Internet Marketing Blunders
Marketing Blunders - Web Hosting
In this first installment of our series of marketing blunders, we're going
to start out with one of the biggest marketing blunders that marketers can
make. This one starts right out of the gate when they choose their web hosting.
These blunders go from bad to worse. This article is going to cover some
of the more common ones as well as the most serious.
The first marketing blunder a new marketer makes when it comes to web hosting
is that they go for the cheap, or worse, free. Let me tell you what you get
with free web hosting so that you know never to even bother with it. For
one thing, with free web hosting, you don't get your own domain. You get
something like www.somestupidsite.com/members/webarea/yourarea/index.html.
This is NO way to establish a web presence. Nobody is going to know you from
Adam. You will never see a big name marketer or web site using free hosting.
Another reason that free hosting is the pits is because you are literally
at their mercy. You're not paying anything so they can make you put up with
anything that they want, not the least of which is horrible banner ads, annoying
pop ups and whatever else they want to load onto your site. Anybody who goes
to your site is first going to see what your hosting company wants to show
them before they ever get to see YOUR offer. Most people will automatically
think "new person" and be off and running. You'll have no credibility with
free web hosting.
Another problem with free web hosting is that you get literally no bandwidth
and no disk space. If your business ever gets to the point where you're actually
bringing visitors to it, you'll most likely get shut down because you've
exceeded your bandwidth. As for disk space, there is none. A good free hosting
service might give you 10 meg. These days, that's not even enough to put
one good download on it. You simply can't run a business under those conditions.
The worst part about free web hosting, however, is that they can take your
site away from you at any time. They don't even have to have a reason. After
all, they're not getting any money from you. And if you should get any spam
complaints at all, unlike a paid hosting service that will either at least
give you a warning or simply ignore them if they are isolated incidents,
a free hosting company will simply shut you down, no questions asked and
no chance to give them your side of the story.
Even with paid web hosting, in many cases you get what you pay for. If you
go with a no name hosting company charging you $2 a month, don't expect to
get any kind of reliable service. We haven't even talked about the issue
of uptime, but with free and cheap hosting, you can't expect uptime to be
very good. I know some web hosting companies that charge a good amount of
money that don't have good uptime stats. With a free or cheap service, you
have no chance.
If you want to do business online, get a hosting company with a good reputation
and good service. You may pay a little more, but in the end, isn't your business
worth it?
Marketing Blunders - Advertising
In this installment of marketing blunders, we're going to cover another one
that is way up at the top of the list, advertising. You can't imagine how
many people go about their advertising all wrong, either with the methods
that they use or the ads that they write. This is a major reason why 95%
of all Internet marketers fail to make any real income at all. This article
is going to point out some of the major blunders people make with advertising.
Hopefully, reading this will prevent you from making these same mistakes.
The first thing I want to cover is advertising methods. There are many ways
to advertise on the Internet. Unfortunately many of them are horrible. At
the top of that list are the ad blasting companies. These companies want
you to believe that these one line ads that get sent out with this crappy
software actually get read by other people. Trust me, they don't. I'm not
even sure all these blasters work. Certainly there is supporting evidence
that My Mega Promoter's Ad Blaster, which is the original, does nothing at
all.
A notch up from the blasters, but not much better, are auto surfs. You've
probably tried these. You basically give the site your URL and they show
it to all the users of the surf. Trouble is, since it's on autopilot, most
people aren't even at their computers while these ads are going by. This
has to be the most useless form of advertising ever developed next to the
ad blasters. At least if somebody has their eyes open with these there is
a snow ball's prayer that somebody might see your ad.
Let's move away from advertising methods for a while and touch on the subject
of actual ads. Most people, sad as it is to say, can't write an ad to save
their lives. That doesn't mean they can't learn. It just means that they
don't bother to learn. So instead, we get these three line ads that wouldn't
get our mothers to buy our product. Worse than that, some people don't even
use any imagination at all and simply copy and paste the ads that come with
the program. If everybody is using these ads, how effective do you think
they are going to be?
Another problem that people have with advertising is budgeting their promotions.
They have absolutely no game plan when it comes to how much money they're
going to spend in a given month. They simply take out one ad after another,
not even researching if the advertising service is any good, and then suddenly
they wake up and find that they're out of money. Then, if they find anything
that is of value, they have no more money to even put into their ads. Not
making an advertising budget has killed more advertising campaigns than you
can possibly imagine.
