Blogger: Mary Keeley
Location: Books & Such Midwest Office, IL
I’ve been gleaning information from various marketing resources lately. This week I’ll share some general findings and tips you might want to apply to your own websites and social media usage. I hope this will be a highly interactive brainstorming exercise from which we’ll all benefit.
Reporting in their journal, Marketing Experiments (ME), a marketing research group, found that if your website doesn’t grab interest in the first seven seconds of a viewer’s experience, you’ll lose them. Their general audience is corporate marketers, but there are parallel applications writers can make to improve their websites and draw visitors to their Facebook and Twitter pages.
ME researchers wanted to know why one website had good “click-through” (visitors continuing to go deeper into a website) numbers, while others had more visitors backing out of a website. They ran an experiment and found that “clarity trumps persuasion.”
Apply this to a writer’s website. If on your landing page you are trying to persuade a visitor to continue to new places on your site by first giving a lengthy greeting, telling a story, etc., this might be the wrong approach. I, for one, can attest that I’m a seven-second viewer. If I don’t learn quickly what a website is about, I often back out and go elsewhere. I don’t have time to work to find the information I’m looking for. There are too many other similar sites vying for attention. How about you?
Results of the experiment showed that a website must answer questions 1 and 2 below in the first seven seconds, followed by equally clear answers to question 3. How can you apply these questions to your writer’s website? Let’s take them one at a time.
1. Where am I? Translated for a writer, you need to immediately orient visitors to who you are. How do you do this? By simply and clearly stating your brand. If you haven’t understood the importance of branding until now, and identifying your brand has been a fuzzy process for you, a new look at your website from this perspective might help you to boil it down. Take a look at your home page. How does it “shout” your brand?
2. What can I do here? Again, the enemy of forward momentum into your website is confusion. You must tell visitors what they will find and what they can do on your site in the remaining few seconds. These experts suggest communicating this in a headline format: “The goal of the headline is just to stop the user from clicking on the back button and leaving. The headline just gets visitors to read the sub-headline. Then the sub-headline gets them to read the first paragraph. And if you can get them that far, you probably have answered the first two questions and have begun to answer question 3.”
3. Why should I do it? Or for visitors of writers’s websites, Why should I be interested in getting to know you and your writing . . . and buying your books? Every element that comes after you answer the first two questions (in seven seconds) must answer this third key question. This is where you go into your warm greeting. Let the visitor know something about you and what makes your writing unique. The experts call this your “value proposition.” This and everything else you include on your site must clearly answer question 3. This is the place to direct visitors to your Facebook and Twitter pages.
What reactions did you have as you read this information? Can you see the value in organizing your website this way? As you evaluate your website, where do you see you need to make some corrections? (Special kudos to PulsePoint Design who designed our website and the LibraryInsider.com website. Looks like they already knew this.)
Cynthia Herron
Mary,I “gobbled” this down along with my freshly poured Starbucks just now! Do we have to wait until tomorrow for seconds? 🙂
Lori Wildenberg
Thanks Mary. Good info. I’m going to look my blog over keeping this in mind.
Lynn Dean
Very valuable information! Thanks so much, Mary.
Diana Prusik
Very timely information, since my author website will launch later this week. Thanks so much, Mary!
Tanya Cunningham
Mary, thanks for the great post with such usable information.
I will definitely be assessing my website and working on my
brand. I remember you writing about branding a few weeks
ago. Thanks for the reminder. 🙂
Sarah Thomas
I’m so looking forward to this week! And I think this advice applies to blogs as well as full-blown websites. So often I visit blogs and there’s no clear direction or personality. I just want to know who you are and why you’re blogging. All too often it seems like blogs are written by phantoms.
Laura Allen Nonemaker
Thanks,Mary. There is a lot of meat here and I intend to evaluate my website(technically a blog)in light of your article. I want to organize my site better in view of my children’s book coming out shortly, but not lose its existing flavor. I offer a variety of topics on one page right now and am considering adding additional pages for specific topics, such as on your site, to which the reader can go with a click once they see their category of interest.
Cheryl Malandrinos
I just redesigned my website, and I still wonder if it fits the criteria here. I like to think that it does, and I feel my brand is clearer than it was prior to the redesign, but I wonder what else I can do.
I look forward to more of your posts on these topics.
Sarah Forgrave
Awesome information, Mary! I think my website header shouts my brand loud and clear, but I’ll have to evaluate your second two questions to make sure I’ve got them covered. What a great post! Looking forward to more…
Melissa K. Norris
This is great. I’ve got some homework to do. Not only will this help clarify our website, but also can be carreid over to other areas of marketing. I’m excited to delve further into this and apply it to my blog and Facebook/Twitter info.
Looking forward to the rest of this weeks posts.
Mary Keeley
I’m glad you’ve found this helpful. It will be interesting to see how much these modifications positively affect your click-throughs.
Sherri
I started a blog about five weeks ago and am still learning EVERYTHING! I want to start a website soon to support a non-profit and these are great things to think about – and practice before I actually get started. The whole social media thing is new and I go from complete frustration at times to giddy excitement when I finally figure out something new. I think this post will remind me to look at my blog and (future) website from a perspective other than mine. Thank you so much.
Sherri
esthersdestiny.blogspot.com
Caroline
I appreciate how you broke down this information. I definitely have a few aspects to improve. I have a title and focus verses for my blog, but I’d like to establish a tagline. I’m still considering options. I imagine that probably would help with quickly sharing my “brand.”
Sarah Thomas
Cheryl- I just visited your site and had been to your old one as well. I LOVE the new header and think the new site is much clearer in promoting you as a children’s books author. Very nice! -Sarah
Sally Apokedak
Great stuff. It makes perfect sense. I don’t know why I didn’t think of this before.
My website is a mess. I keep thinking it’s just a placeholder and I’ll fix it up when/if I ever get published.
Mary Keeley
This is great interaction. Thanks for sharing your positive feedback on Cheryl’s new website with all of us, Sarah.
Cheryl Malandrinos
Thanks Sarah. I’m glad you like it. It was worth the investment, as the old site just didn’t have what I needed and I don’t abilities in that area. I feel my brand is more clearly stated. I made a point to remove my other services from the website too. I want my focus to be on my writing for kids.
Thanks again for the great feedback.
Kathleen Wright
This is like a course for me. New to marketing. Good info.
Laura Allen Nonemaker
Thanks, Mary for another most helpful article. My website for my first children’s book went live this week. I will use your three points to evaluate it and my blog. I already have been considering switching my blog to Blogspot’s magazine format. Can you give me your opinion and would anyone else care to comment also? Thanks.
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