Building a strong online presence is a hard thing to do, but the payoff is worth all of your effort. When trying to build your online presence, whether it is just to build an audience or make money, you should try your hardest to avoid these common mistakes in Internet Marketing:
- NOT HAVING A PLAN
This may seem obvious, but many people enter the online world without a specific goal in mind. Others may have a specific goal but have no plan on how to measure that goal. Both a goal and a way to measure your goal are a vital first step in establishing your online presence. Once you have established both of these things you can begin planning and creating content that will help you to achieve this goal. After the appropriate content has been written and your website has been live, use tools such as Google Analytics to measure your success. - NOT STAYING UP-TO-DATE
Think of your website like a store; stores update their inventory every quarter, therefore you should update your website just as frequently if not more. If your website is not new and exciting each time someone visits it, then why would someone want to continually visit your site? Blogs are a great way to keep your website updated with fresh and interesting content, but only if you continue to post on a frequent basis. At minimum, your blog should be updated once a week. A good tip is to set a reminder on your calendar. Every week schedule one hour to visit your site and update it in some way that will keep repeat visitors wanting to come back. - RELYING TOO HEAVILY ON SEO
Although SEO is very beneficial to your company’s website it is not everything. Traffic does not necessarily equal success. You can have hundreds of thousands of ‘hits’ and not make a single sale or contact. You need to be wise in your SEO tactics by having high-quality content that will draw people in and satisfy your target audience. Although link building and keyword stuffing are good (in moderation) you must be weary not too add too many of either to your website. A lot of links and keywords will get you temporarily to the top of the search engine result list, but once the search engines realize that you’re purposely over doing it they will knock you back to the fourth or fifth page. - SOCIAL NETWORKING WITHOUT REALLY NETWORKING
Just as updating your website consistently is important, updating your social media is just as important. Social networking is all about building relationships and engaging your audience, neither of which you can do if your social media accounts are left unattended. Social media is a fun and easy way to broadcast your brand to a wide range of consumers, but the only way to accomplish this is to make an effort to interact. Your social media does not have to be updated every single day, but a good practice is to update at least 3 times a week. To save time, you can use programs such as Hootsuite and Sprout Social to schedule your posts in advanced.
If you can avoid these common mistakes in Internet Marketing then you are on the right track to building your brand’s online presence to be as best it can be. If you aren’t using the help of a marketing agency, then be sure to do as much research as possible before you take the dive into the complex world of Internet marketing.