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3 Huge Online Mistakes You’re Making Right Now

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It’s a jungle out there.

I don’t care what industry or niche our small business targets. It’s incredibly hard to break through the noise and capture someone’s attention.

3 Huge Online Mistakes You’re Making Right Now

 

Depending on our social media use, the average American sees between 4,000 to 10,000 ads each day!

How can any small business, on a small marketing budget, get their message out?Click To Tweet

It’s a daunting task, yet it’s something we all have to figure out. Depending on our marketing budget, we may be limited in how much we can invest in advertising.

But it’s not just about money. It’s also about making sure we’re not making common huge online mistakes that hurt our chances of being seen online.

Here are a few mistakes we may be making without ever knowing it and a few simple solutions so we can improve our internet presence.

We Overlook a Huge Portion of Our Customers

We never want to be seen as inaccessible. It’s the kiss of death for our online presence. We want every possible person to visit our website.

Yet, 14 million disabled Americans are limited in some way from accessing technology that most of us take for granted.

And there are very easy tactics to comply with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) that explains what it takes to meet the minimum standards for accessibility.

In 5 Reasons Why Web Accessibility Should be Your Priority in 2019, accessibility expert Pamela Pompas explains the problem of having a site that’s not compliant:

By ignoring the issue, accessibility can cut off your business from large swaths of potential customers. This means that you’d be turning your back on 20% of the world’s population—or 1.3 billion people—who experience any type of disability.

Site owners can follow the WCAG guidelines themselves or use a tool like accessiBe that only requires installing one JavaScript code on the site.

Source: https://www.hstern.net/#showacsb

Either way, we just need to commit to making our sites as accessible as we possibly can to both avoid any legal issue and increase our overall customer base.

Our Social Media Posts Are Boring

Small businesses don’t have the same flashy draw as my favorite new Facebook group, Weird Secondhand Finds That Just Need To Be Shared.

Here is just one of the crazy things they share on a daily basis:

Source: Weird Secondhand Finds That Just Need To Be Shared

How can our boring salesy post compete?

The answer is, of course, that we can’t compete with social media craziness.

Although shopping through social media platforms is becoming easier and more common, most people don’t spend hours scrolling through sales pages.

People use social media because they want to be entertained. Click To Tweet

Ripl, a creative video marketing tool, explains that online video ads don’t need to be long and 15 – 30 seconds videos work fine adding:

Sometimes just using video from your phone’s camera of a cool business event is enough to interest your customer. Your audience appreciates getting an authentic glimpse into your real life.

Be authentic, engaging and enthusiastic. Tell a story about how a product was created or share an embarrassing story with a clever learning experience.

Just don’t be boring.

We Have No Hook

If our goal is to break through the crowded field, we have to create a strategy.

Providing a good service or selling a great product isn’t enough when everyone is doing / selling the same exact thing.

We have to give folks a compelling reason to look at us. And, we need to ask ourselves the million-dollar question: What makes us special?Click To Tweet

In Simple Ways to Nudge Our Niche Into Action I explained:

While our end game is to convert a social media follower to a customer, that generally doesn’t happen after seeing one post. Our goal is to provide content that engages users and nudges them to keep coming back until they finally buy something from us.

Our “hook” is what entices someone to pause on our content. TOMS was designed as a “buy one, give one” principle and allows customers to “Pick your stand”.

Budweiser’s commercials bring people to tears:

Jenny Lawson, a bestselling author, is obsessed with wacky taxidermied pets and putting them in crazy situations:

Source: The Bloggess

We’re all unique and our hook should represent that. Be fun, creative, or clever. We can support a worthy cause or share how a product was made.

Or we can be extremely personal or teach others how it’s done. Whatever we do, we need to be authentic, ourselves and engaging.

Fix What’s Fixable

It’s really easy to point back after we’ve achieved a certain level of success and say “This was the strategy that finally worked for us!”.

And it’s almost impossible to predict exactly what magic formula is the right one for our businesses.

Yet, there are clear mistakes that millions of business owners make every day.

Instead of blindly sending out another email or social media post, we should take a few minutes to think about what’s keeping our internet presence from standing out.

We should focus on the issues we can fix first to avoid losing customers simply because we overlooked something basic.Click To Tweet

Because in the crazy jungle of business, we want to be the King of the lions not just another gazelle among the herd.

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Liesha Petrovich

Liesha's a freelance strategist by day and Kyokushin Black Belt by night. She's the author of Killing Rapunzel: Learning How to Save Yourself Through Determination, Grit, and Self-Employment (her mother hates the title - but it's a metaphor mom!). She talks freelancing adventures at Microbusiness Essentials.
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Comments

  1. What an amazing post. Everything is just about online today and even a single mistake means a big downfall. After reading this article, I have actually realised that I am actually doing all that I need to move forwards but there are areas where I need to do better. Thanks a lot for this article. I will now rectify my mistakes and hope to see good results soon.

    Reply

  2. How are you admin,
    I Am Sabreena Shah, I visit this website on a daily basis yo read this blog quality and unique posts, This website provides quality and valuable information which help in the specified field. This website is all about the facts of great information. Good Work Keep it up.

