26 Internet Marketing Mistakes Commonly Made Online

26 Internet Marketing Mistakes Commonly Made Online

Below is a list of 26 internet marketing mistakes commonly made online.  I’ve broke them up into separate topics for easier reading so that you can pick and choose which sections to read…as I know your time is valuable.   Enjoy — and make my day by leaving a comment!

Newbie Marketing  Mistakes

1. Not taking action

That shiny new ebook or video course you just bought might be great, but if you just scan through it and then let it sit on your hard drive it won’t do you any good!

The simple fact is that if you don’t take action you’ll never make any money online! Take action, action, action!

2. Lacking focus

Common scenario:  You try one method of making money online –  put it into action, sit back and get impatient when it doesn’t work. You soon give up on it, then turn around and try something else, that doesn’t work…. and so the cycle goes on.

You must realize that you need to focus on one method and stick it out until you make it work. Tweak, test and figure out why you’re getting the results you are. Once you’ve made it work –  it’s just a case of rinsing and repeating the process over to create multiple streams of income.

3. Believing in a magic formula

You need great products or services that people want to buy and solid marketing methods to help you find the right people to buy them!  There is NO magic formula, secret tactic or cash machine where you just press a button and money falls out.

If you want to succeed online you must accept the fact that you need to build a real business (with proven marketing methods that work) and stop believing in a magic formula.

4. Giving up

Making money online requires persistence, massive action and continued effort. The fact is that too many people give up just before they’re about to achieve success. Most people want instant results and if only they had kept working hard a little while longer they would have begun to see good results.

To succeed online you need to learn a solid method, put it into action, stick at it until it works and then sustain it over the long term.

Article Marketing Mistakes

1. Using a poor title

The title of your article is most important because it’s your opportunity to draw people’s interest and actually get them to start reading your article.

A good title should be informative (giving people a general idea of what the article is about) and should also entice the reader to want to read your article. It’s also a good idea to include a targeted keyword within the title and two or three times within the article as this helps your article to get indexed by the search engines for your keywords.

2. Using a poor opening

The first few paragraphs of your article are extremely important. If people are bored with your first few lines, it’s highly unlikely that they will continue reading any further.

Start your article off with something interesting and keep it to the point without dragging on and on in a long explanation of what your article is about.

3. Lacking structure

An article should have a clear beginning, middle and end. Start by introducing the subject and explain why people need to know this information, then get into the main ‘meat’ of your content and finally draw a conclusion.

Structure your article to make it easy to read. Break your article up into easy to read portions by using numbered points or bullet points.

4. Not researching

An article is only as good as the content contained within it! It doesn’t matter how great your writing style is – if the content is poor it’s not going to make a good article.

Always research your topic thoroughly and make sure you know what you’re talking about. Also include lots of meaty content – in other words, don’t skirt around the subject and make the whole article an obvious sales ploy.

5. Not proofreading

One of the most common article writing mistakes is using poor spelling and making grammatical errors. Such mistakes make you look unprofessional and make it hard for people to take you seriously.

Take a few minutes to read thoroughly over your article. (Combing through it three times is preferred.) In fact, going over it again on a fresh, new day helps you uncover some mistakes that you couldn’t see before.

Twitter Marketing Mistakes

1. Promoting yourself all the time

Nobody wants to read tweets from someone who just talks purely about themselves all day long or from those who posts links to their websites in almost every tweet. Quite honestly it’s plain BORING and people consider constant link posting to be rather spammy.

Differentiate yourself from the spammers and become someone who people actually find interesting and actively want to follow.

2. Not communicating with others

Twitter is about interacting with people. You can communicate by responding to other users’ posts with an @ tweet (@their username) or by re-tweeting a post of another twitter user.

One of the most common mistakes people make with Twitter is using it only for a one-way communication. Try networking with people and showing an interest in them. Not only will this increase your exposure and make more people want to follow you, it’ll also result in you making contacts that can benefit your business in other ways.

3. Tweeting too often or not enough

Tweeting too often becomes rather annoying for the people who are following you (they might be interested in you but they’re not THAT interested!) The other extreme of course is an inactive Twitter account, which simply sends out the message that you don’t really take Twitter seriously.

4. Spending too much time on Twitter

Twitter is quite addictive and it is all too easy to let it to take over your business! You start convincing yourself that you’ve been “working” when all you’ve really been doing is talking to people on Twitter all afternoon.

Use Twitter sparingly. Twitter can really benefit your business, but don’t let it dominate what you do.

5. Desperately following people

If you’re following hundreds of people but you’ve only got a handful of people following you, it rather sends out the message that you are desperately trying to get followers but nobody finds you interesting enough to follow you back.

