Posts Tagged ‘Blogger’
Should a Blog be Part of Your Corporate Website or Stand on Its Own?
Monday, August 30th, 2010Okay, so you understand the benefits of business blogs, and you’re ready to make the commitment to developing and maintaining a blog for the long haul. The next question is: where should I put the blog?
There are five common options:
Free hosting on a blogging platform site. The URL would look something like mycompanyblog.wordpress.com or mycompanyblog.blogspot.com. This option should never be used for a corporate or business blog. Free blogging platforms are fine for hosting personal blogs where there is no justification for spending money and no expectation of generating any business leads, sales or income. For business however, such platforms are an unprofessional setting, offer limited functionality, and provide very little SEO benefit.
Hosting on a corporate website using the site’s CMS tool. Many corporate websites are built on content management system (CMS) platforms such as Joomla, Drupal or DotNetNuke. These and several other open source and commercial CMS platforms offer built-in blog creation functionality. The advantages of this approach are:
- • All SEO authority (via inbound links) accrues to your corporate website, because the blog is just another section of the site. This is valuable because blog posts are often more effective “link bait” than typical website copy (“About Us,” product/service descriptions, etc.).
- • Your internal (or agency) staff, who may at different times write content for both the company blog and corporate website, have only one content creation tool to learn.
- • The blog has the same “look and feel” as the rest of the site, supporting corporate branding.
- • Whether viewing the blog or regular product/service content, visitors never leave your site.
- • Most CMS plaforms will easily accommodate multiple-author corporate blogs. They can also support multiple blogs (e.g. a widget industry blog and a widget maintenance blog)—though the common look/feel and top-level domain name make it difficult to clearly separate these.
The primary disadvantages of the CMS approach are that the blog is very clearly “the corporate blog”—it has no independence or personality of its own—and that CMS tools often lack the rich functionality and plugins that blogging platforms such as WordPress offer (e.g. subscribe to posts by email, quick polls, automatic XML sitemap maintenance, etc.).
Hosting on an existing corporate site using WordPress. This option assumes that your corporate website is built in something other than WordPress (e.g. on an open source, commercial or proprietary web CMS platform), and that you’ll be installing WordPress just to power the blog. This approach shares many of the advantages of using the underlying CMS to build the blog (SEO links, visitor are kept on the site, multi-author blogs are supported) and does away with some of the shortcomings: first, since the blog template is separate from the website template, it’s easy to give the blog its own personality, consistent with but separate from the rest of the corporate site. Second, unlike most CMS platforms, WordPress has an active developer community contributing special-purpose plugins to continually expand and enhance its functionality.
However, this approach has its own drawbacks. For one, it requires installation and setup of the WordPress blogging and MySQL database management software–not a terribly difficult task, but not one for technophobic to be sure. Where this really becomes complicated is in a multi-blog scenario (again, such as separate industry news and technical / how-to blogs), since each blog requires its own WordPress and MySQL installation. For another, functions that are often provided seamlessly by a dedicated WordPress host (see the separate blog and website hosting option below), such as nightly database backups and WordPress version upgrades, have to configured separately for a self-hosted WordPress installation. In other words, you’ll definitely need knowledgeable IT support for this option.
Hosting both a blog and website on WordPress. This is definitely an option to consider if you are just developing the website for a new organization or rebuilding the website for an existing enterprise. It offers all of the advantages of a WordPress blog while giving IT only a single platform to manage and users only a single CMS tool to learn. Though originally developed as a blogging platform, WordPress has evolved over the years into a respectably capable full CMS option for relatively small, simple websites–with or without a blog.
The downside is that WordPress isn’t suitable for large, complex websites or those requiring customer web application functionality, at least not without some highly involved development effort. For midsize to large enterprise sites, or even smaller company sites requiring specialized functionality, it’s often simpler to develop the non-blog portions of the website using another tool and treating the blog separately. Which brings us to the final option:
Separate blog and website hosting. With this alternative, a blog is treated completely separately from the main company website development platform, hosting arrangements and underlying technology. Regardless of how or where the main website is hosted, the blog is generally hosted with a dedicated WordPress host such as HostGator, Bluehost or JustHost. (Disclosure: I do use JustHost for my personal blog hosting, but I have absolutely no financial relationship with any of these companies.) The advantages of this approach are:
- • The blog can not only have its own “personality” separate from the corporate website, but even its own search-friendly domain name (e.g. widget-industry-news.com).
