- If you're using social media,
the reality is that you don't own the relationship you have
with your audience, it's owned by the platform.
And if you're running your business through the internet
and you don't have direct access to your audience,
to your customers, then you don't own your business.
So it should go without saying
that you absolutely need your own website
and you need your own email list.
And that's what we're gonna talk about in today's video.
Hey everybody, this is Roberto Blake
helping you create something awesome today,
welcome back to the channel.
So today,
I wanna talk about something serious with you for a minute.
I wanna talk about why you absolutely need your own website
and your own email list
when all these social media platforms are free.
And the bottom line is,
the only thing that's convenient about them
is the fact that they're free
and the traffic is already there but there are some problems
and some caveats that go with that.
And if you've been paying attention
to anything going on in the world
then you probably understand why.
Do you know what one of the key difference is
between someone who's an employer and an employee,
it's who owns the relationship with the customer.
And you would think that with X amount of followers
and TikTok or Twitter, Instagram, subscribers on YouTube,
you would think that the person who owns that relationship
is you because well, you built that.
You built that relationship with that audience,
you made the content, these people signed on for you.
But at the end of the day
if they decide to for whatever reason,
if social media decides to delete your account,
suspend your account or the algorithm changes in some way
that's not favorable to you then guess what?
All of that effort and all of the hard work
that you put in to build those relationships
doesn't really amount to anything
because you don't control the access.
You have no way to guarantee that you can reach these people
that want to hear from you.
And while this might sound obvious, most people
especially a lot of people who are millennials or Gen Z
absolutely refuse to build their own website
and they hate the idea of asking people
to sign up to their email list and their newsletter.
It's something like, it's just like they're allergic to it
or something like that, I don't know.
But I do understand some of the reluctance here.
For one thing, we live in an age where let's face it
people are gonna feel a little bit more spoiled,
a little bit more entitled.
I know I sound like the old man in the room,
back in my day we paid for everything, I understand.
But the reality is yeah,
back in my day we did pay for everything.
You paid for web hosting, there was almost no such thing
as free hosting or free anything on the internet.
Back in the days of AOL 7.0, Angelfire, Lycos and GeoCities,
what'd they do? Give us like 20 megabytes, 20 megabytes.
And back then, you thought that was a lot.
But now you have unlimited hosting for videos
that are like terabytes large on YouTube.
You have unlimited hosting in many forms
throughout these websites, whether it's like Facebook,
Instagram for your photos and whatnot.
And so when you really look at it,
when you really think about it,
we do have a very great opportunity here.
It's this abundance of resources and access
that you know 15 years ago just didn't exist.
But here's the downside when you don't pay for anything,
you get what you pay for in terms of being a priority,
customer service and control.
Well, the value of having free platforms
that give you so much,
don't require you to build or maintain anything,
is that yeah they have all the leverage
and that might actually be fair.
They did in fact put all the upfront investment
and infrastructure into that.
We showed up, we participated.
And so like I said, you get what you pay for now.
Now as cynical as all that might sound,
when you actually decide that you're gonna pay for
and have your own website, yeah it's a pain in the butt,
it is another bill, it is another expense.
But if you're somebody who is not doing this as a hobby
or if you're somebody who's invested in this
whether you're doing an online business
or you're an influencer; this is part of your livelihood
and part of protecting that livelihood
is having an abundance of options.
And again, owning the relationship you have
and actual access and control
when it comes to those relationships,
when it comes to the audience that you built.
They built the platforms you built the audience.
Now, the idea that I've always stood by
is the idea of moving my audience
and taking traffic away from these platforms
and taking it to my own platforms,
one that I have through my websites.
The problem is that
when you take traffic off these platforms,
there's a little bit of a penalty in the algorithm.
You will not grow as fast,
they will not promote or push your content as much,
that's just the way that it is.
And some of them have like done so much to limit reach,
Facebook, that it feels very much pay to play at that point.
