Why It’s Always Worth Building Your Own Digital Platform

When you’re selling expertise, it’s always worth the investment of time and a few coins to build your own digital platform.

Where you can attract and engage YOUR people using your unique messaging—and where you control the outcome.

If you need an example why this is a great idea, I’ll give you two: Etsy.com and the billionaire boys’ club now controlling a hefty chunk of our public communications.

Etsy raised their seller fees from 5% to 6.5%. That’s a 30% blanket increase that scales as their customers’ sales increase. Great deal if you’re etsy, but not so much if you’re selling on it.

Said one seller: “Technically we are just customers of Etsy because they have a platform and we’re on it,” she told NPR. “But we are also the laborers for them and they make money directly off our labor.”

So they called a “strike” which ended last month with no signs that fee reductions are in the works.

And of course you know that Elon Musk bought Twitter. While the jury hasn’t even convened yet, you can pretty much bet there will be open season on harassment, misogyny and downright meanness (not that there isn’t plenty already on Twitter and the other socials).

Zuckerberg has Instagram and Facebook, Bezos the Washington Post and let’s not forget the Murdoch media empire.

A handful of billionaires controls a frightening portion of how and where we communicate.

While there are plenty of larger societal implications of this control, I want to focus on just one point here: if you’re selling expertise, you must own your own platform.

That means a website that is the central hub for all things you/your firm.

It means an email list so you can reach your people anytime you like.

It means not relying on any one social platform as your primary lead generation or sales system.

And it means getting dead serious about who you want in your world, how you transform their lives/work and how you’ll bring them together in a meaningful way.

Do this work and you won’t ever again need to rely on someone else’s caprice.

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