One of my new sites, MonsterGuide is getting ready for it's grand opening. Unfortunately, I have almost no idea what to write on my front page. Here's what I have so far: Welcome to MonsterGuide -- your helpful guide to common everyday topics. This is the front page of our website, but we don't have much to say here. Use the menu on the left to browse our collection of useful guides. Any better ideas for me?
One idea would be to showcase your latest guides, articles, etc or feature some guides, articles, whatever that you want people to see.
Randomly showing a summary of one of the guides will ensure the page looks fresh whenever the search engines spider the site
Will we are in the same sh*t. I always wonder what will I do with front page. A little overview maybe or I just use one of the articles I wrote and put it on front page ....
Explain the audience that you are directing your content to (including how complex your articles are going to be; whether your articles are making an aim to extend knowledge, or if they are going to be teaching you "How to Kick a Dog" from the basics. *Grins evilly*). Good luck, it is a difficult job.
The greeting is alright. You can also have a small box or something like it where you could have an excerpt from your guides named for example "tip of the day" or something in that sense. Including some images on the home page would not hurt it as well. Good luck!
Thanks everyone for your advice! Here's what I have now: Welcome to Monster Guide -- your helpful guide to common everyday topics. Our mission here at Monster Guide is to enhance your life with helpul advice, information, tips, and resources. We're here to be your guide for life. Use the menu on the left to browse our collection of useful guides. Our Most Popular Guides * How to Make Sushi * How to Build a Computer * How to Unblock Websites * How to Make a Website * How to Write a Resume * How to Solve a Rubiks Cube
Perhaps a selection of the better work, but also a random article, so the viewer has something new and interesting to see on each visit. Dan
This tells me nothing about what I'll get out of your site. "your helpful guide to common everyday topics"?? "We're here to be your guide for life."?? What are the benefits?
Ok here's what I'd do, you've got to look at it from a bigger marketing perspective. Take it with a grain of salt as I don't know your business model. 1st: Give a voice to the site. Make it memorable. At the moment it sounds like every other "me too" website. Get some personality in there. 2nd: Condense all that intro text into a short, snappy, benefit-rich slogan/tagline that you can use in your header graphic along with your logo. As your site is very general this might be hard to come up with. 3rd: Make the homepage a window the the latest/greatest guides/articles/whatever. About.com looks like it might be a similar idea so you might want to see how they do it. 4th: Get some benefits in your marketing. People don't care about what your product is (features), they care about what it does for them - what they get from using it (benefits). So "How to Make Sushi" is a feature. The benefits might be "impress your friends", "save money", "lose weight"... it depends on who your market is.
My business model is: 1. Publish articles on the web 2. Make money from the small percent of people who click AdSense ads Uhh... oh... That really is my personality. Yes! I really am that boring. Logo project hit some problems. I am going to restart it again tonight. I just changed it a bit. It now includes snippets from the top how-to's and that looks 100% better. I've received this advice a thousand times in my professional life, and I have never been able to internalize it. Getting my brain to do this is like teaching a cat to fetch. Worse, each guide has a different benefit. This makes it even more difficult to write something for the main page. I've made some improvement. I need to think more...
Personally I wouldn't rely on that business model, the amount of traffic you need to make a living from adsense could be used to make a small fortune via other means. I'd turn those articles into ebooks and sell them. It's all in the math... Say you turn those articles into ebooks (yes it's little bit more work up front) and sell them for $20 each. You setup a sales page for each book. Let's assume you get about an average conversion rate, say 1%. So, for every 100 visitors to your site, you get $20. How much are you getting from adsense for every 100 visitors? You'd be lucky to make a buck. As for "Getting my brain to do this is like teaching a cat to fetch."... that's why you outsource things you're not good at. Yes, it's a little bit of up-front cost but you get better results faster. ie You make more money!
Just my opionion but I think telling people to look on the left and browse the categories is waste of good real estate. In this day and age, people know how to navigate a site. Personally, I think the home page should be a nice three or four paragraph summary. Welcome people to the site and tell them what it is about. Talk briefly about individual pieces of the site and use this text to link to the pages as well - you want people to get inside your site - not go away and this will entice them to look further. Tell them what you hope to achieve with the site and how that will benefit them and why you have something in common with your readers. Lastly, just a quick ending line or two. Hope this help a little. PS - if you still need some help on Thursday (I am kind of tied up until then) PM me a note and I will write you something - no charge
My AdSense revenue last month was $27,415.02, so I have some idea regarding the amount of traffic I would need to make a living from AdSense. I've never been able to get into the eBook market. I keep thinking about it, and I've done a bit of research. I don't think that this content would do well in eBooks, but other topics should. I look at what Aaron Wall has achieved and I think "Hmmm... that would be nice!" My (limited) experimenting with eBooks shows a close rate of .17% -- for content which is a lot more saleable than this content. And that was with professionally written ad copy designed to drive sales. Plus, with eBooks you have a difficult time getting organic traffic. With this model, Google brings me customers almost for free. $1.12, on average, across all of my sites. I outsource more than anyone I've ever met.
This is an interesting thread...I often face the same problem. I think the solution is to have a front page with little text, and lots of 'calls to action' to entice people into the site. I just looked through a few sites to remind myself what others do - digg have a small paragraph 'what's digg' but otherwise little explanation, for example. Other examples of what I would aim for are deliaonline.com and travelsupermarket.com - especially the delia site, almost every link is enticing you to take a look (shame the site is spoiled by a big flashy graphic across the top). I can't say I have achieved the same for my own sites because I'm a crappy designer, but I'll get there one day.
My problem was the opposite. I had (have?) too much empty real estate on the front page. I think this is pretty close to what I finally have now. I'll have to add the "quick ending line or two." Thanks! And thanks to everyone who has provided advice in this thread! This is going to help me, not just with this site, but with all of my web sites.
Good stuff Will, it sounds like you're doing pretty well with Adsense. You'd know more than most about it! I haven't run any adsense sites for a good year or so. I'd still definitely look to branch out though - affiliate marketing & ebooks are always easy places to start. You don't want all your eggs in one basket And there's no reason you couldn't incorporate them into your existing sites, riding off the traffic you're already getting. If you only got a 0.17% response rate from a pro salesletter for an ebook I hope that your traffic wasn't very targeted. Targeted traffic to a pro salesletter should get you 1% relatively easily, 5% and higher is not unheard of.