10 guaranteed ways to destroy your website

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Website design is a skill that shouldn’t be left to designers, your teenage nephew or anyone else as you must retain control or you may make one of these 10 fatal website design and promotion mistakes.

1. Bought traffic - This is the number one dumb way to waste money launching a website. The idea that you can buy tens of thousands of website visitors is just pure nonsense. Hey, don’t worry we’ve all fallen for this quick fix and all had the same lousy results. Zero opt-ins and zero sales. If any real visitors actually get delivered, and I suspect many are just simple scams, and then there is no way that this will actually ever work. Think about it. It’s like rounding people up at random, forcing them onto a bus and driving them to your store. Are they really going to buy? Nope, not a chance.

2. The bargain scam - Improve Google rankings for $xxx - If these scams actually worked then they would be a lot more expensive! That’s the hard truth that we all know but we seem to turn our brains off and fall for what seems to be the easy option. If they are remotely genuine then they can do some SEO work and charge you twice the price.

3. Knowledge is power - Do you waste money buying book after book that may be read but then forgotten? This habit can get even more expensive online with ebooks and courses - some costing thousands of dollars that is a lot in any currency! This habit has two serious dangers. If you read without acting then you will never get anyway as it is only through action that knowledge has any point at all. The second danger is that you will always think of yourself as a newbie or beginner and never develop further.

4. Website is a tool not a baby - If you’re guilty of this then you’re probably beyond help! You’re probably doomed to pour thousands into your website to make it perfect with one tiny flaw. It’s never ever ready for the great unwashed public to view or use. These people view their website as a loved baby and cherish and feed it and never ever finish or launch it. Get a life people! A website is a tool and if you don’t use it as a tool then it will never work.

5. Any traffic is good traffic - I got 1000 hits so my website must be great, right? No, wrong dead wrong. Hits don’t matter a stuff. Hits are meaningless as a single visitor can create dozens of hits. Visitors are also meaningless to some extent. What actually matters are prospects - people that may become customers. I’d rather have 1 customer than 1000 hits.

6. Spam scams - Ever seen those offers through which you can email 10 million people for $100? Sounds great right? Nope it sounds terrible. If it is actually genuine, and that’s a big if, then you’re going to spam 10 million people with your sales pitch. It only takes a tiny percentage of the 10 million to get a lot of complaints! If you don’t like being spammed then don’t spam others.

7. Throw money at Adwords - Setting up Adwords campaigns can be deceptively easy. It’s easy to get going to start displaying adverts and driving traffic to your website the very same day. The really hard bit is to do it profitably. This is to pay less on Adwords that you then make in sales. If you don’t take the time and effort to monitor and test your campaigns then you could end up losing a lot of money as many have found out to their cost.

8. Do you concentrate on style over substance? - Have you been sold on a choice of pretty templates or been mesmerised by graphical tricks that are the latest in website design? If so, then you fallen for the style over substance con. You have a pretty site but it is also pretty useless and does nothing to get visitors it may attract to stay or come back.

9. Don’t update website content - When was the last time that you updated your website with new fresh copy? If the answer is months or years ago then you are presenting a very bad image to your potential customers. It’s like one of those shop or store windows that are dusty and uncared for with goods going stale and cobwebs all over them. That’s not going to attract your customers in to buy is it?

10. Full of errors - Why is it when we send a business letter we check it and retype it but throw up the first draft of web content without even reading it? This strange behaviour is extremely common and leads to websites that are strewn with spelling mistakes and other writing errors that will annoy your customers.

It is not too late to put these dumb and destructive ways behind you and get on the route to website success. Stop reacting in a panic and instead become committed to your online success.

Tags: Web