What’s the purpose of your website?
For me, it does two things:
- Builds relationships
- Sells my products and services
It helps build relationships using two main factors: educational content and an email mailing list sign-up form.
My newsletter is where I continue building the relationship via email, so that’s the gateway to deeper relationships.
It helps sell my services by listing what I do, who I do, how I do it for, and how much things cost.
But the thing is, nobody buys without building a relationship with me first, no matter how “productized” I make my services.
Which means the primary focus of my website should be to optimize for relationship building.
And that means my home page should be prioritized the same way. It should focus on building the relationships.
So, I updated my home page today to include an email subscription form at the top.
I also better articulated what I do, who I do it for, and why someone should subscribe to my email list.
Previously, it was vague about who should read. And the email subscribe form was buried several full article lengths down the page.
Now it’s right at the top. Organized and easy to understand (I hope).
I’m never done, but there’s one thing that’s for sure: always make the main thing the main thing.
Optimize every page on your site according to that page’s primary goal. In my case, I don’t try to sell on the home page. That wouldn’t work anyway.
Instead, I try to build a relationship with content and a reason to subscribe to my mailing list (where the real relationship gets built).
Here’s the new home page top section (followed by several full articles). A snapshot in time which will inevitably change.
