💡 Why You Must Own a Website (Issue 621)
You gotta own your online home
She was devastated…
“I had over a million followers on TikTok. They suspended my account this week, and now I’ve been kicked off the platform. They gave no explanation and customer support says they can’t help me.”
A reasonably successful author shared this post in one of my writing groups. She’d spent years building an engaged audience on TikTok, which drove many of her book sales.
Then, one day, it was all gone.
I don’t know how often I’ve witnessed something like this happen. It’s why I sound like a broken record when I tell people they can’t fully trust any platform. You never know when you might lose your account, thus losing all your content and followers. Why would you let some company have that much control over your future success?
There are two things every modern professional should own to control their destiny:
Their mailing list.
Their website.
Why do I say that?
If you leave your connections, friends list, professional network, followers, fans, writing, content, portfolio, etc., in the hands of a corporation and its service, you are vulnerable.
You are at its mercy.
What will you do if that service fails and loses all your information (e.g., your LinkedIn connections)? Sometimes, you can download that info to have a backup, but there might be nothing you can do with it without using the original service (e.g., LinkedIn doesn’t provide email addresses for your connections).
Poof! The connections you’ve built over the years are all gone.
What will you do if a service suspends or terminates your account (e.g., Facebook)? What happens if your favorite online profile gets banned and no one can find or contact you (e.g., Instagram)?
Bam!
You just lost a decade of information and connections you invested in building through that account and profile. You lost all your content (e.g., a decade of photos, videos, designs, memes, articles, and thoughts). You may even have lost any way to contact your online customers, loyal fans, and subscribers.
Do you think I’m being dramatic? Or perhaps I’m being paranoid?
I’ve been using software and services for decades. I’ve watched hundreds of companies come and go. Sometimes, they shut down so quickly that you lose everything. Or, they shut down with no easy way to export your data and no alternative service to replace them.
I’ve also watched people lose everything when locked out of their Gmail account inexplicably. It has happened to more people than you might expect with every service over the years. Sometimes with no warning at all.
For example, one day, a few years ago, Facebook suspended my account. There was no warning. They gave me no explanation.
I contacted Facebook Support and heard nothing. I messaged my friends who work there to see if they could help. They couldn’t get an answer either.
I could not access the Facebook groups and communities I had created to run my business. I had to ask someone else to message the group and let people know what was happening.
I was locked out for about a week before Facebook suddenly reactivated my account. Again, they gave me no explanation. To this day, I never figured out what happened.
My best guess is that a competitor falsely reported me for some made-up violation, and Facebook suspended my account while they investigated. But I’ll never know for sure, so there’s nothing I can do to prevent it from happening again in the future. I have zero power in “my relationship” with the corporation.
I vowed never to let myself be that vulnerable ever again.
I created my own community that week and migrated over as quickly as possible (I use Discord).
I distributed my marketing efforts more equally and frequently across Bluesky, Substack, LinkedIn, Quora, Medium, Flipboard, etc.
I invested in building my mailing list on Substack and created a redundant backup list on EmailOctopus.
I built more robust websites on domains I own.
I also set up email accounts using my domain names (e.g., instead of relying on a Gmail address).
My current strategy puts my core website and mailing list entirely under my control. The data is portable, and I can move them to any new service as necessary. Sure, I still use many online services, such as social media, publishing sites, etc. But they are simply tools, marketing channels, and ways to grow my audience.
I no longer have a single point of failure or a risky dependency on one company. I will never again make my primary “internet home” on a service that leaves me vulnerable, and neither should you.
Own your domain and control your website.
Define your website requirements
One of the first steps is to define the purpose of your website and capture your requirements. Owning your website is one way to reduce your professional vulnerability. When you have your own domain and website, people will always be able to find you no matter what happens with any other service (e.g., Facebook goes down, LinkedIn suspends you, your Instagram account is hacked).
For example, my forever online home is a landing page, LarryCornett.coach, directing people to what I currently think is important (e.g., my coaching services, articles, podcasts, books, current social media profiles, etc.).
The first question is:
Who do you most want to find you?
The next question is:
What do you most want from your website visitors?
Your site can be pretty simple or more complex based on how you plan to leverage it. You may already have a website, but is it meeting your needs? Is it in sync with who you are now, your professional brand, and your goals?
Think through some of the following questions.
Who is your target audience (e.g., peers, potential employers, customers)?
Who are the people you most want to discover your website and spend time exploring and using it (e.g., recruiters, hiring managers)?
What is your goal with your website (e.g., a basic “about me” so people can find you and contact you, your design portfolio to encourage employers to hire you, a writing platform to build an audience for your work, a community to connect with like-minded folks)?
What information about you should be on the website?
How do you want people to contact you?
Do you want to use it as a backup for what you post on other services (e.g., blog posts that duplicate your Medium stories)?
Do you need specific functionality (e.g., someone can schedule a call with you, purchase your products, download digital assets)?
How will you ensure security?
How frequently will you update it?
How easy should it be to update information?
How much control do you want over the design, customization, branding, etc.?
How easy should it be to expand the site (e.g., more landing pages, adding features)?
Do you want to use open-source software?
Should it be mobile-friendly (the answer should be “yes”)?
Should it be SEO-optimized (again, yes)?
Do you want to embed other media easily (e.g., photos, videos, podcast episodes)?
How portable will it be (e.g., easy to migrate to another platform)?
There are more issues that you should consider, but this should help you get started thinking through your requirements for a website.
I want you to become invincible
I will always focus on helping you become more invincible in your work and life. Owning a domain and your website and making it your primary online home puts you in the driver’s seat. It makes you more invincible and less vulnerable to the whims of tech corporations.
It makes you more resilient and helps you recover quickly from a disaster (e.g., data loss on another platform). Big companies do it. So should you.
Smart tech companies build a robust and redundant architecture for their services. Their information is backed up to backups that have backups with more backups. A server fails, and everything can be delivered from a different parallel server. An entire data center can drop out, and another can pick up the load.
Careless companies leave their fate in the hands of someone else. I read about a startup founder who says he lost his company and $100 million by relying on Facebook. He counted on that single platform as the only way to reach the company’s 20 million followers. But policy and algorithm changes brought it all crashing down.
“Speiser said his then-flourishing site lost 90% of organic traffic on Facebook. The readership loss forced Speiser to let go of more than 100 staff members, and the former CEO said he lost $100 million.”
I’m sorry that happened, but it’s not wise to build your entire business on another company’s platform and allow yourself to become so incredibly vulnerable. One feed algorithm changes, and you lose it all? That’s terrible business planning.
Similarly, it would be poor planning for your career to create your entire online presence on only one platform.
Essentially, I don’t want you to lose control of the services, connections, and data you need to build your professional identity. People should always be able to find you, and you should always be able to connect and communicate with them.
When you own and manage your website, you will be in control no matter what happens to the plethora of tech companies and services that may lock you out, fail, or even disappear entirely.
I’m Larry Cornett, a Freedom Coach who works with ambitious professionals to help them reclaim their power, become invincible, and create new opportunities for their work and lives. Do more of what you love and less of what you hate!
📕 Check out my new The Invincible Daily Journals!
What a fantastic article. Thank you for sharing!
Why were you still on any of those sites