Is the Home Page dead? Are businesses wasting their time building (and optimizing) them? And are engagement marketing media like blogs about to become the center of the corporate Web site?

That’s the question posed by Matt Ambrose of the Copywriter’s Crucible, which led to my asking a similar question on my Copywriter Underground writer’s blog, which in turn led to an interesting discussion.

The idea is simple; every page on the Internet is now potentially a landing page — especially search-engine friendly blog pages.

That idea is starting to generate some heavy, Russian-novel-level brooding in the marketing world, and it’s certainly fueled an explosion in landing-page specialty firms.

What’s causing this angst? Simple.

Search Engines Love Blogs

Blogs are suddenly outranking the home pages of the very Web sites they’re supposedly subservient to. Instead of a nice, neat flow of prospects — a flow that starts at the home page and ends up in the sales department’s bonus checks — prospects are making first contact with a company via individual blog entries.

That’s not a problem. But yes, it’s a problem.

After all, blog entries aren’t always in total alignment with a company’s marketing message, and face it; blogs are powerful engagement marketing tools, but now they’re being asked to do a lot of heavy sales lifting — a job often at odds with engagement marketing.

How should a company with a successful business blog avoid the problem — and capitalize on the SEO benefits of their blog? Fortunately, we’ve got choices.

Blog Centric Sites

Blog-centric sites are a viable concept (and offer advantages like easy access to content for any user with a Web browser), but they have their limitations, especially in the face of huge, established corporate sites. However, at the professional/small business level, they offer a lot of promise.

A blog-centric site contains all the elements of a standard corporate Web site, but focuses on the blog and home pages as the main points of entry. Each blog page must be configured to not only generate traffic and engage with readers, but to also move prospects to the appropriate static pages.

This involves a certain re-thinking of the “traditional” business blogging concept, but it’s hardly beyond the reach of a savvy online marketer, especially those with landing page experience. What’s critical is to avoid hype and corporatespeak — the sworn enemies of engagement marketing.

Blog For Authority, And Shuttle Users to a Static Site

Instead of rebuilding a site around a blog, consider blogging as much for “authority” (I call these “thought leadership” blogs) as engagement, and imprinting blog pages with “authority” response mechanisms (white paper offers, presentations, essays, articles, etc).

These inducements build credibility, and gather e-mail addresses and other contact information for ongoing marketing efforts.

In addition, blog pages would function as landing pages, so unnecessary elements would be eliminated from the pages in favor of conversion-oriented content. Marketing for engagement and fostering authority-driven response are no mutually exclusive goals, though heavy-handed marketing attempts will spoil engagement potential.

Build an e-Mail List

In an age of blogs, RSS feeds and e-mail redirection of blog posts, an e-mail/e-newsletter list seems like an anachronism. Yet they’re still marvelously effective, and despite what appears to be a duplication of blog functions, they still fill an important role.

For example, a blog could focus on building engagement while the accompanying e-mail list could serve a more direct marketing purpose — and do so without interfering with the engagement occurring on the blog.

It’s an interesting (and effective) one-two punch.

More to Come

Keep in mind I’m somewhat overstating the differences between choice here; online marketing is one vast gray area, and there are as many different online marketing solutions as there are companies.

What’s key is not to settle into a fixed perspective and wrong assumptions: home pages are always the point of first contact; blogs are for engagement only; marketing for conversion and marketing for engagement are mutually exclusive.

You get the point. Keep engaging, Tom Chandler.

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