Your business blog should be part of your site. However, Krishna De writes that many businesses have opted to create their blog on third-party sites like WordPress.com, Blogger.com, and Typepad.com.
She gives two reasons why it’s so much better to place your blog on your own domain.
First, you want the links of your blog to benefit your site. She writes:
If you are going to invest in business blogging, be good to yourself… don’t have all those wonderful incoming links to your great content go to a blog that is not hosted by you.
Links are the most important factor in achieving higher search traffic. If your blog is on your site, all the links pointing to your blog will raise the search traffic of your whole site including the home page and product pages.
Second, Krishna writes that a blog on your site “makes you makes you look like you take business blogging seriously as part of your online marketing strategy.”
More Reasons
To add to Krishna’s points, here are two more reasons to blog on your own domain.
It’s more professional.
The vast majority of blogs on these third-party sites are not commercially-oriented. Instead of associating your blog with these sites, associate your blog with your business.
Of course, you don’t want to alienate non-commercial bloggers. These bloggers will often be great sources of traffic. But you do want to make it clear that your blog is part of a business.
Finally, if you use a third-party site, they have control over your blog.
I’ve heard of horror stories about third-party sites deleting blogs because of terms of service violations. The bloggers didn’t think they were doing anything wrong. They tried to get their blogs restored but to no avail.
How to Switch Over
If you have your blog hosted by a third-party but want to move it to your site, here is my recommendation.
Write a blog post pointing your readers to the new URL. Also, remind them to update their RSS subscription to your new feed.