If you're gonna do pay to play,
you might as well at least own your own website
and your own domain name and be able to control the look,
the branding, the feel
and of course the access to your audience.
This stuff is not cheap that's why most people
decide that they're just gonna use the free platforms
and they're gonna live with the consequences,
until the consequences (giggles) actually show up.
Then it's a problem.
Now, there are a lot of like web hosting companies out there
and I think they're reasonable and affordable,
you just have to make that decision
of whether you wanna do this or not.
Now, if you're someone who's not a paid influencer
or you're not monetized on YouTube,
or you don't have an e-commerce brand
where you're like making money off of this stuff already,
you know selling things or doing affiliate marketing
then it can feel like, oh God it's just one more bill,
it's one more thing to pay for.
But it's reasonable because it does put you in a position
to earn money, usually through things like e-commerce
and like affiliate marketing.
If you're gonna sell things directly,
if you're gonna do e-commerce
then Shopify is something that's specialized in that.
They're not a sponsor or anything
it's just like I'm recommending some things here.
So Shopify is where you wanna do something like that.
Me for example I'm building a template store
to sell graphic design templates to people for social media,
so I'm using Shopify specifically for that.
When it comes to my online coaching business
and my membership program,
I use Kajabi as my hosting company
for my online courses and products and things like that.
So it's a little bit different than a template store
or if you were selling clothing you'd do it through Shopify.
There's a lot of stuff you can do
with e-commerce on Shopify,
but for digital education products,
you wanna use platforms like Kajabi and Teachable.
Those are like the best ones for courses and memberships.
I'm gonna link to those down below,
those are affiliate links if you wanna check them out,
get a free trial, all that good stuff.
Now, if you just want a simple website and blog
then the most practical solution if you want control
is gonna be something like a WordPress website.
For that, I recommend Bluehost
because they hooked our audience up with a discount,
so I'm gonna link to that down below as well.
Those of you who don't wanna do WordPress,
coding intimidates you all of that stuff,
then I would say use something like Squarespace or Wix,
Wix is actually pretty good.
My mom actually likes Squarespace but my sister prefers Wix.
As far as I'm concerned working with clients and stuff,
I found them to be comparable or relatively the same.
I don't really have a bias toward one or the other.
I've used both for my photography portfolio stuff.
I have a Squarespace site that I use
that I built, put together in a weekend.
So I don't think this has to be overly complicated.
If you can use any of these social media platforms,
there's no reason you shouldn't be able
to put together your own website.
It's not that much more complicated to use,
sometimes it's actually easier in some cases.
Now having all that website traffic for yourself is great
especially if you're directly selling a product
or a service because you can do the transaction stuff,
PayPal, Stripe, you need those in place
cause you need the payment processors
to make anything happen.
So that's gonna be really important,
but in terms of being able to communicate
and distribute content,
even content from your other platforms
to your audience that they may have missed
because algorithms may not be working for you properly
or notifications may not be getting through
et cetera, et cetera.
This is where an email list
and email marketing plays a crucial role
in the future of your business
and you really having access to your own audience
because with an email, the audience decides
whether or not to open it or not,
the algorithm isn't deciding whether they see it or not.
They get to see it in their inbox
and then they get to make a decision,
do I open this or do I not?
Do I wanna hear from you or not?
The opt in or they opt out.
Now I've done some videos in the past on email marketing.
It's a very niche subject, it's not the thing
that most of my audience is excited about.
But I think you guys are starting to understand the urgency
of having your own website and having your own email list
and also having something directly to sell
because again, a platform can cut you off
at their discretion, and I'm okay with that.
These are businesses, they're private entities,
we agreed to the terms of service, that was the deal,
I have no issue with that whatsoever.
I just wanna deal in the practical reality
of what do we do if that should happen?
How do we mitigate the losses
that would occur if you do that?
That's why I've never gone all in on YouTube.
