In the early days of the agency, they charged $3,000 per client.

Today, they charge $15,000 per client.

The agency went from charging $3,000 to $15,000 within a few years because they demonstrated their expertise instead of just saying they are experts in their niche.

If you’re serious about landing your ideal clients on a consistent basis, you should become a respected expert in your niche.

How do you do that?

Build a blog

A blog is different from a website.

A blog is frequently updated. A website is not.

You can add new articles to a blog several times a day.

Blogging positions you as an industry leader.

Blogging helps you demonstrate your expertise to potential clients and gain their trust.

Blogging is another form of content marketing.

Content marketing costs 62% less than traditional marketing and generates 3x more leads.

Seventy percent of customers would learn about your business through the articles posted on your blog than adverts.

Publish high-quality articles on your blog on a consistent basis, and you’ll be rewarded with lots of customers.

High-quality blog posts are hard to create, but they are always worth the time and effort.

A great blog post would generate traffic for many months and years to come.

Caz Makepeace of the yTravel Blog revealed that many of their 3-year-old posts continue to generate 2,000 – 3,000 views a month.

And they continue to receive emails of gratitude from people who found it helpful.

Through blogging, Caz and Craig Makepeace have become one of the most respected experts in the travel niche.

To get the real benefit of blogging, you should publish 16 times a month, according to a study by HubSpot.

Bloggers who publish 16 times receive 3.5x more traffic than their competitors who publish less content per month.

Blogging on a regular basis will help you generate more traffic to your brand.

More traffic means more leads.

And more leads means more customers.

Whether your business is a B2C or a B2B, blogging can help you drive lots of traffic to it.

Through your blog, you can collect visitors email addresses.

For example, Kim Garst is a thought leader in the social media space.

She collects emails on her blog.

Email is the most reliable way to communicate with prospects who visit your blog.

Start guest blogging

Blogging is publishing content on your blog.

Guest blogging is publishing content on established blogs in your niche or sub-niches.

When you start your blog, you’ll have zero people reading it.

Instead of publishing on your blog and hoping someone sees it in the early days, you should start guest blogging to drive traffic to your blog.

For example, Bill Widmer uses guest blogging to drive traffic back to his blog.

Here’s one of his Google Analytics screenshots for the same day a guest post was published on a high-authority blog.

Guest blogging will help you build yourself up as an authority in your niche.

No matter who you are, or the kind of business you run, you can leverage guest blogging to become a respected expert.

For example, Steve Elville, a principal at Elville and Associates, an estate planning and elder law firm in Maryland, regularly publish guest posts.

Here’s one of his guest posts on WBJC’s website, Maryland’s classical music station.

When guest blogging, ensure that you get, at least, a backlink to your blog or site from the guest post.

Backlinks coming from guest posts will help your blog rank higher in search engines.

Guest posting is so effective that many SEO agencies and digital marketers say that they use it in their link building campaigns.

Guest blogging will drive links to your blog. That means higher rankings in search engines.

Have passion for what you do

Consumers are more equipped with more knowledge than ever.

If there’s anything they want to know, a simple Google search will reveal everything to them.

So, they don’t need to talk to an expert to understand common topics. Or choose a Niche in which you are most interested.

You need more than just knowledge to become a respectable individual in your niche.

You need passion.

With passion, you’ll not only create content on a consistent basis, but you’ll also innovate.

Your ability to innovate is the key.

Constant innovation gives you a competitive advantage over other thought leaders in your niche.

To maintain your status as a leader, you have to introduce new or better content on a regular basis.

Many people know what you do. They are not respected because they lack passion for what they know.

They lack the passion for experimenting new things.

For example, Neil Patel is one of the most respected experts in the digital marketing niche.

Patel continually tries new things on his blogs and in his marketing.

He spent $57,000 trying different marketing tactics on Instagram and wrote about it on his blog.

He challenged himself to build a blog that makes $100,000 within 12 months without using his name and the network he has built over the years.

That’s not all.

He also wrote a case study of how spending $162,301.42 on clothes made him $692,500.

Neil Patel is always experimenting with new strategies.

That is why he’s one of the most respected digital marketing experts.

This requires more than just knowing what you do. You also have to be passionate about it.

When you have a passion for what you do, the money will follow.

Obsession with learning will help you become expert in your niche

“Ordinary people seek entertainment. Extraordinary people seek education and learning.” –Benjamin Hardy

One of the biggest secrets of Amazon is learning about their customers and various marketing tactics they can use to win a larger market share.

