Josh (00:00)
What happens when the algorithm changes overnight and your digital content just poofs out of existence? The answer might be simpler than you think. And it starts with you taking over your digital landscape.
So on this episode of the Independent Creator podcast, that's what we're gonna talk about is basically reclaiming your space. What I mean by that is your digital landscape, how you basically present yourself to your audience, to the world as it were. Most of the time people do that by posting on say Facebook or Instagram or Blue Sky, Twitter.
wherever you think you can post your content and it lives there forever, right? Wrong, because what happens is that you're posting to a place that is not your own. And what I mean by that is that you don't control what happens to your content once you hit send or enter or OK. It basically lives on a rented or leased space that
you have no absolute control over. It's the whims of a large corporation or a billionaire that can really care less what happens to your content or to you at all. So what we're going to actually look into is finding a way to get yourself onto a place that you can control. And what I mean by that is maybe either through a forum community,
a blog site or any place that you can think of that you can control, that you have absolute control over, which means that you own infrastructure or you have the purchase a VPS, which is a virtual private server somewhere, and you install software to get your content, your word out to these other places. So let's actually take a look at one of the things that I'm talking about here is where
You don't have the control over where you think that, oh, I'm posting a blog, let's say on Substack that, you know, I can control, right?
Well, the thing is, is that with Substack is that when you look at it at the URL, it's substack.com slash whatever name that you you you set your account up with. An issue with that is that when people think of, I'm going to podcast XYZ. Well, they're looking at it. Oh, it's on Substack.
They're not thinking, I'm going to podcast XYZ's website dot com. No, they're going to sub stack dot com. So already you're at a disadvantage when the people are associating you or your your content with, let's say, sub stack that. You see is that the mind share of what people would think of your your digital space lives on sub stack. Now, I'm not saying that sub stack
or medium or any place that you can think of. Patreon is, you know, not a good place. No, what I'm saying is that it's a place that you don't have control over. It's like I said, it's not podcast xyz.com. It's not your home. It's just an apartment. Let's just look at it that way. It's an apartment that you're renting month to month or you got a six month lease on and.
People don't say, oh, we're going to your house. No, you're going to your apartment and say in six months, well, the management company of that apartment says, yeah, we're kicking you out because we're actually going to be turning all these apartments into condos and find another place to live. Sorry. So again, it's. Again, that's like I said, it's the mind share of when people think of
your digital home. And in the case of like Patreon, it's patreon.com slash whatever your name is. It's not there. People are not looking at, again, like I said, not your house. It's just an apartment. I know I'm saying the same thing over and over it because I know a lot of people get caught up and say, well, it's free. It's a place. I don't have to pay for server costs. I don't have to pay someone to
take over and do the admin side of things. And I understand that and I get it. Believe me, I do. It's just, know, take care of your digital space because that's pretty much all you really do. All you really have is your digital space. Your name is who you are as a brand, as a content creator, as a podcast or an artist, an author, whatever.
is your name and you really should take aspects or take better care of.
sending to people that you want to get in contact with or reach out to potential viewers or clients or anything like that, that, hey, you can find me at my website that I own. And it's kind of like it's, you know, it gives a more professional, a professional appearance to things because let's take it. Let's take it a little step further back in time, shall we?
Back in the day is all we really had was websites and email. We didn't have any social networks or anything like that. I'm talking like the days before Facebook or even my space. There were people setting up an account on AOL.com with your name here at AOL.com fast forward or even say even Gmail.com fast forward a decade, 10 years.
When you look at someone's business card and they hand it to you and you see their email is their name at AOL.com, what actually goes into your mind is that either this person is really, really old and they're part of the boomer generation or, you know, they are stuck on AOL or they're probably still paying for AOL when you shouldn't be. But anyways, the thing is, is that
It's not a professional look when you have an AOL.com or a gmail.com email address on your business cards or when you're trying to portray or promote your business and say, hey, I do. I I'm a fisherman. I go out and catch crab. You email me at. Fish fishermen at AOL.com and they're not really going to take you serious.
because you don't have an ownership of your brand. You don't have ownership of your brand awareness with everybody else. Well, the same thing can apply to your blog or to a website. Say with like Substack. Yes, I understand. Substack gives you, especially for bloggers and people who are setting things up on that.
particular website is that it doesn't give you, let me backtrack. It gives you a space. It's kind of like a social network for blogs. Yes, it gives you a place to help advertise your content. But at what cost is it? Yes, it's free, but you don't really own your home.
