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Blog on your site, or blog elsewhere…does it matter?

May 30, 2007 | Filed Under Online Marketing 

The answer: It depends.

How fun, right? It depends. You want to know if the answer is the right one for your company, so let’s cover both angles and see which is better for you.

Blog and Website in the same place

This can be accomplished two ways. First, you can use the blog backdrop as the content management system for your website. This is a good idea for very small businesses because it allows for the owner to update regularly without tons of stress. Even for someone that could code a page, if you’re running a blog or updating sites, there’s no shame in making your job easier.

Blog and website in different places, but blog has a masked domain

You set up your blog on typepad.com, wordpress.com, or ihaveanewblog.com - but you set it up so that when someone types www.yourrealdomain.com/blog/ it forwards to ihaveanewblog.com but "covers" the address bar so it says www.yourrealdomain.com/blog/. Google doesn’t know the difference. Google isn’t paying attention to the address bar you’re typing the domain into. What Google (and other search engines) see is that it’s your domain, and therefore the credit for what’s on that page will go to your domain.

Blog and website in different places, with different domain names

Are you trying to become a resource for people? If you are going to put a lot of information on your blog, and plan on having it become a resource with, say, a forum or other avenue for people to connect, a strong case can be made for having it as a separate domain name. www.myblog.com could become a way of solidifying your expert status. Perhaps you could use the blog site to promote speaking engagements and leave your regular website for your services. It all depends on your business goals and where you see your role in your business going.

Regardless of your choice, you need a good infrastructure behind what you’re linking to and where. No broken links, no sites that lead nowhere, and no category labels that don’t describe accurately what’s actually listed under the category. The blog-as-website choice is nice for this because blogs naturally have a good architecture built into them. A homemade, home programmed blog is only as good as the coder you’ve hired to build it, so it’s a case of buyer beware. You also won’t be able to find hundreds of nifty plugins (easy to add bonus features) like you will find for free if you’re using wordpress.org.

In order to determine the best blog/website combination for your company here are three questions that start you on the decision-making path:

In five years…

1) Do you want to be out of your business entirely and have a team running everything for you while you’re on a beach in Maui?

2) Do you want to take on the role of teacher/speaker, but get out of the service/sales aspect of your business?

3) Do you want to happily do whatever it is you do best and have a team on board to assist you do that?

Your goals are the first step in determining where you want your blog to be placed. Goals also determine what other core services you’re going to incorporate in your internet marketing plan. From that core the spokes of your internet marketing will extend…and the outer edge of the wheel will keep them all connected and cohesive. (Yes, I know I just used a wagon wheel analogy. It works!)

If you don’t already know the answers to those three questions, you’re going to want to review your current marketing efforts (answers in mind). Does your current marketing plan drive your business toward the conclusion you’re hoping to achieve?

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