Things to Own in the Digital Space

Today on the Muletown minute, I want to give you a quick tip on some things in your business that you need to make sure you have control over in the digital space.

So there are some things that you’re going to need to have a web presence, but you want to make sure that you own them and not your freelancer or your brother in law or your agency or anyone that’s working for you, you want to make sure you’ve
got control over these things.

The first and most important is your domain name registration.

So like when we buy muletowndigital.com we’re buying that from GoDaddy or DreamHost or Google or wherever, we as a business own that domain name. Now, if I had an agency working for me, I can give them delegate access so they could go in there and do whatever they need to do with the name. But at the end of the day, if I let them go, I want to own that domain name and you should absolutely do the same in your business. Don’t let an agency set that up for you and you not have any sort of understanding over how it works. Right. You want to be the point of contact on there because your domain name registration is
Mission Control Center, right. It’s the hub for everything you do online. If you don’t have control over that, you really are setting yourself up for a nightmare moving forward.

Number two, and probably second, but definitely almost equally as important is your email.

If you’ve got, like Google Gsuite or Microsoft 365 or some other platform, whatever it is running your email, even if you hire an agency like us to set that up for you and make it work for you, you still need to be the admin.

You don’t want an agency to have control over your email to the point where you decide you don’t want to work at that agency anymore, and they literally say, well, you’re going to  have to buy your emails back from us. Right. You don’t want to be in that spot.

Take control and make sure you’ve got access to or control over those things. Those are the two primaries.

But also in this list for me would be Google Analytics and search console. Those would be two to make sure that you
have control over or at least can view right and make sure you can make changes to it. Your Google My Business absolutely need to be an owner on there. Things like social media accounts, there’s oftentimes where “we’ll set that up for you.” Well, the problem is you now don’t own your own social media. That’s another big problem like YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, any of those. Make sure you own those things.

I think that’s pretty much it. You know, the last one I would say to watch out for is your website hosting understand the terms and conditions of your hosting contract. If you’re not sure what to do with hosting, let us or someone who knows how to do that gets you set up the right way so that if you later needed to take that over, you could do it right.

You don’t want a situation where someone has your website files and says, yeah, yeah, we’ll give these back for ten thousand dollars. You don’t want to be in that spot. Even if you’re rebuilding your site, you don’t want to be in a spot where someone else has the keys to your business.

And those things that I’ve mentioned are crucial things to have control over. Don’t get stuck in a position where someone else literally has the keys to your entire business and can sell them back to you. You do not want that.

You want to make sure you’ve got ownership and that everyone that’s working for you and with you has access to what they need but can’t literally delete you off the accounts. That’s something to really keep an eye out for. So be safe, be smart and be in control of your business. Thank you very much.