- • Related to the point above, your company can potentially get an extra spot on the first page of the search engines for specific core search terms. The search engines will generally display any specific website no more than twice (e.g. the home page and one interior page) on the first page of search results. Having a related blog with a separate top-level domain name gives you the opportunity to snare a third spot on the home page for certain search phrases very closely aligned with your business.
- • The blog can easily have its own look and feel, carrying over selected elements of corporate branding (e.g. colors, logo) without having exactly the same look and navigation structure.
- • There’s no burden on the corporate IT group. Setup is easy and maintenance is usually handled automatically by the host for a nominal annual fee. This frees your IT group to focus on more important things, and it means you don’t have to wait for or rely on IT to install new features, add authors, add new pages or perform pretty much any other function on the blog.
- • Authors can write blog posts, add comments, install or update plugins, and perform virtually any other function on the blog from any Internet connection. This may or not be true for your corporate website, depending on the platform used and security settings. In large companies (and many midsized organizations as well), a VPN connection or other software is often needed for corporate site editing access.
- • Separate hosting supports both a single blog with multiple authors and multi-blog scenarios. Managing multiple external blogs will increase costs (though many hosts offer discounts for multi-site hosting packages) but also provide more opportunity for search presence (e.g. in addition to your corporate site, you may own blogs like widget-industry-news.com, widget-maintenance-tips.com, etc.).
Disadvantages:
- • You’ll incur extra hosting and domain name registration fees, generally running $80-120 per year per blog. That’s not a huge outlay, but something to consider.
- • Your SEO authority will be split, with one set of links pointing to your corporate website and a different set pointing to your blog.
In the final analysis, there is no single perfect answer for all organizations to the question posed in the title of this post. There are benefits and drawbacks to each approach. The best advice is: consider the specifics of your situation and relative advantages and disadvantages of each approach before deciding on the optimal hosting arrangement for your blog.
Other helpful information on this topic:
Location? Location? Location? by SEO Inc Blog
Business Blog: separate domain or on your website by Better Business Blogging
Blog: On Site vs. Off Site – SEO Advantages by WebProWorld (forum)
The Insidious Nofollow Tag: An SEO Rant
Sunday, February 14th, 2010I’m normally a positive, upbeat kind of guy, and as someone who’s been writing professionally since the days of disco, rarely at a loss for words. Yet mention the “nofollow” tag, and that all changes. I, like many other many other web marketing professionals, am left sputtering with a mix of disgust and rage, fumbling for an adjective that conveys sufficient contempt: despicable, vile, loathsome, abhorrent, abominable, wretched, odious, detestable, downright evil.
The nofollow tag was misguidedly inflicted upon the online world by Google in 2005. According to Wikipedia (among the worst nofollow offenders), “The nofollow HTML attribute was originally designed to stop comment spam on blogs. Blog readers and bloggers were well aware of the immense problem. Just like any other type of spam affects its community, comment spam affected the entire blogging community, so in early 2005 (Google and Blogger engineers) designed the attribute to address the problem and the nofollow attribute was born.”
Though the originators of WordPress have developed a far more elegant and inoffensive solution to the comment spam problem with Akismet, the execrable nofollow tag remains with us, like a cancer impervious to drugs or radiation.
The justification for the continued use of this repugnant scrap of code is to prevent passing link juice from listings on directory and social bookmarking sites to spammy or other objectionable content. But, to be charitable, the nofollow tag is to the world of web links what “let’s just be friends” is to romantic relationships. It’s a way for site owners to say: “I’m happy to use your content to build my traffic, but not to reciprocate. I don’t want anyone to think we’re together.”
