10 Deadly Internet Marketing Mistakes Small Business Owners Must Avoid

I am just starting to promote my site and these infos widened my knowledge. It will really help me as an affiliate marketer. Please continue posting informative blogs like this. Thanks.

I sincerely agree on point number 6. There are a lot of experts whom small businesses can rely on to do the best and critical parts of internet marketing. There are billions of websites out there, and to get through with the stiff competition to paramount success, marketing should be done with professional and broad expertise. And this is where entities like SEO and web design companies come in. Here in our locale, we've got a great web site design (Orange County) company which offers an array of marketing tools for their clients they work with.

Well said on point number 10, too. All of this meticulous marketing doesn't give results overnight. Small business owners should not only invest money here but also patience. Like people say, "good things come to those who wait."

Excellent article! I have looked at many sites and not come across such a site as yours that tells you what you really need to know about online marketing.

Great suggestions and examples, especially for a newbie like myself who lacks a natural sense of web design.

Planning is important....you have got to know what your are trying to acheieve and why, that way you can work out how to achieve your goals.

How about not understanding your target audiences search behaviors ie keyword phrases they use at each phase of the buying cycle, which guides how you write your content and your SEO campaigns.
I could also add not knowing your unique selling proposition - not specific to internet (as opposed to offline) marketing, but it sure makes it hard!

Another common mistake is assuming that the website is a computer "thing". It's not about the technology, it's about the message.

The largest issue I see for businesses is that they fail to realize the complexity involved. No one person can learn and stay current with everything necessary to succeed online.

The first priority they have is deciding who can be trusted, stop reading everything else (because there is simply not enough time!) and listen to and APPLY what TRULY works.

An Addition to point 2 perhaps..."Not having a professionally optimised site".

You can have the most beautifully designed site in existence but it means nothing if it's slow to load...Why? Because people are impatient.

Make sure the server configuration has been done properly, optimise your media, consider RSS by a 3rd party (e.g. Feedburner) and look into reducing the number of requests from a single page serve.

Broadband is pretty much ubiquitous, but it doesn't mean we can be lazy. Optimise properly and you can shave seconds off load times...and for high-traffic site, ensure your server doesn't go down because of the strain.

All valid points. I like the last one, giving up too soon. Anything worth fighting for takes a great deal of time and patience so you have to really stick it out and continue to market yourself.

Mos of the mistakes i did.....:( Generally people tend to give up very easily that's biggest hurdles.

Not having a clearly defined plan with specific goals, and more importantly, deliverables to attain those goals, is the worst mistake anyone can make. It is crucial to build in metrics to measure success so you can see tangible results.

I have done a lot of those mistakes, most people do that initially anyway. I persisted with blogger for a long time, that wasted valuable time, work put into the free blog... but even when i started out i was not having a proper plan of action. Its a big mistake not to have a plan, a target divided into goals.

All this is not deadly, no, you can recover from it and use the experience to build your business further. The only thing that is lost is time :( and it is the most valuable thing in the internet marketing.

I agree with you about having a plan. Good point. If you don't have a plan along with goals then you have no way to measure progress.

Giving up too soon is probably the widest-spread mistake of all. I remember working online for one year before I actually started to earn anything. Not many people can actually continue working without seeing any benefit / result.

I'd suggest an addendum to number two:

When you finally approach a professional designer, don't insist your nephew has the right of veto. It doesn't matter that he thinks lime green comic sans is cool - your customers will hate it.

Very good point. We can add to this addendum the customers nephew, neighbor, dog, parrot etc. should not have the right of veto.