It is time to consider your digital independence. You may not realize how easily your hard earned and build digital presence could disappear if it is built on social media platforms. If you are not careful, you could suddenly lose it all! So, let’s establish a digital home base that cannot be taken away from you.

Introduction

Welcome to the start of season three of the Reptile Entrepreneur Podcast. This outreach is to present tools that help members of the reptile community build a business. The theme for this year is independence. The digital world is dominated by social media, but the ease of creating an account and following on these platforms has a dark side. First, the platform is in control of everything you build. You can be removed or demonetized at their whim with neither warning nor recourse. Second, you are forced to play by their rules which may or may not serve your community. We saw this with Instagram trying to transform into a short form video entertainment app and dragging us all with them whether we liked it or not. Just a painful reminder that If you build on other people’s platforms you are only renting your account.

Be your own boss

This season will have a focus on websites, email lists, and podcasts. These are the three pillars of digital independence. They are often pushed to the background as TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube give a much quicker return on much less investment. As I have said, and will continue to say, this doesn’t mean you don’t use those platforms. It means you have a balanced portfolio of platforms under your belt and know exactly what your exposure and risk is.

Our prime focus will be websites. How they can be used to their greatest potential

I know many of you have it in the back of your mind that you want or need a website. But it isn’t straight forward just how to do it and it is just a lot of work. Yes, yes, and yes. First we will talk about if you need a website. Not everyone needs a website and maybe you will eventually, but not right now. Maybe you know you need one, but you just keep putting it off. Well, I am going to spend a season introducing you to websites and getting into the weeds on execution. This season, it is my job to get my listeners to an actionable level of comfort with creating websites. So, if you need a website and have been putting it off, then I invite you to subscribe to this podcast and join me for every episode. If you stick with me you will have your website started by the end of Spring. And by the end of the year it will be a fully functioning e-commerce website constructed with a deliberate strategy to serve you best.

If you are not a website candidate then I invite you to follow along anyways as I will be discussing high level strategy with each episode as well. And this will be useful even if you are just using Linktr.ee or other link aggregator as an effective website substitute.

Now, please allow me all of two minutes to explain how this season is different from the past seasons. You will still be getting an entrepreneurial podcast episode every Monday. But in this season I am splitting up the episodes between the Reptile Entrepreneur and a new show called the Niche Content Creator Podcast. They will trade off every other Monday. So, in effect, you are still getting a weekly podcast.

The reason this makes sense is because there are two main paths for entrepreneurs in the reptile community. One path is a business selling some sort of product. This could be 3D printed accessories, a breeding operation, or any other e-commerce. The other main path is that of an educator or influencer.

The Reptile Entrepreneur Podcast will deal specifically with starting a e-Commerce business in the reptile world. And I will demonstrate in reptile community examples and have reptile themed current events reporting.

The Niche Content Creator will be about strategies in writing content which includes blog posts, podcast episodes, YouTube videos, or posting anything on Instagram or TikTok. These subjects are right at home with what we have been doing. The only difference is that I will be making the examples general purpose. And this strikes a good balance for my personal outreach portfolio. I have a super niche outreach with my Chameleon Academy, a more broad, yet still niche, Reptile community niche outreach with the Reptile Entrepreneur and then I have a general outreach with the Niche Content Creator. There is value in niching down and value in going broad. Of course, we will be discussing that dynamic as well in an episode not too far away. Niching down or going broad is not an easy decision. But that is for later.

Understanding the social media situation

So let’s address the need for owning your own platform directly. Simply put, Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube (and any other social media platform) are not your friends. You work for them. They allow you space on their platform and put you in front of millions to even billions of eyes. In exchange, you create content that they can sell ads against. And, in most cases, you are doing this for free. They give you digital likes, views, and follows and you continue creating content for them. YouTube is a notable exception with its ad review share where you get 55% and they get 45%. Sounds sweet, right? Well, except that YouTube is still in total control. How many times have we heard about YouTube implementing a new policy and creators suddenly having their income slashed? It actually happened last month as YouTube tightened their restrictions against swearing. Once again, the point is not the swearing. It is the owner of the platform which is responsible for your income changing the rules without warning and doing so retroactively. And this can affect you whether you swear or not. Those of you that are involved with breeding reptiles know how a company policy can be applied against you. As these social media apps are private companies they do not have to allow anything that is legal. They can, and will, adjust their policies with the loudest voices. That is great when you agree with them, but not so great when they are targeting your livelihood.

