This is part 6 of a new series on how to start a business blog, and is aimed at businesses of all sizes. In these articles, I’m going to address business-specific concerns and requirements for business blogging. Previously: How to Start a Business Blog, Part 5
Another issue to consider when starting a business blog is what do with the existing site. Here are your choices:
- Create a blog as an entirely separate site on its own domain
This allows you to have a different look for the blog compared to the main business site. If the blog doesn’t work out, you can easily “cut it off” since it never was deeply intertwined with the main site. Disadvantages are that your online presence just got a split personality which may confuse some customers, and you still have to figure out a way to link to the blog from the main site. - Create a blog as a subdomain or directory of the existing site
This shows a greater dedication to blogging, which your blog-savvy customers will appreciate. You’ll have to get the blog and the main site to play nice with each other, though. You’ll want visual consistency between the blog and the main site. You’ll have to figure out how to add links to the blog from the main site where appropriate without making it look like you duct-taped your site. This is a common option, and for good reason: it makes sense from all points of view, from blogger, to company, to visitor. - Replace your current site with the blog’s CMS
This option gives you the chance to do that redesign of the old site that probably needed to be done anyway. The WordPress blog system, in particular, makes an excellent content management system for even large websites, as well as small. You don’t even have to have the blog on the home page, if that’s your preference. The win-win in this situation is that not only did you get blogging, but your company’s entire website just got insanely easier to manage. There’s even a secret bonus for doing this: with only a few tweaks, your new WordPress-powered site will probably be far more optimized for search engines than before.
As you can probably tell, I’m strongly in favor of the last option. The people behind WordPress have plans to continue ah… pressing forward (sorry!) with WordPress’ CMS capabilities, making it even more powerful in future releases.
In How to Start a Business Blog, Part 7, I’ll get into business blog design considerations. Subscribe to my RSS feed so you don?t miss it!
Technorati Tags: business blogging
Definitely some key tips there. Completely agree with getting your own domain. It’s absolutely necessary for branding purposes and such. Great article
.
Thanks, Leonid! Appreciate it.
[...] duct-taped and stapled onto your existing site with no thought to how to integrate blog and web site or an overall [...]
[ALERT - Blog newbie - ALERT]
Isn’t a fourth solution to have your blog pages in the same directory as your static site pages and make the whole thing seamless?
As I consider to continue using a now defunct desktop blogging software (Easy Blogs (http://www.easyblogs.com), one of the benefits I see is having the site be all in “one piece.”
Oh dear, am I on my way to your 25 reasons biz blogs suck list?
Thanks for the good content. Between Gateway and this site, you’ve got a good funnel going!
Natasha Vincent
@ Natasha – Unfortunately, it’s not that simple. Sure, you can have the blog and your site pages in the root directory of your site. But since you’d have to do all the work of matching the designs, it makes sense to just have the whole thing be a blog and use the page capability in WordPress. At least… that makes sense to me.