Online Success Articles

I’m not sure if every Internet marketer is similar to me. I often think, “If I had only known then what I know now.” By “then,” I mean my early months in my adventure into the quagmire of online business. I could easily fill a book with important things that I didn’t know how to do but that I tried, anyway. 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.

Periodically I try to share one of those bits of wisdom that have subsequently 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. I hope you find these useful.

Here is today’s life altering advice: Every page on a website is a landing page.

You see, I originally believed that every visitor to my websites would come first to my home page. They would all digest the valuable content there and progress through my site in an orderly fashion, like third graders marching to music class.

If I had been smart enough to hire a consultant to explain to me how my prospects would actually discover my site and move around it, my websites wouldn’t have looked the way they did those early years. The sites may not have been as pretty, but they might have produced a respectable income. I needed to either contract with an outside expert, take much more time to learn before acting or had someone with Internet marketing experience build a business website for me that could have met my expectations much sooner.

Here are some things that would have saved me a great deal of time and money in the long run:

* 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)

* 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

* 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. Meanwhile, there were plenty of other tasks that I could have had done professionally to allow me more time for my learning.