Trainers: Avoid the seven deadly sins of online marketing

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January 22, 2010

Trainers: Avoid the seven deadly sins of online marketing

With competition between training providers remaining as fierce as ever, how can you ensure you aren't guilty of the seven deadly sins of online marketing? Nikki Pilkington tells us how.

These days you would be hard pressed to find a trainer who doesn't use the internet to promote themselves. However, contrary to popular belief, not all publicity is good publicity. In fact as internet marketing becomes more commonplace, so too do the right and wrong ways to promote yourself online. Trainers need to think carefully about their strategy and the image they want to portray before launching their online campaigns.

Below is a list of the most common mistakes made by those starting out on their internet marketing journey and how to avoid them.

The scattergun approach

So you’ve acquired a huge list of random email addresses and decide to tap out a sales pitch for your business and send it to everyone on the list in the hope that someone will find your offer relevant. If you think this is a good marketing model, you’re wrong!

Mass emailing with no target, and worse, no permission, is spam - pure and simple. Your mailing list should be entirely ‘opt in’ and the content you send should be relevant and useful to the recipients, even if that means writing slightly different mail outs for different groups.

Irrelevant content

You have read that lots of fresh content is the key to getting your site noticed, so you scour the internet for any free to use bits and pieces that vaguely relate to your offering and post them all over your site.

Posting any old nonsense on your site just to bump up content is a very, very bad idea. Not only could this be to the serious detriment of your credibility, it is also very unlikely to pull in relevant visitors, so you won’t benefit in real terms.

Plagarism

In your quest for relevant, useful content, you come across some great posts on other people’s sites – perhaps even competitors. With a quick bit of cutting and pasting, you have reams of fresh, high quality content on your site.

Lifting content from other sites and publishing it on your own without permission is a seriously inadvisable. Unless clearly stated otherwise on the content owner’s site, you should always seek permission before republishing content. You should also include a credit and a link back to the original source.

Spamming forums

You want as many people as possible to hear about your services, so you search for any forum with a mildly relevant topic and post your promotion verbatim on as many threads as you can. Before you know it, there are hundreds of references to your offer all over the web.

The result of your efforts? You are seen as a spammer, banned from several forums, probably attacked in others, and people are generally rather annoyed with you. Remember, internet marketing via social media is about conversations, not shouting the loudest. By all means mention offers when they are relevant to the topic, but don’t expect to get results without putting time in to build relationships.

Falsifying testimonials

You’ve had a lovely new site developed for your new venture, and in the left hand column there’s a special section for displaying your best testimonials. In time, you’ll have some great things to put there, but right now, you’ve got nothing. You decide the best this to do is make a few up using generic names like Joan S and Bill P. It can’t hurt, can it?
Using false or unsubstantiated testimonials is another quick route towards losing any credibility and trust you command. Instead, use the space for something else and work on getting real testimonials by providing a great service.

Puffed up claims

Your company is newly formed, so you don’t feel you have many legitimately impressive claims to make yet. You know your employees have collectively worked for several blue chip firms, so you tell a little white lie and claim your company has served those firms. Well, it’s kind of true, isn’t it?

This is a bad idea. You could be threatened with legal action and suffer irreparable damage to your reputation. Be honest, work with what you’ve got, and publicise your achievements as they happen.

Abusing social media trends

Social media trends – the topics users are talking about most – can be a real temptation for internet marketers. Take Twitter, for example - it seems all you need to do is put the ‘tag’ for a current trend at the end of your ‘tweet’ and you’ll get seen. Who cares if the tag isn’t relevant if it gets you an audience? Well, your audience cares.

Abusing social media trends with irrelevant content has landed a few companies in hot water in recent months. Most famously, a Habitat ‘intern’ caused some serious damage to the brand’s reputation when it put out promotional messages tagged with a reference to the Iran elections. Use tags honestly so that only those interested in what you offer will see your messages.

The bad news is that it’s easy to get internet marketing wrong, but the good news is it is possible to get it right and get great results, so long as you have the time to invest and are willing to learn from the mistakes of others.

Nikki Pilkington is the owner/founder of NikkiPilkington.com, an internet marketing company based in the UK and France.

This article was originally published on our sister site, BusinessZone.co.uk.