Jan 10
29
Big Mistake in New Online Marketer’s Web Design
I’m not sure if every online marketer is similar to me. “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 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 eventually 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. I hope you find these useful.
Here is today’s life altering advice: 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 directly 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 found an expert who would teach me how my prospects would actually discover my site and navigate around it, my sites would have been designed very differently. I guess I should have either hired a consultant or used an online marketer to 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
* 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
* 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 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.
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