Understanding Why Your Blog is Your Most Reliable Online Asset

Saying that your blog is your most reliable online asset would be an understatement. Outside of owning your own list, it’s probably the only online asset which you have that you can be sure will not be taken away from you. Even then, there is some risk involved.

In this post, we’ll take a hard look at why online marketing can be risky and why you should NEVER build your house on rented land. There are countless marketers who have had their online business dry up overnight because they did not own their web properties.

A real-life example

One example is the Squidoo lenses that marketers were rabidly building a few years ago. These lenses were ranking well and marketers were making affiliate sales from their efforts. However, nothing online stays constant for long.

All of a sudden, Squidoo changed their rules and all the marketers’ efforts turned to dust as they lost their lenses and businesses overnight. If you do not control your online asset, you do NOT control your business.

Does that apply to other sites?

The same applies to most business models. If you have a YouTube channel with thousands of followers, guess what happens if your channel gets shut down?
Yes, you lose it all. All your work, all your uploaded videos, all your subscribers and so on. That’s the hard truth.

The same applies to your Facebook groups and pages, your Instagram following, your Pinterest boards and everything else that you leverage to build your following.
Even if you build your own blog and fill it with affiliate links to Amazon, your entire business can go up in smoke if they shut down your associates account. That’s the risk that we face as online marketers.

So, does that mean we avoid these sites?

No. Let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater. These large sites are hubs of traffic. They’ve spent a lot of money and time getting people to use their sites and trust them. The traffic is huge in these sites.

What you want to do is start your own blog and slowly populate it with content and have an opt in form on it. You also want an exit intent pop up that allows people to sign up to your list.
Now, you can build a social media presence on the big sites… but here’s the secret: Make sure you have links on all your different social media entities pointing back to your own blog and/or landing page.

You’ll be leveraging the popularity of these sites and driving traffic to your own blog where you can build a list of interested people. You’ll be able to market to them over and over.
This applies to all that you do. Your YouTube channel should have links to your blog. Your Facebook group may have gifts that your members can access on your blog and so on.

When you have multiple links from different sources pointing back to your blog, your list will grow and this is an asset you can always count on. Even if your account gets shut down on any of these platforms, some people will remember your blog and still visit it.  Plus you can send your subscribers, from your list, to your latest blog posts.

So, it’s best to build your own blog that you have total control over. As for getting shut down by an affiliate program, the best way to diversify your risk will be to NOT put all your eggs in one basket.
Use different affiliate programs and promote different products. Even if one program shuts you down, you’ll still have earnings coming from another. That’s the ideal measure to protect yourself and your online income.

Paul Beamon