    Reply

  5. Hi Liesha,

    Thank you for this informative article that will help us to improve online presence by avoiding these online mistakes. I want to add one more mistake i.e social posting on irrelevant timings, please let me know what do you think about this?

    Reply

  7. Thanks for the advises on this article. It is true especially for social media that you need to be consistent in terms of posting before finally getting some business results and it is not okay if you just post with the mindset just to sell your products or services.

    I think it is very important to know first what kind of brand do you want to build for your product/service and make social media posting which is consistent with this. It is so that you can have the kind of brand you want in the customer mindset who see posts on your social media.

    Reply

  8. Hii Liesha Petrovich

    Thanks for this article. First time I understand very well about marketing strategies thanks a lot to share your experience. I love to share on social media keep it up.

    Reply

  11. Great post. I think most people, especially those new to running a business, are guilty of at least one of these online mistakes! You made a great point about the fact that not having an accessible site means that we are missing out on a huge amount of traffic, and of course, possible not being compliant in so many other ways. 1.3 billion people missed is a huge deal and a lot of uncaptured traffic as well. Thank you for pointing this out!
    SaraD would love you to read ..What Does the Letters in EPCOT MeanMy Profile

    Reply

    • Hi Salman,

      Since you commented in a post about mistakes, here’s another one: not reading the rules for commenting first. If you put something like “Megan Rapinoe Net Worth” in the name field, most of the time the comment gets deleted. Many bloggers will also flag it as spam and then your comments get blocked on ALL WordPress sites.

      Some nicer bloggers will edit your name into the name field if they know what it is.
      Gail Gardner would love you to read ..The Best Time To Send Emails (Expert, Data-Backed Research)My Profile

      Reply

  15. This is very useful article.It is also useful for a small business and initial business. now a days online presence is very important for a business.But online mistake is very harmful for this business.

    Reply

  16. Great post! I am currently trying to rework some of my own social media marketing etc, as I feel like I am just not getting the desired results from the effort I put in. It can be quite disheartening unfortunately. At least now I know what mistakes to never make again. Authenticity is key it seems.
    Best,
    Keiran
    Keiran Potter would love you to read ..Mental Health Awareness Day- The RealityMy Profile

    Reply

  17. I can relate, did so many errors with my ecommerce business until i started to get it right. Its a learning curve for sure!

    Reply

  20. Such irritations can occur most of the time when relaxing social media. But what to do? Can you recommend some other blogs to read through my post and in my leisure time?

    Reply

  22. Great post! I think it’s so important to share your authentic self and not be swayed into being like everyone else. It’s what you do differently that will ultimately give you the edge and make people remember you. Also, I hadn’t considered the vast number of people that may not be able to access my site, so I will be looking into some fixes for that asap. Thanks for pointing it out!
    Sasha Lassey would love you to read ..5 Money Management Tips for Savvy Lady BossesMy Profile

    Reply

  23. Hi Liesha,
    Thanks for sharing your valuable suggestions. I totally appreciate with you. We are making these mistakes without knowing. We should focused with these huge mistakes we are doing online. Keep giving us your worthy suggestions.

    Reply

  25. Your online activities can have a dramatic impact on your Internet privacy. Setting boundaries for your online activities will help incorporate these practices into your daily routine to stay safe and keep your bank accounts secure every time you go online, no matter where you live, work, or travel.
    1.Responding to spam
    2.Downloading suspicious apps
    3.Saving passwords in the browser
    4.Shopping on unsecured network.

    Reply

  26. Thanks for the awesome article and help to eliminate these online mistakes. Being busy, we are forgetting to make our social media posts distinct and impressive. The audience might get bored with our usual social posts. As Lisa told, we have to find ways to be more creative.

    Reply

  27. Liesha, I was not at all in social media. From your posts I came to know that Social media is very important for any business and posts on the social media must gather attention of large audience of the products we want to sell …

    Reply

  30. I think now a days social media are so strong that we cannot avoid them…but still there has to be most lucrative way to post ob social media…and that is challenge..

    Reply

  31. Thanks for this article. I think that creating the right content in the right way is the key. I mean that sometimes you can find really great content which was “sold in the wrong way”. They were just not attractive for an average visitor which is bombarded with thousands of ads per day.
    Anyway, keep up the great work.
    All the best 🙂

    Reply

  34. Thanks for letting us know about the mistakes we make while doing online business. Online has taken business to every home which makes it easier to communicate well. But we are humans after all we do make mistakes. And you have identified them and let us know. Thanks for that.

    Reply

  36. Liesha, I had heard that people go on Facebook to be entertained. So businesses can’t afford to be boring on that network any longer. You have to find ways to be more creative to get people’s attention in the feed if your post even makes it into the feed!
    The algorithm there is always changing and we have to keep up with that. Doing video really helped my own company Facebook page and after reading this I’m thinking of doing video 2x per week vs 1x per week because of that. We always have to be testing and re-doing as we grow and learn from the testing.
    Thanks for your tips and input!
    Lisa Sicard would love you to read ..Online Video Dominates Digital Marketing Today with 7 TrendsMy Profile

    Reply

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