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 quagmire of online business. I could fill an entire book with the idiotic errors that I made due to ignorance. In truth, I could fill a multi-volume set. It’s a bit embarassing.
Periodically I try to share one of those bits of wisdom that have eventually 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 tip for today is this: Assume that any page of your website is likely to be 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 progress through my site in an orderly fashion, like third graders marching to music class.
If I had been intelligent enough to hire a consultant to explain to me how my prospects would actually discover my site and move 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 design a web site for me that could have met my expectations much sooner.
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)
* Having tracking software that would allow me to diagnose how real people move through my site’s pages
* (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
* Recognize that an aesthetically pleasing page is not the same as a productive page
* 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.
