I don’t know if every Internet marketer is similar to me. “I wish I had known then what I know now,” I frequently lament. The “then,” of course, is when I first ventured into the Internet business arena. I could fill an entire book with the stupid mistakes I made due to ignorance. In truth, I could fill a multi-volume set. It’s a bit embarassing.
Occasionally I try to keep new marketers from mimicing 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. I hope you find these useful.
Here is today’s life altering recommendation: Every page on a website is a landing page.
I actually believed that every prospective customer 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 found an expert who would teach 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 guess I should have either hired a consultant or used an online marketer to professionally design a web site for me that could have met my expectations much sooner.
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 view the web as a collection of pages, not a collection of websites
* 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
* (And this one is most directly related to the tip…)Know that collectively, for most business sites, the “inside” pages of a site receive more traffic than the home page
* Recognize that an aesthetically pleasing page is not the same as a productive page
* 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. 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. However there are lots of things that I should have outsourced (and that I now do) when I was first beginning.
