There are lots of myths that have built up over the years in internet marketing. Here are some of the more popular ones.

If you build it, they will come

This might have been true in the early years of the internet when there wasn’t much content on the web. But nowadays there are lots and lots pages on almost every subject you can think of (and quite a few that maybe you shouldn’t be thinking of in polite company!). Which means that you have to do something to make your site and your content stand out from the crowd. Whether that’s writing more content for the robots to crawl round and index, creating a buzz on sites like Facebook and Twitter, churning out popular videos or a combination of these and much more.

Whatever your skills as a creator of websites, you also need some of the skills that the great showman P T Barnum used to promote Tom Thumb and many others.

Internet marketing is expensive

Expense is relative. Expensive compared to what?

There’s also a cost of doing nothing – usually your business gradually declines.

As with everything, there are usually lower cost ways of doing your marketing on the internet. They take longer to happen in the first place but often last longer than the “shooting star” methods that cost lots of money, burn brightly for a short while and then disappear off the face of the earth. Or, at least, the first page of Google.

Pay per click advertising gets fast results and, done correctly, can pay for itself. But you need a clear strategy and every single “duck” in the row needs to be in the correct place.

Other internet marketing methods can be more forgiving and can be adjusted over time. The trick is to do something and test as you go along, rather than out-guessing the world at large and trying to be perfect. Stick to the phrase “ready, fire, aim” and you won’t go far wrong most of the time.

You need to be on the first page

This is cheating a bit. You do need to be on the first page to get clicks from Google, Bing, etc. But they aren’t the only game in town. And you can be on the first page, just not quickly for that phrase you covet that gets billions of searches a month.

Stick to the low hanging fruit. The easy keyword phrases – the ones that get searches that aren’t quite in single digits per month but are close (a few hundred is fine) – are a great target. Because you’ll pick up traffic and visitors from all sorts of weird and wonderful similar phrases that would take you at least a month of Sundays to come up with. Pretty much without trying.

But you can also often piggy-back on sites that are on the first page. Obviously it would be stupid to try to game a site like Wikipedia. But if there’s a forum or two in your chosen business area, dive and help other people. Do that and they’ll start asking how they can begin to do business with you.