The goal for most renters is to one day become a homeowner. When you own your home you can do things based on your own rules. You can paint, decorate, recreate, build, anything you’d like.
If you decide to move everything goes with you. This applies to your web content as well.
What is Web Ownership and Why is It Important?
Scenario 1:
Everything is going great. Links are working beautifully on your website. Suddenly you start getting email after email that certain links aren’t working. It doesn’t make sense to you because nothing has changed on your website. You discover the links you’ve been using to access your teleclass files are no longer working. Why?
Has the URL changed?
Does the host site still exist?
Is there a limit to how long you can access the link?
The answer: Yes, yes, and again possibly yes!
This is why I’m a strong advocate in owning your own stuff.
Scenario 2:
You’ve been using an email marketing system for your newsletter. Everything was going fine. You want to start sending autoresponder messages, but your current email marketing system isn’t designed for it. You decide to switch to another email marketing systems. No big deal right? WRONG!
Images have been uploaded to their system.
The template you’ve been using week after week belongs to them.
The archive links reference back to their website.
This means all of your content belongs to them. You cannot pick up and move to the email marketing system easily.
You Can:
Go through all of the images and download them to your computer.
Copy and paste each newsletter from the archive and store on your system, but remember you’ve been using their template. This means your archives will look vary different from what you expect such as missing images and bad formatting.
Start fresh and don’t worry about the previous newsletters.
Another reason for owning your own stuff.
When a URL is yourname.theirname or just theirname they own your content.
Many website owners host large files outside of their host server such as audio or video files. Whether you decide to host them yourself is up to you. However, you want to always have a copy handy that you own in case one of the scenarios above happens to you.
Do you OWN it? Not sure? Ask me in the comments below or share your experience.
