Avoid These Two Mistakes in Online Marketing

It doesn’t matter if you consider yourself a blogger, a product creator or an affiliate marketer. If you’re online trying to earn a living, you are ultimately an online marketer. These two mistakes in online marketing can ruin you and your business.

Mistake One:

Trying to be someone you’re not. I know, you see other successful people and you think if you imitate them you’ll be successful too. However, this is not a good idea. It’s fine to imitate strategies that others are using, but you still need to be yourself. Let your own personality shine through. If you enjoy humor, use humor. You don’t have to be a stuffy marketer. People will like you for who you are and for being who you are.

People hate someone who is fake. If you’re trying to fake your way into their trust, they will know it and stop following you. Attract your own market, people who like you for you. Don’t try to attract a marketing pretending to be something or someone you’re not.

Trying to be someone you’re not will only run you down. You’ll get tired of trying to keep up a facade or fake persona. This will lead to you not caring or having passion for your niche or your followers. If you’re already trying to be like someone else, stop it. Start being you. You may lose some readers in the beginning, but you’ll gain a whole lot more in the long run by being a real person.

Mistake Two:

Losing focus. I know, this one is easier said than done. There’s so much information to get in the way and so many shiny objects to chase, but that is not how you build a business. you have to stay focused and stay true to yourself, your values and your readers.

The grass may look greener in another niche, but this is rarely ever the case. Successful marketers love their niche and work very hard at them. If you’re not passionate about your niche, then yes, you should find one that you are passionate about, but don’t change mid-stream just because you think something else will be more successful.

Successful people stick with their ideas and follow through to completion. They don’t give up when they run across an obstacle, they find solutions.
It’s extremely hard to stay focused on one market sometimes, but if you can avoid doing too many things at one time or taking on too many projects, you’ll find it easier to focus on your target audience and your target niche.
Always start small, work hard and gain success in one area before you start adding on other things. You’ll be glad you did–even if it gets a little boring along the way, it will help you avoid mistakes in online marketing.

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Simple Tips to Avoid Information Overload

If you’re a new blogger you may be a bit confused by all of the information out there telling you how to set up, run and monetize your blog. You need to learn list building, traffic generation, SEO, email marketing, and a host of other things you should be doing. It’s likely you have information overload and feel completely overwhelmed by it all. Hey, it even happens to seasoned bloggers once in awhile.

What do you do to avoid getting overloaded with things to do? How do you blog perfectly?

The simple answer is, you will never blog perfectly, but that’s okay. It doesn’t have to be perfect, it just has to be informative and inviting to your readers.

You can avoid information overload. It may take an active approach and it may already be a habit for you to try and consume too much information. You need to break the habit.

Here are some tips to help you avoid being overwhelmed.

Tighten your focus.
You already know that you need to blog on a regular basis. That’s not going to change so keep your main focus on that. However, you do need a reason for blogging and you should give your blog posts a purpose. Decide what that purpose is and create a plan to grow your business with one simple method. You can implement other things later.

Choose one business building tactic.
Most business building strategies all go hand in hand, but if you narrow your focus to only one, it will be easier to blog and grow your business. The rest will start falling into place.
So, where do you start?
The majority of experts will tell you to start growing your list immediately. It really is essential to your business. Without a list, you don’t really have a business.
I’m sure you already have plenty of reports and ecourses that cover list building. Go over those, take some notes on how you’re going to focus on your list building efforts and put everything else aside. Do not read about SEO (other than the very basics to get traffic.) Do not read about traffic generation or anything that isn’t specific to building your list.

Create a blogging schedule.
Decide how many blog posts you will write each week and the purpose of each post. Choose one or two blog posts a week that cater to your list building efforts. If you offer a course or a free report as the incentive, make sure the topic of those blog posts are related so you can ask people to join your list at the end of the post.

The rest of your blog posts for the week should also have a purpose, but the purpose of those should be to gain reader attention, set yourself up as an expert or simply to inform the reader of something. It would be annoying if every blog post you made asked for the reader to join your list. You have to find a happy medium of promoting your free giveaway and giving valuable information.

How long?
How long should your main focus be about growing your list? Well, that should be part of your strategy from now until whenever. But for starters you should concentrate on that for a few months, get good at that and then start worrying with other matters.

Learn list building and email marketing first. Once you can do that comfortably then you can start branching out to learn more about SEO and traffic generation. The point is to keep it simple and stop overwhelming yourself with too much knowledge. Learn one thing well before moving to the next.

How do you keep things simple in your business? We’d love to hear your tips.

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