1st Commandment of Blogging
You’ve heard the hype - that blogs are the best way to market your business online. Your blog can be, and SHOULD be the most powerful marketing tool in your marketing arsenal. However, many companies are learning the hard way that there is the right way to run a blog… and more than a few wrong ways to use your business blog as a marketing tool.
The biggest and most glaring commandment of successful blogging has to be this:
1st Commandment of Blogging: Thou Shalt Begin by Being in Control of Thy OWN Blog
Your business blog should be a self hosted blog… period.
I am horrified and stunned by the number of large companies who have more than adequate resources who choose to dip their toe into the blogging waters and choose the path of a free blog to do so.
Wordpress.com, Blogger, LiveJournal are all great free blogging services and if you’re a stay at home mother who wants to express her creativity, then they are truly a great way to see if blogging is for you. By choosing one of these platforms for your business blog, you are broadcasting your level of blogging expertise AND your lack of commitment to your business blog.
The $10 for a domain name and the $120 or less for yearly hosting should NOT be a barrier to entry for ANY business which is SERIOUS about creating a blog to market their products and services.
I was contacted a while back by the VP of North American Operations of a company… well by a company large enough to have a VP of North American Operations. This VP had found my flagship blog (virtual impax) via a comment I had made on another blog as this other blogger was dragging the VP’s company’s name through the dirt because of some exceptionally poor customer service. When bloggers get dissed- they tend to blog about it. (Read Andy Beal’s Rant about Office Depot for social proof!)
So this VP writes to ask me to take a look at his company’s blog and to tell him what they’re doing wrong. I didn’t even have to follow the link to begin the diagnosis. The URL read companyname.wordpress.com.
Lee Oden answers the question of why you shouldn’t host your blog using a third party domain name in his post Learning from Business Blogging Mistakes.
First, you have no control. If you want to change blogging platforms, there is typically no reasonable way to redirect traffic from the old blog to the new address in a search engine friendly way.
If you’re serious about blogging, get serious from the start. Get a domain name and a hosting account for your blog. Starting your business blog with a free blogging account sets your business blogging up for failure from the start.
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[...] the 1st Commandment of Blogging is Maintain Control of your blog, then the 2nd Commandment of blogging should [...]
+100. Respect.