Every week I look at quite a few business websites.
Sometimes I’m looking at potential clients for my company, Ghost Blog Writers.
Sometimes I’m looking because I’m doing research for a blog post depending on the topic or theme for the post.
Other times I’m looking for competitive analysis. I’m looking to see what others are doing well so I can make changes to the GBW homepage.
And I guess other times some people will ask me for advice or whatever for their homepages. So a client might ask me to checkout their homepage and provide a few thoughts or whatever so they can make improvements.
Bottom line – it seems like I’m always looking at homepages.
And something I see from time to time is that businesses that have a blog will promote the blog posts on the homepage.
I wanted to examine that scenario a little to see if that’s the right thing to do…
The Purpose Of The Homepage
This is a simple question I ask myself when I’m looking at my own homepage and it’s a question I ask business owners.
The way I look at a business website is that it’s a salesperson for the business.
So I guess you can kind of think of the homepage as the face of a salesperson for your company. It’s kind of the first introduction to your company in a way.
The goal with the homepage, for me, is to kind of ease the potential customer into what the business has to offer them. The homepage kind of presents what the business does and from there goes through the sales process.
Let’s say you’re selling pens.
The homepage of a pen website would make it known to the visitor that the site sells pens. It might not get into too much more info at this point, but maybe it would ask a few questions to the visitor.
Who are you?
Do you use pens in your daily life?
What are you struggling with right now?
Etc.
Once you gather some information on the person you can direct them to the right places on the site and start presenting the information about how your pens can be a good solution for what they’re struggling with or what they’re looking for.
With that in mind – your sales process – it becomes clearer as to whether you should put snippets of your blog posts on your homepage.
Almost Always, Don’t Put Snippets Of Posts On Your Homepage
My answer is that you probably don’t want to put snippets of your blog posts on your homepage.
That’s always been tough for me to say because my company sells blog writing services to businesses. We want the blogs of our clients to do well and promoting the posts on the homepage would be one way to do that.
But in most cases getting someone that’s on your homepage to visit a blog post is taking them backwards in the sales cycle.
When I think of the sales process and blog posts I think of a post as being very, very early in the process. I compare it to real life where maybe you’re at the grocery store looking at ground beef in the meat area. You ask aloud a question about grilling tips and suddenly someone comes up in front of you. It’s the butcher behind the counter. He heard you asking about grilling and he happens to have a few good tips. They share those tips with you and you thank them. You feel good about getting that information.
Now you’re ready to buy some meat and this butcher just helped you so it’s time to ask about the right meat to buy.
In that scenario, the answer to the question about grilling is a blog post. Once you’re ready to purchase you move to the homepage and from there you move to the other selling pages on the website.
Make sense?
If you walk up to the counter and you’re ready to buy some burger the butcher is not going to give you grilling tips. That would turn you back in the sales cycle. You’re already in the buying mode.
Maybe after you make the purchase it would be a good time to get some tips, but not when you’re learning about what you’re buying.
Final Thought
In general, the homepage is not a good place to promote blog posts. They make the homepage more cluttered than it needs to be and it distracts from the goal of the page, which is to introduce the interested visitor to how you can help them. You want them to learn more about what you’re selling. You want to answer the questions they have about your company and your products and services.
If you do want to promote posts you want them to be somewhat hidden on the page. You want them to kind of be like your social media buttons in a way where they are findable if someone wants to find them, but they’re not a distraction.
Take a look at your homepage and remember what the goal for the page is and see if you can make some changes like potentially removing your snippet blog posts from the page.
