No one ever said that the only way to market your website is on the website you own yourself. The fact is, marketing offsite is just as important as your marketing efforts within the pages of your site. Unfortunately, business owners with little online marketing experience tend to slap up something simple and expect results to happen. If you think you've tackled offsite marketing for your online business with zest and zeal and have witnessed no return on your time investment, you could be one of those unfortunate ones who is getting it all wrong. Check out these three common offsite marketing mistakes you have to avoid for your advertising plans to work.

1. You're not optimizing offsite content with SEO in mind.

Just like SEO is important with the content you have on your site, it is also important in everything you post off of your actual website. Think about some of the top online companies you know and consider what happens when you search for them on Google or another search engine. Those companies who have utilized SEO best practices with their onsite and offsite content will be easy to point out when you search for them because your search will yield you a list of results that include both onsite web pages and associated content on other sites. For example, if the company has a profile on Facebook, this will probably pop up in the search results if the content on their Facebook page is optimized to do so.

There are a few things you should be doing with your offsite content to ensure it is optimized for SEO purposes, including:

  • implementing some of the same keywords and phrases you use in your onsite content
  • following local SEO rules when applicable
  • optimizing headers, titles, and meta data

2. Not properly utilizing the power of social media is one of your biggest offsite marketing mistakes.

It is no big secret that social media platforms are some of the most logical and easy sites to take your offsite marketing efforts. Even though most business owners will do the basics, like setting up a business account on Twitter or creating an Instagram profile for their company, many will not follow through with these ideas to yield the most effective results. To ensure your offsite marketing plans work where social media is concerned, make sure you do these three important things:

  1. logically link from social media posts and pages to your company website
  2. make sure the social media content is recognizably affiliated with your business brand
  3. maintain a consistent level of presence on social media platforms

3. You're simply not doing offsite marketing in the right places.

This sounds to be such a simple problem, but in fact, it is one of the most common offsite marketing mistakes. If you are placing ads, link-backs, or other content on websites that have no logical connection to your own website or business, it can just leave onlookers feeling a bit confused altogether. There are questions to ask yourself to make sure you are placing your offsite marketing content in the right places.

Why did you choose that specific site to advertise on?

What can advertising on a specific site do for you? Will people traveling to that site automatically be interested in something your business has available? There should be reasons why you pick certain places to advertise and the process should not just be picking places to stick stuff at random in hopes of generating some kind of interest.

How can a customer affiliate a certain website with your business?

Not all websites will have a direct affiliation, such as social media platforms, but some definitely do and should. For example, if you want to post a market-worthy press release on the blog of a blogger, make sure that blogger's blog could be associated with your business. For example, posting a press release about new survival gear on the blog of a survivalist would make sense.

At the end of the day, your offsite marketing efforts can do just as much for your business as your onsite marketing efforts, but they have to be done in the right way. Reach out to the experts at Brandgy for more information on the most effective offsite marketing tactics and how to avoid common offsite marketing mistakes.