If you promote your business primarily by using social media as your base platform, you’re likely to shoot yourself in the foot. And very badly too. Read this article to learn 2 important reasons why you will be better off using your own website as a base, while your social media profiles function as secondary marketing channels.

Like every results focussed business owner, you work so hard promoting your business using Social Media as your primary marketing platform.

However if you continue doing this, you’re likely to hurt your business more than you can help it.

1. You Need To Be In Control of What Happens To Your Brand’s Marketing Vehicle

What if one day the Social Media websites you depend on change their rules and terms?

They’ve done it before. They all do it.

These Social Media entities are constantly testing, tweaking and even reinventing. They like to set trends.

The implication is that you’re never really in control of your primary business promotion channel.

Google, for instance, keeps giving website owners grief by changing the rules just as people are getting their website search engine optimization back on track.

LinkedIn.com recently restricted access to my profile claiming they noticed suspicious activity in my account. They asked me to send proof of my identity. I sent my scanned international passport weeks ago, but I don’t think they’ve unlocked it.

2. You Need To Build A Professional Image

Luckily for me, my core business promotion medium is my website (www.spontaneousdevelopment.com), and the blog (www.sdacademy.org) linked to it.

Social media simply serve as secondary support channel.

I strongly recommend you adopt a similar fail safe approach.

You can get a wordpress or Joomla based website up and running at zero cost. Both come as free installations with most web hosting accounts. These 2 Content Management Systems make it easy for even a non-techie to update her website. The former is however easier to learn and has a larger user base.

Don’t go for free website hosting services. That would amount to the same thing as using Facebook or Twitter as your base.

Purchase a hosting account from a reliable provider. If you run a business, you need to own the primary business marketing medium you use.

The truth is that you will never have a final say over a free yourname.blogspot.com blog – the company hosting it will.

Even if they don’t change anything, you must remenber that online companies offering free services can shut down operations anytime.

Many pocket friendly web hosting companies abound online. A good example is www.hostgator.com who I’ve found to quite supportive and flexibly responsive to client needs (note that I’m not an affiliate – but with the great experience I’ve had with them, I plan to be).

You can purchase cheap but reliable hosting at $60 to $70 from my experience based assessment of the average person’s needs, from working with clients in different industries since 2004.

Most hosts will register a domain name for you free for the first year if you purchase a full year of hosting. You then pay approx $10 per year from the 2nd year. That comes to $80 max per year for both domain registration and website hosting.

As you can see, a website can be run on a shoe string budget.

Try as much as possible to register a domain name that reflects what you do.

Also make sure your business email address is based on your domain. You don’t look professional when you display an email address based on Yahoo’s free for all email service!

If you are concerned about email storage problems with respect to exhausting the disk space provided by your host, simply set your domain based mails to automatically foward a copy of every mail that arrives to your free (Yahoo.com, gmail etc) email account inbox.

Then you will be able to free up space in your domain based email box by deleting from the oldest to the newest.

Final Words: Take Action Before It’s Too Late

I’m writing this from Porto Novo in Benin Republic, at the famous Songhai Integrated Farming Centre.

Like I said on my website on Monday, I’m travelling across West Africa offering educational talks for businesses, organisations and solo entrepreneurs.

The main theme is how they can use Web Marketing in conjunction with Public Speaking for low cost but high impact business promotion.

What I’ve told you here is what I’ll be telling people out here.

I urge you to adopt the above approach, to protect all the hard work you’re doing to build your brand.

And I suggest you get started as soon as possible.

Goodluck!