The Key Question Your Site Must Answer: “What Can You Give Me?”

Photography: The Fountain by Maulleigh

Over the last few months I’ve completed 63 simplicity reviews and given away around 385 viral post ideas (with more still to come!). In that time, I’ve examined and explored around 150 blogs and websites in order to give advice tailored specifically to them.

In this post, I want to address a missed opportunity I observed across many of those sites. The good news is that it’s something that takes minimal time to fix, and that the rewards far outweigh the time required to address this simple problem.

To aid in explaining this, it’s useful to think of visitor attention as a currency. Like money, it’s rarely given away unless the visitor can expect to receive something in return.

Does your site tell visitors directly (not by impliciation), clearly and boldly, what they will get in return for their attention?

First impressions count

If a visitor’s first question is: “What can you give me?” then it follows that this query should be the first question your site must answer.

Have you ever visited a blog or website and found it difficult to work out what the site was about, and why it was worth paying attention to? There might be no tag-line, no About page, no visual cues, and so on. Many of us lose patience in the confusion.

On the other hand, it’s easy to see how these mistakes are made. We pour so much time and effort into our sites that it is crystal clear to us exactly what we’re in the process of building. It’s not hard to forget that visitors arrive at our sites (generally) with zero background knowledge and no assumptions.

Many will want to know what they stand to gain (whether that be laughter, entertainment, advice or news) before they dive into your content.

There are a few simple ways you can help visitors do this.

The importance of a tagline

A tagline is generally one-sentence used to encapsulate your site (though it can be a little longer). The best taglines are catchy, yet provide a feel for what the site has to offer. Some examples, taken from Daniel Scocco’s list of the best website taglines around:

• Ample Sanity: Life is short. Make fun of it.
• Shoemoney: Skills to pay the bills.
• Slashdot: News for nerds. Stuff that matters.
• Get Rich Slowly: Personal finance that makes cents.
• DumbLittleMan: So what do we do here? Well, it’s simple. 15 to 20 times per week we provide tips that will save you money, increase your productivity, or simply keep you sane.

Each of these taglines is clever and catchy, yet gives the reader a taste of what the site has to offer.

Vague taglines are a missed opportunity to sell your site. “My thoughts on everything and anything” doesn’t help the visitor: as far as they’re concerned, your thoughts could be on monkey poaching in the Philippines, or mastering pick-up sticks.

If your theme allows for a tagline, invest a little time in working out how you can best sell your site to new visitors in a sentence or two.

Skelliewag.org’s tagline is:

It’s not particularly catchy and won’t make any ‘best of’ lists, but it does lay out who the site is for and what it offers. If you’re looking for a simple formula to follow, this could be useful for you.

Quick tagline alternatives

Not every design comes with space for a tagline, neither does every one of us have the skills required to add a tagline to our headers. In that case, your site’s title bar can be an alternative. Another strategy that works well is to place your tag-line at the very top of your sidebar.

What does your header say?

Images communicate something about their context. If a blog’s header image contains images of money, you can quickly assume it’s about money or finance. If your design allows for a header image, picking one that communicates what your site is about will help your visitors quickly understand what you have to offer them.

The vital importance of an About page

Unless your site is a personal one, ‘About Me’ is still a missed opportunity. It implies that the page will contain information about the author. When a visitor is still unsure exactly what your site has to offer them, they will not be interested in reading the author’s short biography. That’s a time investment which, for them, holds no clear returns.

Your About page is often a first port of call for new visitors. It’s where they go when they want a solid answer to the question: “Why is this site worth my attention?”. Many bloggers and webmasters miss the opportunity to answer this question.

A great About page will tick all these boxes:

• It describes why the content is worth reading.
• It outlines who will benefit from reading the site.
• It explains why the author is worth listening to.
• Lastly, it includes relevant information about the author.

Most importantly, persuade, don’t describe

You can do more than simply describe what your site is about. Description is important (it answers the ‘what’ question), but your words should, ideally, also answer the ‘why’. Why is your site worth paying attention to, particularly over other sites in your niche?

To use an example, you can see how I’ve tried to do this on the About page of this blog. Here’s an excerpt:

Skelliewag is about creating content your site’s visitors will fall in love with. It’s about using simplicity to your advantage. It’s about being innovative, unique, and creating something worth talking about.

I could have said:

Skelliewag is about content creation, simplicity, innovation and being unique.

The last quote describes what the blog is about, but the first quote goes further. It not only describes what the site is about, but also focuses on what it has to offer the visitor. It will help you create content visitors will fall in love with, it will help you use simplicity to your advantage, and it will help you create something worth talking about.

At every opportunity, sell your site, don’t simply describe it.

When you’re done

If you decide to implement the strategies outlined here, a good way to test the effectiveness of what you’ve done is to show your site to a friend or family member who has never seen it before, and who doesn’t know what it’s about.

Ask them to try and gather as much information about the site as possible, as quickly as they can.

After 20 seconds or so, ask them what they’ve learned. Their answer will be illuminating as to how well your site sells itself to new visitors.

This might seem like an artificial experiment, but consider that the actions undertaken by your friend or relative are almost identical to those undertaken by a new visitor.

New visitors also want to understand what your site has to offer them as quickly as possible. Their ability to answer that question (internally) can mean the difference between a loyal reader and someone who leaves your site straight away.