Top 100 Internet Marketing Mistakes

[webwoman]

I am trying to assemble a list of the top 100 internet marketing mistakes netrepreneurs can make.

I have been marketing on the internet since 1996 and I have made my share; but I am interested, with all the expertise out there, what you would say were the worst mistakes marketers can make out there?

[bhartzer]

Add this one:
Accidentally mixing up the Spanish version of your website with the English version--some pages are in Spanish and some are in English. That will certainly mess up your search engine rankings!

I saw this done this week, when someone did a search for the company name the title tag was in English and the description (from the meta tags) were all in Spanish!

[jhusband]

Here's the ones I've heard of or commited.

Make sure all your links work especially to affiliate programs from PPC engines otherwise they get the sales that you paid for but you don't get the credit.

Don't buy e-books on Internet Marketing. Everything you need to know is available for free on this site.

Focus on one program at a time. Automate everything. When it's successful move to the next program.

Make sure to add alt tags to your images.

Goosh this could go on forever! You might have to separate it into categories like SEO PPC Affiliate Design etc.

But I love the idea. I can't wait to read everyone's mistakes.

[mizambar]

I am not too sure if this is considered marketing...

Selling something on your site that you have backordered. I have had a few experiences where I wasn't paying attention to my inventory and I ended up offering products that I didn't currently have. Big Mistake!

[thusmann]

WebWoman you are from Olympia? Welcome to the WebProWorld Community.

I live in the Steamboat Island Area of Olympia...

The number 1 most common mistake I see people make is they start marketing their sites before the site is ready.

I admit that in the planning stages some marketing can be helpful in determining how people interact with the site. When I first created the iBuilt.net site, I used PPC marketing, the http://www.clicktracks.com software, and the http://www.liveperson.com service to to monitor customer interactions on the site. Using these, I continually tweaked the site and tested the response.

It is very important that a site reflects the image of a company. If the site's appearance is poor, so will be the response. Also, the content needs to be targeted to their demographic and has to be presented in an intuitive manner.

As I say on our resources page ( http://www.ibuilt.net/links.htm ):

A well thought-out web site incorporates more than just graphic design, networking technologies and programming. It requires a solid integration of your unique business and marketing strategy. It must have an intuitive interface and execute your objectives efficiently. It should target your customer demographic and promote your products effectively. Without proper planning, your site can turn away potential customers and send out the wrong impression of your company. It can tarnish all the goodwill that you have built.

[hugoguzman]

big fancy intro/splash pages with lots of flash. Even if it comes with an option ot "skip intro" it's still annoying to someone that has seen it more than once.

Also, its not good for seo purposes.

[janeth]

There are so many.

1. Sites with no logo's

2. Colors that hurt your eyes

3. Hit counters on the pages

4. Moving text

5. Links going to other sites at the top of the page

6. Banners all over the home page.

7. Not understanding what your customer needs

8. No contact information any where on the site.

9. Making your customer log in to look at your site.

This could go on forever.

[Webworks7]

Deciding that because you simply must have your site in a particular font with the text wrapped in exactly a certain place, you create all of your pages as graphics of text. These people also neglect the alt tags and title tags and use file names like "page1.html" The end result is a site with not one word on it.

I have seen at least five sites done in this way, and guess what? You can't find them with a search engine no matter how hard you try.

[hal]

the top 100 internet marketing mistakes netrepreneurs can make.

the worst mistakes marketers can make out there?

Unfortunately, webwoman, these are two entirely different questions. Luckily, however, the answer is somewhat the same.

WebPro Poster touched upon it. Janeth is there, too. It's thinking that a customer visiting a Web page is motivated differently than a customer who walks through your front door. Therefore...

The worst mistake a netrepreneur can make is to ignore his/her core business while spending too much time building and re-building Web pages. The Web page doesn't sell. It's the offer, the offer, the offer.

The worst mistake a marketer can make is to call in a Web page designer instead of a Web marketer to build the Web site. Flash doesn't sell the product. Pretty colors won't sell it. And, strange typeface/background color selections won't sell, either. It's the offer, the offer, the offer.

Be sure to post your list so we can all steal it when you're done. :-)

Maybe we need two lists, here. The second one would be what's also obviously on our minds ... the one hundred worst page design mistakes that we make.

Wait! A third one, too ... the one hundred worst seo mistakes that we make.

Three distinctly different lists, but the same end result. Interesting ... interesting ...


Hal

[Runesmith]

A useful tip I came across in a Web design book:

"Nobody wants to see your photograph on your Website unless you're famous or naked."

[ACross]

Another biggie: "under construction" pages.

This is along the lines of marketing your site before it is ready, brought up by thusmann, but goes a step further. Parts of the site are ready, so the owner decides to go live and just have unfinished pages display the "under construction" text of graphic.

The problems are two-fold. First, it is difficult to get a directory, like DMOZ or Yahoo, to link to a site that has under construction pages.

Second, your visitors will not appreciate the disappointment of not finding what they were looking for when they clicked on the link.

If you must put up your site before all the pages are presentable, simply do not link to pages that aren't finished. Add the links to the navigation when the page is complete.

