Below is my latest YouTube video that explore a bit of the detail in the importance of owning your own platform, explicitly creating a website, newsletter list and having a presence on social media.
In this post wanted to spend a little bit of time exploring why that is important.
You Own the Website
Owning your website is, in my opinion, is consistently overlooked. Do you have complete control to do whatever you see fit and whatever you want on your site? You're free to express how you see fit and create various styles and imagery that reflect your brand.
You don't have to fall within a framework that doesn't reflect your values. You don't have to appease anyone other than your audience and yourself.
We are constantly changing in some shape or form; I mean, we are humans. It's a natural trait. The one constant, however, is you.
Documenting your past experiences and development is a unique way to showcase the breadth of skill sets. Having these moments on your website lets you share some of these experiences with future people you meet, especially if you're trying to communicate specific skills.
Newsletter
No one wants to join another newsletter. This is an essential fact because this should be a driver to make sure that you're packing your newsletter with value. Today we're oversaturated with emails; most of us ignore a range of emails that we receive; however, there's an opportunity in that.
If you can send out relevant information to a niche group of people, your newsletter will be successful. The success will lead to you effectively engaging an audience and developing a relationship that will allow you to potentially communicate products or services or update them on different aspects of your experiences.
As a content creator, we're all in some shape or form developing audiences And having a newsletter is a foundational piece in creating this audience.
I'm on the same Path
I am on a similar path as a lot of you, where I have undervalued newsletters. I'm in the process of creating an audience that I can engage around the type of concentration but, more importantly, help drive their value on producing more meaningful digital information so they can better communicate with the people around them.
I have come across countless pieces of information that share that creating a newsletter and creating people to subscribe to it is an essential piece of the puzzle. Building your audience solely on social media is a very high risk if those platforms decide to take it away from you one day.
Experiencing it the hard way
Unfortunately, a local business in my city lost access to their primary communication channel, Instagram, before a significant event that they were doing. It crippled them because they had no actual ownership over the audience they built and instantaneously lost direct contact with thousands of people who depended on the Instagram channel to learn and hear more about this business' activities. Don't fall into the trap.
Social Media Presence
Social media is important, but not as important as you think. Yes, have a social media presence on channels relevant to your audience. I know many businesses that want to engage specific demographics and certain people but do not participate in conversations where these people are congregating.
More than ever, it's overwhelming to maintain so many different media channels more than ever. Still, if you have goals aligned to different engaging sets of people around your products and services, you have to figure out how systems and routines play in these areas.
It's funny to think that a decade ago how expensive and challenging it would be to own your own websites, newsletter or be able to engage with tens of thousands of people across the world, but today it's relatively cheap. Essentially you could almost do it for free through trials and baseline subscription.
It is vital to get back down to the basics and start to build a foundation that you own so that your brand can begin to get roots and build momentum over time.