With more and more platforms to promote and market your business on, it is easy to get caught up launching your presence on multiple sites at the expense of previous endeavours.
We see time and time again new clients coming to us with multiple web presences on different platforms. We often highlight some to them that their last agency built or a member of staff dabbled with and was mothballed. The client didn’t know they even existed and some were way out of date.
Having a web property with no links to any other property is seen as being orphaned. It has no relationships to any other property.
In web terms this means this hard work will probably be ignored or very, very hard to find online, and the idea is to use these properties to get found and to attract traffic.
One of the best and easiest ways of boosting the performance of your web activity is to have it cross linking in some way.
Web Property Audit
Stop and take a quick look at the web properties you have built or control for your brand. Ask these questions when looking at them:
- Do you promote them?
- Are they current?
- Do they link to other properties you control?
How do you find them?
Ask your previous agency or marketing staff. Google your brand name or company name.
Visit most of the main social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, YouTube etc.
Search for your brand on these platforms.
Quite quickly you can see what presences you have out there, and some could be quite surprising.
Now what?
Now you have identified them, see if you can control them – so, do you have account logins? Can you amend them? etc. If you do not want to keep them, then delete then, there is only one thing worse than having no presence on a social media channel and that is a really out of date, neglected one.
Having culled the ones you want to remove, now look at the rest and plan ways to interlink them. We are not talking about doing this for SEO purposes or building a network but simply so people who find you on one channel can find you in any other they want interact with on.
Here is an example company footprint
If this is you , then you really need to take some time out to explore the properties you have online and start looking at linking them.
Here are two options to help reduce the number of orphaned web properties
This figure shows Blogger, Slideshare and YouTube channels adding content into a website and with that web content then syndicating it out to other web properties. This looks complicated but with a bit of planning can be set up to run automatically.
Figure 3 shows a slightly different version whereby you can utilize a standalone tool such as Sendible to power the syndication from the main content elements out to all the other properties.
All of these connections can be a two way street. For example, content posted on Facebook can be shared with other properties if you so choose.
As you can see, there are a number of useful ways to make sure all your online activity is connected to each other. This is not to say each property has to have exactly the same content, but using a blueprint such as Figure 2 or Figure 3 will stop your properties becoming orphaned from each other, and give you the best chance of all your web properties working together to boost traffic to your website.
After all, that’s what we are trying to do.
Good Luck!
