We all make mistakes with our online marketing. It’s a part of the learning process. Some are pretty easy to fix while others are going to take some time and a good bit of education to improve the situation. Here are 10 of the mistakes you could be making with your online marketing and how you can start fixing them.

1. You’re trying to do it all for free.

Yes, a few people have managed to build a successful online business using nothing but free hosting and other free resources. They’re the exception. If you want the best chance at succeeding with your online business, you need to spend a bit of money. Just be careful about it.

My first recommendation is to pay for hosting and your own domain name. The trouble with free sites is that someone else owns the space and can delete all your work at will. That’s not going to help your business very much, and it’s not a risk worth taking. Host Gator is a great place to host your websites, reliable and very affordable.

It’s also smart to spend money on resources that will help you build your business, but this should be done very carefully. Don’t buy just because the sales letter told you how easy it would be to make money with their system. Do some research and find out what others think of it. Try to find non-affiliated reviews, as they’re more likely to point out flaws honestly. Not that all affiliates are dishonest, just that some are, and they’ll say what it takes to make the sale. You might not catch the difference until it’s too late.

2. You don’t know your target audience.

So you decided to start a website on an interest of yours, but you really don’t know how to find people interested in what you have to offer. You know they’re out there, now how do you get them to your site?

The simplest way to do this is to start researching your competition. Figure out who’s selling to your target audience successfully and figure out what they’re doing that you need to do. They don’t have to be exact competition, and may even be somewhat complementary to what you’re doing.

If you’re selling dog training videos, for example, you can look at other websites selling products related to dogs. You should also look at forums about dogs and seeing what kinds of questions people are asking when they’re having trouble training their dogs. Those people are your exact target audience, after all, and you need to know what questions they’re asking if you’re going to attract them.

3. Spelling and grammar mistakes are all over your site.

Maybe you thought at first that spelling and grammar don’t matter online. You look at how your target audience posts on forums and social networking sites, and they don’t seem to care that much about typos.

They do care, actually. Not necessarily for themselves, but they’d rather buy from someone who can maintain a professional appearance online, and that means few to no mistakes in spelling or grammar on your site or in your ads, as well as any other time you’re representing your business online.

4. You don’t know anything about your conversion rates.

You’ve gotten people to your site and that’s all you know about it. No idea where they’re coming from or how often they’re converting into sales.

While you don’t want to obsess over statistics to the exclusion of all else, you do need to know what’s working for you and make sure that you’re making a profit. That’s especially true with paid advertising, as you want to keep the ads that bring in more than they cost going, and to improve them over time. You can’t do that if you don’t know how they convert.

You should be constantly testing your ad copy to make it convert as well as possible. To do that you need to know what your goals are. It’s not always to make a sale right off. You might want people to get on your newsletter list first, so you can sell other things to them later.

Some kinds of testing are easier than others. You can usually have more than one ad running at a time in your pay per click campaigns, and they’ll be rotated, giving you some solid data on which is generating the most clicks. Just make sure that the clicks translate to income, as you don’t want to pay for extra clicks that aren’t going anywhere. Even changing one word in an ad can make a difference.

Testing website copy is more effort, but it can be worth it. Move things around, change what you’re saying, figure out the best colors and overall design.

5. You never work on marketing for your website.

The internet is a really big place. Especially when you start out, you need to work on marketing your website so that your target audience can find you.

Backlink building is a good place to start, and I gave some tips on backlink building yesterday. A well placed backlink isn’t just about search engines; it’s about making your site visible to your target audience.

Paid advertising can go well too, but is by its nature more financially risky. You can buy ads on appropriate websites or do pay per click campaigns through the search engines, but be careful about how you spend your money. Many paid campaigns won’t bring in nearly as much as they cost. Keep tweaking things until you get it right or you decide to try something else. Don’t spend more than you can afford to risk.

6. You don’t understand how online business is different from brick and mortar.

Running an online business is very different from running one anywhere else. Online, your competition is often just a click or two away, and attention spans are usually short. If you don’t do something to catch your visitors’ attention, you’re probably going to lose them.

7. You have a lot of traffic, but you aren’t earning much from it.

You’re doing enough right that you’re getting visitors, but they aren’t converting. It’s really frustrating, so what should you do? Traffic that isn’t converting can have a number of causes.

