Maybe you are a new online marketer who doesn’t meet my former 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 Internet business. I could easily fill a large book with significant things that I didn’t know how to do but that I tried, anyway. 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 foibles. 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.
My advice for today is this: Every page on a web site is a landing page.
I actually believed that every prospective customer who came to my site would first come to my home page. Those prospects would diligently read every well-crafted word 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 my prospects would actually discover my site and navigate 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 professionally build a business website 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
* 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. Meanwhile, there were plenty of other tasks that I could have had done professionally to allow me more time for my learning.