Amazon CEO, Jeff Bezos is obsessed with learning.

If you’re not always learning new things, it means you’re not growing.

And you can’t be seen as a respected expert when you’re not growing.

As an expert, you should always be steps ahead of your followers.

So, develop a growth mindset.

Try new things.

Learn new things.

Ask more questions.

Embrace challenges.

That is how you grow to become an unstoppable expert in any niche.

Most people are distracted right now. They will rather do other things than learning.

The knowledge you have right now makes you valuable.

But you can be even more valuable if you are willing to increase your knowledge.

“Your level of success will rarely exceed your level of personal development because success is something you attract by the person you become.” –Hal Elrod

By starting a blog, guest blogging on a regular basis, having a passion for what you do and obsessed with learning, you’ll become a respected expert in your niche in no time.

What other ways have you seen people become respected experts in their niches?

Tell me in the comments.

Thanks for reading.

The post How to Become a Respected Expert in Your Niche? appeared first on Tricky Enough.

According to him, the place had a TV and a video game console on the ground. Clothes and trash were everywhere.

He saw a handful of young people working very hard to build an audience.

But Andrew was unconvinced Facebook would become the next big thing. In fact, he had in his mind that “Facebook would never become a billion-dollar company.”

His belief was that Facebook would achieve a maximum of 3 – 5 billion page views.

He was so wrong.

Facebook is at 1 trillion page views per month.

Facebook built the audience because people keep returning to Facebook. And more people keep signing up on Facebook.

For 13 months, Derek Halpern built an audience. He did nothing else.

When he finally decided to sell his first online product, he pulled in $46,398 in 10 days.

Two months later, he relaunched the same product. Maybe better. He made $102,621.

Another three months later, he relaunched the product again. Maybe better. He made $196,654.

Over a year of building an audience paid off in hundreds of thousand of dollars.

When you have an audience, you have a business.

Google can release as many products as it wants. They have an audience, who is ready to use their products.

Some products will fail. Some will achieve a little success. Very few of them will become the next big things.

What matters is that they have the market within their grasp.

New startups need an active audience for their products when they launch. That is why they go to press.

They work hard to get featured in the main publications like the Entrepreneur, Fast Company, BuzzFeed, the Huffington Post, and TechCrunch.

When Thenuka Karunaratne released his new defunct product, he got it featured in Time, Business Insider, and others with a $10 budget.

The website received about 420,000 page views and 90,000 unique visitors within a week.

The press has the power to send a lot of visits to your website.

But you shouldn’t always rely on the media.

What if you have your own audience who you can always reach?

That would be cool, right?

You can build a massive audience. But you must be willing to work hard.

How do you build an online audience that wants to buy your product and services?

Build an audience through organic search

People use search engines for research.

Most search users are in the information-consumption mode. They want high-quality content that answers their query.

Visitors from search engines are more likely to stay longer than visitors from social media.

People use social media to keep in touch with their friends and meet new people.

Some people use it just to kill time when they are bored.

Some people use it to entertain themselves.

Search engines like Google and Bing are valuable channels for building an online audience.

Note that there are two types of traffic from search engines.

One is free.

The other is not.

Organic search traffic is free. All you have to do is create remarkable content on a consistent basis and apply SEO to get them ranking high on search engines.

Nick Eubanks created a website that receives 100,000 visits per month from search engines without spending $1 on advertising.

Another great advantage of search engines is that visits from them are consistent. You can see a big wave of traffic from Facebook today, and see nothing the next day.

These are the most important things to apply if you want lots of regular traffic from search engines.

1. Gain high-quality backlinks.
2. Create content around your target audience’s questions and problems.
3. Become a regular contributor on reputable sites in your industry.
4. Do keyword research to find the best keywords that will give you relevant traffic.
5. Do on-page optimization for each content you publish on your website
6. Create high-quality content on a regular basis.

Build an audience through social media

Humans have been sharing information longer than we can remember.

Sharing is part of us. It’s something we do every day.

We share valuable information with our families, friends – and even strangers.

Social media allows us to share. It’s easier to share on social media.

Social media is another channel where you can build an audience.

Social media users may not be in the research mode unlike search engines, but it still lets you connect with people… but in a different way.

Don’t forget the “social” in social media.

