Note: This is a post that contains affiliate links.
Various aspects of your marketing strategy need to be self-hosted; this we all know. At SoVerve Marketing Group, we believe 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. These various marketing and business elements can certainly be hosted on your website. In this blog, we will expand upon an Instagram post that we shared with our community members and build our case for self-hosted marketing.
Linktr.ee Has Its Place
We believe that services like Linktr.ee, InstaPages, and 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 it across various channels. Not to mention that while you are certainly paying for many of these services, you do not own the domain on which your content is being hosted. 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.
Why Self-Hosted Marketing is Better
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 reasons why you should be self-hosting as much of your business as possible on your website. This is where a self-hosted service like Thrive Themes is important.
Aesthetic Control
If you are a branding nut like we are, 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 you use to match your branded color schemes, they do not allow customized fonts, backgrounds, etc. Again, the point is to have the control to do as you please, even if you do not need to. With a product like Thrive Themes in your tech stack, you can have aesth
Analytic Control
Marketing and web analytics do not get the attention they often deserve. With proper website analytics, you can track where your traffic originates from, how your website converts 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. Still, 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 – to refine further, 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 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, maximizing every aspect of our advertising opportunities is important. Suppose you collect your site visitors’ impressions or digital footprint via your analytics. In that case, you can retarget them using platforms like Facebook via Facebook Ads and Google via Google Adwords – 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, some circumstances in the site page file may be affected by what you are hosting – say, a business blog, an evergreen course, or a 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 website design and development professionals to help you tackle these things. The bottom line is that the more you own, the better; hence, 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 to 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, meaning we will receive a small commission by clicking and purchasing from these links. This post is not sponsored; all opinions are our own. For more information, please visit our Affiliate Disclaimer Policy.