Avoid Digital Sharecropping For Long-term Success

June 8, 2021

362 4 minutes read

Avoid Digital Sharecropping is one of the biggest threats to the success of any business online, but few people realize that they are putting themselves, and their businesses, at risk. Here we explain what digital sharecropping is and how to avoid it.Sharecropping is an old term. It refers to the act of landowners allowing farmers to grow crops on their land in exchange for a share of the profits. On the surface, this sounds like a great opportunity that provides the farmer with an instant opportunity to start growing crops with minimal financial outlay. It all sounds great – until the landlord decides to change the terms of the deal. In terms of digital marketing, sharecropping refers to the act of “renting” online space to share content, with the aim of further promoting your core business.

There are hundreds of domains on which you can create content solely for the purpose of promoting yourself or your brand business blogging is still a very popular way to gain exposure online, but there are risks involved.

You can learn about some of the risks here, but let’s looks a little deeper.

The Shifting Sands of the Internet

Do you remember Lycos, AskJeeves, Geocities, 43 Things, Ning, Yahoo! 360 or Squidoo.com?

It was not long ago that digital marketers spent time building a presence on all of these platforms – they,and many others like them, are all now gone. Today, people invest a huge amount of time and resources Tweeting, Facebooking, networking on LinkedIn, guest blogging and building mini-websites on free blogging platforms such as Blogspot, WordPress, Tumblr, Medium, LiveJournal and Weebly. While these platforms do provide good results, the risk is obvious – all of these sites could close at any time.

The Solution

The solution is twofold. First, businesses need to focus more on developing their own piece of virtual real estate. It is better to start very small and grow organically than to buy into a giant conglomerate and then be kicked out.

Rather than invest time and money into many platforms, more time should be spent on creating high-quality pages on your own website. Blogging for business has been a good idea for many years already, so we are not preaching anything new here – but many people do still keep getting this wrong. In terms of content for your own business blog or website, think about what your customers want – this is the key to marketing. Your website has the potential to answer every question a customer will ever need to ask, and by providing detailed and informative advice, the website will start to attract more viewers. This may sound a little like the “build it and they will come” approach – but there is one key difference. While you should not invest a huge amount of time marketing on third party websites, you do still need to do some well-planned guest posting and social media interaction. One simple solution is to take advantage of digital advertising.

Social Media for Advertising

Facebook has changed the way it displays posts in users’ streams, making it far less likely that the average person will see a post from a business website.

It is harder to share information on Facebook today than it was a few years ago. This is a good example of sharecropping in action – the site is still there, but the terms of use have changed. Facebook have provided a solution – advertising. Advertising on Facebook can be very successful, so long as you carefully choose your target audience. It is perfect for local businesses as you can easily target individual towns. You can also target fans of a page and their friends, which increases the likelihood of your posts being seen. This is actually a relatively cheap way to increase exposure online and targeting people who have already shown an interest increases engagement. Automating social media posting reduces time invested on these platforms publish the content on your own website and then have it automatically distributed to social media platforms. Social media advertising is expected to explode in popularity over the next few years, and may soon rival search engine marketing.

Build an Email List

You should also build a solid customer email list. Ideally, every Facebook fan, Twitter follower, and LinkedIn connection should also be in one of your email distribution lists (create segmented lists for higher engagement).

If any one of the social media sites decided to change its policy on how businesses operate on their platforms, you will still have free access to your market. Be sure to adopt a double opt-in policy.

Your Website is Your Rock

The only marketing platform that you can totally rely on is your own website. Some analysts believe that sites such as Tumblr, Twitter, and LinkedIn cannot last forever many of these sites rely on either a subscription-based revenue model or advertising, and both models are under threat from competitors and the growing popularity of ad blockers. If you build a great website, place the best content on your own blog and connect with your market through social media, CPC, and quality guest blogging, you will improve the chances of long-term success.