Do-It-Yourself Has Hidden Advantages

There are many things out in the world that you can do yourself. By Do-It-Yourself I am talking about actually learning a skill and completing it yourself instead of having someone else do it for you.

There are crafts and home repair project not to mention auto repair projects that you can learn to do yourself relatively easily if you put your mind to it.

But as you might notice if you look around a bit this is not a blog about auto repair. (In fact we outsource that little chore quite happily). This blog and our business in fact is about marketing.

All kinds of marketing, online and offline and everything in between as my partner is prone to saying. We gear our training towards small business and entrepreneurs with a bit more advanced stuff thrown in to keep things lively.

We essentially teach do-it-yourself marketing. But this isn’t even completely what I was talking about in the title of this post.

What I am talking about is actually having control of things yourself, especially in marketing your company. Sometimes we tend to take the easy way out when we are starting something new. If there is a click a button and it magically works 100% for free way to do something we are all right on board.

And let me tell those of you who do not know this that we DEFINITELY teach about free tools and automation. But sometimes there are things that you should not cut corners on.

This was brought to glaring reality this week by a little hiccup over at WordPress.com.

If you aren’t aware, WordPress.com is a 100% free version of WordPress blogging software that they host for you where you can have your own blog without spending a single dime. Simply fill in about 5 blanks and wa-la you have a blog.

This is wonderful….on the surface. (And it is better than having no blog at all…) Until they have a little hiccup in their programming, which you have absolutely no control over. And that is what happened this week.

Headlines all over the internet read “WordPress.com goes down and takes millions of blogs with it!”

For awhile yesterday millions of blogs ceased to exist all due to a small programming issue. Now when the dust settled all was restored to normal and it was only down for about an hour.

But a couple of lessons are to be learned from this little incident.

• Back up often, back up early and back up often.
  If something had happened and they were gone then all of those blogs, all of those hours of typing and uploading and making things just right would have been gone in a flash. And there isn’t a single thing that anyone would have been able to do about it.

• Consider a self-hosted blog.
  I understand that servers fail all the time and having your own self-hosted blog will not guarantee that you are safe. But…you have a lot more control of the situation and you can back things up a lot more thoroughly when they are 100% in your control. (As long as you also learn lesson #1 from above…)

Also by learning to create your blog, upload and install plugins, upload and install themes, back things up when needed (often) and everything else involved with having a blog then you have a better understanding of the entire process.

You will know what you are looking for when you are ready to hire someone to do these tasks for you. You will know how to ask for what you want in the correct words that get you the end result you are looking for. So now as a business person you are more confident in your ability to run your business.

You are prepared to ask for help or hire help, but you know that if push came to shove you could do-it-yourself and be no worse for the wear.

So, the moral of today’s story is…..Have you backed up your blog this week?