Writing for Your Wealth

I’m probably the only person you’ve heard of who grins when she enters a port-a-potty.

It’s not because I’m weird (much) or deranged (much). No, there’s a story behind that grin.

A few years ago, a female friend and I were inline skating on a local trail and stopped to use the “facilities” afterward. After coming out, I wiped my hands dubiously on my shorts, and lamented that these darned port-a-potties always had dispensers for sanitary gel but never actually had any sanitary gel.

“Oh, I just used the soap,” my friend said.

I raised an eyebrow. “Soap?”

I was sure there hadn’t been any soap. In fact, I’ve never seen a port-a-potty with soap in it.

“Yeah,” she said. “There’s a bar in the sink.”

Sink?

…

Oh.

At that point I fell down laughing. The real kind of fall-down-laughing where you roll around and everything. It was quite a while before I could stop long enough to explain that the “sink” was the urinal and the “soap” was a urinal cake.

Now, lest you think my friend was dumb, she actually owned her a successful business back then and was a pretty smart cookie. She just hadn’t spent much time in port-a-potties.

By now you’re probably asking yourself what on earth (or in this universe) this has to do with your website.

Nothing. I just love sharing this story.

Okay, kidding. There is a point I want to make.

The people who build port-a-potties assume everyone who goes into one knows the purpose of all the parts. But here in the U.S., it’s very uncommon for a private residence to have a urinal, and most women don’t spend a lot of time in men’s public lavatories. Also the plastic port-a-potty version doesn’t look much like the ones in public buildings anyway.

Because of an assumption by the port-a-potty manufacturer, my friend was thoroughly embarrassed and disgusted. I may be able to grin at the memory, but I imagine my friend cringes every time she sees a port-a-potty.

It’s true that the portable bathroom next to the trail is there for our convenience and doesn’t exist to sell us anything, but if it were a business, it would have lost a customer.

It just so happens that I see a lot of blogs and sites, many that are trying to sell products or make money in some manner, that fail to announce what the point of the site is.

Either there is no tag line at all, or the tag line doesn’t tell the reader anything useful. You might see some vague mission statement for the company, but this doesn’t give the visitor an answer to the age old question: what’s in it for me?

In short, the people behind these websites assume visitors are going to automatically know what the site is about and whether there’s anything useful on it for them.

That’s an assumption that can lose you a customer or a reader.

I don’t have to tell you that people are impatient. If you’re like me, you’re one of those impatient people.

Visitors don’t want to scroll through a site to see if any of the posts pertain to them.

What if 95% of your posts are on fitness and are meant to sell your DVD on prenatal yoga, but on the day that a potential prenatal-yoga-seeking customer landed on the front page, you decided to discuss diet, or tips for staying motivated, or… port-a-potties.

That reader might stick around, but if she was specifically looking for yoga advice, she might not. If her first (and probably only) impression was the wrong one, she might not click around enough realize you have all sorts of yoga information in the archives (and that great DVD to boot).

Don’t assume the purpose of your site is obvious.

Chances are if visitors surf into your site and don’t “get it” right away, they’ll just click the back button. After all, there were nine other search results on that first page of Google.

Fortunately, this is an easy fix: create a tag line that explains the purpose of your site, and put it someplace noticeable.

That’s it!

And ladies, always be careful where you wash your hands…