Are You Guilty of Committing these 26 Costly Blunders in your Digital Marketing?

Here are 26 costly blunders I have encountered recently when advising small business owners about marketing their business on the internet.

1. Paying seo “specialists” to rank your site for phrases that don’t appear on your site. The good Lord can’t make this happen.

2. Failing to use video.

3. Using video, uploading to YouTube and not inserting links back to your site from the description box.

4. Poor/amateurish LinkedIn profile.

5. No LinkedIn account or profile.

6. White text on a black background-check out Google.com, Facebook.com, Twitter.com, Apple.com, Youtube.com, Pinterest.com-all have one thing in common.

7. “Doing a blog” and thinking it is a good use of your time; publish great content that your visitors will appreciate because it helps solve their problem.

8. Failing to find out what your target market is looking for (see 7 above)

9. Failing to give it to them.

10. Advertising on Facebook for “likes” (send the money to a worthy cause instead-maybe the homeless in Dublin).

11. Countless traffic leaks away from your site-Facebook/Twitter don’t need your traffic. You need theirs.

12. Not using email to connect with your audience/potential market.

13. Poor permalink structure-using http://webdesigndublin.org/?p=123 rather than http://webdesigndublin.org/small-business-websites

14. No internal linking on your website.

15. Boring, uninformative About Us page.

16. No photo (see 15 above).

17. Asking people to become subscribers to your site but not giving them a reason to opt in.

18. Simply asking people to “read my latest blog” on social medial sites like LinkedIn-give them a reason-“what’s in it for me?”

19. Not enough or poor content on your website.

20. Broken links.

21. Crap, boring titles giving no encouragement to actually read what you have written.

22. Website posts not categorized-smacks of either a) careless or b) amateur or c) both.

23. Failing to use images.

24. Using images but no alt tags.

25. Thinking the search engine results pages are organised alphabetically.

26. Thinking you can pay to get on the first page.