You don’t broadcast on social media. You interact with people. You connect with people. You entertain people.

You give them something they can’t wait to share with their friends. That’s how social media marketing works.

It’s about getting people to talk about you. It’s about making people spread the word about you.

Every social media site is not for you. And you’ll be spreading yourself too thin if you try to be on every social media site.

Instead, pick one or two social sites and focus on building a massive audience on them.

Focus on a social channel where your target audience spends time online.

For example, you can focus on Facebook and Twitter if you’re targeting a general audience or consumers.

But if your target audiences are business owners, CEOs, highly professionals like marketing consultants, LinkedIn would be more appropriate and effective.

Keep in mind that you’ll receive some negative comments when building an audience on social media. It’s normal.

Even successful marketers and brands receive harsh criticism on social media from time to time. How you deal with them is what matters.

Create a plan for dealing with negative feedback ahead of time.

And always respond when you’re in the right frame of mind.

Don’t reply to a rude or hateful remark when you are frustrated or angry.

Build an audience through paid social media

Organic search traffic and social media alone can take up to 6 months before you begin seeing any worthwhile results from them.

If you want to turn your efforts into profit starting the first month, then you should be willing to do paid social media.

Organic reach on social media is dying seriously. In fact, social media has become a pay-to-play game.

Advertising is not a bad thing. Ads are everywhere nowadays.

Magazines. Newspapers. TVs. Search engines. Billboards.

But social media is the best place to advertise and grow your audience.

Why?

It’s cheaper. It also allows you to reach as many people as possible.

Let’s use Facebook ads as an example.

With Facebook ads, you can target anyone who visited your website.

You can reach similar people who converted on an ad.

You can target people based on their education, income, location, interests, gender, age, and more. There has never been any form of advertising that allows you to do this.

For example, Jeff Goins started buying Facebook ads to drive people to his automated webinar.

According to Jeff, he made, he pays $1,000 a day to make $2,500 daily while still adding thousands of new people to his email list.

You can use the same strategy to build a massive audience within a short time and with little effort.

I believe you now know how to build an audience for your business and yourself. Having an active online audience will increase your earning capability.

Keep this phrase in mind:

If you have an audience, you have a business.

Suggested:

Learn SEO on your terms.

The post If You Can Build an Audience, You Can Build a Business appeared first on Tricky Enough.

You are also always looking for the new ones.

Maybe you do this to be well-versed in digital marketing.

Or, you want to be the first person to get your hands on that raw marketing tactic before the competition does.

As an ardent reader, I recommend reading.

I read almost all the top marketing publications and websites.

I know almost every digital marketing tactics on the planet.

I read them on various blogs.

And I also watch and study what marketing tactics people and businesses are using in various niches and industries.

What I have learned from applying many of these marketing tactics, and watching other apply them is that, most are a waste of time and money.

Trust me, you will do 1,000% better without them.

There are a lot of them out there. I can’t name them all.

But, there are some very stupid ones I’ll urge you to avoid.

These are the 5 stupid marketing tactics that will waste your time and money.

Avoid them like the plague.

1. #Hash #Tagging #Every #Post #On #Social #Media

The “#” symbol represents hashtags on social media.

It was invented in 2007 by Chris Messina, who use it to show where he was tweeting from and what his tweet was about.

Facebook introduced the hashtag feature to their platform in 2013.

“Starting today, hashtags will be clickable on Facebook.

Similar to other services like Instagram, Twitter, Tumblr, or Pinterest, hashtags on Facebook allow you to add context to a post or indicate that it is part of a larger discussion.

When you click on a hashtag in Facebook, you’ll see a feed of what other people and Pages are saying about that event or topic.”

Hashtags are used to categorize your social media posts so that interested people can see it.

It’s good for driving engagement and gaining more followers outside your current following.

But over time, it has become abused by dubious marketers on social media.

Hashtags are to social media what keywords are to search engines.

Imagine, you are writing a piece of content for the purpose of ranking high on Google for a particular keyword. You wouldn’t use the target keyword too many times.

Doing that will affect the quality of the content.

Search marketers call it keyword stuffing.

The same applies to hashtags.

Hashtags overused are the quickest way to annoy fans and reduce the quality of your posts on social media.

Keep hashtags out of your social posts unless you’re posting an incredible piece of content social media users need to know about. In other words, don’t hashtag every post you publish.

