I don’t know 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 jungle of Internet business. I could easily fill a book with significant things that I didn’t know how to do but that I attempted regardless. 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 subsequently come my way. 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.

My advice for today is this: Every page on a web site 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 progress through my site in an orderly fashion, like third graders marching to music class.

If I had been wise enough to hire a consultant to explain to me how my prospects 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 earned a liveable income. I guess I should have either hired a consultant or used an online marketer to professionally 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)

* 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

* 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. Meanwhile, there were plenty of other tasks that I could have had done professionally to allow me more time for my learning.