An alarming number of once-respectable social bookmarking sites—Digg, delicious, Mister Wong, Reddit, Mixx, Bibsonomy, Jumptags, Faves, Yahoo! Buzz, Simpy—have now instituted dastardly nofollow tags. It’s easy to determine if your favorite site should now become an ex-favorite, just “view source” in your browser and search for rel=”nofollow.” If it’s there for any reason other than Pagerank sculpting (e.g. nofollowing pages like “Contact Us”), move along. If you’re trying to promote your own content, it won’t work. If you are trying to promote some else’s, you won’t help them much.
Hey, here’s a novel idea: if someone is using your blog, social media site or directory to link to spam, porn, hate speech, discount online pharmaceuticals, miracle weight loss nonsense, or work-at-home scams—DELETE THE LINK. Why is okay to have such crap listed on your site, regardless of whether or not you’re passing link juice?
In fairness, this pernicious string of characters once served a purpose, as a less-than-ideal solution to a serious problem. But today, Akismet solves the link spam problem on blogs. The community can be used to solve the problem on social bookmarking sites. A little bit of old-fashioned work can deal with issue on directory sites.
I’m not alone on this. It’s time to demand better, to rid the world of the reprehensible, insidious nofollow tag once and for all. Ideally, Google should announce it’s no longer recognizing the tag. Absent that, site owners should boycott it. And if they don’t, users should walk.
Note: This post was originally published on the WebMarketCentral blog in October 2009. But it all remains true.
How to Write an Effective Business Blog
Friday, January 8th, 2010Blogs are not a traditional marketing medium. Blogs written like extended brochures (in promotional language) don’t get read. They’re boring. A blog is rather, a place to share useful content. Instead of saying “We’re the leading producer of widgets…” or some other such self-promoting statement, demonstrate your leadership by writing about the many creative uses of widgets, what to look for in a widget, recent developments in the widget field, or whatever. Certainly you can promote your company and product in your blog, but this should be more in the form of sponsorship than selling language. The Marketing Eye blog once recommended an 80/20 rule for content; spend 80% of your words sharing knowledge, and 20% on promotion. I’d recommend more like a 90/10 ratio of interesting content to self-promotion.
A blog is not an ad, a traditional Web site or an online brochure. It is rather a place where your employees can speak to customers and prospects in their own unique voices. It is a place to demonstrate the collected knowledge and expertise of your company (that is, your people). And, through comments, it is a place to have a conversation with your customers and prospects, informally and openly. Compared to other marketing media, a blog is closest to a (well-written and informative) newsletter, but easier, faster, cheaper, and with the benefit of interaction.
To get started, select a blogging platform such as Blogger, TypePad or WordPress. All are easy to use, but each has its own quirks and advantages. Factors to consider include the option of hosting the blog on your own existing Web site, RSS feed capabilities, Trackback functionality, and of course personal preference. Personally, I’ve found Blogger to be the easiest, but WordPress to be the most powerful.
Who should write for your blog? Anyone in your company with 1) halfway decent writing skills and 2) knowledge of value to your customers and prospects. This means customer service reps, consultants, engineers, technicians (as well as, yes, marketers and executives) – anyone with in-depth knowledge of your product/service and who has direct interaction with customers. While your marketing group should have overall ownership of the blog, contributions should be open to those closest to the product and the customer, with interesting information or stories to share.
Make it easy to contact the author(s) of your blog. Most blogs have a contact link somewhere on the site; a few don’t provide any contact information at all (a pet peeve of mine). If you want to drive business with your blog, MarketingSherpa recommends adding a contact email link at the bottom of every posting. (To avoid being picked up by automated email address extraction programs used by spammers, write the email address as something like “nameATcompany.com” or “name-at-company-dot-com.”) Adding contact information to each post is particularly critical when you have multiple authors contributing to a single blog. Include each author’s Twitter link as well.
How often should you post to your blog? A good general rule to keep content fresh, yet not over-stretch your resources, is at least weekly but no more than daily. An exception to this is in the case of breaking news (for example, an insurance company tracking the progress of a hurricane, a company announcing a merger), where several posts in single day may be justified. Two to three posts weekly is decent frequency for a business blog, with Monday and Tuesday posts generally drawing the best traffic.
