Maybe you are a new Internet marketer who doesn’t meet my former level of ignorance.  I often think, “If I had only known then what I know now.”  By “then,” I mean my early year or two in my adventure into the jungle of online business.  I could easily fill a book with significant things that I didn’t know how to do but that I attempted regardless.  It’s a bit embarassing.

Occasionally I try to keep new Internet marketers from repeating my foibles.  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. 

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

I actually believed that every prospect who came to my site would first come to my home page.  They would all happily consume the valuable content there and progress through my site in an orderly fashion, like third graders marching to music class. 

If I had discovered someone who could tell 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:

*  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)

*  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

*  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.  However there are lots of things that I should have outsourced (and that I now do) when I was first beginning.