Insider Success Strategy … My Technique for Expressing the Core Value of Your Product by Nick Usborne

Some time ago, I received an inquiry from an entrepreneur who was planning to launch a new software program.

He had no marketing materials. Nothing. And he was going to need a website as the major sales channel for the program.

But he didn’t ask me to write a home page, or any other part of his site. At least, that wasn’t the first thing on his list.

Instead, he asked me to write the following:

• a 500-word article on the product
• 10 scenarios of how 10 different people might use and benefit from using the software
• and a tagline

I think he was smart to do that. Instead of diving directly into creating his home page, and the rest of the site, he decided to commission pages and pages of written material that would help clarify and crystallize the core product messages and benefits.

By asking for the article, he was asking me to think about all the most important things that can be said about his product and then put them together in an easy-to-read format.

Then, by asking me to write the 10 user scenarios, he was making sure that I thought about and understood how a fairly broad range of people would use his software.

Finally, by requesting a tagline, he was asking me to crystallize all that I had learned by writing the article and 10 user scenarios … and to express the core value of the product in about 10 words or less.

Whether the article or user scenarios would ever be used or published on his site or elsewhere is beside the point.

He knew, I think, that his website home page was going to be absolutely critical to the success of his product.

So he didn’t want me to start writing the home page immediately. He didn’t want his home page to be the place where I did my “homework” on his product.

I’ve since adapted this strategy for all the Web projects I take on. It works for all products. I recommend you try it too.

Before I sign off as your guest editor for this issue of The Golden Thread, let me leave you with this: Always remember that if you fail to communicate an immediate and powerful value proposition on a site’s home page or sales page, you’re going to create a wimpy page.

A Web page is like a Broadway show. You HAVE to grab and wow your audience in the first few seconds. On a website, you don’t do it with song and dance … you do it by getting your audience to read your headline and think, “YES! This is exactly what I want!”