Every web page should have a goal

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If you have a website for your business, you almost certainly have a solid goal for the site. It might be to gain subscribers to your email list, encourage people to reach out to you for more information, or even to purchase a product directly on your site.

Going a bit deeper, though, every page on your site should have a goal as well. Every page on your site should be leading users down some part of your marketing funnel, so take some time to think about the goal for each and every page.

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The goal doesn’t have to be some huge achievement; it could be as small as helping users understand one feature of your product, with a call-to-action at the end to learn the next piece. Really, simply having that call-to-action is the key to your goal on many pages.

There are too many sites that have great information, but then leave users hanging at the end of the page without a clear next step. While some users will take the initiative to find out more, it’s always wise to give a clear option for those that aren’t sure.

When we’re developing a website, one of the early phases is to write a brief content outline for each page. Even if you’re past the point of building your site, and you’re already live, taking a few minutes on each page to determine next steps for your visitors and then give them a clear way to move forward will have big dividends.

Google ranks pages, not sites

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When you’re working to improve your rankings in Google, it’s easy to slip into the idea of trying to improve the rankings for your entire website at once. While there is a bit of benefit to that, generally speaking Google looks more closely at individual pages than they do at entire sites. In fact, most of your searches on Google will lead to specific, well-optimized internal pages on websites, and not their home page.

As an example, I just searched for “best playstation games” and got the following results:

  • https://www.gamesradar.com/best-ps4-games/
  • https://www.metacritic.com/browse/games/score/metascore/all/ps4/filtered
  • https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/best-ps4-games-20261
  • https://www.techradar.com/best/best-ps4-games
  • https://www.polygon.com/ps4/2018/10/12/17965856/best-ps4-games
  • https://www.ign.com/articles/best-ps4-games
  • https://www.tomsguide.com/features/best-playstation-games-of-all-time
  • https://www.tomsguide.com/round-up/best-ps4-games
  • https://www.pocket-lint.com/games/buyers-guides/131744-best-ps4-games-the-top-playstation-games-to-play-now

You’ll notice that every single one of them was for an internal page on a website. I suspect most of your searches end up that way too.

Related is the often overblown concern about how well the home page of your website ranks. While you certainly don’t want to ignore your home page, most users will indeed arrive on your site via internal pages. This is important for two reasons:

  1. You need to make sure you optimize your entire site for Google.
  2. You need to make sure you optimize your entire site for your visitors. Most visitors won’t arrive on your home page to learn how great you are; they’ll land on a random article deep in your site. Does that page provide context and links to help them learn more about you?

Case in point, in 2020 we had a total of 20,036 visits to the GreenMellen website. 4,962 of them came through the home page, which was certainly a lot. While it was our most popular page, which is generally the case, this means that over 75% of our visitors arrived on our site somewhere other than the home page! Here’s a screenshot to show you what I mean:

Notice the number in the far lower right corner – 1296. This shows that people arrived on our site through almost 1300 different pages. Google didn’t just drop people at our front door — it took them to exactly the page that best answered their question, just like the PlayStation example we saw above.

If people come through your front door, you don’t necessarily know why they’re there, so make sure your home page passes “the grunt test”. If they land elsewhere, it’s because Google thought that specific page on your site was a good answer to your question, so make sure you guide them from that page to take the next step.

How I plan out my future posts

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Blogging daily is tough. I just passed six months and I’m going strong, but it’ll end at some point. For now, though, here is how I make it happen.

Lots of ideas

The biggest challenge for me is coming up with ideas. Following the idea of “long periods of thinking, short periods of writing“, actually creating each post only takes me around 15-20 minutes — it’s the work to get to that point that takes more time.

I have two older posts that talk about finding ideas, and these are still my best sources:

Whatever you do, though, be sure to capture every idea you have. I put mine under a #blogideas tag in Roam Research, but you can store yours anywhere. They key is to get them out of your head and saved somewhere so you don’t forget about them.

I’ll take those short #blogideas in Roam and add other small notes or links as they come up, but most of the work happens directly in the WordPress editor as I start building out the post.

Batches of time

The key to my recent streak is really the concept of batching. I write a handful of posts in one sitting, and then drip them out over the subsequent days.

This is partially only possible because of the types of posts that I write. If I was covering breaking tech news or something, I couldn’t hold posts for days at a time. By mostly writing more evergreen content, it allows me to stack some up. I generally like to have 6-8 in the tank ready to go, but as of this writing I only have two in there so it’s time to catch up!