I’ve learned that tweeting every time and using hashtags within posts is a complete waste of time.

It’s an internet marketing tactic that doesn’t generate a worthwhile return on investment (ROI).

Stop if you are frequently posting and hashtagging on social media.

I’m not saying don’t market on social media sites.

Social media is a place every marketer should be.

It’s the place where prospects and customers spend their time. You should be there too.

But keep in mind that you are there to connect deeper with your current followers. There are the ones who will see those updates.

Stop endlessly trying to acquire new followers from hashtagging. It doesn’t work.

2. Excessive Posting on Forums and LinkedIn Groups

Forums and LinkedIn Groups are places to help and connect with people.

These are places where people of common interests meet.

I like the “help” part. It’s what keep forums existing since the web was born.

Forums, and especially LinkedIn Groups have turned into a channel where marketers want to push their products rather than help and connect with people.

Marketers post on forums even when they have nothing worthwhile to contribute to the discussions. They just want people to see their name, hoping they will click their profile link and visit their website.

Some people will write to promote their products blatantly.

To succeed in forums and LinkedIn groups, you must stop seeing them as marketing channels.

It’s true that you can get the word out about your product on forums, but they are primarily not made for that.

See forums, LinkedIn groups or any online community from a real-world perspective.

You don’t whine all the time at an offline forum.

You are patient.

You watch others. You listen.

You only come in when you feel your contribution will help and is needed.

You connect with a few people at the forum. Exchange contacts and meet later for a coffee or lunch. You get to know them personally.

The bigger and better your network, the more clients you will get from your network.

That’s the way forums work. They are not marketing channels.

But, over the past few years, I’ve been reading gurus approaching them like marketing channels and ignoring what they really are.

This is bad.

The fastest way to wreck your reputation is to start marketing at every forum or community in your industry.

LinkedIn Groups are a great place to connect with professionals.

See it as another place to grow your network.

Genuinely help people who need your help and who you can help.

Web users are wise. They know when you are pushing them to do something. Don’t. It’s a waste of your time.

If you can’t passionately help people in LinkedIn Groups and other communities, you should stay away from them.

3. Auto-Tweeting Every Content You See on Twitter

Most so-called social media experts don’t read what they share. This is bad for their followers.

This practice is very common on Twitter where you see someone you follow tweet every 10 minutes.

Most of these tweets have been pre-scheduled using a social media tool like Buffer or Hootsuite.

Of course, I like these tools. And Also I use a community tool Triberr which helps me to get some more Tweets.

They keep you active on social media when you are busy with other things.

But here’s the problem:

To keep their social profiles active, social users are posting contents they don’t read.

It’s a bad marketing practice.

Because people retweeted or liked your tweets doesn’t mean they clicked the link.

A depressing study showed that 6 in 10 people will share a link without reading it.

This can be bad for you if you have a reputation to protect.

By sharing links you don’t read, you probably don’t know what was written in the content.

Sharing content on social media means giving it your stamp of approval.

You don’t want to approve bad or negative ideas and posts.

You are better with engaging directly with your followers than sharing all sorts of links you come across on the web.

4. Doing The “I’ve Mentioned You” Outreach Trick

There is new marketing tactic marketers are talking about right now.

It works like this:

Step 1: Mention and link to a lot of influencers in your content.

Step 2: Reach out to them letting them know you’ve mentioned them and ask for a link or a share in return.

This little trick does work, of course.

But it’s getting over-used and abused as more marketers are jumping on it.

The ROI has gotten very low.

It has become the fastest way to destroy your reputation before you even build it.

I am less likely to trust anyone who reaches out to me saying I was mentioned and asks that I share or link to their content.

It’s a trick.

Web users hate when they are being tricked.

Before asking anyone for a favor, you should be genuinely interested in them. Help them. Build a deeper connection with them.

People are more likely to help you when you do that.

Don’t just write an article and mention them, then send them an email asking for a favor.

Imagine when experts are receiving 50 emails like this per day?

It doesn’t work.

Stay away from it.

5. Building Micro-sites for Getting Links

You need links to rank high on search engines.

If you’ve ever done link building before, you know how tough it is.

You experience a lot of rejections.

It’s not easy as most marketers often portray it to be.

So, you’ve probably read of the easy way for people who hate getting rejected and working too hard to earn backlinks.

Instead of reaching out to bloggers and asking for a link, why not just build the blogs and get those link juices whenever and wherever you want?

