You have invested your time and money into putting up your company website. Your prospective customers are out there somewhere and you want to make aware of your site, your address, what you offer and why they would want to visit.

You have some ideas, but you don't want to waste money. How can you avoid mistakes other smart website owners make?

By reading this article, of course.

I'm going to outline several tactics that DON'T work. By the end of this article, you'll save time and money (not to mention avoiding throat-clinching disappointment and frustration) by skipping these Bad Ideas.

Bad Idea #1 - Let's get more traffic to get more sales.

Seems reasonable at first glance. But it's not always the best course to take. How well does your site sell now? What's the sales conversion rate of your website? If your website is inefficient at converting 100 visitors into customers, it will be inefficient at converting 20000 visitors into customers.

For instance, I may find a client's website converts 1 percent of their visitors to customers. If we can boost that number to 2 percent, they have doubled their sales without spending more money marketing. When they DO spend money on marketing, they still convert the higher percentage of their visitors to customers.

Bottomline: Take a look at your conversion rate before you increase traffic. What can you do to boost it?

Bad idea #2 - Let's just buy thousands of visitors.

Many emails I recieve start with "I paid for 10,000 visitors and I didn't make ONE sale. You'd think I'd make at least one sale"

Many instant "traffic building systems" DON'T work. Why?

You've seen popup windows. Many times these traffic building systems automatically pop open a browser window showing your website. That counts as a visit. Yes, a person who wasn't looking for what you sell and was in the middle of doing something else. So of course they close the annoying window.

Bottomline: You have other options to build traffic. The goal is to get a return on your marketing dollars. You want the throngs coming to your website to BUY.

Bad Idea # 3 - Where can we buy some banner ads?

Here's the skinny: Targeted banner ads are placed on sites that have visitors who may want what you offer. Even these banners typically get .3 of 1 percent clickthrough. That's 3 clicks per thousand views!

Bottomline: If you absolutely want to do banners, only do them if they are free. By free, I don't mean banner exchanges where you pay by putting banners on your site. By free I mean free as part of your own affiliate program for example. There are better tactics to spend your time and money on.

There you have it. Three common website marketing mistakes you can avoid. This frees up your time and money for things that DO work.