All too often I see people with big followings on social media get their accounts suspended, restricted, or banned.

Some earned it, and some did not.

Either way, there’s always a risk to building an audience on someone else’s platform.

The general advice is to lead people off a platform like X or YouTube and get them to an email list or community, but the problem isn’t 100% resolved there either.

Because unless you have your own email sending servers set up, or you’re locally hosting your community that you built yourself on your own server…

A platform like Kit or Discord could shut you down at any moment…

All because of one of those Terms of Service changes no one reads.

Fortunately there is a real fix.

And it’s having a healthy sense of paranoia.

Because I know I don’t own any of these platforms and things could change at any moment, I simply export my email list every week and that eliminates any worry of losing what I’ve built.

For example, a couple years ago…

I was a customer of a particular email marketing service for over a decade.

I recommended them to tons of people, got to know some of the team, and some of the team members even bought from me.

But one random day, they decided to, uh… save money… and limit the amount of emails that could be sent per month which stopped me from sending my normal daily emails.

And hey, I get it…

Very few marketers send as many emails as I do so it was probably a smart business move that barely affected any of their customers…

However, it wasn’t going to work for me.

Even though I was a bit frustrated at the time, it still didn’t stop me.

I just moved my exported list to Kit and haven’t looked back.

I’m not saying all of this so anyone lives in fear of losing accounts…

I’m just saying it’s smart to have that healthy sense of paranoia so in case the worst happens, you can just move your business elsewhere.

Or if a social media account gets shut down, you can start a new one and email your list about the new account.

At the end of the day…

Always build your audience.

Always build your network.

Always build your email list.

And always protect yourself by backing up your audience in multiple places so you never have to start over from scratch.

Let me know your thoughts in the comments!

Talk soon,
-Gabe