Quiz: Every Page on Your Business Website Is a (Fill in the Blank)
Maybe you are a new online 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 Internet business arena. I could fill an entire book with the idiotic errors that 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: Every page on a website is a landing page.
I laughingly believed that every prospective customer who came to my site would first arrive at 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 found an expert who would teach me how Internet surfers actually locate my website and how they act once they get there, my sites would have been designed very differently. I needed to either contract with an outside expert, take much more time to learn before acting 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 don’t really care about entire web sites; they think of the web as a huge collection of independent 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
* Distinguishing between a pretty website and a productive website
* Learning that spending some money early on can earn a lot more money down the road–and sooner rather than later
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.