The huge problem is in how they wield their power over you. Whether your content on YouTube is monetized or not is completely in their hands and can be revoked at any time without warning or recourse. I just want to warn you that the phrase “without warning or recourse” applies to almost everything social media platforms do to you.

More dramatically, your account can be removed. This is not being alarmist. Facebook and Instagram are actively hostile towards any sales of animals. This is in their rules and they do not give warnings. If you are found to be in violation of any of their policies you simply disappear. And good luck talking to someone to ask why. They are getting a little better at helping, but don’t expect much. I hear about reptile breeder accounts being removed from Instagram every month. As careful as you may be to not discuss sale and as tricky as you think you are saying “looking to fly”, if someone reports you, you become a target for investigation and they will look into your Direct Messages. Those are not private. And if your Instagram account was your main marketing outreach then you have serious issues if you do not have an outreach elsewhere. Now, you may ask how some very prominent breeders continue blatantly selling and not being bothered. They, simply, have not yet been reported. Instagram seems to have the attitude that they will only mess with you if someone reports you and they are forced to take action. Otherwise, they are happy to not look for trouble. Of course, they do not communicate that at all. That is just my feeling. Facebook literally deputized any animal rights people to go out and report groups for removal. Instagram seems to live and let live unless they are forced to deal with a violation on selling. Though this is hardly a consolation if someone got annoyed at you and sic’ed the inhuman Instagram artificial intelligence on you. TikTok has a similar policy against animal sales, but seems to be more busy with political and religious fights. Just don’t get complacent over there just because you don’t have the attention yet. Attention tends to come when it is least desired.

There is also a secondary and slightly insidious trap in focusing too much on a certain social media platform. And that is a conflict of interest between you and the platform. 

Unless you are paying to be on the platform, social media makes money by keeping people on their platform and serving up ads. The more you scroll Instagram and TikTok the more ads you are seeing and the more money they make. So, their goal is to push material that keeps people scrolling. TikTok harnessed the addictive goldmine of the short form video that Vine introduced. And Instagram jumped right in to not be left behind. So, right at this moment in time, you have been forced to do videos to get any sort of reach. YouTube is now getting serious about short form video and including it with their monetization which will be a game changer.

Many people have been able to use short form video to effectively present their material. Others have had to split their efforts between the videos that will get reach and the content that will serve their outreach. 

When you get to the core of the issue, it can be a conflict of interest. And, I ask that you allow me a bit of grace as I attempt to explain a subtle shift here. The platforms make money by showing ads. Thus they will incentivize content you produce that will appeal to the widest range of people. They reward you with lots of red digital hearts when you give them content which a lot of people like. The problem comes if your outreach is more specialized and is not really of interest to the general public. So, if you want to get more of those digital hearts and followers you might be tempted to create content that is more sensational. If your outreach is all about you getting bitten by snakes and being chased by crocodiles then your purpose aligns with the short form video algorithms and life is good. Enjoy your heaps of followers. But if you have a serious reptile education outreach you will soon realize that explaining proper husbandry is hit or miss as far as getting reach. And so you may create content specifically for reach and then content for your core audience. This starts the watering down of your outreach. When you see the reach numbers between the serious and the sensationalistic you will naturally make more and more of what gives you what you perceive as success – which is growth. And, truly, follower count or subscribers is a powerful metric by which you will be judged and opportunities will be based on. So it is not really a vanity metric in that sense. But it is a deception because the more you appeal to the masses for that reach you are addicted to, the more your follower count is filled with people just wanting to see you get bitten again, for example.

The point I am trying to make is that, if you get too caught up in using Instagram, TikTok, or YouTube’s success measurement as a measure of the success of your outreach, you could be watering down your outreach. I know I struggle with this all the time. I know my deep explanations of chameleon husbandry concepts will go nowhere with the Instagram algorithm. But chamelons eating? Those score high. And if I just keep posting chameleons eating or biting my finger then I will fill my subscriber base with people who just want to see me get bitten and do not care about proper hydration techniques. You may say that those followers may not really benefit me, but that they really don’t hurt. And, to an extent that is true. But there is an opportunity cost. How much of my true outreach is being reduced because of the time I am spending trying to win at the Instagram game? See how it can sneak up on you? Before long you wake up, go straight to check your Instagram or TikTok stats and realize you are working for someone else.

