Common Advertising Mistakes

One of the mistakes most often made, is not looking at your product
or service announcement from the point of view of your customer.
Stand back and look at what you are offering, how can you present
that service or product in such a way that it will appeal to you. If
you are offering a service, why should someone buy it from you,
rather than the other 1000 people offering that same service?
Sometimes it's a little tough to be objective when looking at your
own ad copy. I look at ad copy everyday and to be honest I'm really
shocked at some of the things that I see.

I'll save space here by not repeating all of them. Rather I will
list a few ways to get your offer, be it newspaper,direct mail or e-
mail, thrown in the trash immediately. There may be some things here
you don't want to hear or believe, but take my word for it the
things I'm listing can make the difference in success and failure.

I will talk only about your initial contact advertising, follow up
contact takes a completely different tack. Listed here, not
necessarily in their order of importance, but rather in the order in
which they can get your message trashed are just a few of those
Mistakes.

1. Not addressing your offer to the recipient. (I know, you can't
take the time to address all that mail)I would say at least 50% of
the people receiving e-mail not addressed specifically to them, will
immediately hit the delete key. If your offer is so fantastic that
you can loose 50% of your audience right out of the gate, by all
means send out mail with your self, both as the sender and the
recipient. Or addressed to friend@whatever.com. You get the idea.
You will also find this tactic addressed in the anti spam
legislation. ( Note: This does not apply when sending mail to an opt
in list. )

2. Using a vulgar or unrealistic sender address, I'll leave the
vulgar to your imagination. As far as the unrealistic,
dontmiss@this.com or just4u@me.com again you get the idea. You will
also find this tactic addressed in the anti spam legislation. For
the sake of ease (math was never my long suit) let's say this tactic
looses you another 10%.

3. No Subject or a subject that causes an immediate delete. Now what
could be a subject that could cause that? Well, how about. EARN A
MILLION DOLLARS WITH JUST 1 TIME INVESTMENT OF $20. 00 or any
variation of that theme. Again you get the idea. Now you may well be
saying to yourself, but that's what my program offers. That's
wonderful, but in order to get someone interested in that program, a
different approach is needed. Something like:Income Opportunity 5
minutes of your time could be the difference. or:Home business
opportunity! Let's Talk. What can a grandiose subject line cost you,
we'll say another 10%.

4. The cc: field filled with dozens of addresses or the To: field
for that matter. If you need to send the same e-mail to more than 1
recipient use the bcc: field. If your mail program does not offer a
bcc: field GET ONE THAT DOES! There are so many reasons for this it
would take another entire article to address all of them. But the
main one in my opinion is you do not have the right to advertise
those addresses to the world. It is very bad netiquette. You loose
another 10%

5. HTML other than url's. There are many, many people out there that
don't have the $10,000 set up that you have, and their mail programs
DO NOT translate HTML into anything but gibberish. If you want your
message to be read, write and send it in plain text. The percentage
here is probably higher but again we'll say 10%.

6. Sending e-mail the size of War and Peace. Here again there are a
number of reasons not to do this. Besides the main one, there are a
lot of people out there that are limited in the amount of space
their mail server will allow. Mine (yes, I still maintain one of
those free addresses) for example is 2000k. When my inbox, saved
mail and drafts exceeds that amount my mail STOPS. Not 1 day goes by
that I don't receive at least one 75 to 100k e-mail. 20 of those and
I'm out of business. The other important reason, the recipient just
won't take the time to read a book in there e-mail. A message of
that length needs to be on a web page. Opp's we lost another 10%

Ok, let's examine what happens when we make all those mistakes in
sending out 1000 of our e-mail ad's. Right off the bat we loose 50%
by not addressing our offer to the recipient. That reduces our
mailing to 500. We loose another 10% for our return address. Were
down to 400. 10% more for no subject, now were at 300. We decided to
advertise those addresses our up-line sent us to the whole world and
lost another 10%. Now were down to 200. Our new e-mail program is
really neat and we put flowers and red, white, and blue stripes on
our outgoing messages, now were down to 100. We had such a great
story to tell and we were just so excited about all the neat stuff
we spent 2 whole hours writing down every detail. You just lost your
last 100 potential customers.