Avoid being derivative. Commenting on an industry news article or a post on another blog is fine, but devote most of your effort to creating unique and interesting content; after all, you want your company to be seen as a thought leader and expert in your field. Excessive use of content that been posted or reported elsewhere may generate search engine hits, but it doesn’t add value and so won’t make your blog stand out. An exception is periodic “best of” posts from other industry bloggers, which are often popular with readers and search engines alike.
Keep your posts related to your business and industry. Granted, this can be wide-ranging (such as posting on specific new laws or government regulations affecting your industry), as long as the topic is both relevant and of interest to your customers and prospects. Avoid off-topic postings, general musings and rants.
Keep in mind the nature of blog traffic; according to research firm comScore Networks, “Because blogs often source their visitors from search engines or links from other sites (often other blogs), many draw relatively large audiences that visit infrequently.” This means that each post has to add some value in and of itself. If you refer to a previous post in your blog, provide the link to it. Posts don’t need to be long, they just need to be useful.
Provide an RSS feed of your blog. (RSS stands for “really simple syndication.” You can find a useful and not overly-technical explanation of RSS here.) Information consumers have embraced RSS because of the control it gives them over the information they receive (generally without spam).
In addition to an RSS feed, allow visitors to sign up to receive your new posts via email. This also gives you some insight into who is visiting your blog.
Should you accept outside advertising on your blog? If the purpose of your blog is make money itself, ads are a potential revenue generator. Ad programs such as Google AdSense are popular and easy to integrate. But if you’re building a blog to promote your business, the only “ads” should be promotion of white papers, special offers or other information specific to your company.
Follow blogs that provide helpful tips and insights on business blogging, such as Conversation Marketing, Copyblogger and ProBlogger.
With a well-crafted blog in place, you can turn your attention to promoting your blog (the subject of another post in the near future here).
The Wonders of WordPress (from a Blogger Bigot)
Friday, November 13th, 2009When I first started work on the WebMarketCentral blog back in early 2005, I evaluated both Blogger and WordPress. At the time, it seemed that:
- There were a similar number of popular blogs on both platforms.
- The features and capabilities of the two platforms were roughly equivalent.
- Blogger was easier to use.
Today, while I’d argue that the last point above still holds true, on the first two items – it’s not even close. It’s hard to even think of any “A list” blogs on Blogger (okay, Paul Dunay’s excellent Buzz Marketing for Technology, but I mean other than that). And in terms of capabilities, WordPress has advanced with each new release, while Blogger seems stuck in the past. And then there are plugins, of course. As the iPhone commercial says “there’s an app for that,” for almost any cool thing you want your blog to do, on WordPress “there’s a plugin for that.”
To consider just a few differences in capabilities between the two platforms:
- Subscribe by email. This can be accomplished relatively easily with a plugin in WordPress. In Blogger, it can be done, but requires a painful and convoluted workaround using Google Groups.
- RSS feeds. Both platforms make it easy to set up a single RSS feed for all blog content. But WordPress provides far more flexible options as well, allowing users to subscribe only to specific categories, only to comments, whatever.
- Use as a CMS. WordPress can fairly easily be adapted for use as a CMS for a general purpose website, with or without a blog. I’m not sure this is even possible with Blogger, much less simple.
- Add a quick poll. Easy in WordPress. Tried for two years to figure out a way to do this in Blogger, gave up.
- Set up “who links here.” Automatic function in WordPress, painful manual process in Blogger.
- Trackbacks. Again, automatic in WordPress. Blogger requires use of a third-party app and another painful workaround.
- SEO. Don’t even get me started. While WordPress is naturally optimized for search, Blogger seems at best indifferent, at worst hostile to making a blog search engine-friendly.
Perhaps this is unfair to Blogger (feel free to leave comments/corrections below if you think so). I will concede that blogging on Blogger, like most habits, is a hard habit to break. The platform’s quirks and inconveniences can become almost charming. I’ve tried before and failed, but this time I’ve got to quit and take up a healthier alternative. It’s not for me; I’m doing this for the children.