I understand some people will say, well, Substack gives you all of this stuff, all of this distribution network to help get your site seen by many other people or many other readers or viewers or listeners because they do offer a podcast hosting part of it as well. And they're starting to get into the short form video content as well, because, know, everybody's got to do that. So
The thing is, at what cost to your brand is it going to affect that when people think of your blog, the first thing they're going to say, oh yeah, I saw, I read your blog post on Substack. They're not going to say, oh yeah, I read your blog post on your website.
So it's something, it's like kind of like a catch 22. Yes, for many people, mean, there are how many thousands or hundreds of thousands or even millions of users on Substack.
are happy with this and you know what? That's perfectly fine. I'm not here to say using one platform over creating your own website is something that you should be ashamed of. It's something that you should actually take care if you're very serious in your brand and creating content for your brand.
Because, like I said, most people are going to associate you with whatever platform you're on and they're and they're not going to say, yeah, I saw your website or or your video is on YouTube. I know some things are probably not going to be. How should I say this, especially for like video content creators, it's like you either are on YouTube
or you host it yourself through PeerTube or Vimeo, there really isn't any other way cheaply or low cost, I should say, because in that aspect, video is expensive to host.
It is one of those things that perhaps my entire argument that has this totally just get rid of and yes, set yourself on YouTube or PeerTube or if you're in like a filmmaker like through Vimeo because Vimeo is more geared towards the filmmaker side of things or companies looking for a place to store their
videos, their tutorials, their classes and stuff like that. So. In that case, having your. Your stuff sitting on, let's say, for example, YouTube, that's an exception, because again, it's believe me when I say video hosting is very expensive. It. If you don't have.
a infrastructure set up for video hosting, you're looking at thousands of dollars per month. If you have a large following or if you have one or two videos go viral and you got several million video or several million views on these particular videos, your server cost is going to go right through that roof. And like I said,
using substack and medium in that case.
is probably a good idea if you are in a position that you're just starting out. You're just starting out your content creation and you're looking for a place and you don't have the technical know-how to create the websites or a blog post or anything like that. looking at medium.
their information that they have here is great for. can't, I don't, I want to preface this the entire episode. I'm not knocking these platforms or the people who use them and are very successful on these platforms. I'm just giving an insight to what I believe and many other people believe is that
If you want to build your brand, going this route is probably not the best, but we're just looking at these examples that are perfectly in line for people who are starting out wanting to create something. Like I said, don't have the technical know-how of self-hosting a ghost blog site or newsletter site and...
or any other like a write freely or anything like that. They don't have the technical know how to set up a server, install these these software and Docker containers. And you're probably if you're listening and saying, I have no idea what you mean, Docker, what does that mean? So. Again, I like to preface what I've said and saying is that I don't say.
these things to the mean, but it's just looking at medium is that you're kind of locked into this ecosystem. So.
Like with medium here, we're looking at like their membership plans. So five dollars a month or sixty dollars a year is a medium member. You get to read member only stories, support writers. You read most, earn money for your writing, listen to audio narrations, read offline with the app, access our Mastodon community, connect your custom domain and create your own publications. Now.
That is a good thing because for $5 a month, you're looking at, can connect your custom domains.
What I just said pretty much just flies out the window because it's associating your brand, your domain name with this platform. But people are coming to your domain, really don't see it as a medium platform.
They have how can I say this without basically boiling it down. A lot of people have claimed that Substack is catering or platforms far right ideology, Nazism and stuff like that. So if you pay for a Substack or access or you pay Substack membership to different
the creators that in fact you are helping those ideologies. And I am not logged in. am completely looking at this with like random as a random user. And there is a crap ton of political content from the get go.
And is this something that you really want to look into? mean, for me, I'm tired of the political stuff right now because it's pretty much everywhere. I want to look for let's find anything for own cast.
And I'm not people. I want to look for posts.
And of course, there's not going to be anything for that. So let's go for technology.
Entertainment technology. OK. So this is what I was trying to get to is a long way to get to it. But anyways.
Your sub stack page is essentially going to have the same look as many other sub stack pages because there is very little theming. And don't get me wrong, but that's perfectly fine. A lot of people enjoy that. They don't want to. They don't care about if it looks pretty or anything like that. So I don't want to give my email address, but I just want to take a look real quick.
