Maybe you are a new Internet marketer who doesn’t match my previous level of ignorance. “I wish I had known then what I know now,” I frequently lament. By “then,” I mean my early months in my adventure into the jungle of online business. I could easily fill a large book with important things that I didn’t know how to do but that I attempted regardless. It’s a bit embarassing.
Every once in a while, I try to share one of those bits of wisdom that have subsequently come my way. I identify one or two simple realities of the online business world about which I had been ignorant and that cost me a lot of money, a lot of wasted energy or, usually, both. I hope you find these useful.
My advice for today is this: Recognize that any page of your website is likely to be a landing page.
I actually believed that every prospect who came to my site would first come to my home page. They would all digest the valuable content there and progress through my site in an orderly fashion, like third graders marching to music class.
If I had found an expert who would teach me how Internet surfers actually locate my website and how they behave once they get there, my sites would have been designed very differently. I needed to either contract with an outside expert, take much more time to learn before acting or had someone with Internet marketing experience design a web site for me–one that actually had a chance of meeting my goals.
Here are some things that would have saved me a great deal of time and money in the long run:
* Most people find their destinations by using search engines
* Search engines don’t really care about entire web sites; they think of the web as a huge collection of independent pages
* Recognize that each page on a web site should be created with the goal of achieving the ultimate purpose of the site (obtaining the desired action on the part of the visitor)
* Having tracking software that would allow me to diagnose how real people move through my site’s pages
* More quickly discovering that, cumulatively, the interior pages of my website receive more first time visits than my home page
* Recognize that an aesthetically pleasing page is not the same as a productive page
* We should all “bite the bullet” and spend some money wisely in the early stages of our business development, because that will lead to greater income sooner than if we behave as the iconic Mr. Scrooge
I actually love the process of designing the architecture of business websites, now that I actually understand it, so I probably would still not do what I recommend to you: Hire a professional Internet marketer to build yours. But, when I build my first site, I needed to learn so much more before I moved on to the fun part–fun part for me, at least. Meanwhile, there were plenty of other tasks that I could have had done professionally to allow me more time for my learning.
Tags: web architecture, web design