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 am aware of now.” By “then,” I mean my early months in my adventure into the quagmire of web business. I could easily fill a large book with significant things that I didn’t know how to do but that I tried, anyway. It’s a bit embarassing.

Occasionally I try to keep new online marketers from mimicing 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. I hope you find these useful.

My tip for today is this: Assume that any page of your website is likely to become a landing page.

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

If I had found an expert who would teach 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 had someone with Internet marketing experience 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:

* Most people find their destinations by using search engines

* Search engines view the web as a collection of pages, not a collection of websites

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