Internet marketing campaigns revolve around 3 things – search engine optimization, social media and content marketing. These marketing efforts are referred to as pull strategies. These are the marketing efforts that are designed to “pull in” your target clients, instead of pushing them to make favorable buying decisions.

The oft-repeated adage in Internet marketing – content is king – remains as relevant as ever. After all these emerging developments and shifts, the content of your Webpage remains to be the lynchpin of Internet marketing. Search engines scour the pages of your Website to assess if such pages measure up to the search query. On the other hand, your target readers will follow the content of your blogs, whitepapers, articles, etc. in order to get a clear picture of the product or services that you are offering.

This means that you need to generate quality content to build your reputation online. You have to exert extra effort to show that you are a trusted and reliable source of information. Thus, if you want to hit the jackpot in your Internet marketing campaign, you have to work on your content.

There are 4 common pitfalls that you must avoid in your Internet marketing campaign. These are the following:

Inadequate Fresh Content

Fresh content is the lifeblood of content marketing. This may appear to be a perfect case of redundancy. How would you perceive a blog site where the latest post is already a few weeks old? Blogs that are generally stagnant are considered by readers as fairly useless and won’t waste their time reading through the content. You are losing out on the opportunity to rank well at Google since each of the posts in your blog can target various keywords and these can help improve your online presence.

Connecting With the Wrong Audience

Follow the basic rule in marketing – profile your potential clients. You must monitor who are reading your blog posts regularly. Carefully assess if you are missing out on some earning opportunities from other segments of the market. Determine what your priorities are. Do you want to build your reputation as an expert in a particular field or niche? Or do you want to share information with your target clients? You must also get a good grip of the online behavior of your target readers and find out what they are looking for when they browse the Web.

Coming Off As a Hard Sell

You will surely mess up your Internet marketing campaign if you treat your content marketing as your medium in selling your product or service. You have to remember that your primary objective is not to sell but to market your product or service. You are into content marketing to “help” your potential clients. Your readers will surely not appreciate it if you sound a bit too “promotional” when you provide content for your blog.

Producing Content Without Promotional Value

On the opposite end of the spectrum, you should find ways to promote your product or service without going overboard and appear to be a hard sell. Learn of the “stealth” techniques so that you can get the desired response from your readers. When you produce a great article or white paper, you can get positive response from your target audience. This puts you closer to your main objective of developing a potential business through higher CTRs. Make yourself visible on the Web. Get those posts on your social profiles, company newsletters and social bookmarking sites. Of course, don’t forget to put share buttons on your blogs so that your target audience can republish or link to them.

One of the biggest pitfalls affiliate marketers face is losing sight of the big picture.

You might think you are focusing your campaign on driving the market to conversion. If you aren’t converting your traffic and it is arriving in good numbers, obviously something is wrong. There are four mistakes that are very common for affiliates to make. Anyone of them will definitely cause your affiliate niche marketing program to not pay off as it should have.

Mistake #1: Sometimes you get so involved in all the separate pieces of your campaign that you can forget the purpose behind your efforts. What is the reason you are building and launching a promotion? Everything you do must support the product or service you are marketing. If you loose focus of your purpose you won’t be able to take full advantage of any affiliate niche marketing program.

Mistake #2: No matter what types of feeder pages you create they all have to support your efforts. You can’t build blogs, do article marketing or social marketing or whatever form of feeder pages you come up with and forget or overlook that the only reason you are doing this is to support and build the main money site. You could have the highest paying affiliate niche marketing program in the world and not make a dime because you aren’t sticking to your purpose.

Mistake #3: No matter how much traffic you build, if you aren’t offering your target audience something of value you have lost them.

Mistake #4: Don’t expect them to know what you want them to do when the target arrives on your page. You have to tell them what you want them to do. Affiliate niche marketing program success can only happen when you direct the actions of the traffic you have driven to your page.

