I keep seeing even respected online entrepreneurs spread a genuinely terrible, business-strangling, online suicidal piece of advice.
This crowd means well but is using their platform to literally hamstring bloggers who will wind up regretting following this bad advice either near or short term.
As a matter of fact, a few moments ago I read how a successful entrepreneur advised bloggers to forget about a self-hosted Wordpress blog and go with an email autoresponder and Medium.
I wish I were kidding.
I am not.
My friend Alonzo Pichardo and I hit on the absolutely deadly danger of relying on social media alone to build your online business.
Watch the video here:
Over 28,000 views later, folks are still digging our advice.
As a little primer here on why you would be foolish to rely on Medium, your auto responder, or anything other than a self-hosted blog to build an online business, let’s look at the advantages and disadvantages of each.
Build Your Business through a Self Hosted Wordpress Blog
Advantages
- you own your online real estate; you cannot be kicked off your blog because you own it, you won’t disappear when a Google or social media algorithm change hits and you can sleep easy, knowing that you own your online real estate
- unlimited branding potential, with premium or bespoke themes and plug ins
- unlimited earning potential, as you control your blog, your brand, your presentation, hell, everything on the blog....you can monetize your owned online real estate specifically how you want to monetize it, being bound by no rules, save super lenient terms of service from the hosting company
Disadvantages
- It takes time to learn how to blog effectively, to do it right. You need to work intelligently and persistently, backing your actions with the right energy.....but....duh! All successful ventures require patience and persistence
I’d add the money investment thing as a disadvantage, but only the brain dead offline business owner would complain about spending money to rent a storefront and put product on the shelves, so since you are not a brain dead blogger, you understand that it takes money to build a thriving blogging business.
Building Your Online Business Through Social Media or Medium or Other Rented Online Real Estate
Advantages
- everything is set up for you
- can gain traction aka see more success quickly because of shorter learning curve
Disadvantages
- you own nothing....social media and Medium and other such sites are rented real estate, meaning the owners can shut your account down in a split second without warning for 1 of 10,000 different reasons, meaning you can lose hundreds to thousands to hundreds of thousands of contacts - or more - in a split second......this is why you absolutely cannot build your business through anything other than a self-hosted Wordpress blog....online business suicide, reckless and quite asinine way of building a business
- unprofessional looking; seeing medium.com or facebook.com in the domain name makes your business look like a Crackerjack organization. You can’t afford $10 to $20 a month to own a domain with hosting? Yikes...on to the next online business.
- terrible branding aka no branding; look at Blogging From Paradise then look at any Medium profile or Facebook Page....case closed....
- You don’t set the rules; at the snap of Facebook fingers, organic search died and people building their business on a Facebook Page lost everything....although I have compassion for these folks when they suffered years ago I also knew they were making a reckless, outright silly business decision guaranteed to bite them in the behind.
Are you convinced?
Go with a self-hosted Wordpress blog guys.
Build a thriving online business the right way.
Online Business eBook
Are you excited to retire to the tropics by building a thriving online business?
Buy my eBook: