So let's talk about earthquakes as an online entrepreneur, earthquakes, events beyond your control, one of the biggest and most damaging things that can happen to your business. And they happen. And there's usually many reasons but the primary reason as an online entrepreneur, you're going to get an earthquake and talking about business earthquake, you can get family earthquakes, you can get events happen in your life, where it just, it feels like you're in the middle of an earthquake and everything is falling down. And we're going to look at business type earthquakes, but try and apply these principles to any earthquake that comes into your into your life as an online entrepreneur. Third Party platforms now, I've been through this many times and I've seen as even right now, you know, we sell a lot of online courses. And one of the platforms around has just changed everything they do.

And I've just seen one guy and lots of people reporting 80% drop in revenue, another guy showing two years worth of figures at $2,000. And then the last two months because of changes at 400 400. And the guy hasn't done anything. It's not his fault. The platform has changed. Its policies changes focus, change its agenda.

And it's for them, it's a positive change. For the person using it, it's an earthquake. And this is the thing to understand when you tie yourself to third party platforms. When you tie yourself to people like Amazon, when you tie yourself to eBay. You tie yourself some light up when you tie yourself to any third party platform. They're the big guy in the relationship and you're the little guy.

So they're the giant You're David. So when they, when they change something, and you're in this David and Goliath relationship, you know, you have to move quick, you have to adapt to that really quickly. But you have to understand that every time you sign up to a third party platform, you start building a business on there. You're in danger of getting hit by an earthquake. So one of the things you need to do is you need to own your parcel of land. What I mean by that you need to make sure that your business is as secure as possible.

That means you want your own website. That means you want to really focus on the worst case scenario. So if I build a business on a platform, selling digital products, for instance, and it's going really well, the worst thing I can do is just rely on What I need to do is build my parcel of land. I need to make sure that what I'm doing there, I'm duplicating somewhere else, or doing something even better on my own parcel of land, where I am not under the control of someone else's decisions, so that when the earthquake does happen, yes, that's going to hurt. But my parcel of land is going to give me a safe place to retreat to. And eventually, we want to get to the place where third party platforms in the sense of our business where the giant wake life and there, David, and how does that happen when our own property starts developing more income than the third party platforms, that relationship switches.

And it doesn't matter if it's digital products, retail products, doesn't matter. If you're writing blogs anywhere, anywhere you're building on someone else's platform. You really want to think about anything example of this was Facebook, a lot of people were creating Facebook pages for their marketing a few years ago. And they everyone was in this big, you know, excitement about getting loads of followers and people following them on Facebook and they'll show all their posts to those followers and people would sign up. And everyone that signed up to see your posts when you post and then Facebook said, hang on, you're not wanting to show your posts to 20% of people. And 10% 6% actually 2% 1% but you know what you can represent if you pay and they create an earthquake and all those people built their marketing on Facebook and people still do it.

And they either don't advise you build your marketing or Facebook, essentially, you're gonna need to put your marketing in your own place. So what happened was now they had to pay now there was a tax for what was free before. And this is what happens. Pay platforms eventually. They're going to give you for free but eventually when you rely on them, they're going to tax you Are they going to change and discard you. So we want to own a piece of passive land.

In our 15 years, I can give you so many examples of this and online business. So important to protect yourself. And the best way to do that is to build an email list, you want to be thinking. This isn't a course on practical entrepreneurship in the sense of how to build an email list of other courses on that you want to know how to build an email list how to market yourself. What this is focusing on is, how to deal with it. But one of the most basic things I'm going to say is right now, the most basic parcel of land you can build is an email list.

So look into that and learn how to build your email list. If you're an online entrepreneur, and you don't have an email list and you're using third party platforms at some point in the future, you're going to experience an earthquake you can't cope with. So start with your email list straightaway start learning that because you are basically owning the contact information of people have said that interest in your business and your products. So if you're relying on Amazon, if you're relying on all these other places, they own the email list. And if they own the email list, they own the marketing, if they own the marketing, they own your customer. And if they own your customer, they own your business.

So build an independent email list as a priority and recovery. Now, when an earthquake comes, oftentimes, it's it's so heavy, so hard hits so quickly and usually in the pocket, that it feels like we can't recover. But what we have to do is we have to look for opportunities, we have to look to see ways around it. So let me give you an example from my antiques business. We were selling on eBay, but we're selling on the UK site. And we were doing really well and Um, American customers were buying our antiques they just loved that was our main market.

They love antiques and they were buying antiques. One day, eBay said, we're not going to show the UK stock on the American site anymore. So what? You've just closed down our market overnight, our main market 90% of our sales. What's that about? So we're sitting there and basically it was like they closed our business now.

But what we did, we looked at the opportunity. So what we did is we created an ebay.com account. And now we sold on ebay.com. The first month we did that was our most successful month. I think. If memory serves, we did like 10,000 pounds worth of sales adoption.

That's something that I can't remember exactly. But that's what we did. So we moved but we lost the UK customers at that point, we could no longer sell to them because they couldn't see how stuff because They could see it, but they thought it was on ebay.com. And it confused them. So that didn't bite so much. So we lost a UK customers.

But we grew our main customer. So what was an earthquake became a huge opportunity. So, whenever an earthquake happens, the thing you want to be looking at in terms of recovery is diversification, adaptation. So you want to diversify. If a third party platforms got that much control, you want to diversify into other platforms, you want to get your product out there, maybe change your product for different platforms, create new products, or different platforms, sell different products. Create your own website, start marketing now.

And if you do that, we look for the opportunities. If you see the earthquake and see and then recover by saying how am I going to adapt to this? How are we going to recover? Oftentimes, you're going to see an opportunity and like they say, every cloud has a silver lining. So look For the silver lining, when an earthquake comes, Now, obviously, emotionally, intellectually, you're going to be stunned, you're going to be struggling. But this is the point we just have to try and ignore the emotions.

Gaze the brain and find out how you're going to deal with this situation, a nine times out of 10 solution. But if you just sit there looking at the damage the earthquake has done. That's when the earthquake because it's real damage, because now you just focus on the problem.