Internet Marketing isn't as easy as a lot of people will have you believe. In fact, it's a tough nut to crack.
Internet marketing can be easy, if you do it the right way.
Follow these simple Internet Marketing tips and you'll be well on your way to a successful campaign, more traffic and best of all, more sales!
Tip #1 - Use Your Common Sense
One of the biggest mistakes I see new Internet marketers make is not using a little common sense. They are so focused on what others are telling them to do - whether it be from I.M. Forums or blogs or even from paid consultants - that they lose all grasp on the reality of how things actually work.
For instance, I recently had a client who was told on a forum that he should be concentrating on creating original content above everything else. Well, creating original content is definitely important and crucial to a successful online business, but this was ALL he was concentrating on. He wasn't building links, he wasn't marketing any of his content, he wasn't optimizing his pages.
Wouldn't a little common sense tell you that there is more to building a marketing campaign than simply writing content?!
Another good example is how some people choose to do article marketing. They write a bunch of crappy content and spam it out to article directories who are dumb enough to publish it. These directories have no backlinking power, and any traffic that your article gets will bring you no click throughs because the content sucks so badly.
A little common sense would tell you that submitting an article to a few, powerful niche-related directories would get you much better results in backlinking, traffic and above all - targeted, interested traffic and the resulting sales.
So listen to what other people tell you, but think about what you are doing. Step back and look at the overall picture and implement a little thought and common sense. Oh, and remember that just because someone tells you that you should be doing something doesn't mean that you should!
Tip #2 - Have Plenty of Patience
Another big mistake I see is that Internet marketers fail to have enough patience to wait and see how things are going with their current marketing strategies. Especially when you are first starting out, you are going to have to exercise some serious patience when you are waiting for your marketing campaign to take off. This article is specifically referring to organic search engine placement.
First of all, it takes a while to get the search engines to pick up on your pages, and when they do, they will "play" with your rankings for a while. When/if you see your pages suddenly tank in the search engine positions, there is no need to panic. Just give it a few days and monitor the situation. If after a few days you don't see any movement, then tweak a couple of things and wait a little longer. Patience and continuing to publish original content is the key.
And when you do get some good results, let them ride for a little while while you concentrate on your less-performing pages. Then when you have found that your well-performing pages have solidified in their search engine placement, tweak them a bit and wait to see what happens. Again, have plenty of patience and give them time to settle.
As time goes by and the search engines spider your site more frequently, you will begin to see things happening a little bit faster - but you still need to have plenty of patience and give things time to settle down before making any decisions on what to do next.
Tip #3 - Test, Test, Test - then test again!
As soon as most marketers realize that they are getting a steady stream of traffic, they will commit another huge mistake. They will simply "let it ride." They fall into the mindset of - if it ain't broken, don't fix it.
But when you are running an Internet marketing campaign, tweaking and testing is a major necessity!
When you decide that it's time to start testing your pages, you need to be organized! If you blindly start making changes all over the place, then when you notice a change in your rankings, you'll have no idea which change caused it.
This is where tip #2 above comes into play. Make one or two changes and simply wait to see what happens. If you don;t give it enough time, then you could be missing out on something that could increase the rankings of many more pages on your website. When you see something working well, try it on another page and see if the results are similar...and if something causes a negative result, revert back to your old page and watch to see if it comes back. And remember tip#2.
These are only three of many other Internet Marketing Tips that can help you avoid the pitfalls that strike so many Internet Marketers, but they are three of the most fundamental ideas that you should put into practice.
Internet marketing can be tough when you first start out. And it can be tough for those of us who have been at it for a while, but if you implement the tips you just read about, you can realize that it really isn't so hard to bring in enough traffic and sales to allow you to duplicate your efforts and continue to grow your online business.
Here is a short list of marketers who I feel are worth the time to follow...
- Anik Singal
- Jonathan Leger
- Jeremy Kelsall
- Allen Graves :-)
- Duncan Carver
- Brad Callen
Good luck and KEEP WRITING!