Owning your digital space

// The Setup

Time to fess up.

This is a cautionary tale all about putting all your digital eggs in one basket - it’s a mistake I’ve made once before and I’ve recently come to the realisation that I’m making the same mistake again.

I am in the process of designing, building and editing my own ‘new’ website - on the face of it, it was an easy task when I started as all I needed to do was to recreate some of the webpages, update some of the copy and completely strip out all the unnecessary stuff to have a new ‘phresh’ look and feel.

It’s not going to be too hard right?

Just take the pages from this website, update the colours, the fonts, the look and feel and then hit publish.

But then it happened - I got to the ‘blog’ page.

Nearly 100 articles which have been painstakingly created over the last 18 months and now what do I do?

I’d done it again - I’d created this space for myself which had (and still is) cost me money - the subscription costs ever increasing with the additional features of a single platform and now, when I want to make that break, I have to actually do some work.

The decision I’d made, I thought it was a smart one (and it was for a multitude of reasons) but now, I’m stuck.

// The Problem with Consolidation

When I started out on this journey of blogging and creating a weekly consistent newsletter, I made what felt like a logical choice - move all my website and email infrastructure into one ecosystem.

The benefits were clear and I shouted about them loudly, I had streamlined management, centralised tools, and fewer technical headaches - I didn't need to jump around different platforms, bringing together multiple things and linking different spaces.

But here’s the catch - now that I want to pivot (remember that word from COVID - seems to have died off again), I’m discovering just how hard it is to extract myself from this setup.

Convenience has come at a cost and that cost is both time and money.

My Squarespace cost initially started at £14.00 a month - that was just for the website, no emailing, no store functionality. Just to host and allow myself to edit a website.

When I created the website, I asked people I knew to offer their suggestions on where to build and they used their experience to offer spaces, and kindly offered to help build it.

Then came the blog - it started off with a copy and paste exercise from a ‘pre-existing’ blog on Linkedin (which at the time was 3 articles) - these moved over easily enough and then came the emails.

Squarespace lures you in - the ‘starter’ pack for email campaigns allows you to start off and send emails to up to 500 subscribers, yep fine - that’s great because you’re just starting and unless you have a pre-existing audience then you’re not hitting those numbers.

But then the next level hits - you can only send 3 email’s a month - with some months having 5 Tuesdays, that’s not going to work so we have to upgrade.

Let’s upgrade - that’s an extra £16.00 a month.

So we’re now up to £30.00 a month for just a website and the ability to send some emails.

Oh, hang on.. we now want to add some functionality like setting up a ‘store’ - ok, that’s another £10 a month and before you know it - you’re spending £40 a month on just a website.

To some people, that’s not a lot - it’s just £500 a year.

But that is a lot - and it could increase further - depends on whether Squarespace is making a profit or not.

So I needed to change.

// The Social Media Parallel

I am hearing so many rumblings about ‘X’ (formerly Twitter) at the moment and creators, users and people I know who are moving or closing down their accounts - they’re all moving to BlueSky or Threads because Twitter has become Toxic.

I think Twitter has always been toxic - it’s always been a place where people spout nonsense, get abuse regularly and where the rules on what you post are so relaxed that even the owner of Twitter can post nonsense and people will believe it.

But thats the appeal of Twitter - you can post whatever you want so you need to be aware of it all and have a clear separation - your real life and Twitter.

I use Twitter for one purpose really - to get in contact with the customer service people within brands who have failed me. The power of a simple tweet is still inordinately high - you can tweet, the brand can run the risk of ignoring it and causing a storm or they can respond.

9 times out of 10 - they respond and you (me) get the answer we’re looking for.

But I know creators, brands and businesses who have built their entire eco-systems on Twitter - they’ve invested years in creating content, drafting twitter threads and building their audience. They rely on the fact that they use the platform so much that they understand the algorithms and they embed themselves within the eco-system.

There is always an uproar when that algorithm changes or their favourite features disappear or, heaven forbid someone else buys the platform and creates a new model which means you have to actually pay to be verified and get a blue tick.

You have to remember - for all its faults, Twitter was the first platform a few years back to try to get a sense of verification - the whole furore over 'ordinary’ people getting a blue tick was all started by Twitter and Elon found a way to claw back some of those millions he’d sunk into his platform.

Things change.

Platforms can enforce new rules or new features at the drop of a hat - for those who hate short form video and have never stepped into a TikTok feed will hate the changes occurring on Linkedin right now - but we can’t change it.

Eventually, if you build your space on borrowed land, the house of cards will collapse.

Just like I locked myself into a single ecosystem, people lock themselves into platforms they don’t control.

The danger is the same: when you don’t own the foundation, you’re always at risk of losing everything.

// Owning Your Space

I said I’d made this mistake once before and I have - I’d built a sizeable following on Instagram during COVID, I rode the wave of creativity which flourished through lockdown and created graphic content (graphic as in ‘well designed, not ‘naughty’ graphic).

