Prospects Don't Always Behave As We Guess

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 easily fill a large book with important things that I didn't know how to do but that I tried, anyway. In truth, I could fill a multi-volume set. It's a bit embarassing.

Occasionally I try to keep new Internet 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: Assume that any page of your website is likely to become 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 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 been intelligent enough to hire a professional to explain to me how web users actually locate my website and how they behave once they get there, my websites wouldn't have looked the way they did those early years. They may not have been as aesthetically pleasing, but they might have produced a liveable income. I guess I should have either hired a consultant or used an online marketer to professionally build a business website for me–one that actually had a chance of meeting my goals.

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)

* 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. However there are lots of things that I should have outsourced (and that I now do) when I was first beginning.