MindValley Labs Internet Marketing Blog

Learn How to Mar­ket and Pro­mote Your Website

Top 2 Mis­takes Made by Newbies

Not a sin­gle day goes by with­out receiv­ing an email where our clients and read­ers ask us how they can bet­ter mar­ket and pro­mote their web­site.  So, let me share some advice with you that I hope will help you on How to mar­ket and pro­mote your web­site suc­cess­fully. 

Here are the top two mis­takes that I see new online mar­keters make when they first start mar­ket­ing and pro­mot­ing their website.

Mis­take Num­ber 1: The Shot Gun Approach

Many new online mar­keters start out by doing a lit­tle bit of every­thing.  How­ever, there are far to many options and choices on how to pro­mote and mar­ket your web­site online.  I could lit­ter­ally give you a list of hun­dreds of things that you can start doing today.  How­ever, that is exactly the wrong thing to do! 

What you really need to pro­mote your web­site bet­ter do is to fig­ure out what is going to have the sin­gle biggest impact on mov­ing your busi­ness for­ward and focus only on that.  For­get all the noise and all the clut­ter and focus your attention. 

There are two key ben­e­fits of focus­ing on what mat­ters most:

Ben­e­fit 1: Over time, you will get really good at the things that you focus on.  If you are try­ing too many things, you will prob­a­bly know about a lot of things but not be very good at anything. 

Ben­e­fit 2: Focus gives you clar­ity.  If you lack a plan and a strat­egy of what items to zero in on, then you will feel over­whelmed and help­less.  How­ever, once you focus, you know exactly what you need to do to move your busi­ness forward.

How do you fig­ure out what to focus on to bet­ter pro­mote and mar­ket your web­site?   Almost always they will be:

To get traf­fic focus on:

1. Paid traf­fic (such as Pay-per-click advertising)
2. Free traf­fic (SEO, blog­ging, etc.)
3. Affil­i­ate mar­ket­ing (do this only after you know you have a site that sells!)

The trick, how­ever, is to fig­ure out what to focus on within each area and here the 80/20 rule is crit­i­cal.  This rule means that 20% of the activ­i­ties and work will get you 80% of the result. 

As Dave McClure pointed out in our arti­cle on “Suc­cess­ful Web­site Mar­ket­ing” there is another way and that is that you have to mas­ter “viral mar­ket­ing.”  I think Dave is dead on and will get back to you on what it takes to suc­ceed with viral marketing. 

Mis­take Num­ber 2: No track­ing and metrics

I just can’t say this enough:

“You can only improve the things that you mea­sure.  If you have no met­rics it is like dri­ving at night with­out the lights on — you have no idea where you are going.”

We just started work­ing with a new client on Google AdWords and when I asked him how his web­site is con­vert­ing he said “I don’t know.”  To me that is just shock­ing because track­ing is not that hard and it is so important.

If you run a busi­ness and you can­not answer this sim­ple ques­tion, then stop right now and get your met­rics and track­ing in place.  If you don’t know your met­rics then you are gam­bling.  You might be suc­cess­ful for a while but you will have no means to test, tweak, and rapidly opti­mize and improve your site.

The key to suc­cess­fully run­ning a busi­ness is to:

1. Find out what’s work­ing and do more of it!
2. Find out what’s not work­ing and stop doing it!

If you lack the met­rics to find out what’s work­ing and what’s not work­ing then you will have a much harder time turn­ing your new ven­ture into a suc­cess­ful business.

Plus, met­rics can be incred­i­bly moti­vat­ing because they help you to set con­crete and spe­cific goals that you can visu­al­ize and start mov­ing towards. 

How to Mar­ket and Pro­mote Your Web­site is a very broad ques­tion so I hope list­ing two mis­takes that new­bies make will help you avoid mak­ing these mis­takes with your venture. 

If you want to start dabling with pay-per-click adver­tis­ing and Google AdWords then check out these arti­cles to con­tinue learn­ing more about Google AdWords.

• 5 Days to Suc­cess With Google AdWords
• Defin­i­tive Guide to Google AdWords

• Avoid Get­ting Burnt With Google AdWords

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• Google Slap — How to recover from a Google Slap? — Sep­tem­ber 8th, 2008
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• Will Knol Rule The Search Engines? First Analy­sis Indicates…It Just Might — July 23rd, 2008
• Are small busi­nesses drop­ping out of AdWords? — July 23rd, 2008

About the Author

Prior to MindValley Media, Mike was the Head of New Ventures Strategy at eBay where he conceived of the strategies that led to the investment in Craigslist, the launch of Kijiji.com and the acquisition of Skype. Mike has an MBA from Stanford and previously worked for the Boston Consulting Group. He is also a certified Google AdWords Professional.

Check out other posts by Mike Reining

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