A Website is the hub to your marketing. Or is it?
I met a woman recently who told me she deactivated her website because it wasn’t doing anything for her. I said, “You did what?” She told me that she relies upon her LinkedIn profile to do her marketing for her. I said, “We need to have a discussion about that!”
After I walked away, I thought a bit more about it. LinkedIn does show up number 1, 2, or 3 in search results if someone is looking for you by your name. But it is not going to tell them about your product or services the way a website would. I advice jobseekers to at least have a blogspot blog to give them a space on the internet.
If you don’t have a website, or at least a URL driven email address, you cannot have a company page on LinkedIn for your business.
I wrote this article about your website being the hub of your marketing in 2013. I agree with that today. The other thing that I feel very strongly about is the fact that you need an email address that has a company URL associated with it. It legitimizes your business. If people see a gmail, yahoo, hotmail, or, heaven forbid, an AOL email address as your business email, they tend to think less of your business. I am not the only one that feels this way. Read this article from my friend at T.G. Consultants.
If nothing else, spend $10-25 and get a website tonight from a service like godaddy or wix. You can set up a site that links back to someplace else. But you at least have that branding going on that will only help your marketing efforts. If I can help you build a WordPress website to legitimize your business – or update it to this millennium – please contact me.