Outposting your business, and why you shouldn't do it

When you think of an outpost, you probably picture some sort of lonely fortress on a distant hilltop.You'd be right, of course, at least in the normal, everyday world. But what is an internet outpost, and what does it have to do with a crafting business? Keep reading!

Any time you set up a place online where your work can be found, it's an outpost. This blog, my Etsy shop, my Facebook page, Twitter - All of these are outposts.
But wait, you're thinking. Why are you saying outposting is bad when you have so many outposts of your own?
Outposting in and of itself isn't a bad thing, but the idea is simple: Never put all your eggs in one basket, and definitely never put them all in a basket that doesn't belong to you.

It's important to have your own website, and it's now easier than ever to make one. I keep a site of my own for my writing (which you can see here) and it's great, because it's ad-free webspace that's completely under my control. I back up my own content and the only way it's going anywhere is if I decide not to pay the hosting bill. No one closes my site except for me. I'll never have to worry about my portfolio vanishing out from underneath me, it won't go anywhere unless I decide it will!

But why all the outposts, if I have my own site?
Because accidents happen, too. Web hosts suffer outages due to hardware or power failure. Sites get hacked and forced offline until repairs are made. Accounts get suspended because you forgot to change the autobill information after you got your new debit card. Not that I've ever done that one, or anything.

While none of these will put your site out of commission permanently, it's important to keep alternate avenues of communication at your fingertips so that your clients know you're still around. It only takes one attempt to refresh a missing page for visitors to get scared and think their order is lost in the ether, trust me! But if you've also set up communication outposts on social media sites, it only takes a moment to share a message saying that you're aware of the outage and everything is okay, and will be back to working order soon.

Even if you set up shop on your own webspace, always keep a separate communications outpost. This can be social media platforms like Twitter or Facebook, or even a mailing list with the email addresses of your customers. Never back yourself into a corner by having your work found only where other people control it.

For a quicker explanation to finish things out, here's a short story: My husband does a lot of art and posts a great deal of it online. Aside from his personal blogs, he also posted it places like deviantART and CGHub. Then one day, CGHub - and everything on it - just vanished. No warning, no explanation, just there one minute and gone the next. Nobody had a chance to back up their work, and several prolific artists found themselves in trouble, because their CGHub gallery served as their online portfolio, showing off their work and drawing new business in. Without warning, they had no way to contact fans or clients, nothing. They lost their entire following in an instant because one site vanished.
All because they outposted their work.