I have long been saying and now with the potential of FeedBurner  being shut down by Google the subject of Dangers of Promoting, Marketing & Building Social Pages and External Sites only becomes more clear and real.

I have always said,

“Be careful putting and investing too much time building external sites up and counting on them, once they close their doors all your hard work and progress is gone and a waste of time.  Rather, invest that time and energy into what you can control.  Domain names you own that only you can close down.  Then nothing is ever wasted.”

Now as a result of us using Feedburner, instead of keeping the feeds in-house ONLY, we are now going to potentially lose subscribers.  This is because we built up and promoted our Feedburner Feeds rather than our own internal RSS feeds.  Now all that work, effort, and more important users may be gone.

This goes for Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and anyone else.  Remember MySpace?  Well they still get a ton of traffic, but many people wasted their time building MySpace accounts and much of that time and effort is now gone. There are countless examples.  How about Sprinks, Go.com, Excite.com, Lycos, Napster, and many more.  Many of these sites still exist and receive good amounts of traffic, but the original accounts you may have spent day, weeks, months or even years building are now for NOT.  If you invested that time in your own domain name or sites, you would be the only person that could close it down or change it.  But since someone else controls your destiny, you lose.

And I think some of the best signs that tell you to avoid building an outside site are how that company monetizes its traffic.  Feedburner = Poorly, Facebook = Struggling, Twitter=Poorly, see where this is going?  These could be early warning signs.

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