Mistake #1. Going to a lot of work to build a website and then failing to promote it
There appears to be a lot of confusion about how visitors find websites. I had one client that was convinced that they were going to get millions of visitors the first week they brought their website up. They were so concerned they didn’t allow any email addresses or phone numbers on the site, only a mailing address. After months of delay because of this fear they finally brought it up and had very little traffic. We then had to start working on building traffic. You have to drive traffic to your site with advertising, promotions, mailings, putting the web address on your company literature and dozens of other ways. The concept of: “Build it and they will come” is a line from a movie not a workable marketing strategy.
Mistake #2. Building a website that focuses on you and not your visitors
Over 90% of websites focus on their company and not on the visitor. Their sites seems to say, “ME, ME, ME, ME”. Instead focus on the visitor. Talk about their needs, their pain, their goals and how you can help them. Visitors at most sites only visit the home page and then leave. Visitors usually can’t figure out “What’s In It For Me” and therefore leave.
Mistake #3. Thinking of web development as a one-time event like writing a book
A lot of hard work goes into creating a website. When finished you would like to relax and let it bring in the customers. But that is a mistake. There is nothing that turns off visitors faster than to see and out of date website. Keep your site fresh and up-to-date, keep expanding it, and continually improve it. Keep making it easier and more fun to do business with you.
Mistake #4. Not capturing visitor information
It is easy to think that because your website represents your company and your company represents your livelihood that it should be equally as important to web visitors. It’s not!! They are interested in their lives and their businesses not yours. If you want to keep in contact with visitors, don’t rely on them coming back on their own. Instead, capture their email and stay in contact with them. Send them new product announcements, press releases, follow-up messages, surveys, and enewsletters. Aggressively pursue them rather than hoping they’ll come back on their own.
Mistake #5. Registering your site with search engines just one time
Getting a good listing in a search engine is a very complicated process. Although you see many ads promising to get your site listed as number one in search engines, a one time $99 service won’t even come close to helping you achieve that. Your site needs to be designed with search engines in mind including: meta-tags, titles, using keywords and phrases in the page content, web page names, site maps and so much more. The criteria for achieving prominent search engine positions continually changes. In order to get the benefit of search engine traffic you need to keep working at search engine optimization and continually resubmitting your site to them. The traffic you will get for your effort will be worth it.
Mistake #6. Using only the web technology for marketing
The Internet consists of more than just web pages. Think about how valuable email, discussion groups, mailing lists, webcasts and chats can be to promote your website. As wonderful as web technology is, it is passive only communicating in one direction. If you don’t add things like email, discussion groups or chats, you are going to miss out on a huge opportunity to keep in touch with the customer after they have left your site. Most websites don’t collect a visitor’s email address. So once the visitor leaves, they are gone forever. By asking for their email address you can send them product announcements, send follow-up marketing campaigns or send enewsletters periodically to keep in touch.
Mistake #7. Not giving your visitors a reason to come back
If you want your web traffic to grow you need to give your visitors a reason to come back. Successful techniques include: providing a growing collection of articles about their needs, offering a knowledge base where they can learn about solving the problems they face, creating summaries of industry news events so they can stay in touch with what is happening, etc. Make regularly coming back to your site helpful to them and important to their success.
Mistake #8. Not analyzing your web traffic
Peter Drucker, the famous management consultant said, “If you can’t measure it you can’t manage it.” Most businesses with website don’t even know there are traffic logs that can be analyzed, yet alone take the time to analyze visitor patterns. Web logs track every page a visitor sees on your website. They tell you where the visitor came from, what search engine terms were used to find you, what pages were the most popular, which were the least, in what order they visited your pages and a lot more. By analyzing your traffic you can see what needs to be improved, make improvements and see tangible results.
Mistake #9. Poor customer support
When people create websites they seem to lose their common sense. When dealing with customers businesses traditionally would happily provide customer support, direct phone numbers of the people that could help them the most and maybe even a pager number or cell phone number of their key customer contact. They are ready to respond to the customer’s every need. But for some reason, when these same people build a website, they fail to put their 800# on it, fail to provide a list of helpful questions and even seem to put barriers up to doing business over on the web. They will fail to respond to email queries. My own experience is less than half the companies respond to emails queries. Those that do respond often take three or four days to do so. This is AWFUL. Set an aggressive goal of responding to emails within an hour. You’ll be ahead of all of your competition and you’ll shock your web visitor. You certainly wouldn’t wait an hour to answer your 800# would you?
Mistake #10. Focusing only in increasing traffic and not on increasing conversions
Most Internet marketing focuses on driving more and more traffic to their websites. They focus little attention on getting more of their visitors to convert into actual transactions. A conversion might mean the visitor signs up for a enewsletter, purchases something online, calls a sales rep for an appointment, or donates money to your non-profit organization. You can really leverage the web traffic you already have if you work on improving your visitor conversion rate.
Author
Dan Swanson is president of InnovaQuest, an Internet marketing company. He has been involved in the Internet for the last ten years. During that time he has helped develop over 100 commercial websites and has helped clients create millions of dollars of Internet based revenues. You can contact him at 972-675-1413 or at dan@iq2.com or visit the website http://www.iq2.com/. You are free to reprint this article in your newsletter or on your website as long as you include this last paragraph intact.