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I love living in the Colorado Territory in what used to be the "Old West." Colorado was a rough-and-tumble neighborhood back then. People came here in droves.

If Somebody Finds It, Everybody Will Come

Gold was discovered in 1859 in the Pikes Peak area. Over fifty thousand people came to the Pike's Peak (CO) area in 1859 alone. White settlers overran and pushed out the indigenous people who had made the  Pike's Peak area home; the Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes. (But this isn't an article about that.) It's about staking your claim in the rough-and-tumble world of the digital realm - the internet.

In the Gold Rush days, all these prospective miners were looking for their share of this - even then - seriously valuable mineral. There was a way to attempt to stake your claim to riches. According to Britannica.com, "Miners did not own the property they claimed. However, the first person to get to a site, discover gold, and mine it was entitled to the gold he found. A person could maintain his claim to a site only if he notified other miners that it belonged to him."

Old photo of prospective miners riding on horseback near Pikes Peak during the Gold Rush era.

Get Your Piece Of The Digital Gold Rush

The Gold Rush miners had to work hard to stake and maintain a valid claim to a gold find. First, find some of it. Then pound in actual stakes into the ground. Register your claim with any local official office and tell everybody around that it was your claim. Then, protect your claim against raids by bandits, vigilantes, or native indians.


It's relatively easy to stake your claim to your unique place on the internet; go online and buy a domain name. The powers that be (ICANN) will assign that name and its corresponding numerical designation to you and it's yours. Imagine if you had staked your internet claim much earlier and grabbed names like McDonald's, FedEx or Subway? Even misspelled names are valuable because people make spelling and typing errors all the time. Fedx.com is still available. 

Here's my point: Once you buy your domain name, you can now build your digital presence at a place that only belongs to you. If your name is Harry Jones and you buy the domain name of harrysplace.com, no other Tom, Dick or Harry can take it away from you.

You're free to build a very grand - or plain - website at your exclusive name and address.

There's plenty of website builders available to you to build your new site. I recommend using WordPress. I do not recommend places like wix and/or weekly. Because they're not just all yours! 

Don't Build Your Home On Rented Land!

You ever see somebody who owns a trailer home have to move it because somebody else owns the land under it and jumps the rent on it to astronomical levels? There are multiple "mobile home parks" in Clear Creek County, Colorado that are going through this process right now. Some folks placed their trailers on the land 20 years ago and now are trying to figure what to do because the rent for the land underneath is skyrocketing.

Facebook is "rented land." So are Instagram, Pinterest, Threads, and X (formerly Twitter). You can be booted unceremoniously from any one of them without any communication or notice. 

This business owner build her digital home on rented land - twice! Please don't think it can't happen to you. Don't dare to hope it won't happen to you. I'm not saying it will. But I sure as heck am saying it could. That's not a risk worth taking. Here's how all social media businesses handle this:

You can read the entire story here: 

https://photofocus.com/business/facebook-just-deleted-my-business-account-for-the-second-time/

Here's How To Handle Any Third Party Site

Do the slide.