Sure, you get views and follows. And you may get a couple hundred dollars every month. But that is like getting a salary working for another company. You are getting only a fraction of the value you bring the platform. Now, it is true that, in exchange, the platform makes it easy to set up, they maintain the experience, and they give you a feeling of security. Much like your standard employment is suppose to do. And, this may be enough for you to have a solid business. You can produce designs for your print on demand business and conduct your entire business on Instagram or TikTok. But you know that feeling of being a slave to your TikTok or Instagram? How when you don’t post you are falling behind? You can’t get away from that in the real world, but we could make it to where 100% of that effort goes to you. And for that we need both a product and a platform that is all yours.

The solution: A website

Now, I have done a good job describing what is wrong with the social media world. But you would be rightfully disappointed if I did not bring this around to an actionable item to avoid these pitfalls. And, I do. It is called a website. There are many things to be said about a website. The first two I would like to bring up is how it contrasts the two big problems with social media I listed above.

First, you own the domain name, which is the website address, and the website. As long as you aren’t doing anything illegal, your website hosting provider is not going to tell you what you can or cannot do on your website. So it is a safe investment to dedicate resources to building the website up. The downside is that you launch a website and no one is there for your grand opening except for a couple of bots ready to spam your comments section unless you do the marketing yourself. So there is a sizable burden on your shoulders. Growth will go much more slowly than your social media outreach where you can open an account and rack up the followers. But here is where the concept of a balanced outreach portfolio comes in to play. Imagine you have a robust website as your central hub. You then can do Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Twitter, Pinterest and whatever other outreach you want and they are just spokes in your portfolio driving people to your website central hub. If Instagram goes down for whatever reason, your business is still humming. Your business cannot be taken down by the decisions of one platform in your marketing portfolio.

Secondly, unlike the social media algorithms that reward mindless scrolling, the Google search algorithm that crawls the entire internet has its interests aligned with you and will reward you serving your core audience in the most effective way possible. This is because Google gets its money by being the best search engine available. They are the best when the people who type in questions are shown a proper answer. So, someone searching for Veiled Chameleon UVB requirements on Google will be shown my website blog post explaining that detailed topic. The searcher will get exactly what they want and Google will give my website a bump in status. Google is not about any mindless scroll. They are about the searcher finding the answer they need. So a website is where you get rewarded for serving your exact core audience best. You are being rewarded for quality with the Google search engine.

This change in algorithm approach is significant and you need to make sure you are taking advantage of it. You may not realize how social media is training you to be superficial. Time to wear different hats!

We have a trend of cheap content creation. Throw whatever we can on the post, publish it, and get on to the next post. Quality has taken a back seat to quantity in this short form video world. Though I am sure the world will start demanding quality more and more. We are already seeing the masses getting tired of seeing everyone mindlessly jumping on whatever the latest trend is. But, for its entire existence, the Google algorithm has focused on finding quality information. And, every year, it is refined to do its job better and better. So we can settle into doing things which we can actually be proud of. Kind of refreshing, isn’t it!

When is it right to start a website?

With all these great things I am saying about having a website, you still have to make a strategic decision as to when it is right for you to have one. Starting and maintaining a website is non-trivial. There is a healthy amount of working and building and maintaining that goes into it and, like everything we do, we need to consider the opportunity cost. What else could we be doing with that time?

If a website is a little much to take on right now, there are effective substitutes for a website if you want to take a middle step. And that is the bio-link, or link aggregator tools like Linktr.ee or, my favorite, Koji. These are the tools that allow you to have a lot of links in the one link that Instagram allows you. And these services have become so feature rich that they are really the beginnings of a website and offer much of the functionality. So these are a good middle step until you are ready for the website. They do cost money if you want functions beyond the basics, but they are like having a simple website without the pain of getting a domain and hosting. That said, nothing gives a sense of digital stability, to both you and your audience, like a website. I have a hard time coming up with an outreach that would not benefit from a website at some point. But it is worth going through some considerations as to whether this is the right time for you to make one or not.

