I strongly believe that if you’re a creator trying to earn money online, you need to have your own website. Now, in these days of numerous social media platforms, you may think that having your own website is redundant, but let me tell you why it’s not.
Social media sites don’t last forever
The first social media site I used was MySpace. Not long after that, I started using a site called Faceparty. I bet only a small proportion of internet users nowadays remember MySpace, and even fewer remember Faceparty, as both of those sites fell into insignificance when Facebook became globally popular. Nowadays, MySpace isn’t much more than a meme that gets circulated whenever people get angry at their current popular social media platform.
The point I’m making here is that you can’t rely on your social media audience to always be there for you, as those sites come and go. The once-mighty Facebook, which put an end to MySpace, hasn’t been the hot site for years now, and even its successor Twitter (or X, if you prefer), is going through a crisis.
Disgruntled Twitter users are desperately searching for alternatives, and are being split between new social media sites like Threads, Mastodon, Hive Social, or Bluesky. That’s your painstakingly built audience being scattered to the four winds there.
That’s the problem with social media sites, you don’t own your audience, you’re just borrowing them. At any time, that audience could be driven away from that site, leaving you desperately trying to find them again. Worse still, a social media site could decide to restrict your access to them (*cough* Twitter paid plans), or, worse still, ban you completely. Overnight, your social reach, and your income, could be slashed dramatically.
By having your own website, you have your own place on the internet that you can call home. It’s a place where you’re free to post whatever you want, and it’s a place where your audience can always find you.
Of course, you can link to all your social media accounts from your own website, and vice versa. That way, if the hot social platform of the day ever changes, you can just update the links on your site, and your audience will still know where to find you.
You can connect with your audience in more intimate ways
Social media is a shouting match. Sure, you can call out to your audience, but you’re competing for their attention along with numerous other accounts. Whether your audience even sees your content is a matter of luck, and “the algorithm.”
With your own website, you can build a subscription email list and invite your audience to join it. With an email list, your audience is giving you permission to connect with them in that most intimate of places, their personal email inbox. This means that you have a much greater chance of your message being seen than just shouting it to the crowd on social media.
In addition, the people who sign up to your mailing list are showing you that they’re willing to trust you and interact with you. Therefore, if you’re promoting a product or event that you’re involved with, the members of your email list are much more likely to buy or attend than the majority of casual followers on social media who are just using you as a distraction while they’re sitting on the toilet.
And, if one day the current hot social media platform does implode, scattering its former members far and wide, you can send out an email to your list to let them all know the names of your new accounts.
Website building companies like Weebly give you all the tools you need to build and manage your own email list. They also make it easy for you to design and send out attractive email messages to your subscribers.
Affiliate marketing is easier, and safer
If you’re a creator who relies on affiliate marketing to make money, it can be risky to put all your eggs in the social media basket. Let’s be honest here, social media sites aren’t fans of affiliate marketing.
Firstly, affiliate links take users away from the social media platform, which isn’t what the site owners want. They want users to stay on that site for as long as possible, where they can see more ads that earn money for the site. And, that’s the key right there. Social media sites don’t make money from your affiliate links, so they’d prefer it if you paid them to run ads instead.
Secondly, if a social media site becomes flooded with affiliate ads in its regular posts, it doesn’t create a fun experience for users, and it may drive them away. And, again, if users are exposed to numerous affiliate ads, they’re less likely to notice the paid ads that the site actually makes money from.
Internet technology has advanced to a point where it’s pretty easy for social media sites to spot an affiliate link. Even attempts to disguise them with link shorteners are easily spotted, and some sites, like Pinterest, block certain link shorteners completely. In addition, the legal requirement for you to now identify affiliate posts as ads or sponsored content makes filtering them out even easier.
Social media sites tolerate affiliate marketers, but they don’t make life easy for them. That’s where having your own website comes in.
Instead of posting your affiliate links on social media, you can write articles on your website that describe the benefits of those products. A well-written article is a much better sales pitch than a short social post.
In addition, those articles on your website may bring in additional organic traffic from search engines like Google or Bing. With that organic traffic, you can actually start to earn a passive income that’s not dependent on you constantly producing new social content or posts.
And, the best part about publishing articles on your own website is that you have much more freedom to link to them from social media. After all, you’re not just posting an affiliate link to a product, you’re posting a link to an informative, well-written article that may be of use to people. You’re giving them actual value, as well as promoting a product.
You can sell on your website with your own store
If you want to take your creativity further, and take your online business to the next level, you can add your own ecommerce store to your website. Whether you want to make and sell your own products, or just act as a retailer for other people’s products, you can do it right from your own site.
You don’t need to rely on affiliate programs or ad revenue when you have your own online store selling products. You also don’t need to rely on third-party ecommerce sites such as Etsy, who can change their fees at a moment’s notice, or leave you at the mercy of their search algorithms.
The more control you have over your income streams, the better and more secure your online business will be.
Is building your own website hard?
Surprisingly, building your own website isn’t hard anymore. There was a time when your only two options for building a website were learning HTML code or hiring an expensive web designer. However, you can now build a professional looking website using simple tools.
I started building my own websites back in 1998 by manually typing HTML code, but even I don’t do that anymore. The trick is to work smarter rather than harder, and I want my effort to be focussed on creating my content, not building or maintaining my website.
Website companies like Weebly provide you with an intuitive drag-and-drop website builder tool that allows you to design your site without coding. There are even well-designed theme templates that you can simply install to make your life even easier.
You can build your website for free with Weebly right now, and create a real home for yourself on the internet.