It may be that you aren’t targeting the right audience, and so your visitors have no interest in what you have to offer. In that case, you need to figure out what part of your marketing is bringing in the wrong sort of visitor and fix it, either by tweaking it or by dropping that part of your marketing.

It could also be that your site isn’t doing what it takes to make people buy. Do you have a call to action? Can visitors find it easily on every page of your site? Is there something about your site that’s driving them away?

A lot of traffic coming to your site is nice for your ego, but unless the visitors are doing what you’d like them to do, what’s really the point?

8. You aren’t building a list.

There’s a saying about how it takes about seven exposures to a product to get people to buy. That is of course an average, but it brings up a very good point. You shouldn’t rely just on getting sales from people who happen to come to your site. You should try to get their email addresses so that you can send them more information and give them more chances to buy from you.

You should not email pure ads to your list with no useful information. That’s a great way to train people to not open your emails, make them want to unsubscribe, or to even hit the spam button. You want your subscribers to look forward to the information you’re sending them. That way they’ll eventually trust you enough to buy from you.

9. You’re sending all kinds of offers to your list, but no one’s buying.

You built a list because you heard that’s where the money is. But that hasn’t been true for you. Matter of fact, it seems like when you send out an offer, either no one opens your email at all or you get a bunch of unsubscribe requests. You don’t feel as though your list is worth the trouble.

You have to be sure to keep things relevant to your list. Keeping with the dog training theme, you should be sending out other offers related to dog care. You should also be sending quality information about training and caring for dogs to keep people interested in opening your emails. Most people don’t like reading constant ads.

We all want a lot of backlinks to our websites. High quality ones can be a source of traffic themselves, as well as give a boost in search engine rankings. Lower quality ones probably won’t send much or any direct traffic, but can still help you with your search engine rankings, if at a lower level.

The challenge is building those backlinks. Most of us don’t want to have to spend a ton of time on it, but you have to do something to do if you want traffic.

1. Everyone’s favorite – sites linking to you on their own initiative

We all love getting links we didn’t ask for or make any specific effort to get. Links that come about just because you provide content that’s just that good are wonderful. They’re usually pretty good quality too.

They’re usually the hardest to get. The internet doesn’t really live by “build it and they will come” no matter how many of us would like it to be otherwise. People have to be noticing your site already in order to choose to link to it.

2. Blog commenting

Commenting on other blogs is one of the easiest ways to get links back to your site. That’s why you get so many spam comments on most blog posts. For those who don’t want to do the actual work of intelligent blog commenting, there’s software that will do it for them.

If you want a good reputation for your site, stick with doing the blog commenting on your own. Nothing wrong with using tools to help you find blogs, but have something to say that’s more than “great post” or similarly basic comments. Add to the discussion. You probably shouldn’t link within the comment to your own site – use the URL field for that.

Don’t overdo it on keywords in the Name field or within your comment either. Many bloggers either delete or hit the spam key on comments that have only a keyword and no real human name. Using your name, a hyphen and then keyword is okay on many blogs but not all of them.

3. Forum participation

Some forums are really useful for driving traffic to your website. Not all of them, however. You want to check for things such as whether you can have a link to your business website in your signature, and if you can occasionally link to your site if it is highly relevant to the discussion. Knowing these rules can keep you from being banned quickly from the forums. If you can’t at least have a signature link, you probably won’t get enough from the forum to spend your time on it.

Just as with blog commenting, keep it intelligent and have something to say. “I agree” and similar responses may get your post count up, but they won’t draw a picture of an authority on the subject or draw people to click on your signature links.

4. Article marketing

Article marketing takes many forms and recently took quite a hit from Google. Many article directories don’t do nearly so well in Google as they used to. Given that many people use only article directories in their article marketing efforts, you do have to consider if it’s time to change your tactics.

There are more places than article directories to do your article marketing, however. You can contact people who run ezines, website owners and bloggers directly to see if they’d take an article from you. Some will take reruns from your site while others will require original content. You have to decide when original is worth it. If the site is a good one with a lot of traffic you can get quite a healthy boost, making original content worth it. Just make sure you can create something relevant to the site your submitting your article to as well as to your own site to have the best chance at acceptance and to make the most of any traffic generated.

You can also use Open Office or other programs to change your documents to PDF format and submit them to sites such as Scribd and Docstoc. Make sure your links remain intact in your PDFs before uploading them.

