In my house, every morning starts the same way. After my chipper as a blue bird 4 year old son wakes me up we go through a series of choices starting with breakfast.
Do you want cereal or eggs this morning, Bud?
Cereal please.
Cheerios or Rice Krispies?
Cheerios!
When breakfast is over, we head upstairs to get ready. He has his choice of two pairs of undies and socks, two shirts and two pair of pants. By the time he’s ready to go out the door for school, he’s made at least 10 of his own choices and he feels great.
If I had given him every choice I had in the house for breakfast, we’d never get out the door. If I opened up the closet and told him to pick one of his 20 shirts, he may get frustrated because he sees at least 3 favourite shirts that he wants to wear that day. Instead, I give him a series of choices that will guide him through what I need him to do and we avoid the morning mayhem.
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CALLS TO ACTION
When people land on your website, they’re faced with a lot of options like whether they should sign up for your newsletter or subscribe to your RSS feed. Scrolling down, they may have the option to visit your shopping page, or click on a button for one of your advertisers, or head over to your newest product. And all of that is on top of reading the copy or blog posts that you’ve written.
Just like it was important to steer my son through the steps of the morning, the same is true for your readers. You may have several goals for your website (building your list, pushing your social media, brand recognition, selling a product) but you really need to prioritize those goals. If your number one goal is to build your list, you’re going to want to ensure that no matter where people are on your website, they can easily find and subscribe to your list. You’ll want to ensure that when people first land on your website, the SUBSCRIBE HERE call to action is front and center and is eye catching.
MEASURE IT BABY
There isn’t much that can’t be measured when it comes to your business. One of the easiest things you can do is use Google Analytics. It’s a simple and easy code that can be plunked into your website that will help you figure out where your traffic is coming from, what pages are most popular, what keywords people use to find you, where your referral traffic is coming from, and more.
You can even set up customized goals, manage your Ad Sense accounts, understand visitor intent, and use the in-page analytics to see where people are clicking on your site.
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FREE MINI EVALUATION
Since this is my first post for Business Darlings, I thought I’d do something a little different. Anyone who leaves a comment below (be sure to include your website) will receive a FREE mini evaluation of their website which will be featured in next weeks post. Tell me about your main goal and what’s not working with your site. On FRIDAY I’ll choose one random site to receive the evaluation.
