Learn From My Mistakes
Maybe you are a new online marketer who doesn’t match my previous level of ignorance. I often think, “If I had only known then what I know now.” The “then,” of course, is when I first ventured into the Internet business arena. I could easily fill a book with important things that I didn’t know how to do but that I attempted regardless. 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.
Occasionally I try to keep new online marketers from copying my foibles. 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.
Here is today’s life altering tip: Every page on a web site is a landing page.
I laughingly 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 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 discovered someone who could tell me how Internet surfers actually locate my website and how they behave once they get there, 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 liveable income. I guess I should have either hired a consultant or used an online marketer to build a business website for me–one that actually had a chance of meeting my goals.
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)
* 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
* 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.