In terms of specific timing for writing, I have two main windows for this:

  • Weekday evenings. After I drop my daughter off at dance and dinner dishes have been put up, I have about 90 minutes to myself. This is a big time for reading and writing. Ideas come all during the day, but it’s generally this time when I’ll pull them back out and start working through them.
  • Weekend afternoons. This varies a lot more, based on yard work, family trips, etc, but I often find a few open hours in the afternoons on weekends and can put a bit of time in there.

Every day?

I’ve mentioned before that I kind of cheat at the “blogging every day”, because while I publish every day I don’t technically write every day. That may change with time, but right now it’d be very difficult to do. Kudos to those that can make it work.

I’ll leave you with a link to see Marc’s writing process, which inspired me to create this post. While I don’t follow the same format as him, we have a few similarities and perhaps something in his writing will inspire you.

If you publish frequently, what does your process look like?

Obscurity is still your biggest threat

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There’s an old quote from Tim O’Reilly that I really love, and it seems to be getting better with age. Tim simply said:

Obscurity is a far greater threat to authors and creative artists than piracy.

While you can worry about people copying your content or stealing your ideas, your far bigger concern is having no one care at all.

I’ve seen this come up recently in two different places.

Full RSS or no?

The first was from a friend of mine in the WordPress community. I respect her work, and simply disagreed on this issue, so I won’t call her out directly.

Her post was essentially “don’t let people steal your content” and was a list of all of the ways you can lock it down. She took it further by encouraging people to only post partial content anywhere (including email and RSS feeds), to force them to click through to your site to read everything.

That can work to some degree to stop theft, but by forcing people to click you’re making it easier for people to ignore you. You’ll stop most of the spammers, but you’re also risking greater obscurity.

Rick Kitagawa

I see the opposite with Rick Kitagawa, one of the coaches in my recent altMBA experience.

Rick publishes a blog post every day. However, you can consume it wherever you want and you don’t need to click through to his site to read it — he just wants the message to get out. Some of the places he publishes:

  • You can read it on his site, of course.
  • If you sign up for his email, the full content comes to you there.
  • If you follow his RSS feed, the full content comes to you there.
  • He also publishes the full content on sites like LinkedIn.

His goal is clearly to spread his message, and he knows the results will come back in his favor. By making his content easy to find, consume, and share, he’s setting himself up to be a great authority.

That’s the kind of practice I like to see.

Long periods of thinking, short periods of writing

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Cal Newport is one of the great thinkers of our time, and puts most of his efforts into helping us all learn to think more clearly. His books (such as Deep Work) focus on escaping distractions to really focus on what you need to get done.

He recently shared a short quote from Hemingway on his blog that summarized much of what he preaches. It was simply:

“My working habits are simple: long periods of thinking, short periods of writing.”

As I’ve said on here previously, my primary purpose with this blog for now is to help shape my own thinking. If I just write without taking the time to think through things, I’m depriving myself the real value of this work.

I certainly post things on here from time to time that are basic “check out this new thing” kinds of post, but I try to put some thinking behind most of my posts. From the time I hear an idea to the time I press publish is generally a few weeks, and I’ll often combine a few ideas into a single post as my thoughts come together. When something is rumbling around in my brain, I tend to see similar thoughts that might tie in (kind of a combination of a photo walk and Baader-Meinhof).

I suppose that’s also why I throw in the “check out this new thing” posts, as writing on tougher subjects every day is hard to do (particularly while running a company and a family).

For now, I’ll try to keep at those “long periods of thinking” and hope that something good comes out from time to time!

The location changes, but the story stays the same

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The world of marketing is moving faster than ever. If you’re reading this near the time when I published it, you’re likely considering how Clubhouse and TikTok fit into the world of Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. If you’re reading this further in the future, those all have likely changed.

This inspiration for this post actually comes from the 2013 book, “Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook” by Gary Vaynerchuk, where he says:

Whether you’re an entrepreneur, a small business, or a Fortune 500 company, great marketing is all about telling your story in such a way that it compels people to buy what you are selling. That’s a constant. What’s always in flux, especially in this noisy, mobile world, is how, when, and where the story gets told, and even who gets to tell all of it.

The world he wrote about in 2013 is wildly different than what we’re experiencing here in 2021, but the idea stays the same.

