(embarrassing) Marketing mistakes that will stop you from making any progress.

Hey guys,

I wanted to touch up on some mistakes that will completely STOP you from making any progress in the particular fields they are related to. Like literally - you will probably have a very hard time succeeding if you keep making these quite easily fixable mistakes.

Even though I wrote "new startups," these can apply to all kinds of startups since I'm well into my first decade of building startups (10+ products launched), and I still sometimes catch myself making some of these.

Not focusing on content for your site for SEO

It really took me a ton of time to figure out that regularly publishing high-quality, relevant content helps improve your web’s search engine rankings.

I nearly gave up on SEO until one colleague came to join our team and kind of turned it around. Since then, we’ve had 7.2M impressions and almost 200K clicks on our blog.

So write blogs about your niche and put them on your website!
Invest in Ahrefs and research low-difficulty and high-traffic keywords for your niche.

blog

Not triple-checking everything

As bad as it sounds, it really does take a longer time just to stop making dumb mistakes completely.

Until then, you should always triple-check everything (even after Grammarly checks it).

Cause if not, you will get this - “King Regards, Justin”, typing in the wrong name of a journalist when pitching to them, reuploading posts, etc.
Sending 100 emails to EACH of our subscribers because our system got stuck.

If you don’t recheck the links of your ad campaigns when duplicating them, that will result in this sequence of events:

spending money, receiving impressions and good clicks, but for some reason, super low conversions -> somebody changed the link, so the link of the ad didn’t work.

And so on...

Trusting emotions rather than numbers

Wild hunches are okay, but sometimes you end up testing stuff for too long. It becomes a liability and wastes resources just because you had a hunch that it might work.

It is very important to realize early on that something is not working before it eats up your money.

Instead, you need to look at what is working right now and try to apply your spin on it. If something is not broken, don’t fix it.

Use meta-ad libraries to research and analyze working campaigns, visuals, ads, and funnels.

There is a time to have fun, but before that, you have to have solid ground to stand on.

Hiring and taking in too many people on your projects.

The best-succeeding product of mine (RatePunk) started with me, its co-founder, a designer, a developer & a marketer. That was the best team for a good start.

Scale your team with your needs; this will save you money and time.

Not doing enough research.

This might be relevant for a lot of processes when creating a startup, but from a marketing side, when jumping into a new social media, new ad strategy, or a platform - learn about it.

Watch videos, read analysis, and learn what the algorithm is for the time you choose to pursue that platform.
Learn how to target your audience with ads and organic content you create. Define your target countries and make sure that the social media you use sees you as a person from that country.

And the most important mistake I’ve made:

Having too high expectations. Building a product takes a ton of time, energy, nerves, and resources and is a process. Consistency wins.

What mistakes did you wish you had stopped making earlier in your development and marketing process? Share them down below!