Writing
Instagram or your own site: what changes when the address is yours
A social account lends you an audience. A site gives you an address nobody can switch off. Most businesses end up needing both.
Published Revised One Other
Can a business run on social alone?
It can, and plenty do. What you cannot have is any certainty that it still works next year.
The platform decides who sees your work, not you. Rules change without notice, and the list of people following you does not leave with you.
That is fine while it works. It stops being fine the week reach drops and there is nowhere else for anyone to find you.
What does a site do that a profile cannot?
It answers the people already searching for your name. They land on your address, in your words, with no ranking system in between.
It also holds the things a post cannot hold: what you charge for, when you open, what you take on and what you turn down. Social is for showing. A site is for explaining.
What if there is no time to keep both alive?
Then the site should be deliberately small. Three or four pages that do not need weekly feeding beat a site with a blog that has been silent since March.
Social runs on a daily clock. A well-written site runs on a yearly one. Treating them as the same job is what makes a site look abandoned.
When both have gone quiet, I cut the site to the bone first. Fewer pages, written once, are what survives a full month.
Where do you start with one budget?
Start with the address. A domain of your own, an email on that domain, and one page saying what you do and how to reach you.
Everything else sits on top of that, social included. It finally has somewhere to point. Grow from there when the work asks for it, not when a feature list suggests it.
What you keep is the say over it. The address is yours, the files are yours, and changing any of it stays your call.
Send me an email if you want a second opinion on where to start.