Internet marketing is a big subject but it seems to have an even bigger share of problems. I’ve homed in on three of the biggest problems that most people seem to suffer from and given you some ideas to overcome them.
1. Not knowing whether your internet marketing is working
This is probably the biggest issue for most people. Years ago, David Ogilvy said “50% of all advertising is useless. We just don’t know which 50%.” Nowadays with internet marketing, that’s probably closer to 90% is wasted or makes negligible difference to the results you get.
You could spend half your day working out what is working and what isn’t. But then something could change in Google’s algorithm tomorrow and throw all your current results out of the window.
Even when you can potentially measure results, often the resultant traffic is so low that it’s statistically irrelevant.
Take this article, for instance. I don’t know ahead of time how many readers I’m going to get or how long it will take me to get them. I’d need a time machine to be able to do that. So I just take a view that, on average, it will get readers, some of those readers will click through to my website and a few of them will maybe contact me.
Add in the fact that internet marketing often takes what seems like forever to work or get any results and you’re stuck in the dark.
The only solution to that is “get over it”. Unless you can afford a whole analysis department then it’s better just to keep doing lots of different things and rely on the quantity of different things to make up for the ineffectiveness of any single method.
2. It takes so long!
The days of changing your page, waiting a few minutes and then being able to see the effect of that changes you made happen in the search results are long gone. Which in some ways is a shame but is generally more a result of the internet maturing.
It used to happen and I have fond memories of those times. But they’re only memories.
Nowadays, it’s rare for things to change fast. It only happens when you get stacks of new links – usually as a result of a major news story – or if you’re targeting a really long tail keyword where Google hasn’t really got any relevant results to show.
The second option is nice when it happens but runs the risk of spending longer in keyword research than you actually get back in value from the visitors it brings to your website.
Once again, the solution is patience.
And perseverance.
It doesn’t much matter if the work you do today isn’t going to show up in the results for a few weeks or even a few months. Because the work you did yesterday and the work you’ll do tomorrow will take roughly the same amount of time as well. So, providing you’re consistent, you’re building up a future stream of visitors and revenue for yourself.
3. Google keeps changing its mind
This will keep happening.
Google only cares about organic (non-paid) search results in as much as it needs to keep its users happy and clicking on the paid-for adverts that keep it in business in the first place.
The trouble is, for most industries, the average search engine user isn’t going to notice whether it’s your site they click on in the search results or one of your equally switched-on competitors.
You need to get used to this as well. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news!
But you also need to plan for it happening.
Which means that your internet marketing needs to cover a number of different bases over time. So if videos are in favour this year but something else is in favour next year, it doesn’t matter because your internet marketing covers all those aspects.
Diversifying so that you’ve got videos, social marketing on Facebook, Tweets, pictures on sites like Pinterest, micro blogging on somewhere like Tumblr, forum marketing, article marketing, newsworthy press releases, document sharing, infographics and much more will keep you near the top of the results regardless of the mood swings of the search engine algorithms.
If you’d like more help with your internet marketing problems, please contact me.