The buzz was real - I created well crafted, well designed posts every day to post and satisfy my audience with creativity. I worked for at least an hour a day on crafting posts, researching subjects and then posting, interacting and bringing new people to my side of Instagram.

The follower count was rising.. I was getting busy with client work on the back of posting..

I was trying to keep up but work, design work, researching, crafting posts, interacting, posting and all the normal daily work led to me just stopping.

I literally just said enough is enough and ceased everything.

When I did stop, I had nothing.

The ‘audience’ I’d built didn’t follow me to this new space, they didn’t reach out and ask what had happened and the trajectory of growth suddenly became a demise.

The follower count which was nudging towards 10,000 at it’s peak has, after two years now shrunk to 7865.. 2000 people have left that channel and have never come back.

Thats the problem I’d created for myself - I’d built on borrowed land and I didn’t have those people on my side - the followers were wonderful whilst they were being served with newly created ‘stuff’ - they lapped it up and the ever increasing follower count became a hook in itself, when you nudge towards 5 figures then it has it’s own allure - the fear of missing out.

But it doesn’t cost a penny (unless you count time as money).

I hope you can grasp what I’m trying to say here - it’s the same message from almost every person who has lived this process - you have to diversify your digital assets and maintain control over your infrastructure.

Whether it’s owning your own domain and email server or spreading your presence across platforms, it’s about creating a safety net of your own space.

// What’s Next for Me

I’m now in the process of disentangling my digital life - a frustrating, time-consuming task but one which does give me ownership and more importantly, flexibility.

I’ve proven to myself and my audience that I can be consistent - I’ve shown up repeatedly and I’ve been able to build a small yet loyal audience.

The Squarespace era of my creativity was needed - the consolidation of everything, the joined up ecosystem was a necessary tool to starting because I had so many barriers in my own head and in my life to think about and having everything linked together was the right thing to do at the time.

If I had to look back and offer you some advice on what you should do - it would definitely still be to consolidate and have everything in one place because the tools and how they’re structured gave me comfort and allowed me to find my voice, then came the consistency.

From that consistency, came this - the blog.

I would however, make a conscious decision to review everything after 6 months and make the leap away whilst the assets are still fairly easy to transfer.

There will always be an element of not owning something in your space - I mean, the website I’m building now is hosted on server infrastructure somewhere and if that does go down then I’ve lost everything but I do have the flexibility to do as I please with it all.

The design I wanted for my website could not have happened on Squarespace, the fonts I wanted were not available, the colours, the layouts - almost everything, I wanted it to be custom.

The fact that my own website won’t have an email provider means I can move the email marketing to a space which doesn’t cost that much - I’m moving everything to ConvertKit (now known as just ‘Kit) and whilst that does have a paid element, the flexibility and the tools are far superior than the Squarespace ones - and if I want to move, I can.

// The Lesson.

If there’s one thing I’ve learnt through all of this, it’s that convenience comes at a cost - a cost you might not realise until you’re trying to untangle yourself from it. I’m not here to say that consolidation is bad; in fact, I’d probably still recommend it to anyone just starting out. When you’re trying to find your rhythm, having everything in one place can make it so much easier to get going.

But the key is this: don’t get comfortable.

I got comfortable. I thought I was being clever by centralising everything - my website, my email campaigns, my blog.

It worked brilliantly at first, and it served its purpose. It gave me the confidence to be consistent, to show up week after week and create something meaningful. But I didn’t think far enough ahead. I didn’t have a plan for what would happen when I wanted to grow beyond that initial setup.

And that’s where I got stuck.

If I could go back, I’d tell myself to enjoy the simplicity of having it all in one place, but to set a reminder - literally a calendar notification - to review it all in six months. To ask myself: “Is this still working for me? Am I gaining flexibility or losing it?” And if the answer was “losing it,” I’d force myself to make a change before it became a massive, time-consuming task.

Because here’s the truth: no platform, no tool, no ecosystem will ever stay exactly the way you want it. Features change. Prices increase. What worked for you at the start might not work for you forever.

So, here’s my advice: own as much of your space as you can. Build something that you can take with you, even if the tools you use today disappear tomorrow. Diversify your digital assets. Spread your risk.

And most importantly? Give yourself room to grow. The comfort of consolidation might feel great at the start, but don’t let it box you in.

Now, I’m doing the work to get myself unstuck. It’s messy, frustrating, and it’s costing me time I wish I could spend elsewhere. But it’s also freeing. I’m taking back control of my space, bit by bit.

So, if you’re reading this and you’ve built something amazing, ask yourself: do you own it, or are you borrowing it? Because if it’s borrowed, it’s time to think about what happens when the rules change.

Trust me, you don’t want to learn that lesson the hard way.