Maybe you are a new Internet 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.” The “then,” of course, is when I first ventured into the online business world. I could fill an entire book with the stupid mistakes I made due to ignorance. It’s a bit embarassing.
Occasionally I try to keep new marketers from repeating 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. I hope you find these useful.
Here is today’s life altering recommendation: Recognize that any page of your website is likely to become a landing page.
I laughingly believed that every prospective customer who came to my site would first visit 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 discovered someone who could tell 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 aesthetically pleasing, but they might have earned a respectable income. I guess I should have either hired a consultant or used an online marketer to 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 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)
* Track real human beings to see how they move through my website, which is often very different from the way that I expected that they would
* 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
* We should all “bite the bullet” and spend some money wisely in the early stages of our business development, because that will lead to greater income sooner than if we behave as the iconic Mr. Scrooge
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.
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