Whenever you are building an online presence, it can be easy to get caught up in the casual comments of friends or customers who have found something they believe to be wrong about your brand. Everybody thinks they know better, and you should always listen to what others have to say, so this is not necessarily a bad thing. Deriving from customers and more opinionated users of social media their opinions can help you determine – when measured on a large-scale – what is a good idea and what is not. The most important thing you can do, however, is to avoid easily-made mistakes that can sink your brand’s potential. Below, we’ll discuss four of these mistakes and what to do in order to avoid making each.

Bad Domain Name

This can be the number one way to sink a potentially awesome brand – when you purchase a long, irrelevant or otherwise wordy domain name, you can create multiple effects. The first one most prominent one is that the longer your domain name is, the more difficult it is to be pinging search engines in the top rank; Google and others cracked down upon keyword stuffing in URLs some time ago, and longer URLs tend to focus more on keywords than content. Even if you built a successful brand around a domain like “buycheaptablets.com” in 2009, you will find very little success with such an address in 2014.

Plagiarizing Your Competitors

If you want to stand out to search engines and search users alike, then you need to be original in your content and marketing strategies. When you copy the efforts of your competitors (even if it has nothing to do with content), you are not developing that dynamic. If you intend to compete with the number one ranked site in select SERPs, do everything exactly the same as they do and only see to attract business through lower prices, then you’ll be doomed to suffer through a life of perpetual second-place performance with your niche’s followers.

No Investment in Website

Because websites are so easy to build and deploy these days, many people now feel empowered to skip consultation and development with a respectable internet guru on how their sites should look, feel, perform and speak to search engines. Anyone can throw together a “business” and be selling products today, but those who do not give their best can see customers judging their brands negatively based on the appearance of their websites. The development of your niche and the competition alike will determine how much effort and design consideration need to be made in building your website.

Weak Marketing Budget

How can you cultivate strong brand awareness and credentials if you do not make smart investments in marketing? Different brands will have different goals; some will be pinging search engines with advertisements, while others may resort to social media targeting for their benefits. Whatever your decision, make sure that you are investing enough resources into it to ensure success. Perhaps the biggest marketing mistake of all is not putting enough money into campaigns, which only resorts in wasted cash.