Recently I’ve been writing about how the first step you need to take for developing a successful online MLM business is to create an online home base. This is a concept that Chris Brogan, social media dude, talks about. Your online MLM home base is where you tell people about yourself, your business savvy, and why they should buy from you or join your business.
In previous articles, I’ve written about how you need to do some research to find out what your parent MLM company allows in terms of online marketing. You also need to find out if your company offers a template or duplicated website (see mine here). If so, you’ll probably want to sign up for that, and then run a generic MLM blog or custom website on the side that tells people more about you, your business, and your personality. This helps to alleviate the boring “cardboard” cookie-cutter effect that duplicated websites tend to create since they all look the same.
Now the question is whether to choose a blog or a custom website as a way to personally introduce yourself to the online world.
MLM Blog or Custom Website — Which is Better?
You can develop a successful online MLM business using either a blog or a custom website. Blogs and custom websites each have their own unique advantages, and you’ll have to make your decision based on which suits your personality and lifestyle best. Of course, if you’re really ambitious or crazy, you can have both. But let’s not scare ourselves here. Let’s stick with the basics and help you choose just one of these options. So what’s so great about a blog or a custom website? Here’s a run down on both.
A blog offers the following benefits:
- easy setup
- no cost unless you want to really, really fancy
- informal medium, chatty language allowed
- simple to add to, change, post pictures to
- already part of a blog “community,” which helps with initial marketing
A blog has the following drawbacks:
- you need to post to it regularly, at least once a week, preferably more
- is harder to optimize blogs for search engines
- is more difficult for some visitors to navigate
- can be harder to run traffic analysis on (especially free sites)
A custom website offers the following benefits:
- you don’t need to update it often unless you feel like it
- is easier to optimize for search engines
- is easier for some visitors to navigate and access immediate information
- is simple to run traffic analysis on
A custom website has the following drawbacks:
- will cost you to create (unless you know how to do web stuff)
- has a monthly hosting cost (about $10)
- requires more knowledge to update (or you’ll have to pay someone to do it)
- is a more formal medium, you are expected to be more professional
- is not automatically part of an online community, the way blogs are
As you can probably tell from these lists of pros and cons, blogs and custom websites are sort of like two sides of the same coin. For instance, a blog is less formal but harder to optimize for search engines, while a custom website requires you to appear more professional but is simpler to optimize for search engines. See what I mean?
However, this list should give you some good ideas about whether your personality and lifestyle is better suited to a blog or a custom website. If you’ve got a few bucks to spend and not much time, a custom website is probably the better choice for you. You’ll pay to get it set up at the front end, but you don’t have to write posts for it weekly. If you go with a custom website, expect to spend about $500 getting it up and running. On the other hand, if you are short of cash a blog is the better choice. You’ll have to put some elbow grease into posting to your blog a couple of times a week, but it’s not going to cost you much.
Whichever option you choose, know that creating a home base is your first step in actively creating a successful online MLM business. Once you have it created, you’ll need to either spend some time learning how to spread the word about your MLM home base, or you’ll need to pay someone to do it for you. But that’s down the road a ways, yet. Next up, we’ll talk about what to do once you’ve chosen the right format for your online home base: how do you get started?
A very good question … stay tuned for more on that topic soon.
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