Granted, I have never received a single e-mail that contained all of
those mistakes, but it only takes 1 or 2 to significantly reduce
your response rate. You can't afford to let all your efforts and
hard work go to waste by making these easily correctable mistakes.

"Your Success Is Our Success"

Bad Web Design: Advertising Mistakes

Okay, we know we all need to pay the bills. I know that many of us want to
get traffic to our web sites. And some of us just want to make enough money
to pay for our costs so that this thing we love to do is free.

But, come on, that doesn't mean you should plaster a hundred ads or a dozen
banners on every page of your web site. A banner here and there, a small
button or a few text links is fine, but I've seen some web sites that have
dozens and a few that have hundreds of ads on each page! Now this is just
tacky and is virtually guaranteed to get your visitors to hit that handy
back button fast.

One of the worst kinds of web sites, in my opinion, are those that are just
huge advertisements. Especially those that are advertisements for dozens or
even hundreds of other services. People do not surf the web looking for
banners, text links and other advertisements to click on. In fact,
statistically, most people are surfing because they are looking for (a)
information, (b) entertainment, or (c) someone to talk to. Most web surfers
are not looking for something to purchase.

A good web site offers excellent content (which can be graphics, text or
interactive features). Even those sites which sell something also offer
content which is of interest to their visitors. Go take a look at any really
good shopping site and you will see what I mean. Look at Amazon.Com or
Barnes And Noble and you will understand - these sites offer tons of
content. Reviews of their products, consumer comments and large amounts of
data about the items being sold. This is what people want - information.
Some common things on web site that you should never do.

Banner exchanges - It's real simple - these do not work. Oh, you will get a
click or two, but banner exchanges tend to look tacky, take up valuable
space on your web pages and increase your load time. To make it even worse,
many times you will lose far more traffic than you will gain. Don't even
bother putting even one of these on your entire web site.

Notices saying "please, pretty please, keep my site free and click on
something". This just makes you look like a rank amateur. In my humble
opinion, it's very tacky to expect people to click on links just so you can
"keep your site free". Come up with or find a good product or service, and
sell it if you must. Advertising is not in of itself of value - only
products or services have value.

Pornographic ads (unless your site is a pornographic site) - You want to
chase away your visitors fast, then include pornographic ads. Yeah, you
might get a few dollars from them, but you will lose visitors and your site
will not be "family safe", which can be important.

Gambling ads - I understand that these advertisements may be the only things
(besides pornography) that people will click on nowadays, but quite a few
people do not want to be exposed to these things. I believe that these kinds
of advertisements will cause you to loose a large amount of traffic.

Web sites that are just advertisements - I suppose there is a place for
brochures or full site advertisements, but I personally hit the back key as
soon as I run into one of these. I want content. If I wanted this many
advertisements I'd buy a magazine or look in the classified section of the
newspaper.

Any large graphic advertisements. Remember one of the very important things
in web design is load time. Your site must load fast. If you include large
graphic ads you are increase your load times.

Sites which are just lists of pay-surf, MLM or other money making schemes.
There is nothing wrong with include some pay-surf or MLM ads here and there
on your site. Including a section on these programs is also fine. But come
on, please put some real content there also. Otherwise people will hit the
back key fast and never come back.

Brochures - I've seen a large number of web sites in my days, and one of the
ones that I click out of the fastest is one that looks like a brochure. It
feels just like someone took the company brochure and converted it to web
format. What on earth makes companies think these are of value to anyone?

Popup Windows - If you do a survey of web surfers, you will find that these
are among the most hated "features" that exist. No one likes pop up windows,
and if your site has too many of them you will loose visitors fast. Oh, you
may get a few more clicks or signups for your newsletter, but the amount of
time your visitors remain on your site will be limited and of less quality.

900 Numbers - Sites which advertise 900 numbers (a) don't work, and (b)
clutter up the web needlessly. My advice is to find something better to do.


About the Author

Richard Lowe Jr. is the webmaster of Internet Tips And Secrets. This
website includes over 1,000 free articles to improve your internet
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