This outlines, of course, just one of the hundreds of website marketing bloopers.

-ACross

[Wildflowerdyes]

When you first start out marketing your website it may be tempting to use pay-per-click engines to quickly boost traffic to your site. It can be a good option if you choose the right keywords to promote. Do not use general words, but try and use phrases that potential buyers may type in to find you. In the past I have wasted too much money before really figureing out how to use PPC enginges to my advantage and not just to put more money in there pockets.
In general, really research where your marketing dollars are best spent to promote your website. It's easy to waste a lot of money and get no traffic or sales when you first dive in to the web site world.

I still have lots to learn.......:)

[geoffreygag]

Top 100 net marketing mistakes.

1 - Using free hosting services with banners on top.

[httpman]

About keywords (which should bring you your futur customers) :

- building pages with no ideas of the keywords to use. Or the opposite : filling pages with texts where SE will see totally different keywords that the expected ones.

- building highly SE optimised pages, but using keywords that no one never uses. Be ranked 1st on Google with such useless keywords.

JP

[janeth]

Hi JP,
Be ranked first for key words no one will ever use and think you have done good. lol

[venividi]

I hate Welcome pages with flahsy logo plus 3 words:

Enter
Skip intro

Grrr!
Many site owners go for such bells and whistles: I can imagine them opening their sites everyday and think:
"Oh what a beautiful site I have, Oh what a beautiful site!"

Valeria

[flawebworks]

[quote="janeth"]There are so many.

1. Sites with no logo's

====

Why is it important to have a logo?

[Jörn Malek]

Hi
our 19,000 + pages plus web site has hundreds of pages in three different languages and several pages in 5 different languages. I dont seem to confuse search engines as far as I can tell, but yes we had several people recommend to us to run a seperate site with a seperate domain for each language, but this would complicate things a lot for us.
Also I am using this heading:

<META http-equiv=content-type content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
This should cover Europen Languages, right?

Any opinions on that?

Have a happy day
Jörn

[venividi]

Originally Posted by venividi

I hate Welcome pages with flahsy logo plus 3 words:
Enter
Skip intro

Sorry, I was so transported by my hate for these splash pages that I forgot to continue.
There may happen that your site is visited in a long sequence. It depends on the product of course. For example, if you sell kitchen furniture, visitors will certainly not stop at the first site but are likely to go on visiting deep in the search engine list to see what's available.
In these cases, I presume that the visitor will write down a site name that looks interesting in order to go back. This happened to me last week and it was a really terrible afternoon. I was looking for a new kitchen and visited all the sites of Italian kitchen furniture producers that attended the recent Furniture exhibition in Milan.
Well, all of them, without exception started with a splash page where their logo or other geometrical figures danced gracefully while a small loading dot dot dot tried to keep me quiet for they were doing something in order to let me in. Some even had a second splash page announcing: Kitchen furniture (flash again), or Choose your language. When I was finally ushered into the place I had a choice between Our Philosophy, Contacts, News and Products but I was already angry. Why do they think I came to visit their site in the first place? I wanted to see their products. Immediately.
What I means is this: if your site is likely to be visited inside a long sequence of sites, study what the others are doing and try to be a little original, and above all, try to put yourself in the visitor's shoes. Even if the furniture was really gorgeous, I gave up. There wasn't one that I could remember.

Valeria

[httpman]

Hi Janeth, nice to meet you on that forum !

Originally Posted by Jörn Malek

<META http-equiv=content-type content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
This should cover Europen Languages, right?

Jörn

Yes, you are right.
It will also help Mac users, whose computer is sometimes using a specific default Mac charset. Without above meta tag, this results in hard-to-read pages : most of our european accented characters are translated into some sort of egyptian hieroglyphs... (or you should use the &xxx; or &#xxx; symbols for those characters)

JP

[Jörn Malek]

[quote="janeth"]There are so many.

1. Sites with no logo's

2. Colors that hurt your eyes

3. Hit counters on the pages

4. Moving text

5. Links going to other sites at the top of the page

6. Banners all over the home page.

7. Not understanding what your customer needs

8. No contact information any where on the site.

9. Making your customer log in to look at your site.

This could go on forever


10. Build a site without knowing HTML

11.Use Frontpage

12.Hiring a wemaster instead of a web marketer

13.Start the page with a picture

14.Start the page with a table

15.Invest more time for SEO than for marketing.

16.Be in the fist spot with the wrong page.

17.Become dependant (wemaster, Linux!!, Red Hat et.)

18.Geting the traffic and not having the business to take care of it.

18.Too many colours

19.Anything that stays in the way to make the sale!

20.Secure connections all over the place

21.Think that all others know it better than you

22.Too long pages ( I am guilty of that)

23.Links to religious pages

24.Links to penis enlarger pages

25. Getting links from Link-farms

26.Builing a site with "Look what I can do" in mind instead of "What does the customer expect from me".

27. Submit with ...Gold

Well Janeth, I sure you can continue this list. And give me a mail (directly, jmalek@amnet.co.cr, you know the enemy is listening)

Have a happy day
Jörn







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