5 Reasons Not to Give Up Your Blog because of Twitter

Have you been neglecting your blog? Are you spending time on social networking sites like LinkedIn, Facebook and twitter trying to “master” the way to make money and not spending time on your blog? Maybe someone told you that blog’s are dead and its time to bury it? @Markwschaefer wrote a blog post regarding this topic before. I took a short quote from Mark’s blog.

The most important reason for a sustaining a website was entirely neglected: This is the place where you ask people for their money.

I couldn’t agree more with Mark. Although twitter and Facebook are great tools, we shouldn’t neglect our blog just because they are the next big thing. I’ve never really seen twitter or Facebook as the money makers, but I see them as add on to my value meal.

Blog: Big Mac

Twitter/Facebook: Fries + Apple Pie + Coke

Combine them all I get my complete McDonalds Value Meal and a happy Aaron. (hungry now)

Alright maybe not the greatest example, so here is why I say you shouldn’t give up your blog.

1) Social Media Changes

Social media can change “just like that” and without you realizing it. They can take away your monthly income. I realized many people saying we don’t need to spend much time on blogs because we have Facebook or twitter. The thing is, we still need a blog. The blog or website is where we make build content. While social networking sites are where we spread the awareness of our blog.

When I was on Friendster, I heard a lot of people was making tons of money from Myspace. I’m not sure about what happened to them now.

2) Email Marketing is Holy Grail.

I learned this from Nick. Nick is the founder of Social Times Inc, and he spoke at the Social Ad Summit on Facebook’s advertising. He mentioned that email marketing is the holy grail of marketing. The reason behind so is, because “we” as marketers get people who are willing to give in their email so that we can contact them in the future. They are people who already have the interest and the trust that they have put in us.

If I give a person my email or subscribe to their newsletter, chances are that I already have an interest in them and what they have to say.

3) Conversation Rates

Here are the conversation rates from email marketing (the holy grail of course) to other forms of advertising and marketing.

Email > Blog > LinkedIn > Facebook > Twitter

I was looking for the facts behind this but was having trouble looking for it. Email works best because the people already have built a trust on us.

4) “Death” of social networking sites

I’ve been online for a while, and I noticed many social networking sites “dying” because they were unable to “cope” and change fast enough. Look at Myspace today. No offence to Myspace fans out there but Myspace is dying, and I think everyone knows this.

Friendster is not doing very well themselves too. I have a Friendster account that I used for two years and left it there. (Friendster is now owned by MOL Malaysia).

Digg is doing quite bad as well and rumors has it that Kevin Rose the founder of Digg will resign. Hi5 is another example.

However, a few of these websites are having a “comeback” like Myspace and Friendster, which had their redesigns. Hi5 has rumors to be the game version of Facebook, but is it too late?

5) Content Brings Subscribers

In my opinion, tweets and wall post brings readers, and content brings subscribers and maybe SALES. You can’t really get much from a tweet, unless they are engagements, or you’re helping someone out with a problem, but trying to make a sale? Perhaps its possible, after all recently, Mark Collier did just that with his weekly blog chat.

What do you think? Should we put all our eggs onto social networking sites?

Photo credits: by Frerieke

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