Avoiding Online Marketing Mistakes

Posted On: 2006-03-14Length: 60:00

Listen to this podcast

Hi, welcome to Small Business Trends Radio. I'm Anita Campbell, your host, and I'm really glad you could join us today. The topic of today's show is "Ten Online Marketing Mistakes, and how to Avoid Them." Jim Kukral is our featured guest. And Jim is a veteran of online marketing, currently the publisher of an excellent website, revenues.com. And he is just a master in this area of online marketing, and we're very fortunate to have him with us today. And he's going to be joining me in just a little bit. He'll be sharing his essential tips for avoiding the most common online marketing mistakes. And I know we can all do things the hard way, but we don't want to do them the hard way, so it's always good to learn from someone with the voice of experience.

But first, before we bring Jim on, we have our Today's Trend segment. And Today's Trend is about how small businesses in the 21st century are becoming more sophisticated online. And the web is becoming an important and cost-effective marketing channel. And I'm going to talk about what's driving this trend. Now, to some of you listening, this trend may seem obvious. You may be thinking, well, duh, of course the web is important to small businesses. Aren't we all on line listening to this radio show, or didn't we download this show as a podcast from a website? But you know, it wasn't so long ago that the common wisdom was, small businesses are just laggards when it comes to the web. And many small business owners are not convinced that the web has any value to offer.

Now I wish I had a dollar for every time I heard that oft quoted statistic about how fewer than half of small businesses had a website, making it sound as if being online just wasn't all that important to us small business owners. More recent statistics give a much different impression of small businesses online though. They show first of all that the overwhelming majority, 96% in fact, of small businesses have Internet access. Now that's according to the latest small business barometer from Interland. Another survey conducted in 2005 by Hewlett Packard showed that 81% of small businesses plan to spend significantly on technology in areas such as websites, blogs, online services. And then there's the latest Wells Fargo survey of small businesses that I read about just last week. That featured a quote from the Wells Fargo...