I’m not sure if every web marketer is similar to me. “I wish I had known then what I know now,” I frequently lament. The “then,” of course, is when I first ventured into the online business world. I could fill an entire book with the stupid mistakes I made due to ignorance. In truth, I could fill a multi-volume set. It’s a bit embarassing.

Occasionally I try to keep new marketers from copying my mistakes. 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 lifesaving advice: Every page on a web site is a landing page.

I actually believed that every prospect who came to my site would first arrive at my home page. They would all digest 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 Internet surfers actually locate 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 professionally 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:

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