Should I Stay or Should I Go

August 7th, 2008 Chris Posted in Blog | 1 Comment »

Last night, I was out with a couple of friends for a couple of beers (kindest reader, it would be polite to now express some modicum of surprise). As it turns out, two thirds of the people around the table have a blog. One was mine and the other belongs to Ian at Eclipse.

Ian’s blog is about the Eclipse software development tool empire where he runs marketing. I used to work with Ian, where he was known for brilliant marketing and technology insights. He was not known for his graphical design capability. His blog is true to form.

The only reason the third gentleman doesn’t have a blog is that he’s just too darn busy (again, kind reader, any temptation to contrast his situation with mine should be avoided).

Anyways… the topic came up about whether to host your own blog or stick it on one of the popular hosting sites (workpress.com, blogger.com, etc…). Interestingly enough, there has been a fair bit of debate on this topic over the last couple of years.

Originally, the consensus from guru’s I spoke with was that you wanted to stick your blog on one of those hosting sites and then cross-link it with your normal web site. That way the search engines would give you extra credits for more cross-links.

However, in the interim, SEO credit for cross-links has been greatly diminished and you actually do much better having your blog on your site. Plus it makes it easy for everyone that visits your site to see the blog and vice versa.

At this point in the conversation, despite their high geek coefficient, my two friends asked: but is it complicated to host your own blog? To which I replied, boldly, Absolutely Not!

Having heard the concern that it’s complicated to host your own blog, I tell the story of how it took me about three hours to move Colleen’s blog to our company’s site. The steps were quite easy and it should take your web developer even less time given I’m a fledgling, self-taught web guy:

1. Download and install WordPress. Following the instructions and it should take 30 minutes (max!)
2. Customize the template to match your web site. This is the hard part but who ever did your web site should be able to do this.
3. If you have an existing blog, use the WordPress import tool to suck in your previous entries and comments.
4. Post an “I’ve Moved” notice on your current blog. We even have it automatically redirect after a couple of seconds (again, no sweat for a web guy).

Once you’ve moved your blog, there are a couple of cool things you can do to better promote and track your audience. More on that next time…

So, in short:

• If you don’t have a blog for your micro business, seriously consider starting one. It’s a great way to attract visitors. The sooner you start, the sooner you can build up your membership (it does take time).
• Host your own blog and don’t let anyone tell you it’s too complicated… You’ll reap the benefits of increased search engine performance for your site and you’ll get more blog subscribers.

C.