OK, I may not be the smartest person when it comes to the Internet and I know that I don’t always follow my own advice, but here is one important piece of advice that everyone should follow: Don’t put all of your eggs in one basket.

The Internet is a wonderful place and it has lots to offer for both businesses and customers. Some services are free, some cost businesses to use and some cost the customers who want to use those services. For better or worse, I know a lot of entertainers who are “cheap.” They will go anywhere on the Internet that is free, everything from free websites to free advertising. I have nothing against using free services (as long as you know both the advantages and disadvantages). I just want to remind people that once popular websites are quickly forgotten. Not too long ago, MySpace was the hottest social networking website. Thousands of people used to access the Internet using AOL. Yahoo! used to be a more popular search engine than Google.

Let’s say that you decide that you don’t need to have a website and will just have a fan page on Facebook. While that might seem like a fine solution for today, what happens if Facebook decides to start charging people to use it or people decide that another social network website is better. If you put all of your eggs on Facebook, one day, you may miss out. A better approach is to have your business information on several social network websites and have them all link back to your main website. Your goal is to drive people to your website. Too often, people drive customers away to places like YouTube to watch videos or another website to see pictures.

You don’t have to drive customers away. Most of the social networking websites let you embed your content onto your website. People can see your YouTube video on your website without having to visit YouTube. The advantage is that if YouTube goes away, you still have a website. You can find another place to post your videos.