3 Serious Online Marketing Mistakes You Should Avoid
Internet marketing can be a goldmine if done correctly. But it can also be your worst nightmare if you don’t apply proper tactics to utilize its opportunities; you might find yourself spending a fortune working on marketing strategies that never produce results. I have stumbled many webmasters who spend a fortune on SEO and online marketing yet with little results. These people end up dejected and discouraged and some even call it quits. By learning to avoid some of the terrible mistakes these webmasters and business owners make, you will be saving yourself a lot of precious time and money.
1. Not Familiarizing yourself with the latest SEO changes
SEO is not a fixed or rigid set of formulas. SEO is dynamic; in fact, SEO strategy and change are synonymous. Most times, failure when it comes to SEO and Online marketing comes not because you have done anything wrong but because you have failed to adapt to the new changes. For example, prior to Google’s Panda updates, one-page microsites dominated the search engine results simply because they had links pointing out to the irrespective of quality of the links.
The focus was thus on the links rather than the quality of their parent content. As a result of the changes, only sites with strong quality links can get ranked high on the search engine while those with bogus links pointing to them are downgraded or even banned.
Nowadays, it is almost impossible to get ranked if your site has poor quality content. How do you know maximize the chances of being ranked?
- Check that the quality of your inbound links is high (i.e the parent site has quality content). Also, the more the inbound links the better.
- Check that the quality of your content is not only accurate, but also grammatically correct.
- Check that you format your text responsibly (avoid excessive use of bold, italic, colors, e.t.c)
- Publish unique content that will also be useful to the clients. Offering advice based on personal experience is an added advantage.
2. Failure to define your audience
A lot of people don’t know that this is a grave mistake. It is difficult to succeed without a goal. Clearly, it is very hard to reach your audience if you don’t know who they are in the first place.
Who is the marketing intended to reach? The content-who is supposed to read it? are you targeting adults, children, sports fans, women, men? There are endless categories and niches that a business can choose to concentrate on. For instance, this article is targeting business owners, bloggers, SEO consultants, and those who want to make money from home writing irrespective of their gender or age or geographical place.
The problem with most business owners is that they always assume that wider and bigger is better than narrow and deeper. Even if that is the case, you’re better off knowing what your audience is than working on a blank slate. One mistake you definitely can’t afford to make is to try and appeal to everyone. In other words, it is better to try and be a favorite for only 5% of the population-instead of being just one among millions of their options for the whole populations.
If you don’t know what your target audience is, nothing will change no matter how much time and resources you spend on marketing.
3. Buying Backlinks may be the worst decision
This looks like a mistake-right? I don’t think so. If SEO strategies could be weighed, Backlinks would weigh more than any other SEO strategies, but this does not mean that other SEO strategies are useless. A lot of caution must be taken when hiring a SEO consultant to build links for you.
Links are like paths leading people to your site. The more you have them the better for your site. However, if the ‘paths’ seem unnatural or manipulated, irrespective of their quality of the parent site, it will do more harm than good for your site. Companies that are serious about their success should not view online marketing as a short time venture. Thus, buying backlinks can be counterproductive at times due to the volatile nature of the organic search algorithms.
Point is, your online investment should be like stock prices. That is, its returns should grow over time but if the contrary happens, it means that something is really wrong.