Own Your Digital Content

Are you giving away your digital assets for free? Providing free content for your target audience is an important part of building a following. However where you place that content is just as important if not more important than giving it away for free. In this article you will learn why you should keep control of your digital assets and how to do that.

When you use hosted third party services, such as Facebook, Medium, or Instagram you are effectively giving away control over your content. For example the Facebook terms of service (at time of writing this post) in Section 2.1 states:

Essentially Facebook can do anything they want with any content you upload and you have no recourse. What happens to your content if a service changes the terms of service or functionality and you are no longer able to utilize the service in the same manner. Other examples include Facebook changing the algorithm that displays less content from brands and publishers, API Changes, and more algorithm changes.

All services make changes that both negatively and positively affect their users. If your business sales revenue and traffic is heavily dependant on these servers a change over which you have no control could put your business at risk, for example YouTuber ad revenue down: here, here and here.

A brick and mortar example of tying your revenue to another business is that of this watch repair businessman who's business is now in jeapordary due to Sears declaring bankruptcy. He's worried about be[ing] able to find a place to rent that’s as affordable or draws in as many customers as the small area off of Sears’ main lobby here.

Even though on free WordPress blogs and other services you can write whatever you want you don’t own the content. WordPress, Tumblr and other free services can remove your content or delete your website at anytime. Imagine having 200 or 300 posts written and then all of your content has disappeared for some arbitrarily reason with no recourse to recover it. This is not illegal and does happen and without notice or explanation. If you own your own domain and host your content yourself this will not happen to you.

Instead of having all of your traffic and internet presence hosted on third party services it's better to control all of your content by centralizing it in your own website with your own domain. Avoid hosted solutions such as wordpress.com, blogger, Wix, or Shopify. If these services close or change the terms all of your content and SEO is lost or held hostage. And both free and paid hosted services do shut down, remember: Myspace, Geocities, Posterous, Google Photos and many more shuttered services.

The best approach is to have your own website and domain. You can then use any of these services to host your content. If a service goes away you can move your content to another similar service or host it yourself. More importantly you are not losing any SEO juice and all your content is discoverable in one central location.

If you have your own link shortener when you share content you don't have to worry about the link expiring or breaking in the future. If it does, you go into your link shortener and edit redirect.

By having your content on your own domain with a host that you pay for yourself, you control your content. Be sure to have a backup strategy in place in case the unexpected happens. Many CMSs including Craft CMS, and ExpressionEngine have backup options that will make it easy for you to backup all of your files and databases to another service or download locally. At a minimum you should ensure that your hosting company offers daily backups that are easy to access - most do.

It's okay to use third party services, but don't depend on them for your content and discoverability. If you depend on a third party service and your account gets suspended or closed you may have no recourse and lose all of your content. There are 5,480,000 results for youtube channel suspended and 53, 700,000 results for facebook page suspended and 270,000 results for shopify account suspended.

If your business is overly dependent on one of these services you are at risk. It is much better to use these services and then display the content on your own website.

This morning I was listening to podcasts like I usually do and The Business of Authority podcast had an episode titled What's The Best Home For Your Content?

This episode is an absolute must listen episode. The big take away here is from Rochelle Moulton when she says You always want to own your platform. My platform, my rules. If you're own instagram, facebook, twitter you've got to follow their rules and they can change them any time they want to.

You can see a full list of podcasts that I listen to here and don't forget to subscribe to my podcast Website 101 Podcast, a podcast for small business owners wanting to learn more about running and optimizing their website.