That is the question.

There are numerous methods for you to get the word out regarding your products and services including:

• marketing/posting/blogging on your own website,
• mailing a newsletter using tools such as MailChimp and Constant Contact,
• posting on social media,
• and/or posting on a forum or blogging platform such as Substack which has become popular lately.

Here is my assessment of the pros and cons of each.

If your site is created in WordPress, as is my preferred approach, blogging is built in. That is how WordPress came to being – its original purpose. Notification to subscribers can be set up with some well-tested plugins. An example of an organization using post notifications for 8+ years is https://www.awsaeast.org/. Note the breadth and organization of posts in the left sidebar. It can be a challenge to fine-tune 1) the addition of subscribers amongst spammers, and 2) the receipt of notifications by subscribers in their inbox and not in their spam folder. If generating revenue is important, paid membership can be established, and this improves the ability to add subscribers and reach them seamlessly. Although these take time, cost, and some technical knowledge, the biggest benefit is having a permanent record of everything you want to share on your own branding – your portfolio. Poise yourself as an expert. Find everything in one place rather than hunting for emails and in which newsletter you sent something.*

An email service such as MailChimp can be set up for you to send a newsletter. You can import a list of contacts, but be sure you have everyone’s permission. A signup form can be added to your website for new followers to add themselves to your list.

You can post on social media. As you probably already know, all of these efforts take time and reach a certain audience – not everyone. Plugins can be used on your website to include feeds or to attempt to cross post, but they can be problematic and will break every so often when the platforms change their methods. My biggest pet peeve about posting on social media is that older posts take time to find while loading the page by scrolling. Additionally, if anything you have said changes, like your holiday business hours or a sale price, it can persist on the internet because Google may have indexed it at one time.

The benefit of using a blogging platform such as Substack is that if you generate a large following you can easily turn it into a membership site. The con is that your material is on another platform.

*This post is a prime example of saving time and repetitive writing. Any of my clients or followers that read my tips will see it, and I can point people to it easily with the URL.

Just a quick note here. Our domain registrar, Tucows, hosted a webinar about selling online when the .store (dot store) top level domain (TLD) became available. I was curious and watched/listened to most of it, the reason being many small businesses have made the shift to selling online, especially during the pandemic. With the growth in number of websites, being found, i.e. search utility visibility, continues to be a challenge. The bigger portals, Etsy, Shopify, and even Google, are doing whatever they can to suck you onto their platforms—the customer and the business person—at the detriment of arriving at individually branded websites.

The takeaways from the two featured speakers:

• A great, short domain name can still be bought on the .store TLD, sometimes your first choice.
• The .store TLD is a clear call to action—no ambiguity that product will be sold on the website.
• Even if you have a store on a portal, it’s important to have your own branding, offering credibility.

One of the speakers, when asked which marketing activities bring in the most revenue, listed them as:

1. Her email list generated the most sales. (My two cents: remind your people to share your email, spread the word, perhaps offering them an incentive.)
2. Live/video/group engagement where you can share specifics and direct people to that nice, short domain name.
3. Social media way down the list.

Interesting article in The New Yorker about historical business productivity:

https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/was-e-mail-a-mistake

A client recently shared their concern that WordPress with WooCommerce might not be a sufficient platform to support their own growth. A bit of research yielded the following sampling of robust WordPress websites.

Winning WP summarizes a list of WooCommerce sites, noting it’s been estimated “WooCommerce now powers over a staggering 30% of all active eCommerce sites.” Understand that any of the sites mentioned can change at any time.

Better yet, let WooCommerce users tell you themselves in the showcase.

A few non-eCommerce sites worth noting display WordPress’ utility:

• The Harvard Gazette
• Mercedes-Benz
• Bloomberg Professional Services

BBC America the site, and rationale explained in a case study: “Being a part of the WordPress and open source community in general has allowed us to accomplish things that could have only happened with great difficulty if we had to build another proprietary CMS.”

• 50 Notable Examples of Extremely Famous Brands Using WordPress
• 40+ Most Notable Big Name Brands that are Using WordPress

Define your goals

The internet is not only used for marketing, but for a variety of services and commerce, i.e. streamlining operations on an intranet vs. networking your office, supporting the needs of field personnel, posting information that your customers or suppliers use, setting up on-line ordering… [Read more…]