I've been building on the internet for years, and I've learned one thing the hard way: your domain is the one thing that's truly yours.
Everything else—your followers, your content, your audience engagement—lives on someone else's platform. It can disappear overnight. Twitter's algorithm changes. LinkedIn restricts your reach. Facebook goes down. Your Medium account gets suspended. I've seen it happen to friends and fellow creators dozens of times.
But your domain? That's yours forever.
Why Platforms Are Fragile
Let's be honest: building an audience on someone else's platform is terrifying. You could wake up tomorrow and find:
- Your account suspended with no explanation
- Algorithmic changes that tank your visibility
- A platform shutdown or pivot that leaves you stranded
- New terms of service that restrict your content or profits
- Your entire reach becoming hostage to pay-for-promotion features
These aren't hypotheticals. Elon's Twitter algorithm changes eliminated discoverability for thousands of creators. Facebook's engagement declined 50% after their pivot to video. Tumblr, Vine, and dozens of platforms have disappeared entirely.
When a platform dies, what happens to your audience? Your content? Your credibility? It vanishes with it.
A Domain Is Your Anchor
Your domain is different. It's permanent. It's yours. And it stays valuable regardless of what happens in the broader digital landscape.
Think of your domain as real estate. You own it outright. You control it. You can point it anywhere. You can move your content, your links, your email—everything—and the domain keeps its authority and history intact.
A domain you've owned for five years carries weight. Search engines trust it. Visitors recognize it. It builds credibility in ways a platform profile never can.
When you have yourname.com in your email address, on your business cards, and linked from your social profiles, you're sending a clear message: "I'm serious about my online presence. This is my home base."
The SEO Value You're Missing
Here's something most people don't realize: your domain has inherent SEO authority.
Every backlink, every mention, every time someone links to your domain—it compounds. Google recognizes domain authority as a ranking factor. A domain with years of history, consistent content, and external links ranks better than a new domain, all else being equal.
When you only publish on Medium, LinkedIn, or Substack, all that authority is building on their domain, not yours. You get zero SEO value. They benefit while you build their platform.
But when you own a domain and publish there first (then cross-post to platforms for distribution), something powerful happens:
- Your domain becomes the "canonical" source
- You accumulate domain authority over time
- Your content ranks in Google for your topics
- You own the traffic, not the platform
I've watched creators regret ignoring this for years. They built huge audiences on platforms, then realized they couldn't leverage that audience on their own site because they had no domain authority to rank.
One Domain, Multiple Uses
Your domain isn't just for a blog. It's your foundation for:
Email: Use your-name@yourname.com instead of your-name@gmail.com. It looks more professional, is easier to remember, and gives you email independence from any provider.
Website: Your home base. Blog, portfolio, links to everything you do elsewhere. People can always find you there.
Credibility: When you share links from your domain—whether in emails, social media, or professional contexts—they carry more weight than platform links.
Longevity: In 5, 10, or 20 years, your domain is still yours. Your Twitter account might not be.
The Cost Is Trivial
Here's what stops most people: they think domains are complicated or expensive.
They're not. A .com domain costs $10-15 per year. That's less than a coffee per month.
The setup is straightforward:
- Buy the domain from any registrar (GoDaddy, Namecheap, Google Domains, etc.)
- Point it to your site
- Set up email forwarding or a mail service
- Done
It takes 15 minutes.
The real cost isn't money—it's the regret of waiting. Every year you don't own your domain, someone else might. Every year you don't publish on your domain is a year of lost SEO authority and search visibility.
Jottings Makes This Easy
This is actually why I built Jottings in the first place.
I kept seeing talented creators trapped in a dilemma:
- Own a domain but struggle to maintain a website
- Build an audience on platforms but have zero control or authority
- Pay hundreds for a web developer just to publish a few posts
So I built Jottings to solve this: a simple way to own your domain, publish your thoughts, build your audience, and keep full control.
With Jottings, you can:
- Use your custom domain (no ugly subdomain)
- Publish freely without algorithm anxiety
- Own your SEO authority
- Get automatic feeds (RSS, JSON Feed) so your audience can follow you their way
- Build credibility through a real, owned website
No platform overhead. No middleman. Just your domain and your content.
Stop Waiting
If you've been thinking "I should get my domain name," stop thinking and do it.
Seriously. Right now.
Buy yourname.com. Or your-business.com. Or whatever your brand is. Do it today before someone else does, before you get busy with other things, before you convince yourself you'll do it next year.
Then set up a simple website there. It doesn't have to be fancy. It just has to be yours.
The platform reach is nice. The followers are ego fuel. But your domain is your real asset. It's the thing that survives when the platforms change, disappear, or leave you behind.
Start building your owned audience. Your domain is waiting.
Ready to claim your domain and build your owned presence? Jottings makes it simple to use your custom domain and publish freely. No algorithms. No middleman. Just your thoughts and your audience.