An important part of any website promotion campaign is to measure your progress. If you don’t know where you’re at, you won’t know if you’re heading in the right direction until it’s too late to change course. Here are 3 mistakes to avoid when running your campaign.

Mistake #1 Not having a goal in mind.

Like Napoleon Hill says in his book the “7 Habits of Highly Successful People” you need to begin with the end in mind. Before you start your campaign, you need to have a destination or end point for your efforts in mind. Commit your goals to paper so you know what they are.

Set out with a specific goal in mind. Make the goal something that is measurable, so you can easily tell when you have attained it. Make the goal something that is time bound so you can come back and measure it at a specified time in the future.

Mistake #2 Starting your campaign without knowing your beginning position.

When you start off any campaign, you need to measure your starting point. Use Google Analytics to track your beginning traffic position, as well as your sources of traffic at the beginning of a campaign.

Use Google Webmaster tools to figure out where your links are coming from. This tool will also help you find out what the googlebot sees as the content for your site. It is quite possible that the bot will see your site differently than how you see it.

If you have an ecommerce site, measure your beginning conversion rate, your cost per customer and your customer’s lifetime value. If you’ve got a brick and mortar type of location, measure how many calls you get that come from the website. Now that you have your beginning benchmarks, figure out what you can do to improve them.

Mistake #3 Not considering all available options.

If your promotion goals have not been met, you may need to consider the question “Do we need to buy traffic?” Is a pay per click campaign something that is feasible for you and your business? Do you feel like the organic traffic that you are getting, is giving you what you need?

I feel that you should never close the door on buying traffic. One school of thought says that there is no such thing as free traffic. Traffic that comes to you from article marketing, social bookmarking, link building campaigns etc. costs you in terms of your time. Time is money as the adage says.

You may need to consider hiring a professional to handle your website promotion so you can dedicate yourself to running and marketing your business instead of dedicating yourself to becoming a web geek.