If Facebook is your main
online presence your business
is at a huge risk
You may lose your online business overnight If you don’t OWN your online presence (e.g. Facebook or free websites)
Is your entire online business built on borrowed land?
Do you own your followers and the platform where your customers currently find you or are you risking it all if they decide to turn off your account.
Relying on Facebook (or other social media) or free websites puts your entire online business at huge risk. Changes to Facebook in the past have slashed new follower growth by 90% and made it almost impossible for those following you to even see your posts if you are not prepared to pay, can you really trust your sales and customers to Facebook?
Changes like this regularly occur and it means the sales generated by those platforms can drop overnight. Even worse if you unknowingly break one of their rules they have the power to cancel your account, completely destroying your online business and all that goodwill you spent years building up.
The goal of all free platforms is making money for themselves, NOT helping you to make money. They now want you to pay for advertising by making it harder and harder to communicate with your followers without paying for the privilege.
Did you know that most of your posts don’t even get seen by followers now if you are not prepared to pay.
Many online platforms like eBay and most social media actually own your followers/customers not you. This means they regularly show adverts for your competitors to your followers by using data gathered by all your hard work, then stealing your customers. Facebook owns all your posts and all data about your followers, not you.
Some also make it difficult or completely against their rules for you to get emails or contact your followers independent of their platforms, so if you get closed down you lose all those who were following you and have no way to communicate with them.
Four steps you need to take to safeguard your online business
Even if you have little money, you can start small, maybe just with a domain name and then over time build an asset that brings more sales as you work on improving it.
1. Own your domain name, this can never be taken away from you and is an asset which becomes part of the “Goodwill” of your business. Owning your domain name also stops competitors from buying it and cashing in on your customers. You can cheaply buy a domain name and setup an email address rather than @hotmail etc., Having a proper email address immediately makes you look far more professional than using a free address, you can then build the website later when you are ready to take that step.
2. Get a good website and pay for quality hosting which you control, not free hosting which may close down at any time or cheap hosts which often overload their servers making your website load slow. You can always move to new hosts if you are unhappy.
3. Start building an email list so you own all your contacts details - leads, followers and customers. This means you can communicate directly with them anytime you want via email. Email is still by far the most effective way to generate sales despite what some social media experts will tell you.
4. Create great photos and wording which you own to add to your website and emails. Good information on your site boosts your reputation and shows you are a quality business to potential customers. Social media can destroy your value with spammy adverts for competitors and a poor visitor experience designed to make THEM money. With a website YOU control the style and content and build your reputation with high quality content, people respect businesses with good websites far more than companies only using social media for their web presence.
At Fast Web Guru we understand how time consuming and expensive setting up a website can be so we do things differently. Fast & Easy Websites have NO UPFRONT COSTS and include your domain name, email address, email newsletters and even setting up and marketing via google maps.
You will get online fast and easy, our average client has a website up and running within 5 days with very little time needed at your end to get underway. We also help you market your business properly online and do free website updates and prepare and send out newsletters for you as part of your website package.
We know you don’t have time to work on all that technical stuff so we do it all for you, if you can spend a few minutes on the phone we can build you a website and get you underway building an online presence which you own and control, designed to boost enquiries and impress potential clients about how professional you are.