Nov 09
24
Prospects Don’t Always Behave As We Guess
I don’t know if every Internet marketer is similar to me. “I wish I had known then what I know now,” I frequently lament. The “then,” of course, is when I first ventured into the online business world. I could easily fill a book with significant things that I didn’t know how to do but that I attempted regardless. 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 in time 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-changing tip: Assume 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 first to 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 my prospects would actually discover my site and navigate around it, 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 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
* 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
* 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.
