What are your 3 most difficult IM challenge???

[Online-Marketing-Guru]

To business owners who are serious about IM (internet marketing), what are the 3 biggest challenges you've faced with IM?:confused:?

And if you've overcome these challenges, DO SHARE & TELL!!!

[Wozcreative]

Actually, internet marketing has been the simplest form of marketing for what my business is about. I do very little in person marketing/networking as everything I do is online.

Biggest challenges - it takes up a lot of your time when you're first starting to do it. There is a big learning curve for finding out what works and what does not. And the third challenge would be marketing online outside of your local area. People seem to want to hire local designers, despite them only email contacting. I guess it is like a security blanket for them.

[Willow]

I guess it depends on what you are doing. Certain businesses benefit more from things like email marketing or Social Media. The hardest thing that I have overcome is ranking for competitive keywords in Google. Sometimes it can take a full year of hard work to make it to the top. So be patient and consistent.

[Online-Marketing-Guru]

@Woz: I agree with you about the "hire local" thing. In reality its actually a silly position for a business owner to take (other than wanting to feel a sense of physically proximity so owners can touch, squeeze and hug contractors that hire I guess.) After all the very nature of everything internet is that it brings the entire world of information, products and services right into you office, living room or kitchen and opens up unrestricted levels of virtual possibilities. Nevertheless some people simply prefer physical close contact if they so desire.

[Harold Mansfield]

The biggest hurdle in internet marketing for me, was not knowing anything about Marketing. When you are on the outside looking in, you think it's easy to recreate the things that you see other brands doing. But it's not. There's a method to the madness that most people don't recognize and have no formal training in. When you don't know anything about marketing, your first few attempts are going to suck.

So you can't be a successful internet marketer, until you learn how to be a marketer and about marketing. After that, now you have to learn how to apply that to the web against an entire world of competition.

if you are a one man show...It's time consuming, there's a lot of reading, and things change quickly..so you are constantly measuring what is outdated, or a new way to do things against if your target market is actually moving as fast as you are learning things.

The only way to overcome these challenges is to learn. Try. Test. Improve.

There are no tricks. There are no "systems". You have to understand why you are doing the things you do, and how to tailor them to work for your specific situation and the market that you are targeting.

Luckily (or unluckily) I don't have the local problem. Most of my clients AREN'T local. I'm not sure if that's harder to market or not.

[patrickprecisione]

I'd say creating good content. That is, content that people want to share. It takes alot of trial and error to find stuff that connects with your audience in a relevant way.

[Carsten]

The biggest problem for me is lack of time. I agree about the learning curve, but this is even the problem. With every step I learn I feel as if I open a new door to the next issue. Sometimes it's difficult to decide which will be the next door to walk through and start working.

[PayForWords]

For me personally, it has always been persistence.


Here's what I mean:


1. Most anything that has worked for me, took a lot of it. Therefore, it took a while for me to realize that it WAS going to work.

2. Once something worked and I got to where I wanted to be, I had a bad habit of stopping. That's a no-no.

In my line of work, I rely on SEO, word of mouth, and manually getting leads.

What I mean by this, is that my method of bringing in clients basically involves me contacting them directly.

Any time I have strayed away from that method, everything went down hill.

The easiest part? Doing what I say I'll do for a client.

Hope this helps!