Quiz: Every Page on Your Business Website Is a (Fill in the Blank)
February 9, 2010 by gfrancis
I don’t know 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 Internet business arena. I could easily fill a book with important things that I didn’t know how to do but that I tried, anyway. It’s a bit embarrassing.
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.
My advice for today is this: Every page on a website is a landing page.
You see, I believed that every visitor to my websites would come first to my home page. They would all happily consume the valuable content there, and then they would use that information to thoroughly explore the rest of the site in the order that I happened to find logical.
If I had been intelligent enough to hire a consultant to explain to me how my prospective customers would actually discover my site and navigate around it, my websites wouldn’t have looked the way they did those early years. They may not have been as aesthetically pleasing, but they might have earned a liveable 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 professionally design a web site 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 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. 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.
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