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 fill an entire book with the idiotic errors that I made due to ignorance. It’s a bit embarassing.

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.

You see, I originally believed that every visitor to my websites would come directly 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 marching to music class.

If I had found an expert who would teach me how web users actually find my website and how they behave once they get there, my websites wouldn’t have looked the way they did those early attempts. They may not have been as aesthetically pleasing, but they might have earned 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:

* Most people find their destinations by using search engines

* Search engines view the web as a collection of pages, not a collection of websites

* 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

* 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.

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