Your costliest marketing mistake?

What's your costliest marketing mistake? Please share.

 

Google. I wasn't online for a few days and my account was unbelievable. Hundreds of dollars and not one sale.

 

emarketing when I should have been phone bashing - not so much costly as a total waste of time

 

My costliest mistake was a few hundred dollars put into AdWords. I had no clue what I was doing but thought it was as simple as paying Google to send me traffic without any real keyword research, landing page testing, proper product consideration, not setting a reasonable limit on daily and per click, and just about everything else you could do improperly when paying for traffic. I still have a bad taste in my mouth from that experience, now years later, and am just glad that I didn't have more than a few hundred dollars to waste at the time. My stupidity of jumping in, thinking I would be successful after reading an info product (very little real good info, just alot of crap to hype you up and fill your head with highly unrealistic expectations) on making money with Google AdWords, is something I hope to never repeat or replicate in any other area of my life.

 

ebooks! I've bought a few over the years to read when I'm bored and they're all the same oversold crap people have paid content writers to write for them, without any substance, quality information or techniques. I genuinely believe there's nothing you can get from an ebook that isn't already in the public domain on blogs and/or forums. I've since realised ebooks sell dreams rather than reality.. Hard work, solid research, studying and evaluation of results gets you there... Those squeeze pages worked!

 

AndyO, I'm not sure I entirely agree with your blanket statement. While it's true that a lot of people use the ebook setup to get people to buy info they could get other places, the whole idea of a high quality ebook from a source you trust is that you KNOW the info you're getting is good.

I don't randomly buy an ebook, but when I already know and trust an author who has written an ebook, I'd be much more likely to purchase the book. It simply comes down to a time-saving calculation. Yes, I might be able to sift through the internet and eventually come the the bottom of the matter, but why bother? Sometimes the $5 or less I spend on an ebook saves me hours of research, during which time I earn far more than the $5 I lost on the book.

 

Don't get me wrong because I have come across some ebooks that have been very valuable but the advice in the quote above is worth alot more than most of the ebooks I have read over the years. I would put extra emphasis on "evaluation of results" because all the concepts, ideas, and techniques you can come up with are worthless until you put in the time and effort researching, fine-tuning, and testing to discover what they are actually worth in terms of dollars and cents.

 

I bought an unlimited hosting package after research i found there were better options available.

 

Focusing too much on SEO and not enough on my users and site content. That is a killer. I had high google ranks but my users were leaving due to lack of content and activity.

 

+1


lol, you said exactly what I would have written. I think there's probably thousands like you that started off adwords the very same way.

I haven't gone back to adwords since. Instead I've focused on content and getting natural links. It works, albeit slowwwwwwwwwly. Some day I'll try adwords again, but I sure as hell won't be jumping in with two left feet

 

same here but that happened 3 years ago... PPC is my worst enemy..

 

My greatest and the most stupid mistake was when I mixed the numbers in the phone number of my company while printing a lot of offline marketing materials. It was terrible to spend hundreds on hours while changing the number on all the ads...

 

Paying THOUSANDS of dollars for a freelancer and continual updates over the course of about 3 years. End result: the freelancer quit the business and I was screwed with no further support or updates, and had to move the entire site over to a new CMS. Totally learned my lesson after that experience.

 

Yep.. adwords. $800 lost in one night. Had no clue what I was doing, and paid a steep price.

 

Ouch. Well, I've seen people blow more than that on the Roulette table.. just trying to make you feel better

 

Adwords and paid banner - lose like $250 with zero sale in return!

 

Agreeing to pay a freelancer without seeing their work first.

Costly error.

Also not nailing down the requirements specifically enough in Rentacoder first.

 

Oh and leaving my adwords account running for a week and forgetting to check it!!!

Didn't make that mistake again...

 

...Fortunately, the rough draft of the articles were already written and we had only paid half down. We just had to revise most of the articles and have our own webmaster implement to the site.

 

my costliest mistake is no good rank in google