If you have known me for any amount of time you will know that I have a daughter. Elizabeth was 3 last weekend and she is a funny, beautiful and smart kid (first one to say she gets her brains from her mum is in trouble).

We have a bedtime routine which involves me reading her what seems to be endless rounds of books. The books change as she gets older, they also change depending on what she has been doing and who she has spoken to.

Something that happened online this week reminded me of one of her books, the three little pigs. I imagine that everyone has read this story, yet many people don’t ever learn from it.

All to many marketers have been teaching people to build sites on squidoo, hubpages,livejournal,blogger and just about any other “web 2.0″ site that seemed to get get rankings easily. You earn money for very little work and that is what everyone wants isn’t it?

Vox.com is closing its doors at the end of Sept 2010

So if you had spent the last 6 months,year, two years or even more building the masterpiece of all sites on Vox it will be gone..yep gone

Sure you can export the posts and add it to a blog on typepad or just about anywhere else, but you will lose the domain strength and the aging and the links that you have built up over the years.

You have no control over this so why do it?

Don’t tell me it won’t happen to Squidoo, Hubpages or anywhere else because you do not know!

Let me say i am not a web2.0 hater, I love Hubpages, they send great traffic the value of the links is high and you can earn some money from them. But if they disappeared tomorrow (and I dont for a minute think they will) my business wouldn’t die, I wouldnt be affected by the income loss enough to panic.

There have been a couple of high profile marketers who have started to move away from Squidoo recently and are now telling people to get their own sites..What Took You So LONG?

If you are doing this for playtime then it doesn’t really matter too much, if you are looking to do this as a business then think of it like a business.

I give you the choice to borrow a bit of property to invest all your time and energy into or you can pay $10 and own it..

nahh its ok I will save the $10 (or $9 with discount codes) for pizza thanks.

How on earth can that make sense to anyone?

So use web 2 for all its worth, links galore, feeder sites out of your ears, just don’t park all your money on it.

If you do then don’t come moaning at me when they shut down and your income is gone!

Paul

EDIT:- I just read this article which talks about downtime on Tumblr, posterous and wordpress.com

http://www.onenewspage.com/news/Technology/20100907/14796473/Blog-platform-Tumblr%E2%80%99s-soaring-traffic-brings-growing-pains.htm