Monday, November 11, 2019

YouTube, Your own website and Blog, Cons, Patreon, Kickstarter or Social Media?

What?

I mean if your a creator, what is most useful to you for you to get your work out there to be found?

We have had our website for 15 years but the Internet has changed a lot in that time, so I wish I knew, but have found plenty of opinions on it, and it is all changing all the time.

The short answer is Twitter, Facebook and Instagram are very poor. They are very poor for discovery and the type of interaction they encourage is useless. The algorithms are against you, and they have also impacted the rest of the internet, website and blogs.  I think mostly by keeping people on the closed Social Media sites, as they are addictive, rather than doing something useful.

Any Social Media platform is just a very fast flowing river, where you throw something into it, and a few may have seen it out the corner of their eye before it rushes past down stream, but is gone before any body actually notices it, let alone decides to have a close look at what ever that was. 

Years ago forums were really useful for learning and getting known in a community. But forums aren't a growing area anymore, and groups on Facebook are no where near as useful as a forum.

I made my own YouTube channel 9 years ago, and I think the results I had years ago are far better than now. Videos back then got 1,000s of views. Anything I make now will only get 1 sometimes.  YouTube changed their algorithms, and continue to do so. My guess is the develops at YouTube have fallen for what appears to be a profitable approach used by Facebook, but in reality most likely isn't at all.

My own website gets far more accesses than anything else I've tried. But everything I do, such as blogs or posts to a forum point back to it.

Website URLs take some time to work their way into Google search if you create a new website. I have now done this twice, and so realize how important the DNS I bought is, and how much effort setting up a site with all the stuff needed to be processed by a search engine is.  I made a mistake at the time to get a .com.au instead of a .com but from memory that was the cheaper option at the time, even if it isn't now.

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