Top 10 Mistakes of Internet Marketing

Many of us have tried to learn how to make money online using all kinds of inputs: ebooks, forums, videos, audios, trial and error, etc. If you're like me you find yourself constantly second guessing or just being frustrated when you see an Internet Marketing guru use a new bag of tricks to make yet another five million dollars in days.

Recently I polled a list of internet marketers on what they felt were their biggest mistakes made in their own online careers. I seeded the question with my own mistakes with the intent to get a discussion started.

What was revealed was extremely interesting coming from many who are very experienced. I decided to collate the list and rank them in what I thought is the best order based on the number of responses I received.

So, here we go - enjoy the list, and, use this to power your own online business!

Top 10 Mistakes of Internet Marketing

1. No Autoresponder - I think almost everyone responded to this one. Not having an autoresponder means no email list to work with. No list means re-marketing for every new product or service. The gurus make the BIG bucks here because their lists are huge!

2. Product Pricing Too Low - If you have been following Frank Kern's latest endeavor you'll see this is one of his emphasized points. Many are afraid to see the price point high thinking you'll lose customers whereas the opposite may be true. The psychology may be that something expensive is valued whereas something cheap is not.

3. Not Using Your List - Much like #1 even if you have a list you may not be marketing to it. Your list is your lifeline according to most. Use it!

4. Too Many Projects at Once - Ah, the age old story. I'm completely a victim to this - losing focus on a single project to start another. Yes, it is good to have ideas but keep them on a pad of paper by your side and leave them for later! There was a lot of noise from everyone on this one.

5. Test Marketing Before Jumping In - Well, there isn't much more to say about this other than do your research and plan carefully.

6. Offers to Never Seen Products - Whatever you do, don't do this. You must either buy or barter the product you are going to sell. If it is bad you definitely want to stay away and keep your customers away as well.

7. No Affiliates for Your Product - One marketer responded that he estimates he lost over one million dollars just from this simple mistake. Use your affiliate network to help sell your own product - it is like an exponential web, that, if good will grow your income at a massive rate.

8. Bad Sales Copy - Borrow, beg or just pay for this unless you are a great copywriter. This can sink a great product faster than anything.

9. Knowing a Niche is Profitable - Again, much like #5 this mistake is very common. You're excited, build a site, promote only to find out that those hours and hours of work went to waste. Ouch!

10. Not Outsourcing Faster - This is truly the power of many vs. the power of one. Outsourcing means getting help to build your site using such services as Elance.com or Amazon's Mechanical Turk. It is inexpensive and can accelerate your effort.

Some of the runners up were:

11. Bad Adwords Ads
12. Not Using Freebie Lists
13. Poor AdSense Testing

There you have it. If you can take away some of these lessons to use in your own work you should be better off and be able to make money online. Enjoy!

Time to watch the Oscars.

Top Internet Sites by Time Spent Online

Recently, I stumbled onto a page by a site analytics firm that measures how long users spend on a site rather than pure hits. They wanted to understand which sites generate long sessions with users. When you look at their results you see some pretty interesting patterns - all which revolve around content.

Before you look at this list take a moment to think of the sites where you spend the most time online. I'm not referring to how often you visit a site but one where you actually keep your attention and spend a duration of time browsing, reading, purchasing, socializing, etc.

Are you ready? You might be surprised. Here are the top 10 sites with longest attention share:

1. Myspace.com 11.9%
2. Yahoo.com 8.5%
3. Msn.com 3.7%
4. eBay.com 3.7%
5. Google.com 2.1%
6. Aol.com 1.7%
7. Pogo.com 1.6%
8. Facebook.com 1.0%
9. Amazon.com 0.7%
10. Craigslist.com 0.6%

Interesting list - I would say I spend most of my attention share on eBay, Google and Amazon as well as Youtube (which is number 12). I have never even looked at Pogo.com and hardly ever look at Msn.com. Some surprises in the top 20 - Adultfriendfinder.com and Neopets.com.

Looks like I need to spend some more time researching avenues on how to make money online with Myspace and Yahoo. More information on this list can be found at:
Compete.com Attention List

Tracking Heat Maps

As you probably noted in my last entries, my focus lately has been on high volume keyword phrases. The more I have worked with this concept the more I want to research it. As with any site optimizing its performance should always be on your checklist. Part of optimizing my high volume sites to make money online was to take a look at how people were navigating around them. What were they seeing and clicking on?

Recently I came across a wonderful site called CrazyEgg.com that has an excellent interface for tracking clicks and click density over a period of time. I could easily see if my AdSense ads were being ignored, what articles were being read, if any promotions were focused on and what part of my pages were generating real interest.

CrazyEgg.com is a very cool web 2.0 application that basically creates a simulated overlay on top of any web page. This overlay is triggered by a simple javascript line embedded on the page you want to measure. Basically it is keeping track of clicks, click location, and density. What I really like about it is the ability to adjust as the page adjusts. So, if you have a blog you don't have to worry about the content locations changing (although I'm sure a drastic change would probably affect it.)

This tool is particularly helpful with Adsense ads allowing you to visually understand if you ad positioning is working. I was easily able to optimize my placements by viewing the heat maps and rearranging the ad positions. For my high volume sites this has been extremely beneficial. In fact, there were ad placements I definitely thought were in the correct position that turned out to have no clicks at all! I was floored! It seems that users are tuning out ads in various locations that I had no idea were poor screen real estate.

If you have any page that gets some traffic you should try it out for a test drive. A possible option would be to use a very low bid Adwords campaign to get clicks before the page has been promoted so you can tune the layout sooner rather than later. Whatever way you want to test, tune and monetize your site, I strongly suggest that you try this tool out soon.

Web Page Hot Spots

If you get a chance take a look at CrazyEgg.com on how they are able to show you how users are clicking natural links and page hotspots. This is a great research site on how you should organize your web pages and think about monitization!  I use it all the time as should you!

Are You Measuring Your Success?

I've noticed that a lot of new, struggling marketers out there are having difficulty understanding key concepts around metrics and key performance indicators. Also known as KPI these measurements help reflect the strategic performance of a company. In large businesses this would be classified under the term 'business intelligence'. What does that mean?

If I asked you to sit back and tell me exactly how you would know if your business is doing well - how would you respond? Would you simply say "I'm earning some extra cash?" That might be fine. However, do you know some of the basic metrics of your business? Do you understand how many new customers you are collecting, the profitability of your AdWords ads, the percentage conversion rate of your affiliate partners? These are all KPIs for your business.

Now, you certainly do not have to get into this amount of detail to begin with. But you might want to begin measuring your internet business with simple statistics such as your AdSense ad channels, AdWords conversions, ebook sales through Clickbank, top referring sites, monthly profitability, etc. It's really not that difficult to do and can give you a good sense of what your business is doing without relying on your gut feelings. Are you able to simply say home much you have earned this month and how it compares to your previous months? How about how much you have spent (this is typically the naturally ignored metric)?

Here are some of the potential benefits of using KPIs:
Productivity, Profitability, Quality, Cycle Time, Growth, Innovation, etc.

Take a look at Eric Peterson's Blog called Web Analytics Demystified when you have some extra time. This is a great place to learn more about internet marketing KPIs. If you start simple and start soon - your online business will benefit from it.