Here is what I would call the most classic mistakes many small independent online Businesses owners make. While this is not a comprehensive list, avoiding these mistakes may save time and money as you venture into the world of marketing and building your business online.

1. Trying to do it all and not spending enough time networking with people in your niche.
2. Not having a laser like focus on your niche or target audience.
3. Content to be the same as your competitors. How often I hear people say if I could only be like so and so or get the traffic as so and so. Domination of your niche and striving for excellance needs to be all of our goals.
4. Failure to implement a plan, or not having a specific concrete marketing and monetization strategy.
5. Relying on one or two strategies or tactics to market or monitize your biz. Multiple streams of income is key.
6. The idea or belief that just having a business out there, or a web presence will get you business. Once you reach the publishing phase, a full 50 to 70% of your time should be spend on marketing and monetization, the rest on publishing and research.
7. Thinking that people actually care about your business. People will care more about getting value and thats what you need to focus on, providing value to your readers. By doing this they will be more apt to trust you and the offers you have.
8. There is always another customer. Burning out your customers by pounding them with constant offers may make a little money in the short term, but with an authority site we care about each and every customer or reader, as we never know who our next referral should be. Outstanding customer service should be our goal.
9. Not following up with your readers or customers. While this may seem to contradict number 8, it is important to keep in the minds of your customers without burning them out by providing them with valuable content and valuable offers. You need to get into the mindset of your readers to anticipate their needs. How? One idea is to check your stats and see what articles are being hit most and try to get or craft a product from there.
10. Not systemitizing your marketing approach and automating lead generation.
11. Showing desperation. Constant offers show desperation, heavily monitized sites that have ads every couple paragraphs show desperation.
12. Playing it safe. Once we start to get some success there is a tendancy to start playing it safe and not change the way we are doing things.
    
    Well, I am on a role, so here are some more:
13. Spend way to much time on trying to get it right as opposed to getting things moving and going. Planning is a good thing, but it is easy to fall into the trap of too much planning and being afraid to move ahead until things are perfect.
14. Ignoring your existing assets. This includes ignoring your current customers or visitors to your website.
15. Not being focused, or spending too much time on things that don't really matter.
16. Not treating your online endeavor as a business!!
17. If you have your own products not creating an affiliate program
    I have seen a lot of people go to the expense of having an ebook or product created for them but don't offer any type of affiliate program. While they may do very well, think of how their business could explode if they had 10, 100 or 1000 people marketing for them!! 

So, what do you think?

Tags

Internet Business, Blog Marketing