Successful online marketing should be all about increasing sales and profitability. If it’s done well, there’s no reason why you can’t achieve these aims.
Unfortunately, some businesses seem to run into problems. There are some common mistakes that you should be looking to avoid if you’re going to run an online marketing campaign. Here are the top 10 mistakes:
1. Writing content for search engines
It’s amazing how many website owners create content that is aimed at the search engines. Laced with keywords, this content is often almost impossible for website visitors to read. Forget about writing for search engines. Concentrate on your target audience. Write for real people.
2. Confusing link building with spamming
Link building is important for the success of any site. If you want to rise up the search engine rankings then you’ll need to get your site noticed. But remember that link building is about quality, rather than quantity. Spamming won’t do much for your reputation and you may find that your website is actually penalized by the search engines as a result.
3. Losing control of costs
How much is your online marketing campaign costing? What are you getting in return? If you don’t have the answers to these basic questions then you’re in danger of letting the costs run wild. Monitoring will be the key to running the campaign successfully.
4. Ignoring accessibility
You may have a great website. You may have done a great job of attracting visitors to it. But if your site is not fully accessible then you may lose up to 15% of those visitors before they even get beyond your home page. That’s a disaster. Deal with accessibility issues at the outset.
5. Forgetting about repeat visitors
When someone visits your site for the first time, they will know very little about what you have to offer. By the time that they return on a second or third visit, they will already be inclined to buy your products and services more easily. Take advantage of this situation. Encourage visitors to return to your site. Ensure that it’s easy to bookmark and that they have a reason to return.
6. Poor email marketing
You are collecting the email addresses of visitors to your site, aren’t you? If not, you really should be. This is a great, cheap way to get in touch with people who are interested in what you have to offer. It’s also a great way of encouraging those repeat visits.
7. Forgetting about offline opportunities
Have your online marketing efforts created some leads that may help you to expand the business offline? Don’t forget about these opportunities. These may offer the best possible chances for your business to grow.
8. Attracting visitors who don’t buy
There’s absolutely no point in getting visitors to your site if they aren’t going to buy from you. Don’t waste your time attracting 10,000 visitors with no interest in buying your product or service. Your time would be better spent concentrating on a single visitor who is going to make a purchase.
9. Reading, reading and more reading
You need to read about online marketing techniques. But the reading phase won’t make you any money. You’ll only start earning once you put your plans into action. So make sure that you’re not spending endless hours reading. You need to be doing instead.
10. Forgetting about your best resource
What’s your best resource? You shouldn’t even need to think about the answer to this. Your best resource is you! Concentrate on your strengths. Build on your knowledge and experience. By doing so, you’ll put yourself in the best possible position to succeed.
Image Credits: Two Horse Town.
17 comments
Simon,
I liked your point no. 2, 9 and 10. No. 10 is best of the lot. Until and unless one would not believe in himself, how could he do anything in any field.
No doubt..again a great set of tips…more importantly..while writing a blog..always write about something you really enjoy…not just to create a new blog !!!
Simon, those are brilliant points 🙂
“Attracting visitors who don’t buy”
Can’t agree more. My site was recently visited by a crowd of about 5000 people that didn’t do anything. 🙂 The problem? One of my JavaScript libraries got some heavy attention and a lot of programmers came to my site and my blog. Even though my blog is blogger-oriented. Not much of overlap there, spend a lot of traffic, got no results 🙂
@Slava
You’ve addressed a major point here …a lot of us attribute traffic to success and profitability, which is not true.
As an Internet Marketer I am happy to build a community of 50 users a day who are loyal and love my site than build a community of 500 users who are not interested in what I have to offer.
Building a right community is the key rather than building a large community…As you’ve rightly said , you need to build traffic that gets you the right results 🙂
@ZK:
“50 users a day who are loyal and love my site .. rather than .. 500 users who are not interested”
Exactly my thoughts!
absolutely, its better to have 50 loyal visitors than having 500 visitors with no interest in your site.
Great post Simon,
I see a lot of people bloating their content with keywords thus making it unreadable! Many of them don’t realize that SEs are for driving people to your website( and people is who you want visiting your blog) which can be possible clients, but I think they are more interested in crawler/bots traffic.
I mean how could you convert visitors into a clients when they can’t even understand what you are writing, not to mention the frustration of having thousands of visitors and no conversion. Which may lead to point 10.
Great tips, Simon. This post will definitely help the noobs.
Yeah mistakes like that are quite easy to make
Hi Simon,
Thank you for sharing this informative post! I absolutely agree that in order to be successful in the online business, one must read and read, and then implement what they learned. Also, I agree on the part about confusing link building with spamming. What good is it that you can have many sites spammed? It only hurts your reputation in the end.
This is great post. However, I think that the biggest online marketing mistake is a lack of the persistence. Anybody who can commit themselves to create at least one blog post every day, create 10 backlinks every day and make at least 1 good thing for community and do this for at least 90 days, can make big online.
Oh yeah, many of us made some of these mistakes once in a while without us knowing. Thank you for the sharing, you reminded us to be more careful.
Good information about online marketing mistakes. Write content for search engines and users both. Yes encourage return visitors of the site.
Hi Simon,
Rom was not built in one day. It takes time to build up a good web site, so this “Top 10 online marketing mistakes” are a very good to have with you on the long trip to the top on the SERP.
Hi,
You are absolutely right about the online marketing mistakes.But until we didn’t do a mistake then how can we learn something out of that mistake.
Nice post. there are a few thing you have listed here that I have been slacking on. It is so funny how you can get so wrapped up in things you forget about the most simple of tasks.
Attracting visitors that are interested in your site and what your selling is a big must. If you just try to attract anyone, your results won’t be exactly what you ‘d hoped they would be.