Should you make a website?

So, let’s bounce around some ideas.

First, just what is your product that gives you money? Does that benefit from having a digital home base off social media? For example, if your product is baby crested geckos which you breed and want to sell then a website is critical. This is because you have a product that a website offers a better purchasing experience and a safer place to invest your resources.

So, who may not need a website? Perhaps a YouTuber. If you make your money via your YouTube account you want to be very careful sending people away from that account. Every platform in your outreach portfolio should funnel your viewers, listeners, and followers to the platform where you make your money. So, for the crested gecko breeder, the website is where all the inventory is shown and an e-commerce engine allows sales to be made. All social media outreach should link to the website.

A YouTuber who’s income is from people watching videos would have their YouTube account as the central hub and all the rest of their outreach should link to the YouTube account. In this case, there needs to be a compelling reason for a website. These aren’t hard to find. Perhaps you want a more extensive merchandise store than the shelf on YouTube allows. Perhaps you intend to create a blog post for every YouTube video with the intention of gaining more viewers from the Google search algorithm. Google has done more and more about including YouTube videos in search results, but adding a blog supercharges the search traffic. Or maybe you want to start a consulting business as a result of your YouTube success. A website is the place to take those people. YouTube is a noisy environment. There are always distractions presented. Interesting videos to draw your customers away never to return. So, if you have a product beyond your videos, then you want to option of leading your potential customer to a quieter environment where they can read about your services without the promise of a cute cat video in the corner of their eye.

But if you are working 100% on building up your YouTube channel you could put off constructing a website. Though consider that it is worth locking in the domain address and putting up a four page website that has a home page, about us, contact us, and blog. This can both lock in that address so people don’t take your show name, generate a profile in the Google search index, and the blog post per YouTube video will keep your website fresh and strengthen the Google search traffic to your video. It is a very simple website and requires minimal effort each week to keep active. I have stretched my imagination to come up with a scenario where a website is not beneficial, but I am really having a hard time of it.

Websites for Podcasters or YouTubers?

Now, I’d like to make a special mention of websites for podcasters and YouTubers who have been doing this long term. Both podcasters and YouTubers end up creating a vast amount of content which has evergreen value – meaning they hold valuable information that should not be left to die under the constant churn of social media.  As content creators we throw something out there and within a week or two or even a day or two it is buried under the weight of millions of other pieces of content being thrown out there. And social media is horrible as far as retaining content. You could argue that YouTube, as the world’s second largest search engine has a method to keep videos made five years ago still accessible, but that is a problem in itself. YouTube does not allow you to update information. If your most popular video is from five years ago then it doesn’t matter how many times you do a video to update the information, that old video is a darling of the algorithm and your new videos might languish. Your website, on the other hand, can be constantly updated. You will actually get rewarded by the Google algorithm for keeping your pages updated. Obviously, if you are a content creator/influencer whose approach is a vlog style where the value is in what you are doing today then the social media system is fine. But if you are creating a library of information, such as what many podcasters are doing, then you need to seriously consider a website. Unlike YouTube, podcast search is primitive at best. And it is breathtaking how much community knowledge is buried under miles of content created over the years. But a website with a robust search function and curated playlists can keep your hard work and that valuable information constantly available.

The Basic Website

Let’s start at the very beginning. We all know what a website is. And we use them without thinking about it by this time. But let’s take a step back and think about what makes a website you would like to use. Many of us spend much of our online time on social media where we get our constant dopamine fix. This is entertainment. There is some overlap with research and learning. YouTube is the prime example of that dynamic. But we end up going to a website when we want to learn about a person or company or product. We go to a website when we want to purchase a product. We go to a website when we want to do some deeper research. There are no cut and dry definitions and, as soon as there are, there is someone breaking those rules successfully, but for now we can think of social media as what is happening right now with daily variance and a website as a good place for evergreen content.

And you will hear that term a lot as we talk about content creation. Evergreen content is information that doesn’t have an expiration date. It is talking about how to write a blog post, for example. Timely content is talking about an event that will happen next week. If someone reading it gets to the middle and realizes that they can’t be part of the discussion because it happened last year, that would be timely.

