So you’ve got business Facebook & Instagram pages with over 5,000 likes & people following you – that’s awesome … but is it enough?
I’ve got a question for you …. “Do you own Facebook or Instagram?” I wish right?
So if Mark Zuckerberg woke up tomorrow and decided that business pages were no longer allowed on FB or Insta (I can’t imagine him doing this – but just imagine for a sec) … if that happened, do you have contact details for all those people who’ve liked your page? How are you going to get in touch with them, leverage them, sell your products to them? You aren’t … they’re gone! Zuckerberg owns all your Facebook contacts – not you! If you piss off FB you get put in FB Jail … it sounds funny – but if you cant access FB then you can’t run your business on FB.
Got Instagram? Twitter? YouTube? LinkedIn? Pinterest?
Nup you don’t own them either! Bugger!
What do you own? What can you control 100%?
Your own website! And no I don’t mean a website on Wix, Weebly or one of those platforms... cause while you own the content, you are limited by the rules of their website, just like Facebook. Your website is hosted inside someone else’s website – so you still don’t have full control of it.
You want your fans, customers and followers to be on your WEBSITE – cause that’s where you control your message, that’s where your visitors are only seeing what you want them to – not all the other shiny objects vying for their attention, that’s where you convert your visitors into customers.
A valuable lesson to learn
Let me tell you a story … Many moons ago I had an eBay business while raising my kids. The business was earning around $2,000 a week… every week! It was a nice part time business let me tell ya! I was selling information products and it was fully automated … like seriously a VERY nice business haha. BUT eBay changed the rules 3 times in a month, and every time they did my account (and all other digital information seller’s accounts) was suspended until I brought it inline with their new rules. There was no warning or time to get prepared – you just wake up and find your account suspended cause you’re now breaking brand new rules.
Three times this happened - in one month.
When this happens you no longer have access to your customers because they are eBays customers NOT yours! This was a valuable lesson to learn
I quickly realised the only asset I own is my own website… every other site like Facebook, eBay, YouTube, Twitter etc are all TOOLS.
What’s my point you ask?
Your website is the base for all your marketing efforts.
Start with your website. From there you can have your Facebook business page, YouTube, Twitter etc … whatever you feel is going to benefit your business… but it STARTS with your WEBSITE!
This is how it looks….
You create a new blog post on your website... easy enough right? If you’re currently using FB then you’re already creating content… just put that on your website first.
You ‘Share’ your blog posts to your social media accounts.
Copy the URL of your blog post, write a short introductory blurb on FB and paste the URL from your blog post. Doing it this way, can possibly give you more engagement on your posts than just ‘sharing’ it – but you need to be doing a mix of both. Google will see that your blog posts are being shared and will give you a l’il bit more luvin.
Got videos in YouTube? Great – embed those into your website … it’s easier than you think – seriously! When you upload them into YT, make sure you put a link to the blog post with the video in it and more information. Remember Google owns YouTube – so by sharing back & forth between YT and your website will also give you more Google luvin.
Then you can share your blog post with your video embed to FB. You now have a connection between your website, YT & FB. And the best part is they all link back to your website = more visitors, more customers and more Google luvin <3
Pinterest & Instagram – share your images from your website to your accounts on Pint & Inst and again link back to blog posts on your website with more information.
Email Newsletters are still the cornerstone for your online marketing strategies
Ok, that’s the basics – now let’s step it up with an email newsletter. Remember I said you need those 5,000 fans off FB and onto your website? So this is how you do it.
Setup and email newsletter system on your website. There are a few excellent free options you can use right from inside your website, or you can try MailChimp… but let’s just start with a website one.
Now you set up your email newsletter to send out automagically on a regular basis – weekly, fortnightly, monthly or even when there are a certain number of blog posts to go into it. Create the new newsletter, make it look wonderful and match your branding, then add a bit of magic to make your blog posts automatically add themselves to your new newsletter. It’s actually easier than it sounds, and you only need to do it once! The system will take care of the rest and send a new, up-to-date email newsletter to your subscribers, with links back to your website and social media accounts (of course).
Let’s recap
You’ve got your website, you’re blogging regularly, you’re sharing the blog posts to your social media accounts, and your email newsletter is automatically being sent out to your list.
The only thing left to do is encourage your FB fans to go to your website, read your content and join your emails newsletter. This can easily be done with little teases … run a contest, offer exclusive benefits only for your newsletter subscribers, create awesome content that they actually want delivered to their inbox each week…. But this is a whole other blog post ?