Ok, I admit it. I like reality TV.
A couple years ago when my blog was new, I watched an episode of Kitchen Nightmares (Chef Gordon Ramsay) which inspired me to write a post entitled, A Lesson Learned by Watching Kitchen Nightmares. While watching the show I observed how all though Chef Ramsay is a Chef, he’s also an entrepreneur, and that particular episode inspired an entrepreneurial post out of me.
Two years later and I’ve done it again.
Landing page optimization has been on my mind a lot lately because I know parts of our site are in need of some tlc.
Back to the topic of this article, this time I was watching an episode of Jesse James is a Dead Man and what he did to train for the Baja 500 (an off road race). I immediately made a connection in my head with his training exercise and what you don’t want your blog visitors to do when they come to your site.
To train for the Baja 500, Jesse drove a truck through minefield with a computer attached to his head which monitored and tracked his eye movements during the drive.
What? You haven’t done this before?
After his first run through, the computer showed that Jesse’s eye movements were somewhat erratic and his eyes jumped from one area of the minefield to another. This told Jesse that he wasn’t sure where exactly he wanted to go.
After reviewing the footage, Jesse tried the obstacle course again but this time he made sure to focus his eyes on where he wanted to go.
As a result of being more focused on his destination and where he wanted to go (i.e. less erratic eye movements), Jesse ran the obstacle course far better than his first attempt.
You can watch the full episode right here. If you want to see the part I was talking about, skip ahead to about 8:30 in the video.
How this relates to landing page optimization
In case you haven’t made the connection already, the way this all fits in together with optimizing a blog’s landing or sales page is focus and direction.
What you don’t want is your site visitor’s eyes jumping all over the place. You want to guide them and tell them where to look.
By default, blogs suck at converting traffic into sales. There’s just too much to look at and their eyes will jump all over. Some of those eye-jumping areas include:
- Your header image
- Blog’s title and tagline
- Horizontal menu
- Big or blinking graphics (no blinking, please)
- Lots of links in your sidebar
The Takeaway
If part of your goal in blogging is to sell products and/or services, you need to direct your visitors where to go. Remember, the first thing a visitor will do when they arrive on your site is ask themselves, “What does this person want me to do?”
If your visitor is a blogger, there’s going to be a lot of assuming going on in their heads. They’re going to assume what you want them to do is read your blog article and are probably going to skip everything on your site and go straight to your content.
If your visitor is not a blogger, they’re probably going to see something on your site that “pops”, like a nice big pretty image. Simply writing a blog article about your product and then linking to the article isn’t going to do it. You need to link to a product sales page with very little, if none, distractions.
You probably don’t even want a menu system. In this way, their eyes won’t jump all around with many things to see and wonder about. They’ll only have one place to look, where your product and description is.
In fact, make them have to click the back button to get off your page while you’re at it.
July 17th, 2009 at 3:12 am
I want to keep my blog clean. On another business I have, we are going to create landing pages for our adwords campaign.
Jim Gaudet´s last blog ..Firebug for Web Development
July 17th, 2009 at 6:52 am
Hi Jim. Keeping a clean blog is good. My challenge is I always try to tell everything, so I have to watch myself.
Good luck with the AdWords campaign. You might already know this, if so, disregard – remember, Google likes to see links maybe down at the bottom which talk about “disclosure” and “conditions” / “Terms of Service”.
Google not only wants to return highly relevant websites to people who use their search engine, but they also want to return safe websites.
By being transparent and providing disclosures, your landing page quality score will go up which in turns means you may pay less per click.
Read here for more.
Maybe I’ll write an article on it. I’ve been meaning to write some PPC articles anyway.
October 8th, 2009 at 12:11 pm
John… great title for a post, I had to read it just to find out what it was all about.
I understand that there have been some eye movement studies done on people looking at web pages and they show a regular pattern.
Most of us start top left and look around that area, in a sort of F shape.
Lots of blogs have an eye catching graphic or photo in that location.
Keith Davis´s last blog ..easy peasy!
October 8th, 2009 at 11:18 pm
Hey Keith – glad to know my title worked!
People definitely browse in F shapes (read this article for more info on scanning sites) on websites.
It’s all about knowing your audience. If your audience are primarily bloggers, you know content will be important and that should go on the left. If, however, your target visitors are shoppers, they’ll probably be looking for a menu on the left.