So often we design our marketing to lead prospects or visitors on the journey we want them to take. We create our websites with home pages that tell our story and hopefully achieve one or more of the conversion goals we’ve set for our business.

The problem is we aren’t completely in charge of the journey a prospect might take when they find our company or start their search for answers to questions they may not yet fully understand.

For example, a friend might share a blog post you’ve written on Twitter, and a random passerby decides to click on that one post – and so begins their journey. That’s not exactly the linear route you designed in your strategy session is it?

Of late I’ve started to see websites adding what I think is a very powerful way to help orient and then guide visitors that happen to stumble on their site.

The About Us page is a standard feature on most every website, but it’s still really about you. What if you added a Start Here page that oriented the visitor and allowed them to choose what they wanted to do next based on their goals.

For example, if you serve several distinct markets you could show them the various paths they might want to trod based on their interests. We serve small business owners and marketing consultants so a Start Here page for us might ask you to identify which camp you fall into, so we can personalize the journey for you.

A useful Start Here page allows your new visitors to understand better what to do to get what they want, which is how you get what you want.

A Start Here page doesn’t even have to be a page. Copyblogger greets home page visitors with a choice right off the bat.

Amazon and Netflix personalize a visitor’s journey with dynamic content drawn from past visitor history or even search terms that led to the visit. Let’s say a visitor shows up and they aren’t on any of your lists. You might choose to show them some educational content rather than a more sales-oriented call to action. Marketing automation tools like Hubspot make this level of personalization possible.

Michael Hyatt has a great start here page

Ian Altman changed his About Us page to Problems We Solve and found that it quickly became one of his most visited pages.

The key to making this work is to think in terms of the goals likely visitors have when they visit a site like yours. Make it easy for them to get what they and they may indeed end up taking the journey you need them to take