Why I Blog on My Own Site (and Not Substack)
OK so when I decided to start writing properly again, the easy answer was sitting right there. Substack. Everyone's on it. You sign up, pick a pretty header, hit publish, and you're a writer with a newsletter by lunchtime.
I nearly did it. I actually had it linked in my menu for a while.
Then I sat down and looked at what it would actually do for my business. And honestly? It would have made me feel busy and given someone else the asset. So I pulled it, and I'm writing here instead, on my own site.
Here's why, and why I think you should probably do the same.
You're Renting, Not Owning
Here's the thing nobody says out loud. When you write on someone else's platform, you're building their business with your words.
The address is theirs. Every link you share sends people to their domain, not yours.
The audience sits in their app. Readers get nudged to follow other writers, recommended other posts, kept inside the platform.
The rules are theirs. Fees, features, how your posts get shown. They can change any of it, any time, and you get an email about it.
I've been in business for 20 years. I've watched people build entire audiences on platforms that changed the algorithm overnight and took the reach with them. Every single time, the people who were fine were the ones who owned the address people came back to.
Your website is the only bit of the internet that's actually yours. So that's where the good stuff goes.
Google and AI Find Your Site, Not Your Newsletter
This is the bit that actually made the decision for me.
When someone searches a question you answer, Google ranks a page. When someone asks ChatGPT or Google's AI the same question, it pulls from pages it trusts and names where the answer came from.
Every post I write on my own site is another page that can be found and credited to laurenkrepp.com. Over time, that builds up. My site becomes the place that answers questions about sales engines, AI in business, and doing less while making more.
Write the same post on Substack and the credit goes to a Substack page. You've done the work. Their domain gets the authority.
One post is a post. Fifty posts on your own site is an asset that keeps bringing people to you for years.
A Blog Is a Part of the Engine, Not a Side Road
I build sales engines. The offer, the pages, the traffic, the automation, all connected so it sells without me pushing it every day.
A blog on my own site plugs straight into that:
Someone finds a post through search or an AI answer.
They land on my site, with my menu, my offers, and my freebies one click away.
They opt in or buy, and my automation looks after them from there.
That's the engine doing its job.
A post on Substack sends them somewhere else. To get them into my world, I'd need them to click again, land again, and decide again. Every extra step is a step where people leave.
The content is the same. One version is wired into the engine. The other one isn't.
What I'm Doing Instead
It's simple, and it costs me nothing extra because it all runs on the platform my site already lives on.
The blog lives here, at laurenkrepp.com/blog. Teaching posts, how I build things, what's working right now.
The podcast lives here too. Every episode of The Sunday CEO gets its own page with the player and the notes, so the episode can be found in search, not just in a podcast app.
My email list lives in my own system. I own the list, I own the automation, and nobody can change the rules on me.
One home. Everything points back to it.
The Bit I Want You to Take With You
Platforms are great for being found. Post on them, show up there, use them to send people home.
But home is your website. That's where your best thinking should live, because that's the only place it keeps working for you.
If you're about to start writing, or you've been pouring posts into somewhere you don't own, here's my advice: put the next one on your own site. Then the one after that. In a year, you'll have built something nobody can take off you.
That's it.
Want the systems behind this? Watch my free Do Less, Make More masterclass, or listen to The Sunday CEO Podcast for more on doing less and making more.
