At the third Action Seminar, Harlan Kilstein and John Carlton discuss how to keep people on your site once they get there. How to engage them so they don’t just click away.
Their comments:
Remember when I talked about people use Google to search for problems? So, they have this problem. When they arrive at your site, you are assuming a certain level of intelligence that they don’t have. People have to be told what to do. “Come here and give me your email address and I will tell you 7 things your doctor won’t tell you about your neuropathy.” Get their email address.
In 3 ½ minutes you will know more about neuropathy than all of your friends and even some of the doctors you know.
“6 things that you can pick up in your local grocery store that will relieve neuropathy pain.” “The 3 fruits no one told you about that eliminate neuropathy.”
The bottom line here is that you cannot bring people to the front page of your site and assume they are going to know what to do. OK. They’ll just; you know, it is like the Bill Cosby story about the kids in the shower and the wife says “now, remember to use water and soap”, because otherwise they will just wander around in there all day.
OK. So, when they come to your site, if you do not stand there and direct traffic, they are just going to wander around. Because they are looking for a very specific thing when they come to your site, the counter starts and they go up to 5 or 6 on the seconds scale, and if they don’t find it, they are gone.
So. Neuropathy is a great topic, if you have answers. But, you need to have a really good path for them to follow. OK? If you are doing a blog format you can have a sticky post at the top, that will say “Hey, welcome to our site about Neuropathy. We have a lot of information here that is going to help you solve your problem once and for all. Here are the sections that you are probably going to want to check out. Don’t forget to get onto our email list because every week we keep you up to date with the news that has come out in the last week. Our top post, about what your doctor doesn’t tell you about your Neuropathy is right below here. Read it and let us know what you think.”
Also, in a lot of sites like this, you can almost always break it down into 3 categories right off the bat. Were you just diagnosed with Neuropathy? Read this now. Are you suffering from Neuropathy, or do you think you are suffering from Neuropathy that has not been diagnosed yet? Go here now, read that. I guess the third would be: Are you not satisfied with the care you are getting )or have been getting) from your current medical professional…something like that.
I pulled those out of thin air, but take the broad mass of people coming into this and start to break it down and help them. Tell them what to do next. If you do that early in any site that you are on, Say “hey, thanks for coming here…and, actually, you can have 3 different sites, depending on how you are directing traffic here, and the more you can target that.
What is it that Kennedy talks about, the conversation…
Collier, yeah.