8 Major Online Marketing Mistakes to Avoid

Online marketing may be extremely beneficial for your business and typically has a much greater return on investment than in comparison to traditional marketing avenues. However, your online marketing efforts must be conducted in an appropriate manner in order to be beneficial. Here are a few of the most common online marketing mistakes to watch out for and avoid.

1.Unsolicited Emails:
Never send out spam emails. Sending out unsolicited emails may get your domain name or IP flagged as a source of spam. If you're flagged as a source of spam, you may not be able to send legitimate emails, and your dreams of email marketing will go down the drain.

2.Extensive Load Times:
Most people have very little patience when browsing the internet. Avoid slow page loading times by limiting the size and number of images on your website. Also, flash videos are notorious for causing slow load times, but these videos may be incorporated in moderation.

3.Poor Page Copy:
Avoid simply stating the facts about your company on your website. Your potential patrons and customers are interested in what you can do for them and not the biographical data on your company.

4.Flash Based Websites:
Although, atheistically appealing and often quite engaging, websites created entirely in flash are not visible to search engines. Basically, a flash based website is the equivalent of an interactive video broadcasted on the web and cannot be scanned by today's popular search engines.

5.Failure to Measure Success:
Unlike many traditional marketing avenues, online marketing allows you to measure your success. Various website tools allow you to track who visits your website, what it is that they are looking at, and how long they are viewing specific pages. This type of analytical data allows you to custom tailor your online marketing for maximum return on investment.

6.Dependency on Pay-Per Click Advertising:
A common mistake for many companies on the web is to invest solely in pay-per click keyword advertising.Typically, a first page organic Google result is just as powerful as a costly pay per click keyword advertisement. Also, many people prefer the organic search results, because they have a certain implied credibility.

7.Single Marketing Vehicle:
Never keep all your eggs in one basket. For example, if your site traffic is based solely off organic Google search results and there is a change in Google's search engine algorithms, your specific keyword rankings may drop significantly and your online business will most likely suffer greatly. It's important to incorporate a variety of marketing vehicles such as opt-in emails, pay-per click advertisements, organic keyword results, banner ads, and etc.

8.Focusing Exclusively on Site Traffic:
Website traffic is not the only factor that dictates the success of an ecommerce business. All the traffic in the world won't benefit your business, if you have an extremely poor conversion rate. A conversion rate is simply the amount of website traffic that converts to online sales. For example, if your site receives 200 visits a day and your conversion rate is about 5 percent, you would have generated roughly 10 sales. With a higher conversion rate, the amount of traffic required to reach your goals will be greatly reduced.

Landon Wisser is a content developer and web specialist at NLI Media Group.


NLI Media Group is an Austin based web development and media firm that uses cutting edge online marketing and traditional advertising and promotion to create premium brand experiences for clients.

NLI Media Group