Use your expertise to create educational videos on YouTube. Post your best business insights on LinkedIn. Share your favorite images on Instagram.
They have an audience. You have no audience. Capture the attention that already exists on their platforms!
Right?
It depends. What is your long-term goal?
I want to build a library that has significance beyond the length of my own life, if possible. God has given me remarkable experiences. He has provided me with information. It’s not better (or even different) than anyone else’s information, but it was entrusted to my care. It deserves to have a public home that I can pass along when I’m gone.
Alphabet Inc. has a different set of goals for my information. Meta and LinkedIn have a different plan for my writing and photographs.
They want users to remain within their platforms, limiting the reach of posts containing a link to my platform. In some cases, providing no options for a link at all.
These companies are big, now. It looks like they have staying power. But times change quickly, new technologies emerge, and audiences move on.
I could spend my life chasing the times, the technologies, and the audiences, or I could create something of my own. The fact that you are reading this on my personal website reveals that I have chosen the latter.
I’ve owned a personal domain (or two) since 2004. I pay for the website hosting, I create the sites myself, write every word, and take every photograph. My family has access to usernames and password in a shared database.
My hosting company could go out of business tomorrow and I could simply move the data somewhere else, because I own it.
I’m 47 and I have a little less time available than I used to. I want to use it passing along my thoughts and experience in person, to people I care about in my family, my workplace, and my church, but also passing it along online.
I’ll do it somewhere that won’t draw a big audience, I’m sure. Engagement will be limited. But at least it will be around for a while and it will belong to me – the person entrusted with it by God.