I don’t know if every web marketer is similar to me. “I wish I had known then what I know now,” I frequently lament. By “then,” I mean my early year or two in my adventure into the jungle of web business. I could easily fill a book with important things that I didn’t know how to do but that I tried, anyway. 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 in time 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. I hope you find these useful.

My tip 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. 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 discovered someone who could tell me how web users actually find my website and how they behave once they get there, my sites would have been designed very differently. I guess I should have either hired a consultant or had someone with Internet marketing experience build a business website 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

* 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

* Distinguishing between a pretty website and a productive website

* 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. 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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