Things to Avoid While Marketing Online

Using Internet marketing techniques can improve relationships with existing clients and help you acquire new ones. There are many different ways to market your organization online including; building a website, creating an interactive community website, blog, forum, banner ad, video ad, and email to name some. Internet marketing is easy and it’s often much cheaper than traditional forms of marketing. There is a lot of mixed information floating around on and off the web about how businesses should market themselves online so I've created this blog post to list and explain what I think should be avoided and why.

Internet Marketing Tactics I Avoid

- Unsolicited Mass Emails or Spamming – This is when you send out an email to a whole bunch of people without first obtaining their permission. Reasons for avoiding this include; annoying people, wasting your time sending things to people who aren’t interested, getting “blacklisted” or blocked by business or ISP servers, and being overly intrusive.

- Putting Pop Ups On Your Site – These things are incredibly annoying and likely do you more harm than good as far as organizational image. Many people have popup blockers now so chances are good your popped up message isn’t even reaching very many people. News websites still don’t get it when it comes to these kinds of ads. Don’t put something on your site that slides or crawls around above the page and is difficult (if not impossible) to close out of. People won’t buy if they’re annoyed and in all reality you shouldn’t have to trick people into buying your product or visiting your website.

- Posting Shameless Plugs in Forums or In Chat Rooms – Doing this has to be one of the most unprofessional tactics I’ve witnessed. To me, it shows you like to find an easy way out and not really MARKET professionally but instead show up and stick your sign up in anyone (and everyone’s) face whether they have an interest in what you’re doing or not. Avoid this like the plague. In many cases doing this makes it seem as if you’re gloating about yourself in an unprofessional manner.

- Requiring People Sign Up For Your Email List – It’s perfectly fine to ask people if they’d like to sign up for special offers and announcements, you should be doing this, but don’t force them to sign up in order to get more information or to visit your site. People don’t like this and it will reflect negatively on you. It makes you look like an infomercial.

Those are all things I’d avoid when it comes to marketing online. Tomorrow’s blog entry will be about tactics that are good to use at this point in time. When you are an expert, good at what you do, your work speaks for itself so there’s no need to trick people, overwhelm them with your presence or to be unnecessarily intrusive. Be professional and use good Internet marketing practices. Check back tomorrow for more information about those good Internet marketing tactics!