What can you see on the picture above? Lots of keywords, just like the tag list of my site. This is the tag graph of my blog created with wordle.net. Now when a new visitor comes to my homepage, he feels the same with my blog just like you’re feeling with this image above.
A few months ago when my blog was in blogspot platform, my homepage was full of 6 banner ads. When I met a new person via online chat and asked him to visit my blog, he said: “Is this an advertisement website?” -ohh a big failure that my site was unable to express what it’s for?
I figured out that a blog’s homepage could be the worst landing page ever to make your new visitors go away. Here are some simple reasons,
- Homepage loads slowly because it has lots of things
- The content is always changing
- The page can’t focus on new visitor, it’s ideal for returning visitors
- Homepage doesn’t have the content what visitor is looking for
- Harder to tell what this site all about
According to an average blog’s traffic statistics, 70-80% people coming to your blog are new visitors. They could be tech savvy, tech professional or could be a new internet user. 80-90% visitor wants a site to be perfect, or they will leave in few seconds. The rest of the 10-20% people will stay and explore because they have heard good things about this site or they are bloggers like you.
Now if you create a custom landing page for those new people, then I think you can capture some of them on your blog. Please take a look at my Welcome page.
Cartoon credits: Psychotactics Zingers
The focus
The focus of that page was to let the new visitor know what this blog is for? No fancy, I just added few words. A simple image with the logo will welcome my reader and I want them to memorize it.
A killer approach to get their attention!
On the first line I said, “BlogKori is not another “Make money online blog” -like thousands of others on the internet. This blog is focused to create a better blog.” -the reader may know about a lot of make money blogs and he might think it’s another one, so I said that here’s something new. It will make him feel that yes there’s something new and let’s continue reading!
Tell them what this blog can do for them
On the first line I said “This blog is focused to create a better blog” -now I have to explain it what they can do if they have a better blog. Just like if you say that your blog is about “Cooking” then you have to make it clear what you’ll provide in your blog, and what they will get from it?
Ask them to subscribe
Add the options to subscribe to your blog via email or RSS feed.
Provide available options
Like, I added the link to the Beginners guide section for new bloggers. Add your mobile page if you have one, add the contact option, author information, your social profiles and some other things you have.
Don’t say good bye!
Now your reader will react the way you express. If you say, “Thanks for visiting, come back again later” they will go away from your site. But if you say something like this, “Thanks for reading this page, now you can move on to my homepage!” or you can also add some of your best article links at the end.
Using your landing page
You can use this link on social sites such as Facebook, twitter and other ones. It’ll help you a lot when you add this link on blog comments. Use the landing page URL on your outgoing email signatures. Each new reader will come to your special landing page. The blogs that are linking your homepage, ask them to change it to the new welcome page.
Have your say
Do you think you need a special landing page for your blog? What can be done more with a landing page? How’s my welcome page and please share your blog’s landing page too!
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Great post Tamal, nice graphics also. Do you know how to create automatically customized landing pages according to the refferal source of the visitor (i.e. google, twitter, etc.)
@krjx: Maybe it’s possible but you should not automate referral visitors to landing pages. For an example if a visitor comes to your blog with google search, then the automation will take him to an a landing page instead of the search page and that’s a bad thing.
I use refer notes plugin to show special messages to each referrals from each site.
good article I need all the advice I can get to make our site as user friendly and inviting as possible. Ofcourse that will, in time, transfer into effective market relations, built on trust and value for time!
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Very interesting, never really thought of it that way.
Good post.
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This is a good topic, few of blogs that I frequently visit loads very slowly due to the huge amount of content on the home page. It might be better to use list of new posts instead of whole content.
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My take on this is to modify the already existing homepage to be more “new visitor friendly” starting with stating the basic site purpose along with subscription forms, important recent content, and rss options above the fold…then of course test/modify from there ;)
If this just isn’t feasible for the type of site then creating a seperate page would be ideal…
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@Chinese Girl: That’s a good suggestion! Instead of loading the home page, you can go to my blog’s archive page: http://blogkori.com/archives and see the last 30 post links of my blog.
You can also visit http://feeds.feedburner.com/blogkori to read my blog’s RSS -and that’s super fast loading!
Tamal, If you’re going to use my cartoon, it would have been nice to give credit and linked to the Psychotactics Blog, don’t you think?
@Sean: I glad to have you here Sean. I apologize that I didn’t linked your blog but I did added the tooltip that the image is from your blog.
Last night I searched your blog for the colored version but didn’t find it. Can you please send it to me? Yes I’m linking the image to your blog, thanks!
I put the url for our Welcome page as my comment link. So take a look! It does some of the things you recommend, except suggest where the visitor should go next — we were hoping they would select a popular post from sidebar or one of the posts we list by category. e.g. ‘blog design’, ‘writing content’…
But it never hurts to display a loud ‘call for action’ as you did with your ‘Get Started Now’. Thanks for sharing this and doing such a good job explaining by example!
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