Prospects Don’t Always Behave As We Guess

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I don’t know if every web 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 idiotic errors that I made due to ignorance. In truth, I could fill a multi-volume set. It’s a bit embarrassing.

Occasionally I try to keep new marketers from repeating 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 embarrassing stories about myself now. I hope you find these useful.

My tip for today is this: Recognize that any page of your website is likely to be a landing page.

You see, I originally believed that every visitor to my websites would come directly to my home page. They would all happily consume the valuable content there, and then they would use that information to thoroughly explore the rest of the site in the order that I happened to find logical.

If I had discovered someone who could tell me how my prospective customers would actually discover my site and move around it, my sites would have been designed very differently. I guess I should have either hired a consultant or had someone with Internet marketing experience 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:

* Understand that search engines do not view the Internet as a collection of websites; instead they see a collection of individual 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 truly enjoy building websites, so that is not something that I would have wanted to have outsourced. However there are lots of things that I should have outsourced (and that I now do) when I was first beginning.

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