It sounds so easy.

Soon, you’ll start ranking for every keyword you target.

Although this strategy works, it’s 500% more expensive, time-consuming, and you are always at risk of getting kicked out of search engines.

Also, those microsites tend to lose their value over a few months.

Any links you get from them keep depreciating because those blogs aren’t getting new links.

You are better with reaching out to people and asking for a link.

You are better at creating a lot of quality content that can earn links by themselves.

Avoid these stupid marketing tactics and spend your time using the right marketing strategies. You’ll be amazed by the results you’ll achieve.

Thanks for reading.

Please share this article on social media and share your views with me below in the comments.

The post 5 Stupid Marketing Tactics That Will Waste Your Time and Money appeared first on Tricky Enough.

Without links, it’s impossible to rank highly for competitive keywords.

But despite this fact, many marketers hope and pray that they don’t need links to rank for their target keywords.

Why?

Link building can be boring and tiring.

There are lots of frustration and rejections in the process. I don’t blame marketers who just want to avoid it.

The truth is that you can’t rank without links.

Not at least when you are targeting a very competitive keyword. I’ve also seen keywords with moderate competition, yet you can’t rank without zero links.

I’ve also seen keywords with moderate competition, yet you wouldn’t rank them without links.

According to a study conducted by Moz, they found that:

• 2% of all top 50 results had at least one external link pointing to the website.
• And 77.8% of top results had at least one link pointing to the page.

Wake up to reality.

Stop hoping and praying that link building goes away, or you don’t have to do it.

Except you don’t want organic search traffic, link building tactics will always be important.

The good news is link building can be easy and fun when you follow the right process.

The tactics I am about to reveal in this article have been very effective for years.

They will continue to be effective as long as links remain a core part of the search algorithm.

What are these link building tactics I’m talking about?

Suggested Post: How to rank on Google First page without the backlinks?

Tactic #1: Interview Experts

Experts are respected in our society.

People pay attention to every word they say.

Sometimes, we pay experts just to give us their views.

For example, why do we have life coaches?

Is it that people don’t know what to do with their lives?

Is it that people can’t even make decisions for themselves?

According to reports, life coaches charge around $100 – $200 per hour.

Veteran life coaches can charge up to $600 per hour.

Why do we have consultants?

It’s because they are knowledgeable in their field.

We respect their views.

Many people flock to them and pay them for their service, which is just to give advice. Nothing else.

Including expert interviews in your content improves its credibility.

Writers in your niche will cite the content in their own work because it includes views from experts.

For example, Jon Cooper wrote a post where he published views from many experts in the SEO industry.

The title of the post is “The Most Creative Link Building Post Ever.”

In this post, he included views from SEO experts like Glen Allsopp, Sujan Patel, Nick Eubanks and many others.

The post has received 526 backlinks at the time of writing.

Maybe you are in the toothache niche. Think of dentists you can include in your contents.

Or, maybe you are in the estate planning or elder niche. Think of law attorneys you can include in your content.

Experts are highly respected, and their opinions are valued.

Including them in the content creation process will increase backlinks to your website.

Tactic #2: Publish and Distribute Infographics

Infographics are reliable assets for link building.

They can spread very quickly.

According to a research conducted by Buzzsumo, infographics receive the most average shares more than any other content type.

Because they are easy-to-digest information, writers can use your infographic on their websites. That means more backlinks for you.

It’s also easy to pitch your infographic to bloggers for the purpose of using it to back up their points (if it includes some facts).

Copyblogger created an infographic titled “15 Grammar Goofs That Make You Look Silly.”

That infographic has received over 250,000 social shares.

The infographic has also received 2,900 backlinks according to Ahrefs.

For your infographic to earn links, the topic should be well researched, and it must be greatly designed. Getting these two right is very important.

A poorly researched and designed infographic won’t get any worthwhile attention to earn links.

Get to see what your competitors have created and come up with something even better.

For example, if you want to create an infographic about how baby sleep, you should do a search for that on Google.

You can click on Google images to see more infographics the competition has created. That will give you a better idea of how to approach yours.

After you’ve got the content and design right, the next thing is to promote your infographic.

The infographic won’t just start getting links by itself.

You’ll need to do the boring work of reaching out to active bloggers who may be interested in publishing your infographic on their blogs.

When a blogger agrees to post your infographic, do not forget to ask for a link back to your website. That link will serve as the source link.