Blogs

Websites do have blogs which are often used like journal entries and can have timely elements if desired. But social media has hijacked that. Blogs still are powerful tools, but the number of people using websites in this manner have decreased. Social media has done a great job bringing all these content creators into one place so you don’t have to website hop to see what everyone is doing. The blog component can still be used this way, but it has a much more powerful benefit. And that is to create posts specifically to attract search engines. By answering a commonly asked question about your niche once a week, the blog feature could be a weekly invitation to Google to consider your website a good place to send people looking for answers.

Website Structure

And it doesn’t take much to have a clean website that has a home landing page, About Us, and Contact Us pages. A three page website does the job of establishing your existence. It is functional and effective. And then you can add that blog page which has a weekly post to answer commonly asked questions or every time you post a YouTube video, for example. The regular posting keeps the website active and alive in the Google search engine’s eyes. So just three menu tabs on a four page website and you have a functional, effective, and dynamic website. Add a page for merch sales and the five page website is functional, effective, dynamic, and brings in some cold hard digital cash. You know, now we are talking! So, I am hoping you can see how a website can be useful and relatively simple to set up and keep active. It does require adding another content stream to your weekly work load. But a blog post does not have to be a completely different topic. Once again, answer a question on your blog post and on your YouTube video and your blog post essentially becomes your written version of your YouTube video. There are many people for whom the blog post is their main outreach and, with advertising and affiliate link can make a comfortable income. So, let’s bring this website concept into your realm of not only consideration, but also action item list!

Action Items

Right now, your action item is to determine if now is the right time to start your website. If not, then keep listening to this podcast and you will be very ready when the time comes. If so, then we are going to get started in getting things together. Think about what you would like a website to do for you. Here is the schedule going forward.

Next week the Niche Content Creator Podcast will launch and we will start talking about the purpose and the process of writing content. What does it mean for it to be authentic, searchable, and relevant? You may ask what this has to do with a website. Well, many an excited website owner has stopped dead in the water once they have a website hosted and there is a blank page facing them. What do I write and why? That would be content!

The week after that, the Reptile Entrepreneur will discuss search. This is the currency of websites. You can play around with home pages and making a blog post, but to be truly serious you need to know how to talk so search engines recognize you. This is the huge discipline of SEO, or Search Engine Optimization. This will tell you the simple things to consider when writing that will make a huge difference in making your content findable and identifiable by Google or Bing or whatever search engine spider is strolling by.

If you are excited to get going and you want to get your domain name, hosting, and your website on the way then I have three steps for you.

1. Go to the reptileentrepreneur.com website and look for the menu tab “courses”. In there you will find a step by step guide to getting a domain name and procuring hosting.
2. Subscriber to the Reptile Entrepreneur YouTube channel where I will be having step-by-step tutorials for the entire process. You will notice that we talk strategy in the podcast, but the YouTube videos will show you exactly how to carry it out!
3. If you want a deeper ongoing discussion where you can ask questions and get a deeper, longer, and more personalized answers then join the Reptile Entrepreneur Patreon where the podcast episodes and YouTube episodes will be released ahead of public release and we will be working through the lessons.If you want a website, I am going to make sure you are able to put one together! You can click on this link for the Reptile Entrepreneur Patreon.
4. Closing

So, in closing this first episode I suppose I should introduce myself and this show.

My name is Bill Strand and I welcome you to the Reptile Entrepreneur Podcast. We focus on actionable items here that will improve your outreach and business.

The Reptile Entrepreneur Podcast is a true niche podcast. It is an entrepreneurial podcast whose strategies and tactics could be used for any start-up business. But I have chosen to wrap it in the reptile community wrapper because that is where my passion lies. We will talk niches in a later episode and I will share why I deliberately limited my audience outreach. But, if you are coming from another niche and enjoy my style, then please stick around. Everything here applies to building any niche business on the web.

I maintain both a Reptile Entrepreneur YouTube channel for tutorials and an Instagram account for announcements and interacting with my audience.

Thank you very much for joining me for the first episode of Season 3. We have much distance to travel, but I look forward to December when we look back  and see how far we have come!l Take care of yourself, take care of our reptile community, and let’s see what we can build.