5. Create a video

Not everyone thinks of link building when they consider making a video about their business, but it’s a possibility. Sites such as YouTube allow you to place a link in the description of your video. Make it relevant to the video content to have it as relevant as possible.

Videos don’t have to feature you as a talking head. You can use screen capture software to demonstrate something on your computer. You can make a video that is essentially a slide show, and either talk over it about the slides or keep it quiet.

Don’t stress about not being comfortable making videos at first. It’s new to most of us. You will get better with practice.

6. Build link wheels

Now this one can be a bit controversial. Some say Google doesn’t like it and will penalize you if they catch you at it. Others say it’s worth the risk and neener, neener, Google won’t catch them anyhow. You decide if it’s worth the risk before building link wheels to promote your site.

The premise isn’t so different from article marketing in some ways. Rather than using article directories or submitting articles to ezines and other website owners, you create little sites that all point to your own properties. You use sites such as Blogger, Squidoo and other sites that allow you to create your own pages that you can edit at will.

They’re called link wheels because each page links to your site and to the next site on the wheel. Some eventually close the wheel; others do not. People like having control and being able to edit their link wheel pages at need, a big benefit when something changes with your business.

7. Social bookmarking and media

You know, social media sites of all sorts have become popular for a reason. If you aren’t taking advantage by now, you need to start doing so. In particular, you need to figure out if there’s a site where you get access to your target audience and build a presence there. Facebook and Twitter are some of the big names, but check for sites more relevant to your niche.

Don’t forget the more basic social bookmarking sites such as Delicious. You don’t get much link juice from any of the social bookmarking or media sites, but the right one will bring traffic simply by giving your target audience another place to discover you.

If you haven’t been doing a lot of link building for your sites, start with just one link building technique and get comfortable with it before adding another. You don’t want to overwhelm yourself or feel the process is too frustrating. Always remember that your most linkable content is your best quality content, so focus on the things that should do the best.

If you have a home business, you want it to grow enough to pay your bills, give you some extras and put some aside for savings. Maybe more than that, but you want to earn more than just a little. But it’s frustrating sometimes trying to make it grow. Your business growth can stall, or things can start going worse and you feel the need to work still more to get things going.

Perhaps it’s more that you need to do something you haven’t considered to help your home business grow. Some surprising things can help.

1. Take a break.

When you’re at your most frustrated is often when you most need to take a break from things. I don’t mean taking a break of several days, a week or anything, unless that’s what you really need. Just take some time to get your thoughts away from the stresses and do something else.

It’s very common to have stress slow you down when you work. Taking a break, even just 10 minutes or so can get your mind off work and give it a rest. You may find that you get better ideas after a break.

You should be taking several short breaks a day. There are good reasons why employers are legally required to allow employees to take breaks throughout the day. Give yourself the same courtesy.

You can use your breaks in a few ways. You can read something unrelated to work. Take a walk. Do some exercise. Watch a favorite show. Play with the kids or pets. Just make sure that it’s something to ease the stress and get your mind off work for a while.

2. Work somewhere else.

If you have a laptop, this can be pretty easy. Find a new place to work and see if it helps your productivity or gives you new ideas. A good Wi-Fi connection may be nice, but you can always just type into your word processor if there’s no internet connection available. Not that you have to leave your home. Try working in the back yard or a different room of the house. Just make sure there aren’t too many distractions.

If you don’t have a laptop, don’t feel confined to your desktop computer. Grab a pen and paper and find a place to work with them. You don’t have to have a computer for everything you do for your business even if it’s entirely online.

3. Talk it out.

When things aren’t going quite right, don’t hold it in. Talk to someone about it.

They don’t have to know too much about what you’re trying to do to be a good listener and sometimes come up with helpful ideas. My husband has a general notion of what I do, but doesn’t understand the specifics. He can still listen when something’s frustrating me, and whether or not he comes up with useful suggestions, he has a different perspective.

None of these ideas are going to do specific things to help your business grow. They won’t get you x new leads or subscribers or earn you a particular amount of money. That’s all up to you. What they may help you do is to keep things moving and get away from the frustration that’s making your life more difficult.

AB 153 in California is scheduled for a vote by the Rev & Tax Committee on Monday, March 21, 2011. I’d love to see it shot down right away and have already emailed some of the relevant Assemblymembers to say so. There’s no benefit to the state to do this. It’s much more about Walmart and other big businesses wanting Amazon to lose their advantage.