This is just the tip of the iceberg. There's more I could cover, but if you
simply correct these few things, you'll be surprised at what a difference
it will make in your results.
Marketing Blunders - The World Of Distractions
In this installment of marketing blunders, I'm going to touch on one that
kills more people than a bad can of spam. I'm talking about focus, or more
accurately, lack of focus.One of the biggest mistakes new people make is
to bounce around from program to program or do things that are simply non
productive. Well, in this article, we're going to touch on a few do's and
don'ts of keeping your focus. Hopefully these tips will get you on track
and keep you there.
Let's start with the bouncing around problem, which seems to be en epidemic
with Internet marketers. For most new people, they'll join a program of find
some product, promote it for a week, see that they're not making any money
and move on to something else. Look, I am not saying that every program you
latch onto is going to be a good one, but you can't go jumping from one thing
to the next. You'll never build any momentum and you'll never get anywhere.
You have to make a commitment to anything you undertake. I'm not saying to
devote years of your life to something that isn't working for you, but any
new business doesn't see a profit in the first year. Things take time, and
if you don't give them the time needed, they'll never have a chance to grow
into something.
Another big mistake that marketers make is not organizing their day. They'll
wake up each morning and quite honestly have NO clue what they are going
to do for the day. They pretty much just wing it. News flash. You can't wing
your business. Everyday you have to have a schedule, that hopefully was made
the night before, and you have to try to stick to that schedule. Yes, things
happen. Your dog gets sick. Your kid needs a ride to the mall. The water
heater breaks. But on a normal day, you must have a schedule and you have
to do everything possible to stick to it.
Another problem that marketers have is that they spend too much time on
activities that aren't going to help them build their business. Look, I know
it's fun to go to forums and hang out with your buddies, and don't get me
wrong, you need to frequent forums to build a name for yourself, but if that's
all you do and never really get any work done, then what good is it? You
may have 5000 posts but if you have no product to sell, you're not going
to make anything.
Forgetting about forums, too many people spend too much time on reading emails
and surfing the Internet. Yes, again, you have to stay informed. But there
should only be a limited amount of time each day that you spend on things
like this. The rest of the day should be spent doing things that are productive
and building your business.
The above tips are just a small sample of distractions. The more of these
you do away with, the more you will begin to see the light at the end of
the tunnel.
Marketing Blunders - Email Accounts
In this installment of marketing blunders, we're going to concentrate on
another big area where people just don't get it. I am talking about your
email accounts; how to pick one and what to do with it after you have. This
article will hopefully keep you from making some of the biggest mistakes
that new Internet marketers make when deciding on an email account.
In an earlier installment I talked about how getting free web hosting was
just the worst thing you can do. Well, getting a free email account is pretty
much just as bad. There are a number of reasons why you don't want to get
a free email account. We'll cover them here.
The first is identity. Just like with a free web hosting account, the last
thing you want is some email from AOL or Hotmail or Yahoo or wherever. You
want to get your own domain so that you can have your own identity. Now some
people have very uncommon names so they can maybe get a Hotmail account with
their name, but what does John Smith do? Most likely his name is long gone.
Settling is just not an option. But, if you got your own domain name, then
you could be johnsmith@yourdomain.com and you wouldn't have to worry about
somebody else having it. You now have your own identity, which is critical
to establishing an online presence.
But establishing an identity is not the only reason why you don't want to
get a free email account. The biggest problem with these free email accounts
is that they usually come with a ton of restrictions, not the least of which
is spam restrictions. I'm not talking about the email you send. I'm talking
about the email that you receive from others. Most free email accounts have
spam filters piled on so heavy that you're missing a good percentage of your
email. This is not good for business. Imagine a customer tries to get through
to you with questions about your business and you never get his email. Guess
what that is? It's called a lost sale. Free email accounts have been responsible
for most lost sales that just about any other reason.
Now, let's get to the issue of what people do with their email. Now I am
talking about spam. I don't care what others have said to you. I don't care
if they tell you that by emailing millions of people you can make a lot of
money. I don't tell you that if you get some private server in China somewhere
that you can actually get away with this. If you are caught spamming, two
things are going to happen. The first thing is that you are going to lose
your Internet access. Your ISP will yank that away from you so fast it'll
make your head spin. the second thing that will happen is that you will be
forever known as a spammer and people will lose all respect for you. When
that happens, you can kiss your Internet marketing career goodbye.
Get yourself a professional email account and respect that email account
when you get it.
