Why you should build your Brand and Audience?

In this post I want to highlight the value of building your business outside of a platform.  Whether that is on Amazon, Ebay, Facebook or a blog on a domain that you don’t own.

What happens here and its an issue that I have seen too many times is that business that are growing and achieving success essential put too many of their success eggs in one basket.  All it takes is for that platform to change and it has many times and your business can decrease overnight due to no “fault” of your own.

 If you are achieving success already and you are selling to customers on external platform i.e. anything other than on a domain that you manage and own all of your customer or audiences contact details.  Then you are at risk.

The good news is that you have done a lot of the hard work to achieve success and you are making money. So the steps going forward will be around protecting and growing your assets.

I have spent the last 10 years understanding the different marketing platforms, how each work and what best to use them for.  Where there are weaknesses and what are the priority actions.

Where I see the main issues, stems from not having the right strategy in place.  Most people with the right strategy to guide them, can make their way forward and steadily build upon a foundation to grow their business.  What I fear the most is hearing of entrepreneurs who had a successful business on a platform and overnight changes out of their control led them to drastic change.  To me that feels like a massive waste of time, effort with a huge set back to over come.

What I find easy however, is understanding and creating strategies. In fact its one of the areas that I enjoy most about online marketing. So where I can help I will do.

What you should know first:

1. Build your own platform (website /blog)
2. Build your email list and audience – by adding value and providing quality highly relevant content
3. Extend your business onto other platforms to benefit from their leverage but not being beholden to it.
4. Drive more customers and audience from other platforms back to your domain and list.

The plan is not to remove yourself from other platforms, but instead to have the optimal strategy to benefit and not suffer from being completely reliant on them.

You have to own the relationship with your audience or customer, if you don’t then you don’t have a solid business.

As you grow your business, brand, along with your audience, list and consequent sales and profit.  Your business value grows and you open the opportunity for more.