By all means follow other people, but carefully choose users closely related with your niche and quite simply — try to be interesting!

Blogging Mistakes

1. Selling all the time

A blog should be informative and be something which people are interested in reading. It’s okay at times to make a post with promotional intentions – however don’t do it all the time.

You can make posts which both inform and ‘sell’ at the same time by offering high quality content and carefully selecting recommendations (products or services) that are helpful.

2. Not making regular posts

The biggest turn off to a new visitor on your blog is seeing that you haven’t updated it for 6 months. Make a real effort to post to your blog at least once a week.  When you’re just too busy, consider finding someone to guest post for you.

Posts don’t have to be really long (like this one ) and if you’re running out of ideas you can always revisit topics you’ve posted about before, perhaps just changing the angle slightly.

3. Disabling comments

A blog should be a two-way communication platform.  The commenting feature helps you to build a relationship with your readers and comments from other readers spark interests and more conversation.

Don’t be tempted to delete negative comments either. If someone makes a comment criticizing something you’ve done, it’s best to approve the comment and then reply back to the person individually.  Sometimes negative comments can create even more interaction from other readers as well.

4. Not having an ‘about’ page

It’s always a good idea to have an ‘About Me’ page on your blog. Once people have read some of your posts they are quite often interested in finding out more about you.

Your biography doesn’t have to be long or tell your whole life story – it’s simply a place to introduce yourself a little and ‘sell’ what you’re about. Tell people who you are, a few lines of background information about your life and explain why you’re blogging. Include a picture if you can because people like to see the face behind the name.

5. Contradicting yourself

You make a particular point in a post and then a few months later your disagree with yourself. That might be because your opinion has changed (if that’s the case then explain it in your post).

It also might be that you’re using content on your blog which was written by two different people who have differing opinions. Make sure you give consistent information or at least explain why there is an inconsistency.

Email Marketing Mistakes

1. Offering rubbish

People are getting more and more picky over who they’ll give their name and email address to. It was different a few years ago, but today you really must give people a great reason for joining your list.

Offer a quality freebie as an incentive to sign up to your list (whether it’s a short report, video course etc).  Make sure it’s something that people actually want.  If you give away something that’s pure rubbish, then you disappoint your subscribers and lose their trust.

Offer valuable content in your follow up messages as well.  Make it worth their time…and they’ll be more likely to give you their time when you send something else that you want them to read.

2. Emailing too often

Once people are on your list the other half of the battle is keeping them there. Bombarding people with emails (or even worse — mostly promotional emails) is a surefire way to get people to unsubscribe to your list. If you want people to stay on your list, it is essential to treat your list well.

3. Using a free autoresponder service

If you are serious about list building, investing in a quality autoresponder will help ensure that your messages actually reach your subscribers.

The problem with free autoresponders is that they can get shut down without notice, potentially resulting in you losing your list. They also don’t guarantee the deliverability of your email and there is an increased risk of spam complaints.

4. Focusing on list size rather than list quality

Emailing a list of 10,000 people will make you more money than emailing 2,000 people, right? Not necessarily! One of the biggest list building mistakes you might be making is focusing on the outright size of your mailing list rather than considering the quality of your subscribers.  (If you don’t believe me, read this post here: “How a mailing to 98 people beat one to 5200+“)

There is little point in having thousands of subscribers who aren’t especially interested in what you’re offering or with whom you don’t have any kind of relationship with.

Just imagine sending a letter to 2,000 random people in the phone book and asking them to buy your product about monetizing niche blogs. Do you think you’d get a good response? Probably not! What you need is highly targeted subscribers, and then you can focus on building a deep business relationship with them by providing quality content and offering them great value.

5. Being a faceless marketer

People buy from those they like and trust.  Let your subscribers get to know you.  Talk directly to your subscribers and make yourself seem human. Trust me – this works because it means you will build a relationship with your subscribers.

6. Using HTML emails

This may not technically be a mistake (many marketers and companies use HTML emails with fancy graphics) but it IS a mistake if you don’t know what you’re doing.  There’s a good chance that a large proportion of people who receives your email won’t see it in the way you intended them to.  Use HTML carefully and realize that some people opt out of receiving HTML coding to their inbox and only view text.

7. Not proofreading your email message

Just as I talked about not proofreading your blog post, it’s also a big hazard for your online business to send an email with a bunch of spelling and grammar errors.

Always send a test email to yourself before you mail it to your subscribers. Also check that the links within your email work and that they point to the place that you intended them to.  One other thing to consider is that your email formatting looks pleasing and is easy to read for your subscribers.

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