5 Popular Myths You Need to Ignore

The ability to easily share information on the internet can be great, but it can also be confusing.

Take online marketing for example, there is an incredible amount of information about it on various blogs and websites, but a lot of it is conflicting, not up-to-date or simply untrue.

Take a look at my top five online marketing myths below because you can’t believe everything you read.

• Getting a good ranking on Google is expensive

Thanks to Google Places, thousands of small businesses now have a top 10 listing for relevant keywords and phrases for free.

If you’re providing a product or service in a specific geographical area, the likelihood is there won’t be a huge amount of competition (there will be exceptions to this) so achieving your desired rankings won’t break your budget.

• Your text should include as many keywords as possible

This outdated SEO tactic is known as keyword stuffing. Do you really think people want to read the same words and phrases over and over again when they visit your website?

If you go down the keyword stuffing route, don’t expect many (if any) of your visitors to convert into paying customers.

• You should focus on getting as much traffic as you can from day one

In theory this sounds like a good idea but for millions of sites it’s a bit of a myth. For example, you may have just launched an e-commerce store selling golf clothing. Your checkout process may be very lengthy and complicated for users which results in no online sales.

If this is the case, your efforts will be better spent on fixing what’s wrong with your site, rather than driving lots of traffic to it and then putting people off buying from you.

• Social media is a waste of time

If social media for business was such a waste of time, why would millions of people worldwide use sites like Twitter and Facebook every day?

If you take the time to understand social media and how you should use it to benefit your business, you’ll soon discover it’s a very useful tool for brand recognition, driving traffic to your website, finding suppliers and a lot more.

• Pay per click advertising is too expensive for small businesses

This is another online marketing myth I often hear. It may be true if you choose to advertise on some of the most popular keywords and phrases such as “mortgages” because you’re competing against multinational companies.

However, there could be hundreds or thousands of search terms people could enter to find a small business like yours. Some of these terms could be very cheap in terms of pay per click and bring you a significant return.

For example, I did some work with a copywriter recently who achieved just under £1000 of new work by spending only £50 on a low cost keyphrase related to his business.

Do you have any online marketing myths you want to share or questions about something an ‘expert’ has told you? I’d love to read your views in the comments below.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 28th, 2011 at 8:00 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.