I wrote about having your own website quite a while back. At the time, blogs were popular and social media sites hasn’t reached the peak yet.

As I recently moved my courses to a new course hosting platform, I thought I’d add a few more benefits to being able to control you online presence.

_What is important is for me to be able to update all my links to point to the new location.
_

What does this have to do with having my own domain?

I have a lot of links different YouTube videos, Twitter updates, LinkedIn and post scattered all over the internet that point to my courses. Not only would it be too time consuming to change them and it is likely impossible to find edit the links one by one.

Some of the links can’t be edited too.

Fortunately what I’ve done in the past is to use a redirection plugin for all those links. That means I can update the links to point to the new url.

So instead of the actual links to the course, I have links that looks like //jameswoo.net/course-1/ instead of the actual link to the course, and I can edit the destination of my links on my own website.

Initially the reason is just to have a shorter branded link. No doubt it is a bit longer than say a bit.ly link or a Goo.gl link.

With the free bit.ly or Goo.gl link shortening or redirects, I wouldn’t be able to edit the destination of the link to point to the new location.

Hosting my own redirects allowed me to do that.

Since the plugin in inside Wordpress, I just took less than 5 minutes to update them all. It would have been a nightmare to locate and change the links if I have to do it on my YouTube description.

Based on what I found it cost quite a lot of money per month on a paid bit.ly plan in order to have the feature that allows you to edit the destination.

Hosting my own website just cost a few dollars each month.

One more reason why having your own domain and website is so useful.

And also if you link to any page that is important, remember to use a redirect or link shortener.

Update 2019 Oct

Two things happened recently.

First I found out that one of the largest local FB Groups of around 80,000 plus members was shut down by Facebook.

The exact reason for shutting down the group doesn’t really matter.

The thing that matters is the group was used for business purposes and overnight everything was gone for the people who depend on the group for business. That includes the admin of the group not just the members.

Years of hard work.

The second thing. One of my client’s YouTube channel got suspended. Upon appeal the suspension was lifted but for a few days he panicked.

I strongly suggest that you don’t know depend solely on third party platforms i.e. platforms that you don’t control especially if you are doing business.

That platform is your website.

Nothing fancy

You don’t need a fancy website. Just a few pages first that allows you to have a focus point on the internet.

If you need help to figure this out, contact me for some free advice because each business is different.