With so many people on social media sites nowadays, it’s tempting to ask yourself if you should forget about driving traffic to your website and focus on marketing elsewhere. Why not go where people already are instead of making what can seem like a herculean effort to drive traffic to your site?
The answer to this question is that yes, you should go where people congregate, but yes, you should also invite, bribe, entice, and otherwise encourage others to your website. Here’s why:
- Social networking sites own your list of friends and followers. You don’t. If one of them goes out of business, it won’t matter that you have 4,000 followers. Every one of them will vanish into cyber space. By contrast, the list you build through your website belongs to you.
- People want to know where you live online. If you’re spread thin across social networks without a strong central hub, your brand will be ineffective at best. Branding is all about distilling your essence for others to grasp with minimal effort. If your online presence is scattered, you’ll have a hard time maintaining a brand.
- A neglected website reflects poorly on its owner. Those who connect with you on social sites will sometimes visit your website. A languishing website may make the casual visitor wonder what else you neglect in your writing business. The same can be said of a languishing social media account. You shouldn’t try to be everywhere, so pick and choose where you will and won’t maintain an online presence.
- Exclusivity. If your website becomes one of those places people gather, you won’t have to go out and haul people in to connect with you.This takes a great deal of thought and legwork up front, but after that it can pay off.
- Less competition. That’s usually not true on social sites where instant messages, notifications, advertisements, and the updates of others all compete for attention. You still need to have an interesting website, but at least visitors will have fewer interruptions while you try to maintain their interest.
- Higher search engine rankings. The more traffic your website generates, the higher it ranks in search engines. A higher search engine ranking means that those who enter keyword searches matching content on your website will find your site closer to the top of search results. This brings traffic to your site without any additional effort on your part.
- The ability to sell products. Once you give friends and followers a valid reason to come to your site, you can then offer products to them. This privilege can be abused, so be considerate. Remember that visitors to your site want an immediate takeaway, usually for free. Without one, they may not hang around long enough to buy anything.
Do all your social media accounts point to your website? If not, I suggest you change that as soon as possible.
What are your thoughts on this subject?
Related Posts:
SEO Is Not Enough To Grow Your Blog Subscriber List!
Marketing with Integrity: 5 Tips On What Not to Do
Social Media Numbers: How Many Friends and Followers Are Enough?
WordServe Water Cooler 
Great list of reasons, Janalyn! I’ve been thinking about #6 and SEO. Traffic goes up after you hit certain key numbers of blog posts (because of the way search engines interpret you). For example, 100 is a biggie. Search engines give you a promotion after that many posts; and on it goes to their next key number. : )
Thanks for that information, Cheryl. Good to know.
Valuable information, Janalyn. I’m working hard on re-engineering my own website at this time, and your post encourages me to keep moving ahead.
I’m in that same process, Anita, so it’s much on my mind at the moment.
Thanks for making these points, Janalyn.The juggling act of keeping my website appealing to visitors while I stay active on social media is such a tough job! The thing I still grapple with is turning website visits into sales – any advice on that piece?
Thanks, Jan. You’ve given me the topic of my next post. Look back for your answer on the 11th.
I’ve backed off a bit, in recent months, in trying to drive traffic to my website.
I still have everything pointing back to my website. However, I have also accepted that a substantial percentage of my FaceBook friends have no interest in stepping outside the FB environment.
So, I’ve stopped pushing and cajoling and started interacting more in the FB environment. Not sure if it’s a good call or not, but it feels a lot more like interacting and a lot less like manipulating…overall I think that’s a good thing…
Hi, Joe, and thanks for your thoughts. Social networking on social sites is important to an author, so no disagreement there. It’s also best to be sincere. However, for the reasons I listed it’s a mistake to rely on social sites in place of a website. I hope you’ll catch my follow-up post next Monday for ways to increase traffic to your site in a giving and sincere manner.
Oh, #1 is a biggie! We just saw that with Google Friend Connect when Google stopped supporting GFC on non-Blogger blogs last March. Overnight, blogs dropped off people’s Blogger Dashboard (like a feed reader), people who had spent years holding contests with the requirement to “follow my blog on GFC” to drive up their numbers had nothing to show for all their time and effort, and people who had used GFC to gather newsletter subscribers were left with nothing.
I’ve written on my blog about this. 🙂 We need to “own” our online home.
Jami, I also lost blog followers when GFC stopped supporting blogs outside Blogger. I couldn’t agree with you more about owning our own piece of internet turf.