Learn From My Mistakes

Maybe you are a new Internet marketer who doesn’t meet my former level of ignorance. “I wish I had known then what I know now,” I frequently lament. By “then,” I mean my early months in my adventure into the jungle of Internet business. I could fill an entire book with the stupid mistakes I made due to ignorance. It’s a bit embarassing.

Periodically I try to share one of those bits of wisdom that have subsequently come my way. 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.

My advice for today is this: Every page on a web site is a landing page.

I actually 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 been intelligent enough to hire a professional to explain to me how my prospects would actually discover my site and navigate around it, my websites wouldn’t have looked the way they did those early years. The sites may not have been as aesthetically pleasing, but they might have produced a respectable income. I guess I should have either hired a consultant or used an online marketer to professionally design a web site 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

* 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

* 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

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