4 Branding Mistakes Which Can Sink Your Business
Branding means making your business known and respected in your particular industry. However, when you create your business for the very first time, you are something of a blank slate. That means that you have the chance to tell your story any way you see fit. So it’s important to watch out for the following branding mistakes which could easily sink your business:
Price Branding
If the one and only way that you can differentiate yourself from the competition is through cheaper prices, you’ll never be able to make your website or online business into a success. The fact is that there will always be someone willing to undercut you on your prices. They will do this even if they have to sell at a loss just so that they can drive you out of business and then raise their own prices.
Now you could of course try the same thing, however you’ll ultimately end up in a race to the bottom where nobody wins and where everybody ends up losing massive sums of money.
Lying to Your Customers
I hate liars more than almost anything else in life. I find it especially reprehensible in a business because I’m placing my trust in that business and when they lie to me, they show me they don’t care about their customers one bit. Sadly, it seems that every other Internet marketer seems to feel that lying to customers is perfectly acceptable. They do this because they aren’t trying to build a brand but merely make a quick buck and then run off to the next thing they can hawk.
If you want to build a business however, you need to actually keep the truth in mind every time when you talk to your customers so that they know that they can trust you. This means for example that when you say prices are going up soon, you don’t keep saying it six months later. This means that when you make a one time offer, you really do make it only one time.
Overextending Yourself
Otherwise known as vapor marketing, this basically involves making promises about your products and or services which you cannot possibly keep. Some companies have built their business models on this, most notably Microsoft back in the 1990s, however, ultimately most companies which try to do much too quickly instead of being focused on solving a specific problem tend to fail spectacularly even if their product does happen to do certain things very well.
Thinking the Market Is “So Big,” I I Can Just Drop In and Make a Fortune
This is the single most common mistake that internet marketers tend to engage in when they decide that a market is “so big” that they are able to make money because they just have to grab X percentage (usually 1% or half a percent or whatever) of the market and they’d be rich. The problem is, no matter how big the market is, there will always be lots of other “me too” people who jump in and create enough competition to spoil the market for you. So if your branding involves merely trying to grab your share of the market without differentiating yourself from everyone else, then you’ll never be able to make money online.
Thanks for the advice. I am always trying to balance a fair price and giving the customer a deal. However I am finding that it is very important to ensure that you never sell yourself short and always get paid for what you are worth…
Very true. I started out that way as a freelance writer and have learned the hard way that you can get burned out really quickly if you don’t pace yourself and do work that you can actually handle and get paid what you are worth.