Hi Everyone: This is the first post on the new antion blog. I hope you like it and there’s an interesting viral marketing technique included in this posting that I’ll tell you how to do in a future posting.
The first 14 mistakes are in no particular order.
No plan or purpose for the website – People get what I call a “CSI” aka Crappy Stupid Idea and throw up a website without thinking through what EXACTLY they want to accomplish with the site. This allows the site to go off in all kinds of directions with no cohesive content visitors can depend on.
Too many topics – For the best chance of success the fastest, sites should be about one topic. Google wants to please the searcher by giving the searcher the best possible sites based on what they were searching for. If you lump multiple topics on one site, you are hurting your chances of being found in the search engines.
No instant recognition – When someone lands on your site, they should instantly know they are in the right place. Put a tag line near the top of the site so they know. https://fatsotennis.com/
For instance at it says, “The Blog for Out of Shape People Who Love Tennis”. You know immediately if the site is for you or not. If you aren’t out of shape, then the site is not for you. If you are out of shape, then it is. Poor recognition is part of the cause of high bounce rates which means people find your site, but then leave immediately.
Form over function – Many people let creative “web designers” who were probably out of work graphic artists the day before run away with design elements for coolness sake. Websites should look just good enough to represent you well professionally and concentrate on the marketing elements rather than fancy design.
Too much Navigation – Back in the year 2000 a book came out called “Don’t Make Me Think”. It’s been revised two times since. It was all about making it easy to move around your site without getting lost or confused. Here’s something you can do. If on the first screen of your website you have more than let’s say eight places to click, you probably need either another website or you need to rethink and simplify your navigation.
No obvious opt in form – Everyone at my level makes virtually all their money from email. When you hear, “The Money is in the List”, ….believe it. You must get serious about getting people to opt in to your email list and then you must get serious about emailing them regularly with great things that will help them.
Not including social media – Social media can be a big waste of time if you get sucked in to playing games and yapping about your bunion operation. It is a necessary evil for business. Google and the other search engines demand that you have social media indicators on your site to prove that you are worthy of high rankings. Their conventional wisdom . . . .”If you’re site is great, then someone is talking about it and you better be able to prove it with social media.”
Broken Links – Nothing screams “non-professional” like links that don’t go anywhere. You should review your site regularly or have someone else do it for you. You can use this free tool https://www.brokenlinkcheck.com/
Disappointment – I lied. This screams “non-professional” louder than broken links. When you make people feel by clicking on a link they are going to see something they want and then you show them something else or make them search all over to find what you promised, you have just committed a website sin. The visitor will immediately think, “This site is too hard to figure out,” or worse yet, “I can’t trust this website.”
Poor sales copy – On a business site almost everything should be leading people in some way to buy something. Writing words that sell is one of the most important things you can ever learn how to do. These words don’t have to be cheesy or smash you in the face, but they should be crafted to move the visitor to action and to the ultimate conclusion they should be doing business with you. I created the site https://www.CopyWriting901.com to teach you how to write these words for written, audio or video sales messages.
Slow loading – Google has come right out and said, “If your site doesn’t load fast, you will not get a high ranking.” The idea behind this is that Google and the other search engines want the searcher to have a great experience. Faster loading websites contribute to a great user experience. Use this tool to check your site https://pagespeed.web.dev/
Poor quality videos hosted on YouTube – Don’t get me wrong. I LOVE YouTube. I love it to drive traffic “TO” your site. Once people are on your site I don’t want them to easily be able to “LEAVE” your site. Videos on your site in most cases should be 
housed on high quality file hosting like Amazon S3 and connected to your site by means of a video player. An example would be FloPLayer or the top of the line EVS .The videos better be good too! You MUST have good audio as your number one priority. People will sometimes put up with questionable video but they will never stand for poor audio.
No call to action – In business you must get people to do something and you must tell them to do it. You can’t assume they will read between the lines and do what you want them to do. It could be clicking on a link or filling in an opt in form. It could be reading an article or watching a video. Whatever it is, you must tell them to do it. One thing I like to do to get people to click on a link is to put a command and a benefit in the text of the link. Here’s an example from my Wake’em Up Speaking System: Click here to get standing ovations around the world where “click here” is the command and “standing ovations around the world” is the benefit.
Overpaying for services – This is what I’ve preached against since 1997 when Microsoft Front Page came out. This was a program that allowed people to easily make web pages themselves with no web designer involved. This is one of the top two skills to which I attribute my success online. (the other is copywriting that was mentioned above). Now we use WordPress for all new sites and with a very small amount of tutoring you can be making world class websites yourself for less than 100 bucks. I have a course on this at https://www.greatinternetmarketing.com/wordpressecourse/ You can also use https://www.Fiverr.com for custom graphics and all kinds of other services.
And Drumroll Please!
The number one biggest mistake I see on websites is:
Click the Facebook, Twitter or YouTube Share Button to unlock the number one biggest mistake people make on their websites
After you share RETURN HERE
to see the number one mistake people make on their websites.
Poor or Non-Existent Keyword Usage – For years I’ve taught that the number one most important thing you do before developing a website is to do keyword research. If you haven’t done that, then nothing else much matters because for most of us mere mortals who aren’t International celebrities we need to be found by search engines. I currently use the “Google Keyword Planner Tool “which is a pain in the neck to find, but works great once you get signed up. Once you get all your keywords lined up you must strategically place them in your website/blog so the search engine spiders can find them. This topic could encompass an entire course in itself. I’m just telling you, that you need to learn keyword research and utilization from a credible source. I will give you a few tips to keep in mind:
You can put keywords in the titles of blog postings, in links, in the names of graphics, in the alt description of graphics, in captions, in title bars of web pages, in heading tags, in domain names just to name a few.
Fix up a lot of these mistakes you may be making and you’ll have a lot more success on the web.
Tom Antion
https://www.greatinternetmarketingtraining.com/
