Checking the Facebook tweekers into rehab
Published: Sun, 11/01/20
“Please leave my name out but feel free to share: My company’s FB page has over 100k real followers and our live streams get under 300 views - sometimes even less than 100! And you know they are coming for groups next.”
The context:
That email he was replying to told a real life story that happened to an “Email Players” subscriber watching his wife's once thriving Facebook live-driven business be reduced to nearly nothing from powers beyond their control.
And, hopefully, was quite sobering to the Facebook tweekers.
Then came this even more sobering follow-up question:
“But is anything really ‘ours’? Couldn't our web host shut us down at any moment, just like Youtube or Facebook? Genuinely curious to know your thoughts, as I am building and learning from you.”
The answer:
If you can export it, it’s yours, and is an asset.
Thus, regularly backup your list to a secret place.
Then backup that on a secure cloud.
Do that and if your site is shut down, you’re de-platformed, or even if you're exiled to another country… you can always put up a new site, on a totally new domain, and keep selling that list offers as an affiliate or via JVs, etc… and everything is status quo.
The security is in your regularly backed-up email & direct mail lists.
No web host, social media, or other platform can take those from you.
Another sobering real life story about this:
Vincent James (author of the 12-Month Millionaire — doing millions per month one day, broke & in a Federal prison in the desert the next…) said in an interview he did with Michael Senoff many years ago that, if he could do it all over again… he’d have backed up his customer list each day, kept it on a USB thumb drive on his key chain, left the country as soon as he knew something was rotten in Denmark at his bank, etc, and been able to literally do business anywhere he wanted, while being able to negotiate his freedom from abroad while still doing business.
Most people won’t have to be that paranoid about it.
But, apply the backing up part to your email list, and at least you’ll always have options should you get de-platformed.
Finally, one more thing about lists:
A little while back I talked about the realities of big tech platforms, owning vs controlling your own platforms, and a walk through of all the various platform opportunities floating around. I put this talk in our Learnistic app, and anyone who signs up to get a free test drive of the app can access it by doing this:
1. Going into the Learnasium in the app
2. Go to C’App’n Troy’s blog
3. Listen to the “Profit from evil platforms” audio
If you don’t have your test drive, go here:
https://www.EmailPlayers.com/learnistic
Ben Settle
P.S. And if you are politically to the right of the site Mother Jones and naively use Mail Chimp, I'd back up your list hourly, if I were you. I will talk more soon about the coming various email platform crackdowns that are only gonna get worse after the Trumpocalypse Tuesday.
Stay tuned.