If You Do One Thing Today, Do This.

If You Do One Thing Today, Do This.

Have creative aspirations? Prolific user of social media? Writer? Videographer? Photographer? Podcaster?

If so, the one thing you should do today is start your own website.

Right now, If possible!

Why not just use social media? You might think social media is where the audience is. After all, if I set up a blog today, I’d just be writing into the air. “I’ve got to go to where the eyes are, and they are on social media.”

Problem: With social media you are only renting your space and audience. And a sometimes fickle – I follow you, you follow me, cancel each other out – one at that. You want to find your 1000 true fans. You want to have a direct relationship with them. You want their email address so you can contact them should your social media platform just suddenly change its algorithm – which happens a lot! Or what if your platform just disappears?

Vine is the classic example. It was a microblogging website that Twitter acquired in October 2012. According to Wikipedia this is what happened next: “By December 2015, Vine had over 200 million active users. On October 27, 2016, Twitter announced that it would disable all uploads…  On January 20, 2017, Twitter launched an Internet archive of all Vine videos that had ever been published. The archive was officially discontinued in April 2019.”

What if the same happens with your chosen platform? You may have built up a following of several thousand. That audience would be gone in a flash. If you had monetised it, your business would be gone in a flash. Or you may just be using it an as an online archive for your own material. That would be gone too.

Therefore, it is imperative that you have your own place online. One that you own and that can’t be taken away. Where you can’t be deplatformed or later be asked to pay for your business to be promoted (yes Facebook, I’m looking at you!)

How can I build an audience for my site?

This is a hotly debated topic and one I recommend you spend some time researching. (I’m going to be doing just that once this ship30for30 project is over.) One channel for this research that I have come across and that I recommend you have a look at is the work of Miles Beckler on YouTube and milesbeckler.com

He is a very successful online entrepreneur. Since 2016, without the need to make any more money, he has been giving his secrets away for free online. Sound suspect? I suggest you just check him out and give him a fair ear. Anyways, he is against social media marketing for the beginner. His recommendation is focus on search engines. I will explore this topic on my blog in due course, once I have researched it all a bit more.

But please don’t get bogged down in all this. The rabbit hole of search engine optimisation (SEO), affiliate marketing, WordPress vs Substack vs Ghost etc etc.. Just get going. Start your website today. You can figure that all out as you go.