The Honest Way

It’s not often that I make serious changes to the site’s homepage, but this evening I decided to do just that.

A couple of months ago, I put the site up for review in one of the more serious marketing forums and it got a bit of a slating from one of the senior and very experienced members. What it boiled down to was that the homepage was too busy. There was just too much there to detract from the task of getting a visitor to a) sign up to my free offer and b) navigate to one of my other pages, for instance the articles page.

He was right, of course. But I was hesitant to go so far as to remove all my nice ads and affiliate links that had accumulated in the sidebar. My logic was that those links were there to generate some income from the site. I was wrong about that too.

You see, the most important thing about your homepage should be its simplicity and its ability to create enough desire in your visitor to want to see more of the website. It should also make them want to sign up to your list.

So, after much consternation and debilitation, I took the plunge and with one fell swoop removed ALL of my ads from the homepage. Not even the Amazon search box escaped the cull!

And do you know what? I actually like it better now!

All the ads are there in the other pages and if a visitor is keen enough to want to navigate elsewhere in the site, then they’ll still get to see the ads and maybe even want to click on them. At least they will have seen enough of the site to hopefully convince them to return soon to see what has been updated or added.

So we live and learn!

Thanks for looking in - and while you’re here, go have a look at the homepage!

Terry Didcott
THE HONEST WAY