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.
I definitely agree with the taglines issue. My personal favourites are anything involving “ramblings” or “musings”. Somebody stab me in the neck! Please!
Bottom line is, if I don’t know what you’re selling, I’m not buying. Bloggers are often under the mistaken impression that they’re not selling anything.
If you’re asking people to give you something (time or money) in exchange for something else (information or entertainment), congratulations, you’re in sales.
It’s a great idea to get someone who doesn’t know anything about your blog to give it a once-over. It was great for me since 9 out of 10 people I know wouldn’t know a blog if they woke up in bed beside one.
Thanks again, Skellie!
I am thinking of redoing my Abut page, as currently it is not so effective as it could potentially be. Thanks for the great advice.
I really like your “copywriting” point of view on this. Instead of just coming up with some quick points that don’t really make sense, you come with the why, the who and the how in a an almost new way. I love reading posts like this, it makes us bloggers and webmasters think a little deeper than just the HTML. Thanks a lot Skellie!
@ Naomi: I couldn’t agree more — in fact, I love how you put your comment. If you don’t mind, I think I’m going to find an excuse to quote you!
@ Mohsin: I look forward to seeing what you come up with :)
@ Alex: Aww, shucks :). Thanks!
Skellie - I am always amazed at the quality of your content. I am honored that you use my blog header as an example. I will have to review my about page and tag line based on our very thorough explanation.
I don’t know if you know it, but you are by far the best meta-blogger in my book, and bloggers in my network all love your blog.
Skellie, as I work on a site redesign, in part based on some great ideas you sent me a month ago, articles like this come in real handy. For me, the starting point is clarity on exactly what one wants to accomplish with a blog. Your site is the epitome of clear thinking!
My personal gripe with sites… How do I get in contact with you?. Sorry for the comment spam… but it was the one thing missing from this otherwise stellar list. A contact page, form or even email address (which I advise against) is one of the most over looked portions of a blog.
Skellie, you seem to have the uncanny ability of posting an article answering the very question I’m pondering. This one prompted a few changes to my about page as well as the addition of a tagline. And I do like Mike’s point about the contact page. I just recently added one and it’s proved useful to my new readers.
Anyway, thanks for another great post. Of all the “metablogs” that I read, yours has proved the most helpful to me.
Nice post Skellie, with some great tips as usual.
I tried to be creative when I was writting my about page, but, I wrote about myself, before a gave info on the blog itself. I’ll maybe have to go and switch it around.
Thanks.
Thanks for even more to think or rethink about.
More work methinks, but good advice and I’m learning new stuff from you each time I visit.
I am currently working on some of the viral post ideas you gave me, thanks for those.
Skellie,
First advice you should give to your readers before they ponder the above is “Are You Brave Enough To Do This?”. Unless a blogger is brave or courageous and confident enough to sell his own site (whether through tag-lines or description in the About page), it would be difficult for him to overcome this.
What I notice amongst blogs which I find good reading are their confidence in themselves and they things they talk about. They seem authoritative. And this is evident from their posts, tag-lines et all.
Actually an “Your About page” might not actually be absolutely necessary, if your links/menu tell enough of whats to expect on your site. At least that’s my experience.
Great post with some really good tips. This is my first visit to this blog and I have found it to be very informative and helpful.
I will be back!
Skellie,
All very good tips - I’ve got a blog site languishing, mostly because it doesn’t know what it wants to be. Reading this gave me a kick in the pants to get it figured out.
BTW - you’re right on regarding the about page. I hadn’t read your blog before jumping over here from problogger, so one of the places I went was the about page. But I got a 404 error - page not there message - thought you’d want to get your webmaster to take a look.
Later,
John
Genius.
[...] into the blog´s archives maybe? There is one question, your blog has to answer to a new visitor: What can you give me?. Does your blog answer [...]
Skellie, this is all good, but I especially liked the part about persuading, not describing. What we say is indeed sometimes less important than how we say it. While search engines might not care how persuasive you are, bloggers would be well-advised to always remember that they’re writing for people.
As an example, I happened to stumble onto your blog via Problogger.net. That was your intro, but it was this post that grabbed my attention and is going to make me come back for more. That never would have happened if your post presented the same information but with no oomph behind it.
Kudos!
[...] What can you give me? Skellie writes a great article (as always) about the “Key question your site must answer.” [...]
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