4 ‘Rookie Mistakes’ to avoid when promoting your own website

When trying to build a following to your website for the first time, you can waste a lot of time and money trying to get people on your site and trying to make money. There are a number of rabbit holes that website owners can fall down, some more technical than others. In this article, we focus on 4 general principles that should save you a great deal of time & effort. They are as follows:

Tracking

It used to be said that 50% of marketing and advertising efforts don’t work but that you could never tell which 50%. This is untrue of the Internet. It is possible to track the way that people find and use your site in a way that puts all other media to shame. With the right statistical analysis tools you can tell:

* Where people are finding you
* What keywords they are typing
* How much it is worth to you each time someone comes to your site using any given keyword
* How long people stay on your site
* Where people are turned off by your site
* Whether the changes you have made to your site have improved your ability to make money or not

This information is priceless. If you can get useful statistical information, you can set your business on a path of constant improvement and you can immediately see the fruits of your labours and whether your changes are making you money.

The results of adding statistical tools to your website can be millions in extra income and the cost? Nothing. Google Analytics, one of the best statistical tools can be added to your site at no cost.

No-one who is serious about making money on the Internet should be without this tracking information.

Goals

The biggest problems with most businesses are clearly defined goals. This is especially true for businesses on the web: although the Internet offers all manner of tools for finding your return on investment from Internet marketing, many businesses do not know what these tools are & do not use them.
A web-based business is no different to a traditional bricks & mortar business. Your website should be taken as seriously as the training you give your sales team & you need to set performance goals for yourself and the site in order to get the best out of what you are doing.
Goals should be, according to the acronym, SMART:

* Specific
* Measurable
* Attainable
* Realistic
* Timed

Providing goals for yourself and your site will help you to be more successful more quickly. These goals might be for the number of links you build to the site over a period of time, the number of articles you post on your blog, the number of improvements you make to your site or even to the return you are getting on your investment.

If you have a new site or a new business, it can be difficult to set goals that you feel are realistic or attainable as you might not yet know what is realistic & attainable. In this case, pick a number, any number & set yourself a goal for one month. At the end of the month, evaluate your results & then set yourself goals based on 3 month cycles. In this way, you can quickly get a feel for what you can do & use that information to develop goals that can be re-evaluated every 3 months.
Finally, if you have not done so already, set up Google Analytics. This tool will enable you to see how your site is performing and what traffic & what kind of a conversion rate you’re getting from visitors to customers. There is no better tool for analysing your progress on the Internet than Google Analytics &, what’s more, it’s free.

Paralysis

There is a phrase that pervades the business community: paralysis by analysis. Many of us suffer from information overload. There is so much information, there are so many blogs, so many experts that it’s easy to find hundreds if not thousands of ways of doing any particular task in order that it can deliver you the greatest benefit. The problem is that we can spend more time learning how to do a task than we spend doing the task. We never get started & we never learn by experience what will and what will not work for us.

The idea of ‘paralysis by analysis’ has never been so true in the Internet marketing business. There are myriad ways to promote your sites, large numbers of link-building strategies & then there’s the minutiae of SEO, of social media, blogging, & then you need a presence on YouTube, Facbook, Twitter, LinkedIn…
If you are looking to promote your website, pick a task & get it done. As a further step, write down what you’ve done so that you can do it quicker next time & so that you can get someone else to do it for you in future.

Purchasing Links

It’s very easy to purchase links. It’s easy to convince yourself that the easiest way to get links to your site is by purchasing them. There are companies that sell links all over the Internet & you can convince yourself that you can make a giant leap forward if you do this.

In reality, this is a never-ending rabbit-hole that can drain money from you and be a drain on your resources. Purchased links often give you quantity but rarely deliver quality. Purchased links can often be gained from pages that are not even indexed by the search engines. Purchased links can be found by the search engines with relative ease and any influence they give can be rescinded very easily.

It can be impossible to tell which of your purchased links work & so it becomes difficult to stop paying for the service as you become worried that you’ll lose the benefit.

Don’t purchase links. The search engines will look far more favourably upon you if you get good links by publishing high quality articles on relevant sites.

Sam Goddard is an Internet Marketing Consultant. His company, St James Systems, is based in the UK.