Marketing Blunders - List Building
In this installment of marketing blunders, we're going to touch on a topic
that the big names have been trying to beat into marketers heads for years.
Build your list and then when you do, don't abuse it. This is something that
a lot of people either don't get or they don't believe. Well, hopefully,
this article will open up your eyes to the importance of building your list
and the even greater importance of not treating that list like a cheap suit
when you're done.
Let's focus on the first blunder of not building your list in the first place.
Many marketers will send out their ads, using whatever medium that is, and
send visitors straight to their sales page. At that point, the visitor will
either buy or be gone forever. Now, statistics show that it takes a person
a total of seven times to see a sales page before they are emotionally prepared
to buy. If you send them to your page just once and don't have a way of getting
them back, you have very little chance of converting them into a sale.
This is why, instead of sending them to your sales page first, you should
send them to a page that offers some kind of free report. This way, you get
them to opt into your list and ultimately get those extra chances to get
them back to your sales page if they don't purchase the first time. This
is why list building is so critical and why the big names say that you are
leaving money on the table if you don't build your list.
Okay, now let's focus on the next blunder that marketers make after they've
built their list. I'm not really sure if this isn't worse than not building
one at all because this blunder is literally taking the money that you could
have earned and chucking it in the trash. Yes, this blunder is that bad.
Actually, it's several blunders.
The first one is emailing your list everyday with another offer. The thing
most marketers don't get is that these people join your list to get some
content and hopefully get an education on whatever topic it is that you're
educating them on. It's up to YOU to educate those people. If all you're
doing is sending them one offer after another, they're eventually going to
get very ticked off and unsubscribe from your list. After that happens, you
will never see them again.
The second blunder marketers make after building their list is not emailing
them at all. They have a list and do absolutely nothing with it other than
just send them that initial report. They think that report is going to do
all the selling for them. Wrong! You have to keep in contact with these people,
at least once a week, maybe twice. Let them know you're around but don't
badger them. By giving them content regularly, they'll eventually see that
you're trying to help them and become potential buyers.
List building is really not that hard. The problem is, most people either
don't bother to do it or abuse their list after they have. By following the
above tips, you should end up with a list that is happy to hear from you.
Marketing Blunders - The Biggest One
In this last of our series on marketing blunders, I am going to go over the
absolute biggest marketing blunder of all. As a matter of fact, it's so big
that I am not even going to tell you what it is until the very end of this
article. Yeah, I know, I'm a real tease. Well, don't worry, you're going
to love this story and the payoff is going to be a big one. I promise you
that. As a matter of fact, you might even get a big laugh out of this one,
though it is far from funny. Hopefully, after reading this article, this
is one blunder you will NEVER make.
A friend of mine came over one day and told me that he wanted to start a
business on the Internet. I asked him what it was that he wanted to do and
he told me. I told him I thought that sounded interesting. Certainly it was
different. Anyway, he asked me for some help, not advice, but help. I asked
him what he wanted and he told me he needed technical help putting together
a site. I told him that he'd be better off going to a professional, so he
did.
Anyway, he went to work. He hired a web designer, a graphics artist, a copy
writer, and got just about every tool he could think of. He created his product,
got his site and everything together and decided he was ready to start promoting
his new product. Honestly, he did a great job on putting everything together.
Then it came time to figure out what advertising he was going to use. He
decided on Adwords because at the time, it was still very effective and very
cheap.
Well, he launched his Adwords campaign and started to track his impressions
and clicks. Unfortunately, he wasn't getting either of them. He waited a
day and called me. I told him that sometimes it takes Google a while to bring
you traffic. He said okay and went back to tracking. Well, a few days later
he still didn't have any impressions, let alone clicks. I found that to be
very odd. So I asked him if he had researched his keywords to see that they
even had any monthly searches. He didn't answer right away.
I told him to give me his list of keywords and let me do some research for
him. Sure enough, it was just as I suspected. The keywords he was using,
which were perfectly matched to his product, had no searches. The problem
was simple. There was no demand for what he was selling. Nobody was even
thinking of looking for this thing. So I asked him if he had done target
market research. You can probably guess the answer.
Whatever it is that you decide to do, and I don't care what it is, you MUST
first research to see if anybody will even care about what you are selling.
If there is no market, it doesn't matter how great the product is. Nobody
is going to buy it. Yes, this is the number one blunder that most marketers
first starting out make. They don't do market research.
My friend learned his lesson after this one. Hopefully, you learned it before
it was too late.
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