The online brand building wheel.

If you’re a savvy digital marketer, it’s not enough to have a great website. That’s a given. The name of the game today is expanding your reach beyond your main site. If you start to think of your main site as a hub, and other digital assets like Facebook fan pages, blogs, email campaigns, etc. as spokes or offshoots from the hub, then you’re on the right track. Like a spoke, the additional digital property should be robust enough to support the hub, or your main site. The more spokes you have, the more marketing muscle. If you think of it, digital assets like Facebook and Twitter can cross-over in many areas thus offering a double-whammie. For example, you can automatically send your tweets to your Facebook fan site to keep your fans in the loop. You can also take content like blog entries and post them on your facebook site. In effect, your spokes are can and should cross each other to add support to your hub. Why do this? Here are a couple of reasons:

1) Multiple Entry Points. Some people are on Facebook all day long and consider Twitter a waste of time. The converse is true too. So why limit yourself to one or the other? By spreading your content across multiple platforms, you make it easier for people to interact with your brand.

2) Spreadable Content. If you have a great blog post, why not share it with your closest followers on Twitter or Facebook. Be careful though, you don’t want to bombard your friends with shameless self promotion. As long as your content is good enough, people will be open to a link to your blog. So spread away.

3) Cross-Promote. Let’s say you just created a great YouTube video about the latest widget your company just created on a shoe string budget. Why just use the YouTube platform to promote it? Announcing your opus on Facebook, Twitter, blogs etc., may expose your video to an entirely new audience that would have never come across it. It’s a no brainer.

Having your content spread across multiple platforms can help SEO and can make it easier for people to find you. It can also establish a lasting digital footprint across the web and on search engines. As long as you are creating killer content, why not roll it out in more than one way. Get it? Roll it out. Wheel. Never mind.