Introduction
Do I need a website? Well…
There are so many different ways of publishing content these days, and getting your sales and marketing messages in front of your digital audience. It is tempting to focus more on your social media than on your website.
We get it… social media is free, and it’s easy. Rewards can be instant… if it’s ‘likes’ you’re after.
Faced with the costs of domain name, design, development, hosting, and a seemingly never-ending list of housekeeping tasks, why would you even bother getting a website?
Here’s why we think having your own website, and continually developing and improving it, is more important for the long-term health of your business than social media.
Your website is the only digital platform where you have full control over what gets published!
Take a moment for that to sink in.
Posting on Facebook is easy. Tweeting on Twitter is quick, and doesn’t need much thought. LinkedIn is a great business platform. We use it a lot to connect with businesses and to share our thoughts, but…
All of these platforms control who sees your content, how long it stays ‘in the feed’, and, crucially, what other content is shared alongside.
If your content is surfacing to a lot of people on social media right now, there is no guarantee that it will also do so tomorrow.
On your website
Your visitors will see the content you want them to see, without getting bombarded with the competitor ads that social media platforms push to them.
On Social Media
Unless you pay to advertise, the social platform will decide who it displays your content to, and which of your competitors’ content is shown in close proximity. You may also need to deal with trolls and detractors.
Your website is ‘forever’… if you want it to be
How’s that MySpace post doing? The one you wrote back in 2011? Do you remember MySpace? Once the most popular social media platform on the planet?
How about those updates you shared on Google+ a couple of years ago? Ok, Google may have transitioned to something similar [Google My Business], but it’s hardly a social media network – more a platform to tell Google more about your business [no bad thing!].
A social media graveyard exists, and many of today’s social media platforms will end up there in the coming years. There are just too many of them, each falling in and out of fashion. Once their initial funding runs out, they all ultimately need to make money to survive. The old adage of “if you can’t understand what the product is, then it’s because YOU are the product” is still very true.
There are inevitably winners on social media, but, as Seth Godin explains, the odds are really stacked against you.
A picture of a wheel?
Read on to find out why this picture is here.
On your own website, your content will live for as long as you want it to.
You might change your host.
You might change your domain name.
You might even adapt your content as time goes by.
But… it’s yours to do with as you like. If it’s genuinely good, it’ll gain followers, build your search engine authority, and deliver traffic to your website for years to come. It might even convince your next customer to engage with you!
Here’s a fact…
The most visited article on our website yesterday was one that we published back in 2012. Who saw your 8-year-old social media posts yesterday?
Yes. Almost certainly.
Use your social media platforms to inform and amuse, to connect and build authority. Keep your greatest content for your website, and tease it out to your social networks.
We like to think of our website as the hub in a wheel. Our social networks are dotted around the rim of the wheel, drawing visitors down the spokes into the hub.
You might lose a spoke or two over time, but the structure of your ‘wheel’ remains intact, working for your business for many years.
Don’t make the mistake of using a social media platform as your hub – your entire wheel will collapse if the platform disappears.
Conclusion – Do I need a website?
Hopefully, we have shown you why a website is important, and why it should be the hub for all of your greatest content. Yes, there is a cost, but payback happens over a long period… and your website is YOURS. It belongs to you, is controlled by you, and may turn out to be an asset when you decide to sell your business.
So, why not dust off your website and turn it into the great business asset it deserves to be? If you haven’t looked at your website for a while, our website housekeeping tips might be a good place to start. Or, complete the form at the bottom of this page and ask us to help revive it with you!
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