How Content-Driven Websites Increase Sales

Here’s a post by one of our favorite Fairy Godmothers, Sarah Bray of S. Joy Studios: First, let’s clarify something. Sticky is good. We’re not talking grimy, gooey, my-kid-just-stuck-his-peanut-buttered-hands-on-my-keyboard sticky. Sticky websites are sites that people come back to.  Now, let’s talk about “content-driven”. Content-driven is geek-speak for a site that has really useful, constantly updated content on the home page.

Ginny’s story

Ginny has a website. It’s really well designed, and everyone she knows is impressed. Ginny’s business looks successful, but isn’t.

Ginny has a blog attached to her website. It’s also really well designed, and everyone she knows is impressed. She has about 250 subscribers and has a decent little community built up. She spends a lot of time writing good stuff that’s interesting and useful. Her blog is very sticky — people come back time and time again.

Right now, about 25 of Ginny’s visitors click over to her home page in a given week. 2-3 of those visitors buy a product or service in any given month. Ginny figures that all she has to do is get more subscribers, and then more people will click over, and more people will buy.

Sigh. This is hard work.

Ginny’s problem

The problem Ginny doesn’t know she’s dealing with is that her blog is sticky (people come back), but her main home page is not. She doesn’t know that people rarely buy on the first visit. She doesn’t realize that they need to be presented with the solution to their problems a number of times before they finally decide to buy.

This is why the traditional “home page with a blog attached” is so ineffective. The blog is sticky, but the home page is not. Therefore, only a small percentage of visitors are viewing the solution to their problem enough times to move them into action.

Hello, right people

Ginny has a revelation (maybe she read my other post about this topic). Instead of ushering people from her blog to her home page by sheer force of will, she’s going to make it easy for them. She is going to make her home page driven by her content.

Her home page is now her blog. Except she gets rid of all of the cheesy sidebar stuff, and only puts something there if it serves a clear, strategic purpose. She pays attention to what she labels her content pages. She makes it easy for people to find her products and services.

Ginny starts writing for the people she’s serving and creating products for. She becomes an expert in her field. Her community builds up her credibility, and wow. She doesn’t have to move people to her home page anymore. They are already there.

And the floodgates opened

Instead of 25 people visiting Ginny’s homepage every week, there are now 250. Even though her subscriber numbers have not increased. And instead of 2-3 people buying her product and/or service in a month, there are 20. Not only that, but it’s going to be easier to build traffic now, because Ginny is clearly awesome at what she does. Her expertise and confidence shines through her amazing content.

It’s not just a fairy tale

I’ve seen clients increase their sales 200 – 500% by using a content-driven approach on their home page. I personally increased my income 700% the month after making the switch.

I’m clearly passionate about this topic, because it’s such a simple solution to maximizing the traffic that you have. Dang it, it takes hard work to build traffic, and if we’re spending our energy trying to get our people to move from their sticky, comfy seats on our blogs into the stuffy, self-indulgent inner sanctum of our home page, we’re wasting a huge amount of time and opportunity.

Sarah Bray is a web developer and Twitter nut. She and her husband John hang out over at S.Joy Studios, making stuff and talking to people about how to improve their websites. They’re currently jazzed about LiteSites: a unique approach to cost-effective, professionally branded web design.