Classic mistakes to
destroy your business

Classic Mistakes

When running an online business, there are some simple mistakes you should watch out for which will brand you as an amateur if you use them. Remember, your online appearance is everything in gaining customer's trust!

1. Using a free email such as Yahoo, Hotmail and so forth. Everyone knows these are free, easy to get and easy to change, almost hallmarks of internet scam artists. Don't make the mistake of using your free email for your communications. They're fine for your personal communications, but highly unprofessional, especially in the day of $9/year (or less!) domain names. Many domain name registrars will give you an email address using your domain name even if you don't have a site hosted anywhere, so take advantage of this and build your professional image.
2. Excessive use of capitalization, $ or !. Not only is this hard to read, but if you use it in email promotions, it will get you marked as spam. Not a good way to reach your customers' inboxes. This goes double for your subject line in email advertising. Typing in all caps is also considered shouting, and therefore rude. By the way, the trick of adding an asterisk in words such as free do not work as well as they used to in fooling the spam filters. These things do get smarter over time. Try to use synonyms, such as complimentary or gratis. And don't forget to mean it. Free is filtered for because it is so overused.
3. Never, ever buy cheap emailing lists. This is one of the fastest ways of being accused of spam. Know exactly how the list was compiled. Your best option is an established, double opt-in list from a reputable vendor. In many cases, they will send your email themselves. They should have enough information on their subscribers to show you that your campaign will be reasonably targeted, not just sent to 1 million generic subscribers. Failing to do this can get you blacklisted, which means your email may not get anywhere in the future, even if you improve your tactics.
4. Excessive linking. Never link with another page just because they asked you for an exchange. Make sure you are offering a value to your readers by the link. This will improve your search engine rankings and your image with surfers. People don't care about topics irrelevant to your site, and many search engines have learned to look for relevance. One way to counteract this is to exchange relevant articles instead of plain links. It adds to your credibility on their site and gives your readers useful information.
5. Have a poorly designed website. All the traffic in the world won't help if your website drives visitors away. Make sure your site looks professional with no broken links, missing graphics or "under construction" signs. Test your advertising copy to find out what is effective. Go for the sale. If you have testimonials from customers, get their permission to use them, ideally with links to their sites or some other form of making it clear that these are real people talking about your business.
6. Failure to follow up with existing customers. Hey, just because they bought one bottle of Super Printer Ink doesn't mean they'll never buy anything else from you. Make sure you get permission to email your customers your latest specials, new products, etc. These people are your best pre-qualified traffic, so take advantage of it.
7. Advertise once. It can take repeated exposures to get people to buy from you, so don't give up just because your ad didn't pull the way you expected it to. Test, tweak and rerun ads as necessary. Marketing takes a lot of effort, so don't give up just because of poor results.
8. Place excessive advertising on your site. No one wants to be bombarded with advertising online, yet it's a very common mistake webmasters make. Keep the advertising on your site from interfering with your visitors' use of the site.
9. Hide promotional products. If you're advertising a deal on a particular product, make it easy to find. If your advertising isn't directing visitors directly to the product's page, make sure there is a very clear link to it on the page they arrive on. You do not want to frustrate your potential customers.
10. Fail to track your advertising. If you don't know where your adverting is getting responses, how can you test it? Ad tracking is not terribly difficult, but utterly vital. You don't need special software to accomplish this. Simply typing your URL as http://www.yourdomainname.com/pagename.htm?trackingcode will suffice in most cases. No fancy software is required, but you may need to find out how to get the information from your website log.
11. Failure to market your site. There is often a mentality that websites simply get traffic with no effort. After reading this report, I hope you agree that it is simply not true. It can take a great deal of effort to get traffic to your site. Despite the many claims to the contrary, there is no way to build an online business in two hours a week while you're sleeping.