Your friends know you on FaceBook, you have a few photos on Instagram, your CV or Resume is on LinkedIn and you broadcast to the world on Twitter. Some people even think you have mastered Social Media, have you discovered that not much actually happens and you are unable to monetise your efforts?
You may even be beginning to think that the whole Social Media trip is a waste of time and you thinking of throwing the towel in. Yet you also know and if you not that sure, at least you have heard about others that have used Social Media effectively to grow their brands and make sustainable amounts of money.
What is missing is often a Website or Weblog or even just a simple Blog
Let’s look at one of the reasons why the internet was created, and that was to visit Websites. You may have seen the term WWW or World Wide Web and all addresses start with http://www.name – Social Media was created as a way of telling people what is happening on your website and although it’s very effective in assisting you at building relationships too. If we become boring because we have run out of interesting things to say, our relationships start to lack purpose and our friends soon find other people who are more interesting to relate to. The key is to keep things fresh in our relationships and also with the information or content we send out into the world. Let’s look at the different tools at our disposal.
Website – Traditionally the domain where all our information was parked so that people could find out about our products and we updated it when we felt that it needed an update. People used to get excited when a website was first published and then came back to it once or twice only to find that there was nothing new and therefore lost interest. This approach is still taken by many who create a LinkedIn profile and effectively park their CV or Resume hoping that some recruiter would find them.
BLOG – Blogs were originally started as online journals and soon became popular when people discovered that voyeurism in any form was entertainment. Blogs were effectively the start of Social Media as we understand it today. Blog platforms have become easier to use and one of the most popular platforms is Google’s Blogger.com
Weblog – These are blog platforms like WordPress.com that actually allow your Blog to look like a website and have most of the functionality of a website including a dedicated address as in the case of my site richsimmondsza.com.
These platforms allow you to have a searchable database of information that will become part of the complete body of information that makes up the internet. Will your information be found by people, not just because they have seen it on the social web, but also because it is worthwhile reading your stories and /or viewing the photos on your blogging platform? This will be the centre of your Marketing Universe, please consider it as it will give you the dividends you are looking for.
RichSimmonds 