1st Steps For Blogging for Business – Owning Your Blog

by blogmistress on May 13, 2011

Blogging 1st steps

photo courtesy of torange

Happy Friday! This is article 3 in our ongoing series about blogging for business.

Now that you have been reading blogs and getting an idea of the different styles are being used by others, it is time to get started yourself. When you start blogging, it is the same as when you start a website. you need to OWN it! Owning your blog is an important 1st step, and there are a few things to consider.

  1. Make sure your blog is under a domain name that you own. That means that it is registered in your name and that you have a username and password to access it.
  2. If you already have a website and want to have your blog be a part of it, you can create the blog as a sub-domain of your current website or place it in a folder on your current website.

Have  I lost you yet? Sorry to start talking techy on you here, but this is important. Let’s look at an example using Wharton Marketing:

NO: wharton-marketing.blogspot.com
or 
wharton-marketing.typepad.com

YES: blog.wharton-marketing.com
or
 wharton-marketing.com/blog

As you can see, in the 2nd example, the blog is “under” the main site. It is in what is called a sub=-domain. This is a self-hosted blog, meaning not only do we own the domain name, but we pay for the hosting as well.

In the 1st example, I would have been using a free blog hosting service such as Blogspot or Typepad. While I understand that free is good, here is the problem:

Blogging is good for SEO, but only if it passes credit back to you or if you are in a sub-domain of your website back to your website as well. If you are taking the time to create good linkable content (which we will talk more about next week) you don’t want to be doing it for Blogspot or Typepad, you want to be doing it for you!

If you don’t own your blog, you don’t control it. Your URL doesn’t belong to you. In any business, you want to be building assets that you own and control.  All of the wonderful benefits that you get from blogging are pretty much negated if you don’t own your blog!

The most important 1st step for blogging? OWN it!

Blogging for Business Seminar

By the way, if you have been blogging with a free blog platform, often times you can export your posts to a hosted platform. We have successfully moved blogs from BlogSpot to a hosted WordPress platform. So, don’t think that all is lost. Just make sure that you make plans today to start owning your blog!

 

 

 

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