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Common Mistakes | Article #31: MARKETING BLUNDERS – PART 2

In this next article on marketing blunders, I want to focus on something that really drives me personally through the wall. Look, I know that when you put up your own web site, you really want to impress people, not only with your skills, be them what they are, but with all the bells and whistles and toys that you can possibly think of to make an impression. Guess what? It's only going to make them leave your site, OR, get so distracted that they forget the reason they came, to buy your product or service, and ultimately you lose a sale. So, in order to make sure you don't ruin all your chances to make sales, here is my personal list of do not do's.

The first thing that really drives me crazy when I go to somebody's web page is to get immediately bombarded with some stupid popup. Fortunately, with most browsers now equipped with popup blockers and many firewall programs equipped with the same, this doesn't really affect me anymore. So since popups are virtually a waste of time anyway, don't put them on your site. Regardless of what most marketers will tell you, that an opt-in popup is great, most people will be annoyed and leave your site. If you want an opt-in box, just put one on your main page.

Another thing that drives me crazy are all these Flash presentations. The darn things take forever to load, even on a fast Internet connection, and a lot of people don't even give you the option of exiting out of the presentation itself and going right to the site. Flash is nice and it's very high tech but it's not needed to make a sale. Good sales copy on your web page is all you need. Don't clutter it up with all this fancy stuff. Nobody cares and if they can't get past it quickly they'll just leave.

Another one of my pet peeves is when I get to the site and there are a gazillion things on it. I saw an ad for XYZ product with a link, but when I get to the site, I see a hundred products. I have no idea where the one is that I want to buy because the page is just too cluttered. On top of that, there are pictures all over the page. Some of them, if not all, have nothing to do with the site itself. Like one site I went to, in order to buy some kind of php script, had a bunch of photos of this guy's dog. Now I know he's probably very proud of his dog, but I don't care about his dog. I just want my script. Long story short, I never found it and left. He lost a sale.

And finally, there's all that racket. I go to a site and I'm bombarded either with music or some guy yappin' about his great product. Trust me, NOBODY wants to hear this stuff. What if they're surfing at 2 AM and they have a sleeping baby in the room and suddenly they get bombarded with Jimi Hendrix? You are going to have one very ticked up ex customer because trust me, he will NEVER go to your site again.

In a nutshell. Keep your site simple. This doesn't mean to not have a site that looks professional. It means don't overload it with junk that you don't need.

Sometimes, less is more.

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