With the invention of the internet almost anyone can start their own business and become a success. It takes time – there are no thriving entrepreneurs who hit the jackpot without spending time to learn and build – but there are no restraints concerning who succeeds and who fails other than the degree of effort the individual puts into his business. The 4 internet marketing mistakes that I’ll discuss in this article will ensure your failure if you make them.
Avoid them and you have a higher percentage of finding the life you long for.
Failure To Perform Market Research
The ultimate reason for starting a business is to create a prosperous life for yourself and your family.
The path to that end requires that your business sell a product. The choices you have for a product include some sort of service and some sort of item.
A service comes in the form of training, some type of repair, painting, consulting, and similar activities.
An item as a product can be a book (digital or physical), a toy, computer equipment, lawn furniture, etc.
Your choices for a product to sell are many. The question you must answer when you select the product (or product area/line) is: Will that product sell?
You waste your time trying to market a product if that particular product is not marketable.
Market research is a learning curve all its own but you can get started by going to Google Adwords. Enter your product type (a word or phrase that describes the product) and see if people are looking for information on that word or phrase.
If the results show you that a lot of people are looking for that kind of product you have a potentially salable product.
Next look for websites that market that type of product and see what level of sales they’re making. If their sales a poor – walk away. Don’t worry if you find a lot of sites that market the product. Competition is a good thing. It’s an indication that your product choice is a good one and you can also learn marketing techniques from those competitors.
Study their techniques so you can improve on them and set yourself up in a way that the buyers of your product type view you as the most logical business to buy that product from.
Most Often Made Of Internet Marketing Mistakes: No Business Plan
One of the most often made of the internet marketing mistakes by the majority of would be entrepreneurs is that they don’t create a plan for their business.
The business plan carries the business growth forward. It identifies potential obstacles on the future path, along with solutions for how to approach those obstacles so they don’t hurt your business growth.
Every business suffers defeats from time to time. With a well thought out business plan, your business minimizes those problems as they pop up.
Building A Dis-Organized Website
The truth of it is that you don’t really need a website for your business. You can sell your products without one.
But having your own online real estate will greatly increase your chances of success.
A website gives you space to house and advertise your products. It makes your business look more professional.
There are a few important considerations for your website if you want it to perform in your favor.
That saying: “If you build it they will come.” doesn’t work. You do need visitors to your site. Without customers you’ll make no sales.
So you need to learn some skills for generating traffic to your site. That training is outside the scope of this article. There are plenty of books and courses available for that. Just be careful in your learning choices. Not all of the offerings you’ll find deliver value.
Once you get visitors to your site you need to give them a pleasing experience.
Your site must be easy to navigate. If your visitors come looking for a specific thing you told them about in an advertisement somewhere else they must get access to information about that specific thing – or they’ll click away from your site without looking at anything on it.
Your website must have a pleasing look and feel to it. Your main goal with the creation of your site is to keep your visitors looking at your pages. The longer they stay the more opportunity you have to sell them your products.
If they don’t like how your site looks they won’t stay.
Present your product line in a way that’s easy to look at and such that as they look at each offering they quickly see reasons why they should be interested in purchasing your product.
Failure To Build Relationships
This is one of the internet marketing mistakes that’s always been around. This one was a marketing mistake even before the internet showed up.
Have you ever gone into a place of business (convenience store, grocery store, hardware store, etc.) and approach an employee that greeted you with a sour look on his face? Or even worse, one who was outright rude to you?
How did you feel when that happened? Did you even continue your shopping activity at that place?
It is very important that you build friendly relationships with your customers and potential customers. If you don’t they won’t come back to buy from you in the future.
And a huge portion of your business success depends on returning customers. When a customer has pleasant experiences when he buys from you, he’ll not only be back to buy again but he’ll also tell his friends all about how super joyed he is to be your customer.
I gotta tell you that word of mouth is the cheapest advertising you’ll ever have. It can be bad or good – your choice of course. And the cheapest customer is always a happy, returning customer because you save advertising dollars that you must spend to attract new customers.
So build pleasant relationships with your visitors. Tell them stories about yourself so they realize that you are a real person. Give them plenty of valuable information that they can use to improve their life experiences.
Do that and you’ll build a loyal customer base.
Avoid These Internet Marketing Mistakes
Don’t let these internet marketing mistakes guarantee the doom of your online business.
I know you’ve likely heard the term: Fail Forward Fast. I don’t remember who said that at the moment but it does have some usefulness in it.
If we approach our mistakes in a proper way we learn from those mistakes and turn their negatives into positives. So yes, there’s valuable help in making mistakes along your way if you use those mistakes to your advantage.
But there’s more value in learning from the mistakes of others who have traveled that business path before you so you can put their solutions to use – and avoid making those same marketing mistakes.
My advice to you now is find a successful entrepreneur who is willing to be your mentor. Learn from that mentor so you don’t make the same internet marketing mistakes that there are already answers for.
