How important is your main menu? - Have A Stronger Focus

bychrisyohn

1.1K followers

5 years ago

Your main menu could either make or break the success of your website. That is the plain and simple truth.

How often do you see major corporations with privacy policies and disclosures of vast majorities in their main menus? NEVER!

I am going to do my best to keep this short and simple, although I must warn, I may go off on a tangent as I am covering more than menus in this article.

You have your niche, your website up and running, great! Have you configured your main menu and footer menu yet? How long is too long to wait?

The second point we have to make is; is your niche too wide with too many variables?

Be Aesthetically Pleasing

For this example, let's say our chosen niche is leadership focused in on public speaking. That is a good narrow niche that is easy to break into and not too broad. If we were to focus on leadership as a whole, you may be disappointed to learn that you're going to have a hard time.

Anyhow, that has nothing to do with being aesthetically pleasing!

With our chosen topic, imagine the following main menu:

"Home | About | Reviews | Start Here | Privacy Policy | Affiliate Disclosure

Blog Roll Side Menu (post ex.)

Footer: Empty"

This is what I see more often than not when reviewing content via site feedback here at wealthy affiliate. Every one of you have amazing ideas, don't get me wrong, but those that have a menu that looks similar to above, PAY ATTENTION!

Now let's take a look at a more simplified version of this very same web page:

"Home | About | Reviews | Start Here

Blog Roll Side Menu (post ex.)

Privacy Policy | Affiliate Disclosure"

You tell me, does that look better to you, it looks better to me and it makes it aesthetically easier to navigate, meaning more click throughs and less bounce.

This has been my experience with it at least.

Of course, you don't want to hide these policies entirely, you want them to be findable, but you don't want your readers to feel like it's forced into their face, they already have to have the EU Disclosure shoved in their faces do to recent law policies in Europe.

Let's move on to the next topic being covered in this article. I would split this up, but I'm NOT after SEO on wealthy affiliate. I am here to help you, you are here to learn a thing or two, yes?

Get Narrow With Your Niche!

I have recently checked out seven websites that I can recall that had at least four different niches, with niches within their niches on each site at a minimum. There is a lot of power in focus.

Do ever wonder why some folks who seem so simple are so much more successful than those who seem to be complex in their nature? It's not their nature, those successful folks have learned the power of focusing and not multitasking.

Focus on one thing and become an expert at it, you can do the other stuff later, little by little as your site has become a huge success.

Don't be complex, be simple, stress less, earn more. Sounds simple enough, yes?

Let's research a niche...

Rolling on from our previous section, we are going to research a niche, let's start with "Leadership."

Leadership in and of itself consist of a vast array of topics to cover. Just to name a few:

• Public Speaking
• Become Marketable
• Corporate Management
• Entrepreneurship
• Etc.

You get the point, you can't possibly become an expert in everything. Sure, you can get a generally good idea of it all, but becoming an expert takes A LOT of time in every subject.

In this case, if it were me, I would focus in on Public Speaking as it's something I enjoy, have an interest in, I'm knowledgeable in, and I'm very good at.

Let's research a few topics we could cover under Public speaking:

• Researching target audiences.
• Conveying your message.
• Understanding different situations.
• Speaking with confidence.
• Rehearsing tips
• Knowing your style
• Etc.
• Etc.

There are a lot of points that go into becoming a good public speaker, we could even narrow our niche down into one of these categories, but that would be entirely too narrow.

This is how your narrow a niche down, you write it all out, and research the points and their audience potential.

The Point Of All This

I did not write this to batter you, well maybe a little, haha.

We need to make sure we are showing our audiences that we are professionals and good authorities within our niches, good and simple aesthetics is a good starting point.

As far as our second topic goes, there are 5.6 Billion searches per day, mostly through Google, so please understand, narrowing down to a single topic will not kill your business potential, in fact it probably will help it!

What niches do you all write in? Have you been guilty of any of the previously stated points? What have you taken from this? Anything to add? Let me know.