Maybe you are a new web marketer who doesn’t match my previous level of ignorance. I often think, “If I had only known then what I am aware of now.” By “then,” I mean my early year or two in my adventure into the quagmire 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. In truth, I could fill a multi-volume set. It’s a bit embarassing.
Occasionally I try to keep new online marketers from copying my mistakes. Tips that if I had known them at the time I began my first Internet business venture I could have started making a decent income sooner, could have spent less time by doing it the right way the first time and wouldn’t have to tell embarassing stories about myself now.
Here is today’s life-changing advice: Every page on a web site is a landing page.
I laughingly 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 in line on their way to gym class.
If I had been wise enough to engage a consultant to explain to me how Internet surfers actually locate my website and how they act 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 professionally build a business website for me–one that actually had a chance of meeting my goals.
My business would have reached a decent level of success much sooner if I had known these things:
* 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
* Each individual page on your site and mine should be authored in a way that it contributes to the websites main purpose (sell, obtain leads, whatever)
* 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
* Distinguishing between a pretty website and a productive website
* Learning that spending some money early on can earn a lot more money down the road–and sooner rather than later
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. Meanwhile, there were plenty of other tasks that I could have had done professionally to allow me more time for my learning.