What to Put on the Home Page of Your Business Blog

What to Put on the Home Page of Your Business Blog

Posted on February 13, 2013 by Michael Martine • 13 Comments

One critical mistake I see constantly in business websites is a default WordPress blog setup where the blog is the home page. After you read this article, not only will you not be making that same mistake, you will know what you should put on the home page instead.

A home page that’s just the blog main page can prevent you from being seen as a real business.

 

Why?

Because there’s no obvious product or service. There is a blog and that’s it.

It often doesn’t even matter what your tagline says or what’s in the header area of your page because people barely look at that that stuff once they’ve seen the logo and the first few bits of navigation links. Here’s a link to a Google image search on eye-tracking heatmaps so you can see for yourself.

What You Can Put on Your Blog’s Home Page (In Order of Preference and Impact)

homeA big fat giant link to the main thing you sell - Yes, I am Captain Obvious here, beating you over the head with the obvious stick. If you sell web design then put a big fat “get a quote” box on your home page. If you’re a developer, put big fat “hire me” link on the home page. If you’re a coach or consultant of any kind, put a link that gets the ball rolling on your home page.

Have you ever seen an ecommerce website home page? Of course you have. Notice how different that is from a typical blog home page. They couldn’t possibly be any less alike. It’s no wonder an ecommerce site manages to sell products and a blog page does not.

Product category links – If you have enough products or services to sell they need to be categorized, provide links to them by category. Again, you can take a page from ecommerce website design: they all have their product categories as main links.

Go for the smaller, easier commitment: build your list - Not everyone (probably most people) will not rush to buy what you sell right away, but they may be interested in the right information for a smaller price. For the cost of their email address, they can receive a vital report that could prevent them from making terrible mistakes or a course on how to accomplish something they long to do. This isn’t mutually exclusive with trying to sell the main thing, either, because if a visitor doesn’t go for the big thing, the next available choice is more appealing by comparison.

Begin the education process: link to your best content – If they won’t go for the big buy and they won’t even give up an email address, at least you can begin the process of educating them about what you do by providing links to your best content. This can be in the form of links to blog posts or your social media feeds or profiles. You may need to prove yourself first in the eyes of some people before they would ever commit an email address or actual dollars to you. This is what content marketing is all about, in fact.

Blog posts - Finally, yes, you can put blog posts on the home page of your business blog. But they probably shouldn’t be the main thing at the top. And if I were you, I wouldn’t publish full posts on the home page, either: use excerpts. Not only do you want to draw readers deeper into your blog, you don’t want blog posts competing with your home page for search keywords. If you don’t publish frequently, leaving the same content on the home page can affect your SEO.

This is still content marketing

home2You could remove all content from your home page and just make it a clean, simple proposition/positioning statement. I for one am loathe to remove any of the content from the home page that helps to make my case above a few clever words and an arresting image. I still want there to be some there there, if you know what I mean.

Often your email sign-up incentive is a piece of content marketing designed to educate prospects and lead to a sale, and may require a few words beyond “free ebook.” Most of my email sign-ups occur off the home page for this reason.

remove all doubt: test

This might seem like the tenth time this year I’ve said you should split test your home page, and every time I mention it you nod sagely and think to yourself “I need to get on that.” Split testing will remove all doubt as to what works on your home page and what doesn’t in relation to your main conversion goal. Not only can you split test your home page, you can also split test sign-up forms within the same page. Or, at least with Aweber (affiliate link) you can.

So…

How’s your home page looking?

What are you going to do about it?

photo credit: ~jjjohn~ and Nebojsa Mladjenovic via photopincc

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  • http://twitter.com/TiceWrites Carol Tice

    Michael, it’s like you’re reading my mind! I just prepped a training video for freelance writers in my current marketing class, in which I reviewed a lot of their blogs. And they’ve all got the blog as the home page.

    I usually advocate that the Home simply address client’s pains and how you solve them…but most of my folks don’t have a product they’re selling, but a service. You can sneak testimonials onto that home effectively, and links to a few key clips to convince clients.

    Biggest mistake I see is hidden contact info — get it in the sidebar so it’s visible on every page, not hidden under a tab. People can’t imagine how lazy prospects are online and each click you make them take to find information is another chance for them to give up and leave.

  • Erin

    Completely agree – I think it looks so unprofessional when people do this. And it’s not a user-friendly “website” either. I have an unrelated question – what do you think a good “time spent” is as far as minutes each reader spends on a 500-700 word blog?

    • http://remarkablogger.com Michael Martine

      Oh, my… that is unrelated. :) Since everyone reads at different speeds and has different levels of attention/distraction at any given moment, who can say?

  • http://twitter.com/Red8interactive Red8 Interactive

    Good points all Michael but, if I may, I have a small note of caution.

    We often see too much on the home page, even when our customers are “professional” designers. Consider the five second rule; in five seconds you need to do three things: assure the visitor they are in the right place, give them a good reason to stay, and make it crystal clear what you want them to do next. If there is too much content, too many choices, your visitors won’t know what to do and you will see the bounce rate go up.

    James

    • http://remarkablogger.com Michael Martine

      That is a great point, James. Well worth heeding by everyone who’s creating or rethinking their home page. I could probably make mine simpler. :)

  • http://twitter.com/write_clever Sue Neal

    Hi Michael – I’m not selling on my blog yet, so at the moment just have my home page set up with excerpts of my latest posts. I’ve been wondering what to do moving forward, once I start building my list, so this is helpful advice – thank you. I think it’s very important not to confuse people with too much information, so I’ll aim to keep it simple.

    Sue

    • http://remarkablogger.com Michael Martine

      Absolutely, Sue, and James makes a great point about simplicity and purpose in his comment.

  • http://remarkablogger.com Michael Martine

    I don’t have any experience with CrazyEgg, myself. I’m sure you’ll be able to find plenty of reviews of it, though. Glad you liked the post. :)

  • http://twitter.com/andrewrondeau Andrew Rondeau

    Michael

    With your great guidance, I have changed my home page offering my
    products/services and free opt-in.

    I now need to do a bit more re-designing to get it all above the fold.

    The temptation is to put too much on the home page!

    Andrew

  • Matt Spaeth

    Thanks for the this post Michael. I have been debating this in my head for my site and I am torn. I have a coaching business both internationally and locally. However, I also offer bodywork services can only be done locally. I want to expand my coaching sphere of influence and sell information products as well.

    I don’t have lots of traffic right now. If I have my products and services on the home page, will that slow my rate of reader growth versus having the blog on the home page?

    Personally, I feel like I am more inclined to subscribe to a blog than a business that has a blog.

    I am working on rebranding right now and deciding how I want to structure my site. How to integrate the local service offerring with the global offerring is leaving me a bit stumped.

    What do you think?

    • http://remarkablogger.com Michael Martine

      Matt, you can have a separate site for local or if you’d like to include in on your main site, have a page for it. Depending on what you’re using for a theme, it might be possible to have “sub site” with a few links that only go to each other and to the local page.

      Either way would allow you to focus your local SEO efforts on specific pages. It could be made obvious from your home page where locals need to click.

      I get your point about subscribing to a blog instead of a business. A good blog that’s worth subscribing to will get subscribers regardless of who’s behind it. For example, Kissmetrics sells web analytics. Their blog is awesome. It definitely gets sales for them, but also many people subscribe to it who may or may not ever buy their stuff. But that’s exactly how business blogging is supposed to work. :)

      My ultimate point is that if you feel a blog isn’t worth subscribing to because it’s by a business, then that business is not blogging as well as it could be.

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