What friends don’t say about your website.
Your homepage is the “face” of your business online
There are 4 things I want to see on your homepage:
- Enthusiasm
- Competence
- Results
- A “call to action”
There are 3 things I don’t want to see on your homepage:
- “Do you struggle with ----?”
- A headline that you would never say out loud to a client.
- A lot of words that don’t make me feel hopeful, excited, or agitated (or feel much of anything.)
Here’s the thing: your homepage is the “face” of your business online.
And it needs to be as clean, clear, and friendly as your real face is, when you are with people in real life.
Maybe even MORE so.
But when you show your homepage to your friends, there’s a good chance that they will compliment you. They love you, after all. They want you to succeed. Even if they think you are crazy for being an entrepreneur.
But even if your friends consider themselves writers, they may not be helpful readers of your website.
This is because writing a website is not writing.
I know, this may sound bananas. But it’s true. Writing a website—and writing promotional emails and sales letters—is actually more like TALKING than writing.
That’s because you want it to “sound” more like a conversation, and less like a college essay on Hemingway.
This can be intimidating at first. You KNOW what you sound like when you’re talking to someone who is your “ideal client”… but you may not have learned how to WRITE in that style.
The good news is: you can learn.
The even better news is that it’s a lot more fun—and “in the flow”—that trying to squeeze out some crappy marketing copy.
And the best news of all is that as you practice writing this way, it gets easier… AND you will get better response.
But unless you hang out with friends who are copywriters or natural born marketers (aka people whose enthusiasm is contagious, and sells stuff in the process), you will never know how to “do” this kind of writing on your website.
And if your intention is to use online marketing (that’s websites, emails, sending a newsletter, writing a blog) to build your business, this kind of ignorance gets more expensive with each passing day.
Unless you take a stand and figure out how to start doing it right.
Want more tips and AHAs about writing your website? Join Stella for a no-cost training call “Clear as a Bell: 3 Simple Steps to Writing a Homepage That Makes Your Cash Register Sing” on February 22nd at 8pm EST. For more information and to register, go to: http://tinyurl.com/7zyrlnb
Mighty thanks to Bull3T’s Flickr Photostream for the www on pavement
