Millions of small business owners have to make the tough decision of where to allocate time. Any small business owner knows there is just not enough time in the day. While many dream of being that entrepreneur that strikes it rich the harsh reality is it takes tens of thousands of hours before finally getting to the point of profitability. One of the greatest entrepreneurship quotes is:

“Entrepreneurship is about living a few years of your life like most won’t, so that you can live the rest of your life like most can’t.”

Entrepreneurship is about living a few years of your life like most won’t, so that you can live the rest of your life like most can’t.

Those first few years are not easy but they are necessary. Unfortunately, there are so many marketing opportunities thrown at small business owners it can make their head spin. In the last several years there has been a strong push that EVERY business needs to be on social media. They need to update their Facebook, blast out Tweets, engage on Google Plus, have a LinkedIn business page, pin photos on Pinterest and so on. Even if small business owners did have a little extra time it would never be enough to keep up with all of these new social networks.

As someone that has ranked websites in Google search for well over seven years I can tell you that social media is not a major factor in search rankings. While it may be a small factor it is often not worth the time and effort to build a following of “fans”. Instead, I would strongly suggest creating content related to your business. It is much more time and cost effective to publish a blog post or article three times a week than it is to Tweet 50 times. You will get much more focused traffic from the resources on your website than the Tweets that are going out into the world of the unknown.

Honestly, I like what Snapchat is doing with Snapchat Stories and I think Instagram can help reach an audience but it takes a lot of time and effort to build any type of presence on these social networks. You already have your own business and hopefully your own website. If you were selling shoes would you go to Foot Locker and stand at the store and try to sell your own shoes? This is basically what using social media is. You are trying to sell somewhere that is not conducive to your business.

Making the commitment to update a website several times a week will be an investment that returns in perpetuity over the next several years and decades. Google Search is not going anywhere. Once you rank in Google Search you have the opportunity to get traffic for years. If you Tweet or share a post on Facebook you have about 20 minutes to get traffic. Personally, I like to look more long term. Why spend thousands of dollars and countless hours trying to get traffic that will last 20 minutes? You will also have to constantly update Facebook and Twitter whereas blog posts and articles will be evergreen in nature as they will consistently show up in Google search.

Jesse Wojdylo
2 Comments
  1. Jesse,

    This post did great on Twitter. 🙂

  2. Great one, indeed. I love reading this.

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