There’s a great book by Donald Keough the former CEO of Coca-Cola called “The Ten Commandments of Business Failure“.
It’s a great book that I highly recommend for any entrepreneur, and it’s premise is that there are thousands of ways to make your business successful, but from his own experience there were only about 10 ways for your business to truly fail.
This is no different in the online world. There are different ways to succeed online, but there are common factors to failing. So as you venture online to promote and market yourself; try to avoid these deadly pitfalls.
#1 – Launch a Bad Website
There’s no excuse to have a bad website. It’s almost better not to have a website than to have a bad one.
Thousands of new websites are cropping up each and every day. According to Domain Tools, a website that tracks domain name information, there were approximately 70,000 new .COM domain names registered per day. Although not the perfect indicator of how many new sites are launched daily, it gives you an indication of how many people want to get online. But most importantly it gives you an indication of how competitive the online space has, is, and will be.
Really good companies will put their best foot forward and have a professional looking website that is organized, pleasing to the eye and follows the best usability practices. Having a sub-par website cripples you right from the beginning. It’s your home base. Your face to the online world. Although content is still king, no one will eat a prime rib steak off of a garbage can lid. Also keep in mind that having a great looking website can be had with less than a couple of hundred dollars if you are tech savvy and use open source software like Wordpress (which is being offered as a free installation by most web hosting companies like GoDaddy) with a really good looking theme that’s free of charge.
#2 – Avoid Measuring Website Traffic or Activity
Just like your balance sheet and cashflow reports are critical to your business, so are web analytics. If you don’t track and review the data that exposes how your website visitors are getting to your website and what they do once they get there. You’re running your website in the dark. You won’t know about critical info such as:
- Which campaigns drove the most users to your website
- Which campaigns yielded the most leads
- Which pages have the highest likelihood of driving someone away
Services like Google Analytics are free, so there’s really no excuse to not track this kind of data. Unless you like the thrill of not knowing.
#3 – Ignore What People Are Saying About You or Your Company
What your clients or competitors say about you online:
- Is easier to publish via their own blogs, review websites or forums
- Can be easily found by prospective clients
- Is more important than what you have to say about yourself
With this in mind it’s important to track your online reputation so you can mitigate any negative feedback. (Hint: Use Google Alerts to track website mentions and Yahoo Sideline to track real-time Twitter messages)
#4 – Don’t Respond to Inquiries or Criticism
This rule applies to inbound emails, comments on your blog posts or even online feedback that you find on other websites. Not responding is the equivalent of saying “I don’t care”. We’ve all experienced it at one point or another. We contact a customer service email address with no reply. Or post a critical comment on a blog post. Or send a Tweet to someone…and not even an acknowledgment.
Your silence speaks volumes, which in turn will come back to you in bad online Karma in the form of diminishing user engagement with your Twitter account or a decline in readers of your blog. Or simply bad word of mouth…”Oh ya, I contacted him but he never got back to me…”. It always come back to you in one way or another.
#5 – Stop Testing New Marketing Techniques
You’ve found a great way to drive leads, and your done? This is a great way of stifling any forward momentum or progress. But before you pat yourself on the back, remember that what works now doesn’t necessarily mean it will continue to work at the same peak level continuously.
The biggest gift that the web has given us, is the ability to fail really fast. Why not use this to your advantage and keep testing to improve upon your last best effort? Testing is what will help your marketing campaigns innovate and incrementally improve. To avoid this blunder start small by testing different variations of your email marketing or the pages that you send people to. See which marketing copy increases your inquiries.
#6 – Don’t Use the Web to Promote Your Website
This may seem like an obvious one, but you’d be surprised how many companies fail to recognize this. You may be putting your website URL on your advertising billboards, direct mail, business cards and flyers. But if that’s your only traffic generation strategy you’re missing out big time.
It’s too far of a reach to expect a majority of your clients to read your website URL on a billboard, remember that URL, recall that URL when they actually need to look for your services, and hopefully type in that URL without any typos.
To crank up your website’s traffic research tactics such as:
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
- Pay per click (PPC) advertising
- Email marketing
- Etc.
Or just continue reading this blog 
#7 – Ignore Google in Your Marketing Strategy
For a large majority of successful businesses that operate online Google represents the largest contributor to their website traffic. People use Google as their starting point to anything they need to find online. Google is also the most dominant search engine in North America.
So suffice it to say, Google should be a big part of your strategy to increase your online leads. (See #5 about SEO).
#8 – Being “That Guy” in Social Networks
Chris Brogan termed it best. So I’ll let him explain:
#9 – Let Your Web Designer Lead Your Online Strategy
Web designers are great. If you find a good, reliable designer that does great work for a fair price, keep her. But not all of them know online marketing.
There are many facets to succeeding online, great design is just one of them. Use other resources at your disposal to create an online marketing plan and to help you execute them.
#10 – _________ (Fill in the Blank)
What have you found that’s a one way ticket to failing online? I’d like to hear what you’ve learned from your own experience…