Many small business owners know that having a blog will benefit their business. So they do a little research and then launch their blog. Unfortunately, they often make a big mistake right off the bat that will impact the success of their blog.
Recently I was researching local photographers to get a family portrait done. Most of the photographers I found had beautiful websites showcasing their photography talents. Many, I am happy to report, also had blogs linked to their sites but most of them had made this mistake. It is a common mistake, and in fact, I made the very same mistake when I started my first small business blog back in 2006.
Keep Your Blog Under Your Domain
I touched on this point when I discussed Choosing a Blogging Platform. If you want to get the maximum benefit from your blog, and have it appear to be professional, you need to keep your blog under your own domain. The big mistake many small business bloggers make is that they use a hosted blogging platform and use the standard URL that platform provides.
What does this mean exactly? Let me illustrate with an example. Say I was a photographer and I had a website called www.peterrentonphotography.com. The way the blog for this site should be setup is under the domain with the address www.peterrentonphotography.com/blog. It should also have a similar look and feel to your website so your visitors will know it is your blog. The mistake people make is they sign up with a hosted platform and their blog has an address like: peterrentonphotography.blogspot.com or peterrentonphotography.wordpress.com. It often has a completely different look as well.
What is the reason to have your blog setup under your own domain? There are several but the main reason is you get maximum benefit for all your blog content from the search engines. Blogs are all about content and search engines love content. Most small business websites have only a limited amount of content on a small number of pages. Writing a new blog post 2-3 times a week over time will add a lot of content to your site which, if done right, should lead to higher search engine rankings and more visitors.
I will write more about maximizing the search engine potential of your blog in a future post.
Photo courtesy of SHUN [iamtekn]
