I don’t know if every web marketer is similar to me. I often think, “If I had only known then what I know 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 mimicing my mistakes. 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 website is a landing page.
I laughingly believed that every prospective customer who came to my site would first visit 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 the order that I happened to find logical.
If I had discovered someone who could tell me how my prospects would actually discover my site and move around it, my sites would have been designed very differently. I needed to either contract with an outside expert, take much more time to learn before acting 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
* (And this one is most directly related to the tip…)Know that collectively, for most business sites, the “inside” pages of a site receive more traffic than the 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. But, when I build my first site, I needed to learn so much more before I moved on to the fun part–fun part for me, at least. Meanwhile, there were plenty of other tasks that I could have had done professionally to allow me more time for my learning.
