Note: This is a post that contains affiliate links.
There are various aspects of your marketing strategy that need to be self-hosted, this we all know. At SoVerve Marketing Group, we believe that there is value in building your email list and that driving traffic to your website (and away from social media) is important. A “catch-all,” page like a Linktr.ee inspired page hosted on your WordPress website has a lot of value to your overall marketing strategy.
However, what happens when you start an e-commerce site on external hosting avenues? What about your online business course? And then there are the membership sites and webinars to consider as well. All of these various marketing and business elements can certainly be hosted on your website. In this blog, we are going to expand upon an Instagram post that we shared with our community members and built our case for self-hosted marketing.
Why We Love Linktr.ee
We believe that services like Linktr.ee, InstaPages, Thinkific serve a purpose, but for a marketer, it is not the ideal scenario. They impose a threat on how much control you have over your content and how you deliver that content across various channels. Not to mention, that while you are certainly paying for many of these services, you do not own the domain that your content is being hosted on. Should something happen to the domain, what happens then to your content? These are just some of the questions you should be asking yourself – before – you commit to using external hosting services.
If you’d like to visit our Instagram account, we recommend that check out the comments left by many of our community members on the post that inspired this blog. We believe that taking a close look at what you are hosting externally will help you make consideration to start self-hosting many of these marketing and business aspects. Now, let’s break down a few of the reasons why you should be self-hosting as much of your business as possible on your website.
Aesthetic Control
If you are a branding nut like we are, then you will want every aspect of your brand to be consistent across the board whether marketing-related or not. For many companies branding often becomes synonymous with that company. You see the bullseye – for example – you immediately think “Target!” That is how powerful branding and important branding is in 2018. As a small business owner, it is your job to manage that brand’s image wisely and carefully. While many external services like Linktr.ee offer a Pro Versions that allow you to customize the colors that you use to match your branded color schemes, they do not allow for customized fonts, backgrounds, etc. Again, the point is to simply have the control to do as you please even if you do not need to.
Analytic Control
Marketing and web analytics do not get the attention they often deserve. With proper website analytics, you can track where your traffic is originating from, how your website is converting leads and where those leads are also visiting from. Not to mention which website pages are most frequently visited, and what keywords are being utilized to arrive at your site. These are just the tip of a very large iceberg when analytics are concerned, but we encourage you to understand that by hosting as much of your only presence directly on your website you have more control over how you will then analyze this data – in a centralized location – in order to further refine, change, or pivot your marketing strategies, objectives, and goals. While many external platforms offer you internal analytics, some still lack integration with Google Analytics. To take a step further, many also lack in-depth and robust analytics that is often so helpful and necessary.
Advertising Control
Lastly, with the changes that are currently being presented on social media, having as much advertising control over your content is beyond necessary. This isn’t even an option at this point. With more and more social media platforms moving to a pay-to-play algorithm that encourages engagement and discourages tactics that prevent community interaction with our content; it is important to maximize every aspect of our advertising opportunities. If you are collecting the impressions or digital footprint of your site visitors via your analytics, you can then retarget them using platforms like Facebook via Facebook Ads and Google via Google Adwords – just to name a few. Again, even if platforms like Linktr.ee offer some analytics via their Pro version, we go back to the notion that you do not have control over how your content is hosted.
How Much Is Too Much?
Now, there are some circumstances that the site page file may be affected by what you are hosting – say an evergreen course or membership site – but that is nothing that an increase in hosting budgets can’t fix. By default, we suggest an annual increase in overall marketing and advertising budgets to allow for website design and development professionals to help you tackle these things. The bottom line is that the more you own, the better; hence why we recommend self-hosted marketing as much as possible. A Linktr.ee inspired page is just the beginning of that.
Bonus Linktr.ee Tutorial!
As a bonus, we have put together a tutorial to show you how you can create a Linktr.ee page directly on your WordPress website using Thrive Themes. We hope you enjoy it and that it helps your self-hosted marketing efforts!
CLICK ON THE VIDEO BELOW
Note: This post contains affiliate links, which means that by clicking and purchasing from these links, we will receive a small commission. This post is not sponsored, all opinions are our own. For more information, please visit our Affiliate Disclaimer Policy.