Post your biggest online marketing mistake

believe in google. the bigest mistake ever.

 

Buying cheap/long term ads on low traffic sites!

 

Not knowing about PR earlier. This is horrible for my would-be traffic.

 

Changing a website that was ranking very well while I did not have a backup of the site.

Fell to page bazillion on Yahoo, completely out of MSN.

Ouch, never happen again!

I swear.

At least, I swore that day!

Be$t of luck!

 

I’ve bought domain name and spent money for promoting my site, but finally it’s appeared that I’ve used copyrighted word in my domain name. So I had to change it. The moral is, research copyright issue before choosing your domain name.

 

Mines is to spend money on Adwords where I made a loss.

Another is to spend money on web directory submissions when I could get just the same quality submissions elsewhere for free.

 

that is why this is such a great topic. Let's learn from other people's
mistakes!

The biggest mistake is to not pick yourself up and recover from
your mistake.

wiz

 

Thanks, that was a hoot.

wiz

 

Using adwords like a drunken sailor

 

1. I gave a deposit to Overture. They promptly removed most of my
key phrases, just keeping the "highest traffic" ones. I never
came close to getting traffic to equal their minimum monthly
charge. They noticed this and kept encouraging me to add
new keywords, which they rejected. Finally my password stopped
working and I just let the money run out.

2. I spent $500 per month on pay per view ads on Google. When 9/11 hit and my business went into the toilet I stopped
advertising and my traffic wasn't affected. Luckily Google
has since abandoned the pay per view model.

3. I spent way too much time optimizing for keywords when I
should have just been writing more content. In my business
specific keywords are worthless, 65% of my 100,000 visitor search traffic
in September came from key phrases that only had one visitor each.

4. I spend too much time on Digital Point forums and not enough
writing new content!

best regards
wiz

 

My VP of Sales talked me into a $250 banner ad on a high traffic page
related to one of our products. It turns out that

1. He was getting 1000 "hits" a day, not 1000 "visitors."
2. We got about 10 click throughs in a year.
3. Worst of all, he hid our URL in javascript so we didn't even
get credit for a link.

 

Yes it is very good to learn from your mistakes. But you will only really profit from them if you notice your mistakes quickly. If you don't realise your making a mistake untill like a year or 2 later then you have wasted alot of time.

I remember when I starte online, I started trying to earn from PTR progams, I done that for around 6 months and what I waste of live there.

Once I got into the better advertising part of the internet I soon realised that I had wasted half a year doing PTR stuff where most of them are scams and pay peanuts.

 

Possible mistake - we'll see....

I signed up for a £5000 (about $9000 US?) web design course. It is a good company, and I'll learn PHP and other stuff.

Then, I find a few tutorial sites, and in no time I am able to build basic websites....

Now, I have no time for the course, as I am spending so much time checking adsense CTR etc, and the payments on the course start next Feb....

Any and all donations gratfully accepted, lol

DD

 

The last Google update cut my income by about $5K per month which kinda pissed me off. I have used Adwords to bring traffic to my big sites for a few years now and never tought the day would come when I could couldn't count on Adwords.

Lesson learned = Don't count on PPC for traffic (especiallyAdwords), study other ways.

 

Legendary - Great Story!!

 

My biggest mistake is probably not taking advantage of local oriented websites for my hometown. Which I am designing a campaign build around using the local market.

 

Believing SEO and trying to 'rank' is anything but a rediculous waste of ones time.

Pete

 

by mistake told by publicity secrets to friends... YES this is the only biggest mistake I hve made..
some small one...
- made domain names in two languages (Hindi and english but they worked)
- very curious in registering new domains still hve 4 domains on which there is nothing
- didnt emphasis on designing of the site.. now i am in big pit of redesigning work to be done

 

My biggest mistake was to not get started, i.e. wait until everything was perfect and I knew everything - that time never arrives! To be successful means you have to be willing to make loads of mistakes!

 

Granted everybody make mistakes. I'd like to see them lesser of mistakes, but more of lessons learnt from the past.

Mine was registering several domains with adsense in the name, and tried to advertise adsense on the site. Got warning letter from g, and now stucked and not sure what to do with it.