I have always been fascinated by the amount of energy Bouwer ploughs into making a podcast. I actually featured in one of them, in exchange for one of his Liefde Wen hoodies. I asked him if he was worried about spending so much energy on a project that wouldn’t generate an income. He was not bothered.
The point of the podcast is to build a proven track record, so I can leverage that currency to land bigger interviews. Your clout isn’t always measurable only in cash. I’m just building influence, for now. Playing the long game.
If this fires up your interest in setting up a site of your own, it doesn’t have to cost much any longer. Thanks to services like Wix.com, designing a website is now even simpler than helping your grandparents set up a Facebook profile. Or you can build your website on Wordpress.com if you want to flex or strengthen your amateur-developer muscles. Regardless of which route you take, you can seamlessly and affordably set up hosting and e-mail integration on Google’s G Suite in record time – complete with a fancy business-like e-mail address, such as [email protected].
In fact, while you’re at it, take a short digital course on search engine optimisation (SEO) so that you can ensure your website pops up where it needs to. These skills are never wasted and even if you eventually abandon the idea of having the website up and running for whatever reason, at least you’ve parked your domain. Just in case.
I have a website of my own, I own a domain and although it is still visible and active for now, it has fallen entirely out of use, both by me and in terms of traffic on it. And for now, I’m totally okay with that. Any web platform remains relevant only for as long as someone updates it and there are users consuming what is on it. If those two things stop happening, it simply crumbles into irrelevance, like a sandcastle.
Proof of this can be found in the story of the biggest social media network on earth between 2005 and 2008: Myspace. At the peak of the Myspace era, it was synonymous with the words social and network – effectively it was Facebook before Facebook. Myspace boasted 100 million active users, which was incredible for the time. In fact, as a music portal it jump-started the careers of well-known musicians such as Calvin Harris, Sean Kingston, Lily Allen and the Arctic Monkeys. I even know a couple, who are now married, who met on Myspace.
So, if you’ve never heard of it, take it from me: it was a thing – a big one! And yet, it has since imploded so spectacularly that in 2019 all user data (images, music and videos) from before 2016 were accidentally deleted as a result of a faulty server migration. What makes it worse is that I didn’t even know about the 2019 loss of data, even though I had a Myspace account, so I was one of those 100 million users.
This is not the only story of its kind. Google+ (sometimes written as Google Plus), a social network started by the mighty Google (of all companies), was another failed social network. It started in 2011 and closed down entirely in 2019.
I am not explaining all of this in such vivid detail because I enjoy a trip down memory lane – although it is fun to reflect and reminisce. I am trying to warn against the impression that all the data you have uploaded to social networks and the audience you have built on these platforms will exist forever. They might, but what if they don’t?
Things change, they move on, and you need to ensure that your influencer business is nimble and substantive enough to outlive the platform itself, much like Calvin Harris’s career outlived Myspace. It is important to remember that what feels like the career of your dreams at the moment (a massive audience on a particular social media platform) might turn out to be a pop culture blip in the long run. This also isn’t unique to social media. I have hosted many TV shows that had faithful daily or weekly viewers for years on end, which have now disappeared. In fact, the entire TV channel that hosted the first TV show I ever presented no longer exists.
Your favourite platform might cease to exist, users might simply stop visiting it, or worse: you might lose interest entirely. If all three happen, for whatever reason, where would that leave you? If you can live with your answer, then proceed. If you can’t, start building a digital bomb shelter of sorts.
This could mean building a website or perhaps simply diversifying enough that your content exists across a few different platforms so that you reach your audience through a variety of means. Perhaps what ultimately works for you is an approach that involves not only social media but also traditional media (which is probably the best way to describe my own business model) or one that isn’t only content driven, but also has an entrepreneurial thread: making gorgeous wedding videos like Katinka does, or perhaps making adverts like Bouwer does. Perhaps it’s starting a line of swimsuits, like Nadia Jaftha’s, or a restaurant like Buns Out – à la Maps Maponyane?
What to dish up and where
On the
