How is your Myspace page doing?

Myspace you say? It almost seems like a funny thing to ask these days but only a few short years ago it would have been a perfectly reasonable question. Yet despite the fact that MySpace, Geocities and many others have now failed, too many people continue to rely on free sites and social media pages to build their main business sites. Sure you need a Facebook page and you probably should be on Twitter but these sites should NEVER be your main site. They should be used to direct people to your own site on your own domain where you can interact with them on your own terms.

For a start having your own site with your own domain gives you security. All the people with geocities sites woke up one day to find that the plug had been pulled and it had closed down. If you’d just spent a few years building up an audience for that site then you were now plain out of luck. The same with MySpace. While it hasn’t quite gone away completely yet, it now looks like a ghost town so if you were counting on it you are also plain out of luck.

Next, having your own domain name gives you more credibility. www.facebook.com/mybusinessengine simply doesn’t have the same credibility as www.mybusinessengine.com as well as being a lot shorter and easier to remember. The same goes for you email address. Using gmail or hotmail is fine for your personal email but looks half-hearted for your business. Don’t do it!

To reiterate, you definitely should have a strong social media presence with facebook, twitter, instagram and others but they should all be used as tools to get people to go to your main site. Once there you can entice them on to your mailing list which is where the real work will be done. Yes there is a cost to having your own site on your own domain but there is a huge cost to relying on something that has the potential to just disappear one day. Don’t think that can happen? Well, how IS your MySpace page doing?