While the title of this article doesn’t quite have the cadence of “lions and tigers and bears, oh my!”, I think it may be safe to say that for most website owners facing the cavalcade of options for properly marketing your website, it may be tempting to say that the title of this post is far more intimidating than lions and tigers and bears. Most website owners are solo entrepreneurs, or possibly small partnerships with very limited resources. But when we look at all of the channels that are demanding our marketing attention, it can be quite intimidating and frustrating to simply try to keep up with all of it.
To make matters worse, publications that exist to help us wade through the mess of what should work and what doesn’t work provide guides and messages encouraging us to increase our efforts in the latest and greatest marketing efforts. Unfortunately Site Reference is not spared from scrutiny on this account either as we have published multiple articles on LinkedIn, Facebook, Google+, certainly on SEO, SEM, and recently Pinterest as well. Simply put, website owners today are faced with marketing channels overload. Our checklists for proper marketing strategies are growing increasingly long:
- Setup a proper website
- Do thorough keyword research on the website to ensure top rankings in search engines
- Engage in link building
- Setup PPC campaigns
- Establish an email newsletter along with autoresponders
- Setup a blog on yourwebsite
- Build a Facebook page
- Setup a Twitter Account
- Add yourself to LinkedIn
- Start a LinkedIn group
- Add yourself to Google+
- Add a page to Google+
- Start indexing on Pinterest
- Add yourself to Foursquare if you are a retail shop
- Integrate all of your social networks together
- Create regular updates for your social networks
- Write a blog post once per week
- Write your email newsletter
- Check your stats to make sure everything is effective
- Read newsletters and articles to be sure you are staying on top of the best marketing efforts
And for some people this list could be considered abbreviated.
So how does one wade through the mess of social networks, marketing channels, and specialties that we are expected to learn in the current Internet world?
Simplify Your Approach
The advice here is so simple it should be obvious: when you feel overwhelmed by the number of marketing channels you are supposed to maintain, step back and simplify. A simple realization that we all must come to at some point is that we cannot do it all on our own. Rather than trying to do it all, learn how to do a few things very, very well.
It is my opinion that poor marketing can actually hurt your presence more than it can help it. For example, if you setup a Facebook page because you were told that this is what you are supposed to do, but then never take the time to customize that page, update it, and turn it into a great marketing vehicle, what is that going to say about your business to the general public? To the general public, it will simply look like you have a business that is not concerned with details, that you are content with half-done work, that you are a business that is unpolished.
Exemplary businesses find their successes in attention to detail and creating a complete experience. Unfortunately details take time and attention, and as such, being detail oriented requires that we focus our attention in select areas.
Do a few things extremely well rather than doing a lot of things poorly.
Outsource (and Outsource Your Outsourcing)
This may come as a surprise, but some of the most successful online businesses I’ve seen (multi-million dollar per year operations) have owners who are challenged when it comes to operating their email accounts. Being successful online does not require that you be particularly technically savvy or particularly good at link building or SEO. Being successful online requires that you first know your strengths, but more importantly you learn your weaknesses and plan for those weaknesses.
The secret to running a successful business, online or offline, is being able to properly identify, hire, and manage people who will accomplish your end goals. Obviously this is not something that comes free or easy, necessarily, but the nature of online business is changing from what it once was: the days where a person could put a site up online after a few days of work then see it rank at the top of the search engines within months are no longer the reality. Today’s Internet requires that we build teams and manage our goals.
Not all things with your business need to be outsourced. However, properly identifying areas of your online business that could benefit from a specialist touch will have a return that will far outweigh the costs of outsourcing.
Not Every Channel Needs to Be Used
Finally, realize that it is OK to ignore a few marketing channels. Use discretion in spending the resources of your business (whether that be your own personal sweat equity or money to hire outsourced labor). It is true that some marketing channels are becoming more important than ever before, but resist the urge to immediately setup a new marketing channel without first exploring what resources it will truly take for you to succeed.
After all, when we look at case studies of online success stories, we often find that they didn’t necessarily rush out and create a presence in every possible social media and marketing channel, but rather, we often find that they focused their efforts into one channel and did it very, very well.
8 Comments on "Facebook, Google+, Twitter, SEO, SEM….Oh My!!!"
Wow, did they say alot. As a website tech, website owner, and SEO / SEM Consult, I see so many tricks for traffic. When many of us first started { 1974 } traffic was simply word of mouth, posting ads in papers / magazines, and getting listed in an idirectory. Nothing complicated, just business. I was a simple freelancer, and computers a fad, like calculators. Now here we are talking headings, body, keywords, meta tags, alt tags, rel tags, dofollows, /follows, sitemaps, custom search engines, in-house indexing, search engine indexing, and this list gets longer and longer. Every step is meant to bring traffic. Then like Tell-A-Friend, TV, and Radio – we have FaceBook, Twitter, MySpace, Google, and numerous other social networks. What we once saw as simple has become clustered or clutter. We are looking for organization thus bring up new lines of mass marketing like the ABC, CBS, and NBC, which operate newspapers, magazines, radio, and other media forms. We call some of these search engines, like Google , Yahoo, AIM. Then there are those like totallytweetable, MerchantCircle, hootsuite, and so on. Learning what, where, when, and how to use each for advertising is the challenge as well as how much you pay. We the older ITs and business owners believed in the KISS method, but as a SEO / SEM and now SESM consult, I attempt to find what market are you are targetting via social markets and how best to keep negative overflow from one to another. My companies like so many others are impacted by social media. Can you imagine a major ticket company or airline getting bad reviews? It has happened and happens often to big and small sites. Good PR helps but Social Marketing PR really can strip credability and tons of financial avenues. As a publisher I not only represent myself as a company but those whom I am affiliated with. Relate this to the Tylonal and WalMart scares of the 80s. For months people were afraid. Tylonal lost but so did WalMart and they both came back with Good PR. Then there was Immagration and WalMart of the 90s. WalMart lost but they came back with Good PR. Now lets look at Martha S., Sears, and KMart. Again, Good PR, but not everyone has it. We must be mindful of our social mediums. Not every company is a FaceBook or MySpace or a Twitter. Some are better bloggers and some are better left on the website info. In closing, It is worthwhile, to spend a few bucks, to work with a good marketing firm who will guide you in the right direction and keep your repution in the social marketplace.
I enjoyed your article…as someone who runs a successful online sales site, I know first hand how head-spinning keeping up on all the key components of successful marketing can be. I love your checklist…a few additions I would suggest would be focusing effort on second hand retail sites like eBay & Amazon to compliment your own site’s sales and leaving time to research and implement major site changes such as the decision to offer a mobile version of your site, etc.
I’ll be sure to follow your read your articles more in the future!
Tom @ http:www.mohawkmedicalmall.com
Well, good to ear, but how much does it cost to outsource for this kind of things? And where to find good outsourcer as well, because hiring somebody in India will not make it easer. After; Good day mister… you know where it come from and just go somewhere else.
So, for a solo entrepreneur who can’t keep it with his sites, any suggestions of good company to work with?
thanx for the wonderful information.
thank you for share ,It’s useful for me.
thank you for share ,It’s useful for me.
Thank you for your article – I thought there was something wrong with me feeling so overwhelmed and overloaded with all the social media channels and engines and on and on and on.
So, I am not alone and not stupid.
Thanks.
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