I recently read Leo Laporte’s post about wasting time on social media and it inspired me to write my perspective on creating content for someone else’s platform. I equate this to working at a large company or grinding away at a job just to pay the bills. A lot of your effort spent on someone else’s dreams. Not only are you building someone else’s platform for them , but you are neglecting yours. Yes, there are cogs and people perfectly fine with this, but from an entrepreneur’s prospective, this is pure agony.
I came across a friend’s website who was using Posterous as their primary blog for their tech startup company. The blog content was very well written, keyword rich and focused. Why the hell would you not want this content on your own domain? The SEO benefits are huge, especially since the content is very useful and targeted. Please stop donating this much energy to someone else’s project. If there is any benefit of having a Posterous blog over your own blog, someone please correct me.
Of course the vitality of a social network relies on user generated content. There are plenty of people fueling the fire. However, if you are in the content creation business, every ounce of your creativity should be poured into your personal blog or website. Three benefits of hosting your own content come to mind: Centralization, Ownership, and SEO.
Centralization: All of your data and life’s work is in one location and can easily be managed and filter. Ever tried to export your data from Facebook or Twitter? Without third-party software it’s nearly impossible.
Ownership: You create, host and essentially own the content. These social networks are free for a reason. The data you put in them is very valuable.
SEO: Google and Bing love fresh content. If YOUR fresh content is hosted on another site (i.e. yoursite.posterous.com) search engines will like that “other” site over your domain. This is essentially a complete waste of time from an SEO standpoint. Even if you link back to your site within the content, it will be a nofollow link with no SEO juice.
Social networks are fun and serve a purpose, but if you are using them as your company’s primary blog, you’re a donkey. Even personal blogs could benefit from the content and energy being poured into other people’s platforms. On a hyper-local level, you could easily dominate keywords in search engines. To illustrate: you go to a restaurant in a small city and take picture of your meal. Naturally, you would post this to Facebook and say something stupid like “Nom nom nom, sushi!”. Instead, post it to your personal blog with a title like “Sushi in Smallville” write a short article on the place. 3 months later you’re on the top 10 search engine results page for the keyword phrase “Sushi in Smallville” and your traffic just increased.
I plan on implementing this strategy and see how it affects my social media content and blog traffic. It is a no-brainer if you have a brand and company, but on a personal level it makes sense and is definitely worth a shot. Stop working for someone else and throw yourself a bone.
Knowing that at some point, my provider is going to shut down or lose my data has been a major deterrent for me to create more content online. I can’t stand the thought of doing a bunch of work and then it being destroyed just because someone’s business model changes or collapses!
I do use posterous for my own domain, http://www.benWoz.com but I populate it via their email bridge. I do the same thing with twitter using ping.fm. This helps me maintain a balance of creating content but still keep a backup of my data.
Of course, if gmail goes away, I’m screwed but who wants to maintain their own mail server too?
Having your own domain (www.benwoz.com) is a lot better than benwoz.posterous.com. However, I am still on the fence with it being hosted on Posterous. If you look at your HTTP responses in a packet sniffer, it bounces around with 302 redirects from posterous.com to benwoz.com. Now the question is, how does this affect SEO and if you were to migrate to another host, what happens to your links?
My guess is that you will be fine if you migrate your data to another location. This is a good discussion and I would like to get an SEO expert’s opinion on it.
Having your own domain (www.benwoz.com) is a lot better than benwoz.posterous.com. However, I am still on the fence with it being hosted on Posterous. If you look at your HTTP responses in a packet sniffer, it bounces around with 302 redirects from posterous.com to benwoz.com. Now the question is, how does this affect SEO and if you were to migrate to another host, what happens to your links?
My guess is that you will be fine if you migrate your data to another location. This is a good discussion and I would like to get an SEO expert’s opinion on it.