While it wouldn’t completely ruin my business, it would take some income away and mess with a lot of my current plans if I were dropped by Amazon and other programs that are unwilling to deal with state taxes. I firmly believe something has to be done about the situation because I really don’t blame states for wanting an easier way to get the right amount of sales tax paid in, but this is not the way. It’s only hurting a lot of small businesses, decreasing income taxes paid and doesn’t bring in any sales tax.

It’s kind of odd being a stay at home mom much of the time. People have such varying expectations of you. Some figure you for lazy. Others know how much work you do. Too often immediate family takes you for granted.

There’s a lot to get done every day, and never enough time. You could drive yourself crazy with stress, but you’d be better off figuring out how to make the most of being a stay at home mom. With the right perspective and some good family support it’s a lot of fun. The parts where the kids are silly and you get to see them reach so many milestones are always fun, but some days you’ll wish the stress and noise would give you a break.

1. Take a break for you.

That’s right. When you need a break, find a way to take one. It won’t always be easy, but you need to take time for you.

The problem many stay at home moms have is that they’re on call 24/7 and they don’t ask enough help from their husbands. It’s that feeling that he works all day, discounting what you do all day yourself as just part of the deal. The simple truth is that you’re working hard too; it’s just a different kind of work, a different kind of hard. Much of what you do may seem like play to others, but if someone else did that for your kids, you’d probably have to pay them.

That’s why you need and deserve breaks. Children are demanding little rascals. You need a break so that you can deal with the demands in a better frame of mind, more relaxed, and with plenty of time to pursue your own interests.

There’s no good reason to drop all your interests just because you’re raising children, and many good reasons to keep them up. Reading to amuse yourself is a good example for the children, as is showing them that you have interests outside of their care. Nothing selfish about that. Instead you’re teaching your kids about things you like to do and that they can amuse themselves when you need time for yourself. You may still have to keep a bit of an eye on them while you pursue your interests, but the independence they learn in playing on their own, or with siblings and friends is a great skill.

2. Take time for your marriage.

Your kids need you quite a bit, but so does your husband. You need him too, and you both need time together. Make time for it.

Dates don’t have to be fancy, or even away from home. Put the kids to bed, shut off the TV or put a great movie you’ve been wanting to watch together, just make time for the two of you. A special dinner, some massage, even just talking, whatever sounds fun to the two of you.

That’s not to discount getting out on your own away from the house and the kids regularly. It’s just to point out that you don’t have to pay for a babysitter if you want to be spontaneous or the budget doesn’t work out. When you can get out together, do so. Have some fun.

It’s important to keep that connection in your marriage. It’s good for the both of you and a great example for the children. They need to know that your partnership as a married couple is a vital part of life.

3. Take time for your friends and other family.

Being a stay at home mom can be really lonely if you let it. Don’t.

This is a good time to quit talking about the kids and remember who you are. It will help encourage you to keep up your other interests, and of course it’s fun to have time with your own friends.

4. Take time for your career.

That’s right. Just because you’re a stay at home mom right now doesn’t mean you should neglect your career entirely. Stay at home moms have a lot of options right now to be there for their families and still either work from home or keep learning so they don’t lose all their work skills. Make the most of these opportunities.

This is important even if you think you’ll always be a stay at home mom. None of us know what the future holds. Death, divorce, layoffs, disabilities, all these things can mean you suddenly need to plunge back into the workforce. You should prepare in other ways financially as well, but keeping up some sort of job skills or running a home business can mean a lot in the long run.

There are a lot of ways to work at home, whether you telecommute from your usual career, freelance, take a simpler job that can be done from home or start your own business of one sort or another. The internet gives you more possibilities than your own mother had for an income from home.

You could also take time to further your career. Night classes, online classes, take something that will give your career a boost later on. Most of us don’t remain stay at home moms until retirement. Better to work to advance your career than to fall behind because your skills are out of date.

5. Have pride in your work as a stay at home mom.

Despite the common description, you aren’t “just” a stay at home mom. There’s nothing so little about it. You do complex, challenging work. Don’t minimize it. The work isn’t for everyone, but what job is?

You know you don’t have that much time for sitting and watching TV. Your day won’t sound like much to some people, but those who have been there know how much is really involved. Have a little fun talking about it when the topic comes up.