and have very clear navigation on the front page. So in the example above it might be the case that the top three topics are Copywriting, Advertising, and Social Media Marketing, in which case I could have three big buttons saying “If you want information on Copywriting click here”, “If you want information on Advertising click here”. That does work, but works best when you have only a very small number of top choices which take the vast majority of the traffic.
So what do you do if you have lots of subtopics and the traffic isn’t clearly inclined to a small number of them?
Easy: you filter your visitors with a survey and let them choose their own adventure, so to speak.
There are various ways to do this and many of them can be done programmatically on the page with Javascript and (in the case of Content Management Systems like WordPress, Joomla and Drupal) software plugins, so your visitors don’t even have to leave the page — instead, they simply click check-boxes and the software automatically leads them down the path they’ve chosen.
On the right you can see a simple diagram of how it might work for the small business marketing website we mentioned before.
At the terminal point of each survey we’d then offer them a tailored solution to their problem.
In the example opposite we might offer them a free report on the particular area of interest they’ve identified for us, or put them onto a dedicated email list so we can send them tailored messages. Now the really cool thing is you don’t even have to make each free report truly specific just so long as the title reflects their area of interest and the report does actually include information on the topic they’ve chosen (a strange quirk of human psychology leads people to appreciate and value anything they believe has been tailored to their specific requirements, even if it hasn’t been).
The BIG Benefit
The big benefit we’ve not mentioned yet is the double-whammy we get in segmenting our list like this, right on the front end.
The first benefit is we can tailor our very first offers to the area of interest they’ve shown, so the “copywriting people” will be offered a copywriting product, the SMM people will be offered a product relevant to Social Media Marketing, and so on; and because the offers are precisely targeted, our conversions will be high.
And the second benefit is we’re building a list of buyers. A buyer is a buyer is a buyer, and someone who’s bought, say, a copywriting product, is going to be a hot prospect for the Social Medial Marketing product in the future.
CHRIS CARDELL’S KEY TAKEAWAYS
So once we’ve run the course of the first, tailored product we can then put them on our “main” list and offer them everything we have.
You can apply this principle to any business you like, too. So try it, and let me know how you get on.
Please share here your thoughts on this article about Chris Cardell, share it on social media and express your views. To learn more about Chris Cardell visit his website chriscardell.com or Chris Cardell’s Media Company, Cardell Media Ltd. There is also an interesting video interview with Chris Cardell. His next life changing event is The Sovereignty Summit with Chris and Dan Kennedy on 29th – 30th of September 2015.
