New to this site? We’d love for you to check out our book: Six Biggest Mistakes.

The payoff of your online efforts is proportional to the amount of effort that goes into it.

Spend an hour working on your link-building, and get a few people to visit your site. Spend some spare time on launching a business – and get that sort of spare-time quality traffic.

And so on, and so forth.

No Shortcuts to Online Success

Here’s a for-instance: Let’s say you’re launching a blog called “New Frugality.” It’s not an overnight success, because it takes real time. Time for you to build relationships, time for you to get real quality content, time for you to carve out your niche.

We’re in our Fourth Month over at New Frugality HQ. And it’s taking some time to get over the hump – as expected.

But here’s the thing: we’re actually in this for the long haul.

The Tactics to Definitely Avoid

If you’re new to the online space – or you’re a veteran marketer but are just now getting into blogging – you can easily get sucked in to some shortcuts that are disguised as strategic moves. They’re actually just tactics that are kinda lame – and will end up giving you headaches as you build your online empire. And here are a couple:

1. The “Can I Guest Post?” Email

These can be great – and you need a healthy reliance on guest posting (as you will read in this awesome “Noob Guide” on the SEOMoz site). But we have had a few requests over at New Frugality that gave us some serious pause.

Quoting an email: “This is Jack…I went through your site while surfing in Google.com, am very much impressed with your site’s unique informations.”

AVOID.

We HAVE had some great guest posts on that site – but they came to us from legitimate people with legitimate social presence. (Hint: they had last names.)

2. The “Same Stuff, Different Site” Post

We have watched a couple bloggers of note make this mistake – and they may NOT be paying attention to words like “Panda” or “Penguin.”

“Penguin” is Google’s Algorithm Update. This controls search like nobody’s business. And this can affect your business like nobody’s business.

In brief, you can’t copy and paste content that you used on one site and put it on another site you own WITHOUT making changes to a good percentage of the text.  (Estimates we’ve heard: 70% of the content can be the same.)

3. The Over-Reliance on Facebook Likes

“Engagement” by big brands on Facebook – that means how many times stuff the big brands say gets shared, commented on, or has the like button clicked – is as high as 0.2% in the auto industry, according to this report by “All Facebook.” (This study looked at “daily page engagement.”)

Wait. WHAT?

Ford is considered the industry standard for its social media presence – and they have 1,400,000 fans on Facebook. They should expect 4,200 of those fans to be engaged each day. A tiny number.

This isn’t to say that 4,200 is a BAD number for Ford.

But for you…that percentage of engagement multiplied by your number of Facebook fans (or people who click the like button) isn’t going to give you much. And the amount of time to get those fans – well, your efforts might be better spent elsewhere. Now, the last thing to avoid:

4. Posting Stuff That Isn’t Good

Chris Brogan had a great piece on this the other day – though we think the title of the post doesn’t match the content.

Upshot? Write Good Stuff.

Not everyone is an awesome writer – we get that. But that doesn’t mean that crap needs to be put on the page just to have the page filled. You’re not running a daily newspaper here – if you don’t have something good, productive, well-thought out, clever or (here’s that word again) “engaging,” don’t publish it.

Real Work – Online AND Off – Takes Time.