Usually we talk about what are the best ways to sell online. But let's have the opposite this time, what are the worse techniques that we should avoid? For me I think the worse is building too much back links early. This will immediately tell Google that you're a link builder. What about you?
I think it could all be summed up by saying "doing things without really understanding why." Any type of marketing requires extensive study before it will be executed.
Relying only on Google for traffic. There are plenty of other ways to get people to Your site, but placing all your eggs in google basket is crazy.
1) Posting 500 articles that you found on some article directory to your site... 2) Posting to 5000 directories with some software in a matter of days... 3) Buying advertising on 50,000 expired domains 4) Linking to even one PR0 or broken external link... fix these ASAP Of course 1 and 3 are exaggerated, you don't want any of these, and only a few of the higher quality directories should be submitted to Google says: External links to your site can't hurt you... Reality: They can, and will... Think about it, Matt Cutts works for Google's SPAM Team, therefore Google thinks that SEO people are spammers! Why listen to Matt Cutts, his advice is only what is best for Google, not necessarily what is good for webmasters, though much of what he says is true, and any new person in SEO should watch all of his YouTube WebmasterHelp videos... keeping in mind what I said in the first sentence.
Figuring out how to make money off a site before you figure out what your website genuinely has to offer to your visitors.
I think the worst strategies are those which treat customers like a walking credit card - personally, I hate aggressive upselling techniques and I don't like being treated like an idiot by those marketers who send you to a video you can't stop or fast-forward through, where they expect you to listen to their (probably fictional) life history before they hit you with the "buy now - you'll never in your entire lifetime get this offer again" hard sell. Presumably some people fall for these tricks but that's what I think they are - unscrupulous tricks - and once you get wise to that kind of technique you're just going to start sending their marketing emails to your 'junk' list. At the end of the day, that's not the kind of strategy that's going to help you build a list of prospects who trust you and who will want to buy from you in future. The successful marketers will tell you that 'the money is in the list' - and you don't build a list of prospects who have faith in you by tricking or pressurising them into buying rubbish.
One of the biggest sins that I still see from a lot of my consulting clients websites is that they don't have any kind of contact form on their site...let alone an autoresponder. Not building your list is like the ultimate marketing sin. Another big one is not knowing what the purpose of their site is. For example many times when I ask them what they want their site to do for them and their business I get generic answers like I want it to make money or I want more customers and they have no strategies in place to accomplish those goals. To many people still have this mind-set that if they just throw up a website they will start making money.
lol PR has nothing to do with the quality of a site, there is nothing wrong with linking to PR0 pages.