Reprinted from his blog Conversation Marketing with the author’s permission.
- Hire one contractor to design your site, then send the development work to an offshore company. Guaranteed to produce a Frankenstein monster every time.
- Make your IT/development team build the entire site, with little or no input from the sales, marketing, or fulfillment teams. You’ll spend at least twice the initial development cost on post-launch changes, I promise.
- Run your own pay-per-click campaign after reading one e-book by someone who says they Beat Google. The money won’t burn, in this case, so much as it will vanish with a “pop.”
- Tolerate mediocrity because it’s cheap. If you pay one person $50/hour, and it takes him or her 10 hours to do something, when someone else was going to charge you $250 to do it in one hour, did you really save any money? That should be a rhetorical question.
- Host your company website internally. Wow, nice job—you’re saving $30/month! Now go hire someone for $40,000 a year to keep the server running. Yeah! You showed them!
- Build it from scratch. Build your whole website and online store from scratch, custom. It’ll cost 10 times what it would have had you used one of a dozen great systems out there that will all do the same thing.
- Put all your eggs in one basket. If SEO is working, why spend any money on social media, or PR, or paid search? You can just wait until your rankings collapse, then start from zero in Google Adwords. This will devour your profits AND, as a bonus, Google will charge you inflated bid amounts because you have no account history. Neat!
- Ignore the analytics. See my previous writing on the subject. All analytics do is let you review what’s earning money and what’s not. If you’re looking to shred as many dollars as possible, don’t bother looking at that pesky ROI report.
- Embrace (stupid) change. Sure, you’re getting a nice 3:1 return on your campaign. That’s no reason to stick with it. Trash that sucker! Start a whole new campaign. Don’t test anything—just start over. Weeeeeeeeee….
- Do it yourself. You’re the CEO of a company that designs windshield wipers. That’s OK—you can still learn WordPress and build your site. Those are 120 hours well spent, I’m sure. Cough.
Ian Lurie is the President of Portent Interactive, an Internet marketing firm whose clients include Princess Alaska Lodges, AdAge Magazine and Attachmate Corporation.
