Top 10 Online Marketing Mistakes #1

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Over the next three weeks, we’re going to explore the Top 10 Online Marketing Mistakes made by local businesses. If you find that you’re making one or more of them, they could be holding back more than your online marketing strategy.

1. Not having a website or blog

This one may seem obvious, but stick with me for a few minutes because my intention is to go beyond the obvious and offer some new ways of looking at this.

The best solution to Mistake #1 is to have your own website or blog. And let’s take up a moment to clear up the website vs. blog confusion. A blog is a website. It just uses a software solution, such as WordPress, Moveable Type or b2evolution to organize the information on the website.

The term “blog” is short for weblog. A weblog organizes it’s content in reverse chronological order. A standard website organizes content in a hierarchical structure.

Whew! OK, so why is having a website (or blog) so darned important? It’s simple really – a website is the gateway to all aspects of Internet marketing. There are dozens of Internet marketing strategies and tactics that can drastically cut your advertising expenses while increasing your campaign’s effectiveness. And most of the best ones work for local businesses as well as or better than for businesses with national reach.

Let’s look at a few of the website options available to enable you to Dominate Your Local Market.

One-page website – a one-page website is often referred to as an online sales letter. In another variant, a one-page website can give the essential information quite effectively. Various marketing elements can be included on the page with a single call to action. The downside might be a lack of focus in the page content that might result in less effective search engine optimization.

Mini-site – A mini-site contains a few pages to organize content in a logical manner. It’s a simple but effective way to enable the developer to produce a search engine optimized website.

Full-scale website – If you have too much content for a one-page or mini-site, your site will ned to be organized with multiple pages in order to provide search engine optimized pages and effective organization for site-mapping.

Blog – We explained the mechanical make-up of a blog earlier, so now we’ll explain it’s advantages. Once a blog is properly set up, it can be added to, updated and automated to create an online marketing machine.

Search engines L-O-V-E blogs because they tend to be updated on a regular basis – so be sure to update yours (or have it updated) to gain maximum advantage. A blog can be added to a current website or built as a “stand-alone” website.

They are flexible, economical and can be easily adapted to any business. Anyone without a website – or with a static site that doesn’t rank as well as they’d like – should consider adding or moving to a blog.

Top 10 Online Marketing Mistakes #2-#10 will be coming over the next two weeks. To take action now, call Orange Cat Productions at 859-544-9005.

Dominate Your Local Market!