Prospects Don’t Always Behave As We Guess

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 quagmire of web business. I could fill an entire book with the stupid mistakes I made due to ignorance. 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 marketers from mimicing my mistakes. 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. I hope you find these useful.

My advice for today is this: Realize that any page of your website is likely to be a landing page.

You see, I believed that every visitor to my websites would come first 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 been smart enough to hire a consultant to explain to me how my prospective customers 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

* Recognize that each page on a web site should be created with the goal of achieving the ultimate purpose of the site (obtaining the desired action on the part of the visitor)

* Having tracking software that would allow me to diagnose how real people move through my site’s pages

* (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

* 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. 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.