5 Instagram Marketing Mistakes to Avoid

Since 2010 when Instagram came into existence all top-notch brands, celebs, social media influencers as well as small companies have taken benefit of Instagram to increase their website visitors.

Companies have adjusted their social media marketing strategies rather quickly to engage their target audience and drive more traffic, leads and revenue to their business. However, some companies follow the same strategy that they follow for other social media networking platforms. It does not give them the optimal results.

Therefore it becomes vital to know what should be done or not while using any social media platform, including instagram.

Here are 5 Instagram mistakes that people or businesses generally make while running their Instagram campaign:

1. Not Setting A Goal

Instagram is one of the most powerful social media tools that allow you to bring more traffic to your website. However, if you don’t have a goal-driven strategy, you will get no positive results with your social media campaigns.

You should be clear about your goal before opening your Instagram account. Create content or image by keeping in mind your target audience. Know what you exactly want from your Instagram marketing campaign and develop a strategy around your goal.

2. Not Responding to User Comments

User engagement is an essential and most important part of building brand value. Several Instagram analytics tools are there to help you know the post viewers and the number of people who liked or commented on your post. If you have a new Instagram site and have only 2-3 comments on your photos, you can take help of paid marketing.

With the help of this, you can get users who can comment on your Instagram photos. Once people start commenting on your photos, respond them as quickly as possible. If you don’t respond to your customers, it will be interpreted as a sign that you do not value your followers. And it will result in unfollows. Therefore, it is vital to respond promptly to all user comments.

3. Not Including A Link In Your Bio

Traffic is vital for a brand to get successful. And an effective Instagram marketing campaign allows you to reach the target audience. If people like your brand, they will start following you.

However, if you don’t put a link in your bio, people will not be able to reach your website, and this will decrease your site traffic. Instagram gives an opportunity to its users to add a clickable link in the author bio. So, make sure to take complete advantage of it. You can place links to your website or landing page.

4. Not Completing Your Bio

Your profile builds the first impression of your company. An incomplete bio makes users reluctant to follow that account. Therefore, make sure to curate your profile with the good quality picture, a call to action and an interesting description.

5. Not Using Hashtags The Right Way

If you do not include proper and relevant hashtags to your posts, it means you may miss a chance to be found by new users. To get better reach, you can use up to 30 hashtags in an Instagram post. Don’t place so many hashtags in a post as it will make your post look spammy and it will also decrease your trustworthiness. Keep hashtags limited and relevant to the context to get your content discovered by people.

How To Come Back From A Google Penalty

Google constantly changes its ranking algorithm to give its users access to the most relevant and unique content. They ensure that websites with the finest and valuable articles get the exposure they deserve. During the 2012 Penguin update, they started to eliminate low-quality content and elevated the sites that produced high-quality ones to the top of the search engine results.

As for the pages that contained poor content, they were either pushed further below the search results, or they were deindexed. Since then, webmasters began to be more careful with their content strategy and SEO professionals tuned in to Google updates to ensure that their sites stay on top of the SERPs.

How do I recognize a penalty

Even the most experienced digital marketers are taken by surprise by Google penalties. The search engine may or may not inform you that you have been targeted as these penalties can be automatic or manual. If you notice that your site is not ranking well anymore, even for your brand name, then you might have been targeted.

A clue to look out for is when a high-ranking page of yours starts to slip back to two, three or four pages without any action on your end. Another determinant is that your PageRank has significantly reduced. An unexplained traffic drop is another warning sign from Google.

The most feared of all webmasters are the kind of penalties that would yield no search engine results. When you run a site search and type – site:yourdomain.com keyword on the search bar, but nothing comes up, then you have been targeted by Google. Sometimes, it would even remove an entire website from its cached search results overnight.

Here is an article explaining the different types of Google penalties.

What causes a Google Penalty

Google penalties are not randomly handed out. Since its main concern is to deliver quality websites to its users, penalties often come from websites who fail to comply with the Webmaster Guidelines released by Google. This is the bible of webmasters and digital marketers.

Misuse of Links

Your link portfolio may hold the answer to this question. If you have many links coming from unrelated and low-ranking websites, chances are, you will get penalized. Too many poor-quality backlinks will appear as if you have adopted manipulative link building schemes. These include link buying, excessive reciprocal links and other blackhat link building techniques.

To avoid getting punished by Google, or any other search engines, check your link portfolio and make sure that you are receiving high-quality backlinks. Associating your site with low-ranking and suspicious sites is dangerous.

Stuffing Keywords

On the internet, you will see all kinds of dos and don’ts about keyword density in a content. So it can get a bit confusing as to which rule you must apply to. The rule of thumb is to never use keywords excessively. In other words, if Google detects that you are cramming your content with an excessive number of keywords, you will get penalized for it.

Below are other causes for penalties:

Duplicate content – Publishing the same content or plagiarizing another work can be considered as duplicate content. You must publish unique content every single time. Use tools like CopyGator or Copyscape to screen your work for uniqueness and authenticity.

