Business Blogging Tips — smallbusinessemarketingcoach.com

This is the first post in a 13-part series that provide blogging tips to improve your business blogging efforts. The blog posts are excerpts from an eBook published by Hubspot.com, 13 Business Blogging Mistakes and Their Easy Fixes. The ebook is great reading. If you work to eliminate each of the 13 business blogging mistakes mentioned in the eBook , you will be on your way to producing a successful blog.

Whether you’ve only just decided to launch a blog for your business or you’ve been blogging for a while, Hubspot’s eBook will help prevent you from falling victim to some of the most common business blogging mistakes and teach you how to fix the blogging mistakes you might already be guilty of making. Consider this series a sort of business blogging first aid kit, and get ready to start applying some blogging Band-Aids!

Marketing Tip #1: Integrate Your Blog With Your Main Website

Your blog is published on its own domain, separate from your company’s main website. Even worse: Your blog is published on a free blogging platform’s domain such as Blogger.com, WordPress.com, or TypePad.com. Eeek!

Why It Hurts:

Not integrating your business blog with your company’s main website can be damaging for several reasons:

Search Engine Optimization (SEO): One of the biggest benefits of business blogging is its impact on search engine optimization. Because each new blog article you publish creates a new web page that can be indexed in search engines to help you get found online, you really want your business blog to be associated with your main website. That way, any SEO juice you generate from your blog will automatically benefit your corporate website as well. Hosting your blog on a free platform’s URL like http://companyblog.wordpress.com will only guarantee that the SEO credit you’ve built gets applied to the blogging platform, not your own website.
Branding: There are a few negatives associated with hosting your blog separate from your main website that affect your company’s branding. First, even if you link to the blog from your website’s main navigation, your site visitors will get sent to a completely different website, which may not espouse design and branding elements consistent with your main website and may result in confusion. Furthermore, sending site visitors to a blog on a free platform can result in the perception of your brand as unprofessional or unreliable.
Centralization: Even though your blog is hosted on a separate URL, let’s say you’ve purchased a unique domain (e.g. http://thisismyblog.com) and linked to it from the main navigation of your company website. While this is a better practice, you’re still sending site visitors away from your main website. This is counterintuitive, as usually the goal is to attract visitors to your main website by using your blog as bait. Ultimately, you want all of the engagement to happen on your main website, and you want your blog visitors to associate your blog with your brand name

Easy Fix:

Hubspot recommends that the ideal home for your blog is on a sub-domain of your main website (e.g., http:// blog.website.com, http://blog.SmallBusinessEmarketingCoach.com, and etc.).
Another good alternative is to put your blog in a folder of your main website (e.g. http://website.com/blog; http://smallbusinessemarketingcoach.com/blog, etc.). Both of these options will allow your corporate website to benefit from the search engine optimization advantages your blog will generate. The only difference between the two is that a sub-domain will allow you to set up your blog as slightly independent from the main website (though still contributing SEO advantages), which affords you some additional flexibility regarding the blog’s layout and design.
As a third alternative, hosting your blog on a separate domain can also offer a way to pass some link-building SEO juice from your blog to your main website. However, these benefits are limited.

For SEO, synergy, and upkeep reasons, I recommend that your blog is part of your website.

Source:

The series is based on an ebook published by Hubspot, 13 Business Blogging Mistakes and Their Easy Fixes. Hubspot is an Internet marketing company established to help grow small businesses.

Other posts in this series: