This may confuse a lot of people. After all, how can a world famous chef like Gordon Ramsey give you the best website marketing advice?

One of my favorite shows on TV is Hell’s Kitchen. Having spent some time in chef’s school, and working in the business, I probably see nuances in the show that the average person never will. However, it also contains some of the best website marketing advice that I have ever heard.

With how terrible this season has been (this one is going down as the worst chefs in history), I got bored the other day  and went to HULU to watch last season’s episodes.  As I was watching, they were doing a challenge where each chef had to prepare a dish. A member from each team was called up, and presented their dish to Chef Ramsey for the tasting, and to see who won the point for that round.

One dish looked like it was just slopped on the plate, and the other was an immaculate work of art. Chef began the tasting and after a moment he gave everyone a lesson, which I think people need to apply to their websites as well.

He looked at the dish that was sloppy, and said, you need to work on your presentation, but that is the best dish that I have tasted today.

then, he told everyone that the presentation needs to be nice, but it only lasts for 30 seconds. The flavor is what will stick in someone’s mind and bring them back for more.

This is true with your website as well. You can have the best layout and an immaculate design but the flavor in your content is what will keep people coming back to your site, opting into your list, and trusting your recommendations for products.

So, the best website marketing advice that I want to leave you with today is to make it look nice, but make sure that your content has the right flavor to bring people back for more.

by the way, the pretty dish was also the worst tasting dish of the day. He spat it out super fast. It doesn’t matter how pretty it looks. If it tastes bad, you wont be seeing them again.

I recently got an email from a guy who has been reading my blog here, and he was asking  “What is the key to climbing the ladder of success online?” He has struggled to do anything successfully, and is pretty much on the verge of giving up. Since this is a common problem, I decided to make this post for everyone to see.

The #1 key: Outsourcing ASAP

Outsourcing and hiring help is the number one key to climbing the ladder of success in IM. Whether it is posting links, writing new content, or getting some cool new graphics. This is one thing I see a lot of people miss, and sometimes it is hard when you just start out.

Most people that I know who are looking to succeed online start out trying to do everything, and wind up not making any progress at all. This is because they get overwhelmed with trying to learn every nuance and detail of every step that they take.

Getting started when you don’t have any Money

Your job is not to be an expert at EVERYTHING. Focus on learning the basics. You don’t have to pick perfect keywords, the perfect niche, write masterpeice articles, or any of that. Your goal with your first site should be get it up, make it look decent, and try to make just a few sales. Focus your attention on getting it moving forward. Sometimes good enough really is good enough. Dont’ try to perfect everything. This is what leads to overthinking and analysis paralysis, constantly looking at things, and failing to take action. If you try to do that with every detail, you wont make any progress.

Instead, do what you have to do to get off the ground, with as little analyzing as possible. Just do something. If it works, repeat it if it. As soon as you see some results, start repeating it over and over again. Focus on traffic, and getting links built, not making sales. Those will come later.

Now, as soon as you make any money at all, (5 sales if you are using Clickbank, and have to pass their threshold), Don’t stick it in your pocket. Pay someone else to write more articles for you, or buy a link building package and have someone do that. Pick the one thing that you are the worst at, or hate doing the most and pay someone who is good at it to do it for you. This will free up more time for you, and you will then be able to relax just a little.

Moving Forward

Take a new action every day, even if it is just a simple article, or 10 article submissions. If you submit 10 articles a day, it is not as overwhelming as thinking about submitting 200 or 300 articles. As you outsource more, you can increase your daily production goals a little at a time.

When I started out, I did everything myself. I lost my job and started freelancing on top of running my sites. I had to pocket the money I was making to keep myself afloat. This made it much harder to get anywhere. Even if you can only spend $20/month on outsourcing, that will take a lot of stress off of you. Over time, you may want to build it up and hire people to work for you full time. This will give you a team of people working to build up your business, and will help you take the stress off.

Your ultimate goal as you climb  the ladder of success should be to not be doing any of the actual work yourself. That is one of the secrets of the super affiliates that I have learned. They pay others to do the work, and they spend their time helping customers, planning new projects, and managing the business rather than working in the business.

So this brings us to our question of the day. What is your biggest obstacle to outsourcing? Is it the cost? Is it the trust factor? Let me know what stops you from outsourcing.

I have been answering a lot of emails and questions on forums about beginning a new website promotion strategy. One of the biggest problems that I am seeing is people getting overwhelmed with trying to get the numbers of traffic that it takes to be successful.

Don’t freak out

Part of the problem is people seeing that they need hundreds or thousands of back links to get high search engine rankings. Or, they think about the hours of work that it will take to set up a proper social networking campaign. The thing about it is, you may need all that, but you  don’t have to do it all at once.  What you need is a consistent plan of action to take every day.You can develop your own plan, or follow the advice of a proven expert in the field.

As I am writing my new ebook on True Article Marketing Exposed (which will soon replace my Traffic Formula), I really started thinking about all the ways people overwhelm themselves. That’s right. The first thing you have to accept to get past being overwhelmed is accept this simple fact:

YOU ARE DOING IT TO YOURSELF!

Step back, take a deep breath and control yourself. The best way to overcome this is by planning your strategy. One thing that I tell people is that consistency is more important than quantity. Develop your new website promotion plan to fit your schedule.

Now, I am going to shoot myself in the foot once again by giving you a plan that you can use,(and I am not even going to charge you for it, not even an email adress). Adapt it to fit your schedule, and how much time you have to spend promoting your new website.

First, look at where you want your links. Personally I go for a diverse structure including a few article directories, Web2.0 sites, blog commenting and guest posting, social bookmarking, and other sites.

Rather than looking at days of building backlinks, set a daily goal for the number of backlinks that you can comfortably build. This can be a few or a lot. I have one friend that does 20/ week. He works 2 jobs, while building up his sites, so he doesn;t  have a lot of time to spend on promotion. His sites are starting to take off, and he has even said if it stays consistent ( which it will if he does), he will quit one of his jobs, if not both of them later this month.

Your New Website Promotion Plan:

Start out by writing one article. Now, you can spin this article. Submit it to 5 article directories, and 5 web2.o sites. That sounds much simpler than submitting it to hundreds of sites doesn’t it?

Now, while you are on the social sites, go through and post 5 comments on related pages within the community. Stop by the forum, and leave one or two comments there. You don’t have to spend a lot of time on this, but by being involved in the community, you will increase your standing there, and you will get traffic to your pages on their site.

Next, i would go through a list of RSS feed submission sites. Submit your feed to say 5 sites/ day, which should take about 15 minutes.You can even outsource it here if you really want to. ( not an affiliate link, but I do highly recommend his service)

Make 5 blog comments on ComentLuv enabled blogs. This will help you get your site found quickly.

Thats it. now, you could do more, or less, depending on how much time you have. You can also outsource the article writing and submissions to more sites. This will increase your exposure, and give you a better chance at ranking well for your keyword.

Remember it is not about quantity it is about consistency. If you have more time on your hands, do more, if you cant do all this in a day, then do part of it one day and the rest the next day. Develop your own plan and stick to it.

Don’t overwhelm yourself with your new website promotion.

I have recently found that I bit off more than I could handle. When I started I built up multiple sites and I still think it was a good idea. However, it is also difficult to manage all those sites when you are doing most of the work yourself. How am I working around this? If you have found yourself in this position, or if you are considering starting multiple projects, follow these simple tips to keep yourself on track. It has worked for me, and for others as well.

Focus on One site

Even if you have multiple sites started, I recommend you focus on one site until it is successful. Once you get some money coming in from one site, you can go back and work on the others. THis will help you to have more to put into those other sites. Instead of pocketing the money you make, reinvest that money into outsourcing.

I know this can be difficult to do. However, you will achieve more success faster if you focus. This is part of why it is highly recommended to find your passions at least when you start out.It has been proven that you can be successful in a niche you know very little about. But, you will need to do a lot of outsourcing in order to get there.

Scheduling

If you just cannot force yourself to focus on one site, then this is the most important thing you need to do. Set yourself daily schedule. Figure out what you need to do for each site. Depending on how you work, you can do this one of two ways. You can schedule yourself tasks to work on one site every day.

Schedule yourself what you will do for which site. Make sure you include one day each week for analyzing all of your sites and setting up your plan for the next week. I recommend doing this on Sunday or Monday to start your week off with a good plan.

If you can change gears easily, you may choose to schedule yourself a couple of hours every day for each site. I often work 10-15 hour days anyway, so if I spend  hours on each of my 5 sites, I can make some progress on each one every day.

Success will come much more slowly following this path. You can do it, it just takes longer to get there.

Look for free help

Now, this will not always be an option. but, if you can get someone to help you with no payment or the promise of future payment this will help you tremendously. Make it fun and exciting. Where can you find people to do this? Ask your wife or friends for help. They may not understand the whole concept, but you can show them how to do simple tasks.

For example,  I have a friend who is a school teacher. She helps me to proofread my articles, and she also helps with posting those articles to different directories. I showed my roommate how to do blog commenting, and he does about 5-10 per day for me. This helps save me a lot of time, but does not ask too much of them. I have found that offering to buy pizza and beer will get a lot of help without paying a lot of money. we get together with our laptops and work for an hour or so, then have some fun.

Over the last few days, I have been observing some huge online marketing blunders by a lot of  people. Sometimes, I can’t believe some of the things that I see when I am looking around the web. Just so that I can save you from looking like some of these other fools that I see online, I am going to share with you the biggest marketing blunders that I see online. Now, if you make just one marketing blunder listed here, then please, stop and think about what you are doing.

Now, The Top 5 Marketing Blunders to Avoid Online:

5. Over Analyzing Competition

I spend a lot of time helping new marketers on forums, through emails, and pretty much everywhere that I go online. One of the biggest marketing blunders that I see is people spending so much time analyzing the competition, and worrying about whether or not they will succeed that they never do anything.