Suggested Post: 

How to Better image optimization for Better SEO?

The link credits you as the creator of the image.

You can use this simple tactic to build links in almost any niche.

In fact, it works in the Casino industry.

Tactic #3: Videos

According to a comScore’s study, 182 million U.S. Internet users watched nearly 40 billion online videos just in a single month.

That’s a lot.

Many marketers dismiss the video as time-consuming and expensive. That’s very true.

But the ROI can be exceedingly great especially when done for link building.

I must say that you should not venture into video marketing just for the purpose of using it to build links alone.

Video marketing offers great ROI on its own.

Keep in mind that marketing isn’t just about written words alone.

Don’t forget that YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world, only behind Google.

YouTube provides you with the opportunity to be in front of your target customers.

YouTube allows webmasters to embed your video on their websites. This could lead to more mentions of your brand which will have a big positive impact on your organic traffic.

When website owners embed your YouTube video, you can reach out to them and ask for a link to your website. This could be the start of a great long-lasting relationship.

You can also create video resources on your website.

People like linking to high-quality resources online.

Anyone can use this strategy.

Whether you offer white label marketing services, or you’re a local dentist, you can use videos to earn links and improve your organic search engine rankings.

These 3 link building tactics are very effective and will improve your organic search rankings starting right now.

Thanks for reading.

Please share this article with your network on social media.

The post Link Building Tactics That Will Improve Your Rankings Right Now appeared first on Tricky Enough.

If yes, then there’s a high chance that you’re committing one of the top sins of internet marketing.

Unless you start doing the right things now, it would be hard to reach your target customers and convince them to buy your products.

According to Econsultancy’s Marketing Budgets Report, 77% of businesses increased their budgets for digital marketing in 2015 alone.

We expect the trend to continue this year of course.

That means more of your competitors are prepared to take their digital marketing campaigns by storm.

Except you stop committing the silly marketing sins I’ll be revealing in this article; there’s no way you’ll hold them back.

There are top five digital marketing sins that could prevent you from building a successful business online.

1. Relying On One Traffic Source

Most webmasters start their websites relying on “big daddy” for traffic.

The whole industries optimize their websites based on big daddy’s requirements.

Until one day, big daddy took all their traffic away.

The big daddy I’m talking about is Google.

If you’ve ever started a website, I’m sure you’ve read a couple of articles on search engine optimization.

This is because you want to rank your website on the first pages of Google for your target keyword.

As the smart people say “don’t put all your eggs in one basket.”

A single search algorithm update from Google could put you out of business. That is what happened during the first Penguin update.

For example, Andrew Youderian lost 80% of his website traffic to TrollingMotors.net because of a Penguin update.

Facebook has been changing their algorithm over the past few years, drastically affecting engagement reach of posts.

When Facebook first rolled out Instant Articles, the media world raised concerns that the network’s all-powerful News Feed algorithm would prioritize Instant Articles over external links, leading to the drops in traffic to external publisher sites.

Even though many web publishers like Vox and BuzzFeed have now fully embraced Facebook’s Instant Articles, it’s still a little bit dangerous to build your business on a rented land like Facebook.

Facebook own their platform, and they could change the rules any time they want.

Jon Loomer, who is one of the world’s top Facebook Marketing experts, doesn’t think it’s wise to rely on Facebook as your only traffic source.

Loomer currently spread his risk across different traffic sources:

Your business will be in a big danger if you’re not currently spreading your risk across different traffic sources.

Make sure a traffic source doesn’t make-up over 65% of your total traffic.

Here are great traffic sources that will help you spread your risk:

• Sites commenting
• Forums commenting
• Quora
• Medium
• Guest blogging
• Hacker News
• Reddit
• StumbleUpon
• Influencer Outreach
• Twitter
• Facebook
• Slideshare
• Take part in interviews
• Invest in Ads
• YouTube
• Instagram

As you spread your risk across these traffic channels, you’ll find that your business would become more successful, and it will be much easier to recover if you lose a big chunk of your traffic from Google or Facebook.

2. Ignoring SEO

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the processes of getting free traffic from search engines like Bing, Yahoo, Google! And some other search engines.

Recently, there has been a lot of talk in the town about that “SEO is dead.”

Is SEO dead?

I don’t think so.

When you consider the fact that Google processes 100 billion searches per month, it means SEO is still alive, and we can’t ignore it.

