SocialMediaBust

With all the hubub about social media as THE essential business tool, I get the impression that companies are ignoring or under developing their websites. One of the advantages of a website is that the content you have on there tends to be "evergreen" in terms of search engines. Articles and information tend to have value long beyond that which is found using blogs and social media platforms.

I'm sharing some numbers, which previously I'd kept confidential, about our success with website development. A few things to keep in mind.

• I'm a one person company (usually), so it's not like I have a raft or resources to use to build websites.
• I actually developed all of my websites, including all the coding and updating. As a result, the ease of use and slickness of all my sites is at least somewhat less than I'd like since I'm not that skilled at that stuff.
• Most of my sites are built to service people interested in certain niches. As you will see one of our most successful sites has been the one on performance management.
• We are now using the program "Artisteer" to add a a professional feel to our sites and blogs. If interested in more information click here.
• Our most successful websites have been on line for a long time, and longevity counts. You probably won't be able to generate the kind of traffic levels at this point in time.
• Of course, traffic levels don't necessarily mean profit. Unfortunately, that information I can't share with you. Suffice it to say, it's worked out well.
• The numbers below reflect traffic going ONLY to our websites, and does not include any blogs.
• I believe the numbers we achieve are a result of providing good content in the niches.

Customer Service Zone

Built as a springboard for my customer service books, the traffic has been absolutely traffic. Below is a graph that shows what we are getting.

Below shows the traffic, primarily for 2010. The site has been online longer than that, but this graph only covers from late 2009 to the present. The large green bar represents page views, while the blue one (the really important one) reflect actual numbers of people. So, in 2010, we got close to a million page views, and had about 400,000 actual people visit. (give or take).

Performance Appraisal Center

Our resource center for performance management and appraisal has had very similar results. Take a look

Communication Resource Center

Here's a bit of a weak sister but a site that has still garnered over 1,000,000 page views. it's a question and answer site about communication,

The point with these numbers is to show what a modest business can do outside social media, using simple, content rich websites.

In case you are wondering, we did experiment with adding commenting capabilities to our websites using a free third party service. Aftera number of months, we removed the capability since nobody was using it and it was slowing down our page loads.

No matter if you are using social media or not, your website should be your foundation for customer service, promotion and interaction. Best of all, YOU control it, and you become immune to changes in policies of third party companies like Facebook, and reduce your reliance on someone else for your business.

Your website can still be interactive if you want, but the key is something is to provide good, reputable content, so your site becomes the go to place for your topic.