Now, knowing what your competition is doing  is important. It is a great way for you to know what you are doing wrong. However, too much analyzing leads to analysis paralysis.  Take a deep breath and plunge in. You will never really know if something will work until you try it for yourself. Don’t let anyone tell you that you can’t do something. Try it for yourself, and see if you can do it.

4. Over Promotion

I see this on everywhere online, especially on the social networks. This doesn’t mean don’t promote. It means provide valuable advice first. I am more willing to consider buying a product or service from someone who took the time to give me some free advice first.

Your “free report” that is nothing more than an advertisement for a product that I don’t want does nothing to help me. If you are going to run an email list,send out informative emails instead of just promoting products. Otherwise, I will unsubscribe faster than you can blink.

If you are on Facebook  or Twitter then post useful tips and advice. Socialize and ask questions. Don’t just post advertisements, and links all day.

3. Excessive adds

Now, this could have been lumped in with the other one, but it gets its own category.  This is a common marketing blunder, which I atribute to the many fake marketing experts selling crap ebooks.There are actually products for sell teaching people to build sites this way.

I had someone ask me to review his site, and was offended when I told him that it was total trash and he needed to go build a website. I told him to write some articles on a specific topic, and post them on his site. His answer was that he couldn’t write them. So, I offered my writing services. He refused, and broke contact. Oh well its his loss. In a few months he will be complaining that this make money online stuff is nothing but a scam because he built a crappy site.

You see, his site had no niche, and literally no content. He built a horrible affiliate marketing website that was literally nothing but about 20 banner ads. There wasn’t even any connection to the ads he had. There were banners for make money products, dating books, and even World of Warcraft Strategy guides, all on a one page site.

This wasn’t so much a marketing blunder as a train wreck. And it is a common hurdle for marketing newbies to get over.

I was stuck between being pissed at seeing that crap, and laughing my butt off that he thought this site was actually valuable to anyone foolish enough to land on it. Since he couldn’t even be bothered to write an article for the page, I have no idea how he planned to promote it and get traffic. Building an affiliate marketing business is possible, but not with that crap on your site.

IF you can’t research and write at least 20-30 articles, or pay someone to do it for you, go get a job, and quit wasting your time here. Content is what makes or breaks a website. If you can’t create the content, or hire an article writing service, then you need to quit now.

2. Lack of promotion

This one always makes me laugh, but you would be surprised at how many people do it.  I was answering emails the other day, and I had one from a frustrated newbie that I met in a forum that we both frequent. He was struggling because nobody was coming to his site. He had a few visitors, but that was it.

So, I asked him how many links he had built, and where he was posting them. His response almost made me cry. He hadn’t done any, in over 3 months, and wondered why nobody was coming to his site. Now, this is just one example, but I see it every day.

WAKE UP PEOPLE!!!!

If you don’t do anything to let people know your website exists, they can’t find it. The best websites online are not the ones with the best content.  They are the ones that get promoted the most.

Look at Ezine Articles. 80% of the articles in that directory are TRASH. They are the most worthless drivel you will ever read. However, they are the biggest directory online. This is not because of the quality of their information, but because people know they are there.

That is called marketing, and that is what we do here. You are going to try to market a product with your site, but the first thing that you have to sell is your own site. Not for cash, but for a click on a link.  If you don’t have links, or they are not where your potential customers can find you, then your site is dead before you even get started.

Ok, so now the wait is over, the biggest, most terrifying  marketing blunder that you can make online is…..

#1 Marketing Blunder: Relying on one site for all your traffic

How many times do you have to lose all of your traffic because Google makes a change before you get this one? This is probably the most common of all the marketing blunders that I see.

There are so  many great places to get traffic. you can link up with bloggers, and get guest posts. You can post to social sites, build some relationships, and gain the trust of people before sending them on to your site, you can join a bookmarking community, or a forum within your niche. These are just a few places that you can get a lot of great traffic.

I have said this a lot, especially since the latest Google update, but the saying is still valid

“DONT PUT ALL YOUR EGGS IN ONE BASKET!”

Did I shout it loud enough yet?

Google is great, and you should work to get the Google rankings. However, if you give them complete control over your traffic then you deserve to lose everything in an instant.  And, it isn’t just Google. I talked with a guy the other day that lost everything because he got banned from Facebook for spamming, and all of his marketing was done there. Well, first of all, he shouldn’t be spamming. Facebook is a great place to share information, articles, and network with people. But, Don’t get caught posting affiliate links or you are going to be banned. Also, you are not allowed to have more than 1 account there. I know one guy that had 6 accounts, all with his first name. He just got banned too.

Ok, so my rant for the day is over. I hope you learned something from my short post here.  Now for the question of the day.. of course it will be related to the post ….duh…

What are the worst marketing blunders that you see online?  Share the silliest mistakes that make you go  “DUH!” Don’t forget, you will be entered into the blog comments giveaway that we are having.