Prospects Don’t Always Behave As We Guess
I’m not sure if every online 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 easily fill a large 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.
Every once in a while, I try to share one of those bits of wisdom that have eventually come my way. 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.
Here is today’s life altering tip: Realize that any page of your website is likely to become a landing page.
I actually 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 progress through my site in an orderly fashion, like third graders marching to music class.
If I had been wise enough to hire a professional to explain to me how Internet surfers actually locate my website and how they act once they get there, my websites wouldn’t have looked the way they did those early years. They may not have been as pretty, but they might have earned a respectable income. 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)
* 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. 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.
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