Marketing Mistakes

Online marketing mistakes: what not to do

Among the how-to articles about online marketing are lists of online marketing mistakes. We’ve probably all made some of these mistakes, and perhaps we’re still making a few of them.

Instead of creating another list, we’ve compiled a number of common Internet marketing mistakes to paint a picture of what to avoid. Keep in mind while reading the following that it’s what not to do if we want our website and business to be successful.

Web design and content

Don’t worry if web pages take a long time to download. Everything we’ve loaded onto them is so interesting that site visitors will wait around, right? And if they have to install the latest version of Flash or download a different browser to view the page properly — or at all, well, we live in a technology-driven world.

Once we get our website content up, it’s up. We don’t have time to update it right away when information changes or we add new products or discontinue others. People will contact us if they want to know more. Just as they will if they can’t find their way around the site because we haven’t provided clear navigation or a site map. And if we’ve forgotten to include critical information such as where we’re located or what sizes our products come in, people might figure out or guess what they need to know.

Too many steps to get through the site can be a good thing. The longer people spend at our site filling in forms or trying to find information, the more likely they are to see something they like and to buy.

Promotion

Keywords in meta tags are all that we need. Just put some in our keyword meta tags, and the search engines will bring site visitors. Even though major search engines have disregarded keyword meta tags for years now.

Or maybe we’ll include keywords in our site content too. But surely that’s all we need. We heard that having a website is a way to get rich without much work.

As for those customers who bought from us before, our cool website is all we need to keep them coming back. They’ll remember our name and our products or services even if we don’t have a newsletter and invite them to subscribe to it. They’ll probably tell all their friends about our site too even without our suggesting that they do.

If we want to market our website after all, online is the only place to reach our intended audience. Why bother trying to reach people with print advertising when they have to be at their computers anyway to view our site? And since the range of people who might be interested in our business is so wide, we should just try to appeal to everyone in our advertisements. We won’t need to work hard to target people and draw them in. It’s our site, so of course they’ll want to see it.

We’ll market our site when it’s convenient for us to market it. If our website isn’t ready for the public or isn’t current, no problem. Everything online is in a state of change. If we don’t promote our products and services when they’re new, someone will still be interested in them.

Information use

If we studied all the information available to us, or even took the time to find out what that information is, that would take a lot more time than we’d anticipated to run our online business.

Chances are that if we’re new at this webmaster business, we don’t even know about website traffic statistics, much less how to learn from them. We’d probably be happy to know how many people land at our site. Do those site visitors spend time looking around and following a path of information, or do they hit the Back button from the landing page? How many of them bail before reaching checkout? At what point do they exit?

Studying and using this information would mean revising the website, and we like it just the way it is. But most likely, we just haven’t learned enough about online marketing to realize the importance of studying traffic statistics as well as the keywords and links used to bring visitors to our site.

Following the rules

So, we see now that simply having a website isn’t enough if we want it to be successful and that we should be more methodical in promoting it. We’ve read all the rules about online marketing, and we’re going to follow them.

No? That isn’t the right way either?

To a point, it is. Websites should be current, useful, and usable. A variety of promotion techniques is more effective than relying on just one, or worse, on one that’s outdated. We can improve the effectiveness of our website and our marketing techniques immensely if we use the information available in website traffic stats.

But the Web is a relatively new medium. We don’t have the amount of history that we do with print advertising and marketing to really understand what methods work best. Some of what we’ve learned from online promotional successes applies to most or all websites, but some practices may be suited for only some types of situations. The best rules to follow are ones that tell us to study what works and doesn’t work and to focus on what gets results for our sites.