While social media is likely a major piece of your marketing, it’s also important to keep ownership of your content. Whatever social content you publish today will likely disappear some years into the future. That’s ok, as long as you’re getting value from the exposure today, but you also want to keep ownership as much as you can.

In the end, though, as long as your story and vision stay constant, the medium can change all the time and you’ll continue to stand strong.

Marketing doesn’t stop

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If you own a small business, you’ve likely gone through at least a few “feast or famine” cycles. They’re easy to get into.

  1. Sales are solid, and you’re too busy for marketing.
  2. As a result, things slow down so then you start marketing more.
  3. Now sales are solid again, and you’re too busy for marketing.

It can be tough to break. If things are busy and you’re already putting in long days, finding the time to continue your marketing efforts can be nearly impossible.

One good solution for that is to set up a content calendar, so that when things are busy you already know what content you’ll be pushing out (via blogging, social media, video, etc).

If you’re not sure where to start with a content calendar, here are the slides from a recent Meetup we hosted, which should give you some solid ideas for getting started.

It’s My Calendar

Taking it further, you can block off some time on your personal calendar to focus on marketing. If you carve out a few hours right now, say every Friday from 10-noon, you’ll likely find that time waiting for you when Friday arrives. If you just “hope” to have the time then, it’ll almost certainly get swallowed into meetings and other work.

During feast times your marketing efforts may need to dip a little, simply due to your time constraints, but if you can take some steps to help keep things moving along it should really help avoid the famines.

Your website should bring value to your users

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The title seems obvious, but is often overlooked. We can get focused on other things that are indeed important, like speed, security and SEO, but at the end of the day it’s all about what kind of value your site brings to your users.

Headline, headlines, text headline, headline

The common issue we see is sites that focus on SEO to the point where the content on their site is a mess of repetitive words (like the headline above). It may help you rank a bit better in Google, but people will immediately leave when they come across text like that.

Taking it further, there was recently a thread on Reddit that dug into reasons that a particular site might not be ranking well. The site was related to Bitcoin, and Google’s Gary Illyes offered the following advice:

Ask yourself why would anyone go to this site instead of the thousands of others to read about Bitcoin? … Once you can see that the pages can be rendered just fine by search engines, this is your next thing to figure out.

This isn’t true in every case; sometimes you do need to focus on rendering, speed and other items. If those are a mess, it’s a problem. Once you reach a certain point, though, it becomes a case of diminishing returns. Instead of trying to make your site load 2% faster, spend some time producing great content that your users will love.

I’ve been around since 1976

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When a visitor first arrives on your website, they want to know three basic things (sometimes known as “the grunt test“):

  1. What do you offer?
  2. How will it make my life better?
  3. What do I need to do to buy it?

Something that isn’t on that initial list? The age of your company. That information may be important, and may eventually help to make the sale, but it’s way premature to lead with that — it’s like proposing on the first date.

I saw two examples of this with local sites today. One included “we have been in business in the Atlanta area for more than 100 years” in the very first sentence on their site, and another lead off their second sentence with “Since 1977, they have provided…“.

That can be great information for someone to have, but it’s not a good place to start. State the problem your visitors have, explain how you can solve it, and them know how great life will be if they take up your offering.

If they want to dig in more, let them explore your site and learn more about you — and then your 100 years of experience might be a more impressive piece for them to learn.

Writing every day vs. publishing every day

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I’ve been publishing a daily post on here since late October last year — I believe today is number 163 in a row. I’m happy with that.

However, I was careful with how I worded that sentence: I “publish” every day, but I don’t “write” every day. There’s a big difference, and it’s something I’d like to improve upon.

I explained last year why I’m posting every day (I said “writing” at the time, but that’s not really accurate), and those goals are working well so far. I mentioned Seth Godin and Chris Lema in that post, and as far as I know they’re both writing every day.

Seth has mentioned it in some of his podcasts, and Chris mentioned it in a recent tweet here:

Writing daily?

In my case, I find ideas throughout the day, almost every day, but I often don’t have time to really think through them. Many of my posts are written over the weekend, and then slowly released throughout the coming days. As an example, I’m writing this post on April 2, but don’t plan to publish it until April 9.

For now, I’m blaming it on my schedule. Some days I find time to write, and some days I don’t. I hope to get to a place where I can consistently find time to write every single day, and we’ll see what happens.

For now, I’m quite happy that I’m at least able to press “publish” every day. Eventually, if things work out well, I’ll be able to write every day as well.