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.” The “then,” of course, is when I first ventured into the Internet business arena. 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.

Every once in a while, 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. I hope you find these useful.

My tip for today is this: Every page on a website is a landing page.

You see, I originally believed that every visitor to my websites would come directly 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 in line on their way to gym class.

If I had found an expert who would teach me how my prospective customers would actually discover my site and move 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 produced a liveable income. I guess I should have either hired a consultant or had someone with Internet marketing experience 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

* 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

* 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.