I was recently participating in a thread in the Writing community over on EmpireAvenue and wrote a reply to the following question by another user…
…so if you have a tool that someone like me, or one of my writers, can use to help brand their own freelance skills through social medias or other manners, shoot me a message and I’ll be glad to investigate it…
I started my reply with this…
…it all starts with WordPress, or more generally, having a website that acts as the “central hub” for all they do and offer.
More than that though, the site design, layout and content structure should be determined not by “oooh that looks pretty” factor, but by the content itself and the “path” you would like the visitor to take.
The fact of the matter is that there is no one technical tool or service that can accomplish a complete branding and social media presence for you or your business. In the old days of social media marketing (wow, did I just say that?) you were able to leverage one tool or one service with great results, but today it’s different.
There are literally hundreds, if not thousands of branding and social media tools and services available. How could you possibly create a presence on all of them in order to gain an audience? By streamlining and creating a centralized source for your best and most meaningful content. Your website.
It’s not enough to just have a web presence any longer. You must have a website that enables you to distribute your content outward to other websites and services. On the flipside, it must also enable you to pull in and display content from other influencers on your own site. Wash, Rinse, Repeat.
I continued my reply on EmpireAvenue with this…
When I mentioned “central hub” above I was of course referring to the platform that runs your site, and in my case as you may have guessed, WordPress is the best choice.
Using your site as the central location where you create the majority of your content, you can “feed” it out to social media and other locations and the best part is that once you setup automation (by adding the right WordPress plugins), you are populating your other online locations with your best content. Then it’s a matter of adding supplemental content.
This allows one to spend less time on Twitter, Facebook, etc. trying to build Brand Authority. Of course there are numerous other tools that all supplement this approach, but I’ll have to stop here for now:)
Make no mistake, building a brand online and through social media takes dedication and focus. But you CAN DO IT. It’s a lot of fun and you will meet some amazing people. I promise:)
The key is to start with (or move to) the right framework to power your site, then add the tools to that framework to send and receive the content which will be of interest to the people you want to connect with in your niche.
This is just the beginning and in my experience, it’s the keystone of any online brand.
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Related articles
- PubCon South 2011 Takeways – Online Reputation Management and Social Media (wpromote.com)
- Does Social Media Presence Trump a Website? (proactivereport.com)
- The Ultimate Guide to Twitter Marketing (copyblogger.com)
I’ve started working with Wordpress and love it! In the future I might be interested in your live training.