Peter Drucker in his classic work The Effective Executive stated that the executive and the organization must ruthlessly abandon yesterday in order to make way for tomorrow. Of course not everything from yesterday need be abandoned, but some of it must be.

What to Abandon

The criteria for what to abandon would be those things that if we were not doing them now, we would not start doing them now. This is a great criteria. It allows people to break away from the Concorde Fallacy otherwise known as the sunk costs fallacy.

What to Abandon in Internet Marketing

When actually deploying this in terms of Internet Marketing, we need to ask: what in Internet Marketing should we abandon? There should be several areas to look into for activities that should no longer be invested in:

• Social Media
• Advertising
• Content

What to Abandon: Social Media

There are some new social media sites, such as Branch and Medium. However, we don’t get any extra time in 2013 to try these out without clearing the way by jettisoning other social media we are dragging into the new year. So, this year the recommendation is to abandon the following. Now, some people may disagree with these choices, that is fine. The point is to make the choices. Now.

• WordPress.com
• Blogspot/Blogger
• Posterous
• Tumblr
• App.net
• Buffer
• StumbleUpon

What to Abandon: Advertising

We at SEO Chiang Mai run great ad campaigns. Still, it is important to review the performance of all campaigns and put the lowest performing campaigns on pause in order to create new campaigns which can outperform. This is not a recipe to constantly change marketing messages, but to have an opportunity to create new messages and see how they perform. Small campaigns can yield good data fairly quickly. Also, some campaign performance degrades over time. What advertising to abandon?

• Marketplaces or marketplace segments which are underperforming. This includes search and display network segments.
• Keyword or demographic metrics which do not compare well with the customer base or are getting worn out from the marketing messages.
• Ad components which produce low cost but highly irrelevant traffic (Facebook sponsored stories, I’m looking at you)

What to Abandon: Content

The glut of content means that more content is not necessarily the winning approach. Only the highest quality or most relevant to the customer should be considered. What content makes the reader want to share this content, and what content can be rediscovered in the future and still be relevant (perhaps with periodical updating). What content to abandon?

• Uninteresting content, content that doesn’t make you think Wow, that is interesting, also content that doesn’t make other people think Wow, that is interesting.
• Content based on a weekly or monthly wordcount or article count (doing it just to do it).
• Content that has no relevance to what people are looking for (that is, content which is virtually invisible to Google).