There are plenty of sites and blogs that have countless pointers, tips, and advice on how you should market your company. They will tell you the best practices of the industry and give you the step by step how-to’s to make your website great and grab viewers. However, sometimes those same sites that give you those tips and advice can give out downright terrible advice. For today’s post, we’re going to look at three pieces of advice that are tossed around that you should ignore whenever you hear them:
1. Get on every social media site!
Now don’t get me wrong, social media sites are a great resource that you and your company should dive into to grow your user base. However, some people believe in the notion of quantity over quality when it comes to social media. They will tell you that you should be on every social media site there is.
Why this is bad advice:
If you’re on seventeen social media sites, chances are you’re going to see a few sites that you’re gaining some traction on and a lot that see almost no activity no matter how hard you try. Social media is a very diverse place and not every social media site is a fit for you and your company. If you try to be active on seventeen social media sites, you’ll spend a lot of time trying to reach all those inactive communities and lose time that you could otherwise spend nurturing relationships on the sites you are gaining traction on.
2. SEO is dead. Don’t even worry about it.
Some people will tell you that SEO is a waste of time. They’ll say that even if you make all the right decisions and follow best practices, you won’t see any changes in your rankings so you shouldn’t even bother with it.
Why this is bad advice: As long as there are search engines, there will be a need for SEO. Humans and computers read the web differently and if you want to get your content to humans on the web, you have to go through the search engines. Search engines will rank your content based on how relevant your content is and, similar to humans, don’t like websites that are difficult to read, don’t make sense, or haven’t been verified by other people. So if you don’t use SEO to make your website easy for both humans and search engines to read, you’re going to have a bad time. You’re ranking will fall on the SERPs and no one will see the content you created.
3. Just write something
In the world of digital marketing there is a saying, “content is king,” and this is absolutely true. However, this refers to quality not quantity. Some believe that if you create loads of content (even if it’s not very good), you will eventually arrive at success.
Why this is bad advice: Just like every other medium out there, there is a difference between content and good content. It’s easy to tell the difference between a good book and a mediocre book, good music from okay music, and it’s just as easy to tell the difference between good writing on a website or blog and okay writing. If you want people interested in your website and what you have to say, you’re going to have to consistently produce good content. Otherwise, a person might visit your site and never come back because they didn’t find your content interesting or helpful enough.
There is both good and bad marketing advice out there on the internet. The key to your success is having the sense to take the time know which advice will result in your company’s growth and which will lead to your demise. Knowing the difference will allow your business to reap the rewards of success.