Mistake #5: A lot of even talented affiliate marketers can easily fall into a lack of clarity. If it isn’t clear what the page is about when the target arrives, they’ll be gone in an instant. Focus on the action you want them to take. Don’t clutter up the page. Too many images and graphics mean they have to think about what is going on. They don’t want to think, they want to know what to do here.

Affiliate niche marketing programs will only pay off when you are in control of the visitor.

You can’t have poorly written copy or miss out on the opportunity to use a call to action. You need to make the most out of your keywords and push the traffic to convert. That is how you make money in affiliate marketing. If you did all the research, then one of these common mistakes might be what has closed you off from a revenue stream.

It is hard to find anyone who haven’t heard, used or seen of Twitter these days. It’s popularity has increased even more within the business world. It is open source of information for anyone and everyone to use. But still some of us are not sure of how to make the most out of it. When I first started using Twitter for my work, I was bit lost, even though I had idea about what Twitter was and how it worked. I put together this basic guidelines for anyone interested in using Twitter or already have account and want to make more out of it.

First step is to get a account. You can go to Twitter and create account. Once you have account setup it is important to customize your profile to something familiar with logos, picture or products etc. Click on Profile next to home on top. Then click on edit your profile. Or click on setting where your picture and account name is displayed. Then you will be presented with options to customize your profile. Click on profile and make sure, if it is for company you have company logo and if it is personal Twitter have your picture. Icons are outdated and nobody likes to follow icons. Use the space for Bio wisely with strong and specific message regarding your business or you.

You can always use your own background image to make it more attractive and familiar.
To change the background image.
1. Click on Design.
2. Then Change Background Image, browse the picture you want displayed and Save Change.

And of course the most important, your tweets. Make sure they are engaging, relevant and interesting to your followers. Hashtag and trending topic are also good strategies to tie your tweets to send your message beyond your followers. Hashtags and trending topics are displayed on right hand side of your Twitter account. Twitter is not only about informing your customer but also about communicating with them answering their query, solving their problem, listening to them and taking actions, keeping close eyes on your competition, following the trends on your industry.

First and most important is always research your competition. You will know about what your competition is doing and may also be able to find a niche where they are falling behind. With Twitter it is open and easy. You can locate their Twitter account through directories like wefollow. You can include your own Twitter account with 5 interest categories. Lets you find the top Twitter accounts with categories. Very effective in finding the influencers in particular industry.

Once you have followed your competitor or subject of interest create a list. This helps you to be informed on what your competitors/subject are doing and how they are handling their Twitter strategies, special offer or other promotion or their weak points. For easier access to the information you can create a lists for each competition/subject so that you don’t have to search for their tweets in jungle of tweets. Here is how to do it. Find and follow them in the Twitter. Then you will get option of create a list. Follow the instruction and you will have the list with all the tweets for that Twitter account.

Once the account is set up following is the next step to get followers to your account. The key to following is look at the number of people they are following and number of follower they have. 1:1 ratio means if you are following that person it is most likely they will follow you back. Finding people is easy, just click on who to follow and type in your interest/company or keywords you want to follow in the search box. Check the follower to follow ratio.

If someone follows you and they are relevant to your business or interest make sure you follow them back and send a direct message. Make the direct message short, relevant and personal.

Hootsuite is important tool that helps you monitor you Twitter. The great thing about this tool is its free and after signing up you will be able to monitor your Twitter performance in one platform. You can monitor mentions, direct messages, searches and Twitter lists by setting upto 10 columns at a time. With the search you can use the keyword related to your industry to see the real time tweet queries and direct them to website/blogs or answer their queries with @username.

Most important aspect for any media or marketing effort is flawless integrating with other marketing effort and continuous and engaging communication. Integrate your social media into other aspects like website, blog, email signature, advertisement etc to get the best results and maximum exposure. There’s ton of tools, both free and paid versions, that help monitor Twitter analytic for your business and it’s worth trying few of them to figure out what works best for your scenario and goals.