And you can say, oh, well, this looks like your site on the two town waffle dot com. It's like, yeah, it's true. And you're perfectly right, because my my two town waffle dot com site has the same layout, essentially. And pretty much my way of thinking is that you really unless you custom code it or you purchase a
a
Actually, you couldn't see it because it was sharing the wrong tab. My way of thinking is that if you're spending like a hundred dollars on a theme or having someone or custom code, a custom theme for you, there really isn't that much difference between what your site on Substack could look like or on Ghost or on Medium. It is something that you have to
If you're serious in furthering your your content creation as a journey as a business, that is something that you have to deal with and have to think about as you grow your your media empire as a word. And. You know, that's perfectly fine. Some people just want to do this as a hobby and there and for me, I'm I'm
gearing my this podcast and my little two-tone waffle metaverse and stuff like that is I'm gearing it more into the business side of things. So I'm focusing on trying to maneuver certain items of like the website, the YouTube channel, PeerTube and stuff and the content that I am producing in a way that helps others in a not.
professional level because this is not very professional. That's OK because my content is geared more for the people who are up and coming or just starting up or have been doing this for a while and are looking for something different than YouTube or Twitch or anything like that, alternative platforms. So what I'm trying to say is that all in all, your decision on creating a
your brand for your business, you have to make these decisions on how your content, your clients and your viewership perceives what you make or what you are wanting to present to the world. And really, by using certain platforms, you would have to take that into consideration. I know
I should have pulled up the clip. There is a guy called Mike Elgin. He's been in the tech space for many, many decades. He actually gave a very passionate and passionate speech on why he creates his blog on Substack. And he understands what some people
perceived Substack as like again, like I mentioned that in his case, he hasn't seen any of that going on. And we can say that we can argue that, well, just by using the Internet, you are essentially platforming those ideologies as well. Well, are you going to stop using the Internet and just, know,
live in a shack in the middle of Montana in the forest somewhere and live off the grid. So you kind of have to...
No way the pros and cons really. Hopefully with this complete rambling episode, you might've got some kind of semblance of figuring out for yourself what is best for you. I'm just here to show you and to say, if you want to take your brand to the next level, create a domain, find a domain for your brand name.
set up with your website. It's definitely that is what all the meat and potatoes. What I'm trying to say here is that if you create your website, create the content on your website, share that content out to, a blue sky or Twitter or Facebook or wherever else to lead back to your website is a much better experience, probably for yourself, your content.
and eventually your members or your viewers and people who are interested in what you have to say. You can also utilize Substack if you want to, let's say, have a newsletter. You can use Substack, can use Medium, you can use Beehive, Ghost, Fourth Wall. There's many, there's many places that you can look into and creating or Kit is another one.
creating your newsletter, if that's what you're interested in, to send out emails once a week or once a month or every quarter, whatever, whatever. And, you know, just get your information, your content out there. But it's important to have that domain, not just for a home for your content, but again, for your emails. It's more professional to have a your name at
whatever.com instead of aol.com or gmail.com. And I have to say with a story we have in my line of work, we deal with firms that deal with different things that we talk back and forth with emails. one of them, one of the people who work at this particular firm gave us
as a professional email with at gmail.com. And I'm like, this person is part of a multimillion dollar firm and they have a dot at gmail.com email address. I'm sitting there like, that's so unprofessional really to, you're working in this professional environment.
and you're giving someone a Gmail.com. And I know some of you will probably say, well, what's wrong with that? It's just an email account. And I get it. But in certain aspects of corporate life, you want to not show that by using a account that it gives the air of laziness and you really don't care about your work.
You could have, you know, Josh at Nvidia dot com or Josh at, I don't know, Riverside dot com. I don't know. I'm just giving examples here. But with the company name as the domain gives so much more weight to your email, to your presence with other.
people in the industry, clients and viewers or whoever. So take that as like a little grain of salt is that if for as a creator, a content creator, especially independent creators, you're running, trying to run your own business, set up a domain to so you can have an email address. You can have like two tone waffle or I have for myself, I have Josh B at two tone waffle dot com.
or at also have it same at any creator hub.com. So I can use that email in a more of a professional setting instead of AOL, Gmail, Hotmail or anything like that. So if you have any questions of what I rambled on tonight, do send me an email or actually if you're watching this on YouTube or PeerTube,
Leave a comment down below. I'll definitely try to answer as many as I can. yeah, until next week, I hope you enjoyed this episode. Do be sure to join our community. We're at two town waffle dot forums and I'll see you on the next episode of the independent creator podcast. Until then, later taters.