Hidden links – All links on your site should be visible to the users. Hiding links in the source code or changing its color to camouflage the link in the background will only draw negative attention to your site.

Forum Links and Blog Comments – Be careful when using signature links in forums and commenting on blogs. If you are adding a forum link, make sure to use natural and good techniques only. As for commenting on blogs, it would serve you more if you use your real name. Here is a Youtube video of Matt Cutts explaining on how you can comment on blogs safely.

Spun Articles – Spinning is basically stealing a content from another website. Do not pay marketers for cheap articles. If the price is too good to be true, chances are they are not selling unique content. If Google catches up with you, you will be in serious trouble.

What to do if I received a penalty

The most complex part of this endeavor is identifying the root cause of your penalty. Whether you got penalized due to unintentional or manipulative reasons, there is a bright side to this – penalties can be fixed.

You can track your backlinks and manually try to remove each one of them. If you fail to remove a link from a troublesome website on your own, you can reach out to Google and ask to disavow the link. You need to clean up anything that caused the penalty on your site. Once done, you can contact Google and request a reconsideration.

If your page has been completely removed from the search results, and there seems to be no other way to fix the issue anymore, the most valid option is to start all over again and create a new domain name. Once this is done, remember that it would be best to stick to white-hat SEO strategies to avoid getting penalized next time.

Marketing Products And Services Online For Startup Businesses

If you have a business that offers great products or services, start offering them on the internet before somebody else does. It allows you to reach more potential customers and reach success. Here are some of the advice you should take to become an online success!

Start A Website Or A Blog

A flashy and fancy-looking website might look attractive, but try not to overdo it by adding so many additional designs. Instead, concentrate your efforts on promoting your brand. But make sure to host your site on a quality reliable server.

The rule of thumb is that you have just five to ten seconds in search engines to catch the new visitor’s attention and convince them that your site is worth checking out on. If you do not catch their attention by then, they are most likely already looking through one of your competitors.

Create An FAQ Page

Given that you want to sell your products, you should aim to provide potential customers or clients the right answers to the questions whenever possible. You can achieve this by creating an FAQ page on your site, or you can add an online chat feature on your site.

Be sure that the FAQ page does not sound promotional; always aim to answer the most commonly asked questions about your product, service, and brand.

Set A Specialty or Niche

It can be hard to know how to go about the content on your site. Deduce your choices into one winning strategy and pick a website niche that you are familiar with and that you also enjoy. A clearly outlined goal eases your efforts to market your website properly.

You should back up every claim you make about your niche. You can talk a good game about your own brand and the product you are selling, but posting an image or a video can provide some type of proof that you are selling an item that is worth the customer’s money. Selling products that you have used and have had success with just makes good sense.

Work on Content and Keyword Research

Right now, search engines favor sites that produce long, informative and well-written content. This is imperative if you have other competitors that market similar products or services. With your original content, peppered with choice of high-ranking keywords, your site can really rise above the rest, even if you are all selling the exact same products.

Seek Feedback

Ask for feedback often. This is important to ensure you are getting an accurate portrayal of how others view your business. Obtain as much feedback as you can from family, potential clients and friends. If possible, you can hire an expert in the field of digital marketing to help you establish your online business. Take their advice seriously and make any changes you need.

Keep A Track Record

Keeping detailed information about your site is crucial so make sure you track everything you can. This includes traffic, sales, referrals and anything that can affect your site’s performance. Watching your stats help you to make wise internet marketing choices, as you will have a good idea of what’s working and what’s not. You may also install tools that will help you analyze the user behavior whenever they visit your site.

Lookout For The Competition

One good tip for internet marketing is to become aware of how your competitors are doing. Check their sites to get a better idea of how they are marketing their products or services. Also, you can gauge the number of visits they get from their audience. Doing so will allow you to evaluate their site’s performance and investigate how they keep their stats up.

If you found a competitor that is doing really well, you can also examine their website and mimic how they do things. Study how they entice more customers to buy their products and how they manage their website to stay on top of the search engine results page.

Stay Updated

Online marketing is quite similar to other marketing tactics. As an example, search engines frequently change their algorithms and provide a new set of guidelines for webmasters to follow. In this case, it is crucial to stay updated. Once it happens, You may need to refocus your efforts on other aspects of digital marketing such as creating videos or publishing more unique content.

Consider Giveaways

Think of interesting and fun yet unique ways to offer your visitors their prizes. A great example of this would be to answer trivias or hide words in an article and ask potential customers to find them. When your visitors find the words, you can offer them a reward.

Getting your customers to participate on your website will foster a fun and pleasant experience, making them feel comfortable when buying from you. Another example would be offering raffles to users who share your content through social media. Whatever it is, be creative!

The ultimate goal of any business should be longevity. You most likely want to be in business for the succeeding years, but you must understand that every company starts at the bottom. Online marketing for your business may be difficult at the beginning. But if you persevere, you will surely succeed.

The most important aspect to remember here is to research and organize every last detail before launching your brand new site. If you can set aside a budget, you can hire an SEO specialist to guide you along the way. This can be time-consuming work, but the rewards are worth it.