Don’t forget that we also have other search engines like Bing and Yahoo, who also receives billions of searches per month.

Roughly 75% of search users click on organic results and ignore paid ads.

When you rank on the first pages of search engines for your target keywords, your business will continue to receive streams of customers each month.

SEO is a subset of inbound marketing.

And as you may already know, inbound marketing is a marketing strategy focused on earning people’s interest rather than buying it.

According to HubSpot, inbound leads cost 61% less than outbound less.

And according to SimilarWeb, almost 40% of worldwide e-commerce traffic came from search engines in January 2016.

This should tell you that search engines can’t be ignored in your marketing strategy.

By doing SEO on your website, you’ll be helping customers find you. This is better and cheaper than trying to push customers to come to your site using paid ads or other outbound techniques.

Here are the things you should do to start benefiting from SEO:

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3. Not Collecting Email Addresses

When the internet was new, everyone loved email.

Decades ago, when you use to login into your AOL, you’ll see that beautiful phrase “You Got Mail!” and you feel excited about it.

But then email quickly turned into the home of Nigerian prince schemes, Spanish lotto scams, and mountains of unsolicited spam.

How do people feel about email now?

Is email still the good place to reach your target customers?

The answer is yes.

Email offers the easiest way to reach your customers. It keeps them informed about your product.

Email marketing is easy to integrate and customize than any other marketing channel.

It is also less expensive and more effective than other channels.

In fact, email offers an ROI of $40 for every $1 invested.

If you’re not collecting the email addresses of your customers, then you’re committing one of the top internet marketing sins ever.

72% of U.S. adults say they prefer companies to communicate with them via email, and 91% say they would like to receive promotional emails from companies they do business with.

So if someone has demonstrated their interest in your blog or website, and give you their email address, it means they are willing to receive emails from you.

Taking advantage of this, you can keep deepening your relationship and market to them through their emails.

Email marketing safeguards your business against future traffic changes.

For example, as I said earlier, if you receive a large amount of traffic from search engines, let’s say 100,000 visits per month. Then if search engines suddenly stopped sending you traffic, you’ll still have your customers’ email which is a good thing.

You can keep selling to the people in your email list even though you’re no longer receiving any traffic from Google.

But imagine that you didn’t build your email list, that means you’ll have to start all over from scratch again.

It means you won’t be getting any new businesses on your website. That could leave you in a very bad financial spot if you’re living heavily depends on your Website.

4. Not Creating And Using A Buyer Persona

What is a buyer persona?

And why do you need it?

A buyer persona is a detailed description of your target customer.

A well-crafted buyer persona tells you everything you need to know about your target customers, helping you create contents and marketing messages that resonate with them.

Not having a buyer persona for your website is a BIG internet marketing sin.

It’s totally impossible to market with the people you don’t know.

There are ads almost everywhere online and offline. You need to make your message stand out. The only way to do that is by creating and using a buyer persona.

You need to understand your customer’s fears, goals, challenges, and interests.

After you’ve recognized these things, you’ll need to put them into your messages. That way, customers will know that you’ve truly done your homework. They will be more convinced to patronize you.

5. Writing Average Contents

There has been a significant growth in web contents as various brands are pumping more of their marketing budgets into content marketing.

Web users now have more contents than they can consume.

Businesses who can’t create high-quality content are getting knocked out by those who can.

If you’re still creating average contents, I’ll like to tell you that you’re committing a big internet marketing sin that is slowly killing your business.

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Content marketing tips to boost your business?

Imagine you’re searching for content on how to do yoga and you came across the sites captured in the below images:

Actionable Yoga Content

Non-Actionable Yoga Content

Which of the above yoga content would you want to read?

I’m sure you’ll want to read the actionable yoga content.

The actionable yoga content isn’t just content. It’s a higher quality content.

Now imagine, the actionable yoga content has videos to go along with it?

That will automatically increase its quality, isn’t it?

So instead of just creating average contents, you should be creating high-quality materials. That is the only way to stay ahead of your competitors.

Almost every topic under the sun has been written about on the internet. You have to stand out to get attention.

Simply creating contents for the purpose of creating contents won’t get your business anywhere.

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How to Check Duplicate content on your website?

So before you create any content for your website, think of ways you could beat everything that’s out there.

The post The Top Sins Of Internet Marketing And How To Avoid Them appeared first on Tricky Enough.