1. Buying marketing products you don't use. Do NOT buy another product on how to market or how to make money online if you're not going to at least read it or watch it. True, not everything you purchase will turn out to be something you want to implement in your business, and you don't know that until you read/watch it. But even the stuff you don't directly use can be useful if you get at least one great idea from it. What's not useful is buying stuff and not even consuming the content.
Seriously – how many ebooks and videos do you have sitting on your computer right now that you haven't touched? How much software have you purchased that you haven't used? Find them and at least glance through them or try them to see what you're missing. You paid for it, you should get some benefit from it.
2. Posting on social networks that are not providing a return on your time. Just because other marketers are on a particular social network does NOT mean you have to be, too. Take a good hard look at each social network you're on, and decide if it's paying off or if you're wasting your time. Then act accordingly.
3. Mistaking quantity of content for quality. Here's what's true – blogs that post several times a week tend to get more customers than those that post less frequently. However, here's what else is true – crappy content does not get you customers, no matter how much of it you post.
If the choice is between quality of content and quantity, go for quality every time. It's better to make two posts a week that totally knock it out of the park than it is to make 7 posts that are mediocre. People sign up for great content, they return for great content, and they trust the person who delivers great content. And when they trust you, they buy from you, too.
4. Going SEO crazy. If you can get enough inbound links, you'll rank high in Google and you'll get a flood of traffic, right? So you should focus all your time on link building, right? No. Building links to your website does not make a business. Selling stuff makes a business.
Further more, if you're building micro sites just to link back to your main site, you're filling your bucket with a leaky spoon. For those links to be relevant, those sites have got to be good. How are you going to have time to create good content for all those microsites? We just said quality is what counts.
So forget the microsites, and never spend more than 5% of your time in link building. Instead, spend your time creating quality content, making quality contacts in your niche, and making your visitors and customers happy. These 3 things will build your business – not a fistful of microsites or a link building obsession that robs you of your time and enthusiasm.