I get a lot of people saying,
"Roberto, YouTube's your biggest platform,
"you have like a half million subs.
"Why don't you have this going on?
"Why don't you have that going on?
"Why don't you grow bigger?
"Why don't you add a million?
"Why don't you get these views?
"Why don't you get that?"
I don't do what's in YouTube's best interest,
I do what's in Roberto's best interests
and that's why I won't always get the views
cause I'll make helpful videos like this
that have no hope of entertaining a young audience,
going viral or being for a majority of people.
I do these videos to help some of you out
because it's important.
And I wish more of you would watch, but I'll take it.
I also don't control the algorithm,
I don't control whether or not the notifications work.
Less than 10% of this audience has notifications turned on
because YouTube notifications didn't exist
when I built the first quarter million subscribers
on this channel.
YouTube notifications didn't exist and YouTube never decided
to opt everybody in
to notifications that were subscribed to me.
So, there's probably less than 60,000 of you
that even have notifications and only 35,000 of you
have them all turned on.
See, these are things beyond my control
but building an email list gives me some control back
and gives you the viewer some control back
in terms of how you want to reach me.
So if you want to be on my newsletter, you want updates,
you want some of the discounts that I run on things
or some of the roundups and news updates for the community;
then go to Robertoblake.com/newsletter, link down below,
you'll also get my free ebook.
And see it's really that simple to tell your audience
another way to stay in touch with you
should the worst happen.
It's also good to have a website
and find a way to regularly promote that
by giving your audience something that they would enjoy,
that they would want, that they would care about
or just letting them know there exists the way to reach you
if the platforms are not cooperating.
Now when it comes to email well programs,
a lot of people will go with the cheapest solution,
the freest solution.
Some of them upgrade later but there's like hidden fees
or cost or something like that.
I've used really almost every email marketing program
out there, either for myself or for clients
or when I worked in corporate.
And what I've come to the conclusion on
is there's two that I can recommend for sure.
Growing my list was something that was very important to me
and so I use ConvertKit.
I like it because of its automation, its features
and because it's simplistic.
It's what my friend Pat Flynn uses,
he's the one who really put me on to it.
So you can check that out,
link is in the description down below
or go to Robertoblake.com/go/ConvertKit.
Now what I used to use back in the day myself was MailChimp
because of the marketing around MailChimp
and that it was free.
It was kind of like the Dropbox of email marketing
for a lot of people.
But because I make a lot of freebies for my audience,
I like to do a lot of freebies and give stuff away,
I ended up making duplicate lists with MailChimp.
So when I started paying for it,
it started to get more and more expensive
for the same people downloading stuff over and over again
and getting onto multiple lists.
So I went with ConvertKit
because I only pay for one email per person
with the way that it's set up.
So in the long run,
I do feel like you should pay for these things
so that you have more control
and you have more options if you can afford that
if it's part of your business.
And so for me, ConvertKit still the best solution.
So everything that I'm talking about is linked down below.
The bottom line of this very dry video
is that you need to have a measure of control
when it comes to what you're doing online.
You need a way to have direct access to your audience
and to the relationships that you built.
You need a website, your need an email list.
You need, in my opinion some kind of e-commerce solution
that is separate from your major social media platform
in terms of monetization.
That way you're not relying on the brand deals,
relying on the ad revenue or the donations or whatever.
People need to be able to do a transaction with you
because you need access to your customers,
you need to have some control over your resources
and you need to be able to directly sell.
Like this is what has to happen in order for you
to truly have a business that your in control of
instead of somebody else.
Question of the day, do you have an online business
or is social media a hobby for you?
Let me know in the comment section.
If you want to do more with online business
and make money online, watch the video up here.
And if you also are trying to do anything
with affiliate marketing,
I have a wonderful playlist that you can check out.
As always you guys thanks so much for watching
and don't forget,
go out there and create something awesome today.
Take care.