If the price of two systems are equal, would you rather have full ownership and control of your business and be able to customize a system on your website to fit your specific business needs or would you rather give your content to some other company (pray they don’t go out of business) and be permanently beholden to some proprietary system? Your content is your own. Don’t give it up without a fight.
So what if it was actually cheaper to own your system instead of using a service? Is the choice easier now?
Let’s go a step further..
When I migrated a client off of a membership service onto his own server his list of complaints from the service was very long. So long, that it prompted him to call me for help. He wanted minor tweaks. Not huge, complex, bazillion hours of coding type of stuff. Just a few changes here and there.
His response, after an average phone wait of 1 hour, was that they only make universal systems, not customizations for a specific client (full disclosure: being a programmer, I’m usually on board with this). I looked around for different solutions and realized that I could duplicate everything his current provider was doing, and this time, it wouldn’t suck.
He now has his full membership website in his own name (as a developer, I want everything I create to be in my client’s name) and has complete control over all of his content and how to present it to his members. All of those little tweaks he wanted on the former site, were now fast and easy to accomplish with the new site.
Here’s the really cool part…..
It’s WordPress.
Ok, WordPress plus a few plugins.
That’s incredible when, for the cost of a single month of the former service, you can build a full membership site. On top of that, you can now customize the experience for your membership with more design and configuration of the basic model. You get your cake and can eat it too.
So, seriously, why would you give your content and control to someone else?
Toff Ward
OpenSourceMarketer
Learn how to build and market your business online using open source tools.