There was a restaurant in our town that was doing really well.

The food was good, the parking lot was always full, they were located on a busy street, and they did a great job of marketing. Things were going well.

A few weeks later, they were gone.

What happened?

The landlord had tripled their rent, and suddenly their great business model wasn’t so great anymore.

When someone else controls the fundamentals that your business model is based on, you’re one step away from disaster.

If your business model depends on advertising in one magazine, even if that advertisement brings new clients in the door every month, what do you do if that magazine goes under?

If your business model depends on publishing great content to one social media site, what do you do if that site crashes and loses all of your great content?

If your business model depends on one trade show, and the show decides to change its policies to exclude your particular business type, or to disallow selling from the booth?

In any of the cases above, you’re depending on something that is outside of your control.

Which is not to say that you shouldn’t use magazines, social media sites, trade shows, and any other means that works.

What it does mean is that being dependent on any one thing, especially if that thing is not completely controlled by you, puts your business at risk.

We advise our clients to control every factor they can in a marketing system, and of the factors they can’t control, reduce dependencies by having more than one option in every category.

We highly recommend creating a blog for your company and publishing materials to it for a lot of reasons.  And a lot of those reasons have to do with control.

  • Unlike other social media channels on the web, you control what visitors see when they’re on your blog.
  • Blogging software is easy for a non-programmer to use once it’s set up. So you’re not at the mercy of your webmaster or technical guru.
  • Every great article, video, interview or other content requires the investment of time and energy. You should protect that investment by publishing it to an environment that you control. You maintain undisputed ownership of the materials you publish on your blog. On other sites, you’re subject to their terms of service.
  • You control the technical environment. You can back up your data and restore it.  This may not be true if a social media site has technical difficulties or goes out of business.

Strategy – Maintain control of your marketing variables.

Tactics – Diversify your marketing efforts, and create a blog for your company.

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