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 know now.” By “then,” I mean my early year or two in my adventure into the jungle of Internet business. I could easily fill a large book with important things that I didn’t know how to do but that I tried, anyway. It’s unbelievable how many tasks that had consumed hours of my precious time had to be redone, once I overcame my ignorance bit by bit.
Every once in a while, I try to share one of those bits of wisdom that have subsequently come my way. 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.
My tip for today is this: Realize 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. Those prospects would diligently read every well-crafted word, and then they would use that information to thoroughly explore the rest of the site in an order that I happened to find logical.
If I had been wise enough to hire a professional to explain to me how my prospects would actually discover my site and navigate around it, my websites wouldn’t have looked the way they did those early attempts. They may not have been as pretty, but they might have produced a respectable income. I needed to either contract with an outside expert, take much more time to learn before acting or used an online marketer to design a web site for me that could have met my expectations much sooner.
Here are some things that would have saved me a great deal of time and money in the long run:
* 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 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. 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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