Online marketing has grown exponentially in lockstep with the rise of social media. You can use Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and more to reach your market online. But the question of the day is, what is the BEST place to focus your online marketing efforts?
The Short Answer is—your website!
Your Blog as the Centre …
Social Media is your promotional tool for your website. Here’s why:
1. You Control Your Website
When your blog is part of your website, you own your blog. That means that you control user guidelines as well as the look, functionality and style of your content. YOU decide what changes, when it changes and how.
This is not the case with social media sites and external blogging platforms. You are forever at the mercy of their guidelines and terms of service.
If your online marketing focus is a single social media platform that suddenly decides to shut you down, you’ve lost your entire online presence.
2. Blogging Boosts Your Website Traffic
When you create new posts, you give search engines more content to crawl and index. We’ve said it for a long time, Google likes fresh content and rewards sites that create new quality content consistently. And if you’re blogging for the right audience and using the “right” keywords, your content will show in search results more frequently sending traffic to your website.
3. Your Blog Helps Natural Link Building
Here’s the thing: when you create great content, people will share and link to your content. Your message will spread around the web – and naturally. You’re content will show up on other websites and social media accounts, new people will way to find you and your services.
4. Your Blog Strengthens Your SEO
I’ve alluded to it in two previous reasons. Blogging boosts traffic and blogging builds links to your site. More traffic and more links improve your search results naturally. Links and fresh content tells Google that your site is relevant to users. Google loves websites and blogs that make user experience a top priority.
These Stats Will Convince You!
Here are some great stats from a HubSpot Report that will add some piquante sauce to my argument. According to Hubspot
- Companies with blogs produce an average of 67% more leads monthly than companies that don’t blog.
- In 2019, 77% of marketers were focusing on written content
- Half of the top 200 Fortune 500 companies had a corporate blog
- Blogs can result in a 434% increase in indexed pages and a 97% increase in indexed links.
- Company websites with blogs report 67% more leads for B2B.
- Businesses that blog get 55% more website visitors than businesses that don’t.
Your blog should be the centre of your online marketing efforts. You own it and control it. Once you’ve created your unique content there, jump to social media to promote it and guide your audience back to your site.