5 of the biggest mistakes new businesses make

The following are five easy traps to fall into that all new and growing businesses must do everything in their power to avoid.

Any one of these five could seriously limit your income and profits. Combined, they can destroy a business. Avoid at all costs.

1 Trying to sell something that people don’t want

It sounds obvious but you would be surprised.

Choosing a good product or service to sell is easy.

You just choose something that large numbers of people are currently spending money on – and market it better than anyone else.

But that’s far too easy for many would-be entrepreneurs who feel they have to invent something new. If you’ve watched Dragons’ Den you know precisely what I mean.

Your product may be ‘great.’ It may be something we all ‘need.’

Just make sure it’s also something that people want. It’s a key distinction

2 Wasting Money on Ineffective Advertising

Most small business Advertising does not work.

You must be ruthless and immediately stop any advertising that is not producing profits for you.

When you’re growing a business, finances can obviously be tight. The problems caused by wasted advertising go far beyond just losing the money. Businesses end up in a loop where they feel pressured to throw more at the advertising, that creates more financial pressure and then there’s the continued frustration that the ads are not producing customers.

This cycle of Advertising despondency is very demoralising as well as being very expensive.

If you’re Advertising is not working – Stop It!

3 A Website that’s the World’s best kept Secret

I’ve seen business owners spend weeks, months and in some cases years building their website. Many of them have probably not even spent 30 minutes working out how to get people to the site.

Unfortunately, the quality of your website has virtually nothing to do with the number of people who will visit it. The analogy of the internet as a massive shopping centre is just plain wrong.

Actually the opposite is true. Take all the shops in the mall, spread them out over a radius of 100 miles and make people drive to them and you have a closer analogy of what it takes to get people to your site.

So how do you attract customers to your website?

Here are 7 methods to focus on, all of which we can cover with you in detail

1. Pay per Click Advertising

2. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

3. Viral Marketing

4. Email Marketing

5. Online Articles

6. Inbound Link Campaign

7. Offline / Traditional Advertising

Do all of them and you’re set to become a true online success story. We can help you with any of these

4 Creating Unrealistic Time/Money Pressures

Most new and growing businesses seriously under estimate how long it’s going to take them to be successful.

It’s certainly possible to create remarkable shifts in your business performance faster than most people think possible.

But it’s also true that masterpieces take time.

It’s a real shame when you see entrepreneurs with really good, solid business ideas suffer because they haven’t given themselves enough time. You need to have access to enough cash to keep you going, probably for twice as long as you planned. How you do that is up to you. You have to do what it takes and you have to give yourself enough time.

5 Just Selling One Thing - Not creating a ‘back end’ of Products and Services

I’ll go as far as to say that if you don’t get this one right, you’ll never have a truly great business.

The real profits in most businesses are in the long term relationships with customers

The costs of Marketing to new customers are very high. The costs of Marketing to existing customers are very low – with the internet and email, close to nothing.

So you simply must build up a ‘back end’ of products or services to offer your customers.

If you do not have anything obvious to offer them, find someone who does, team up with them and offer their stuff to your customers.

It’s all in the back-end!