Business Blog Advice

Different blog programs have different features, but they all do essentially the same thing. They convert your text into an HTML web page (known as a blog post) at the click of a button. You simply type your blog post, add links or images as desired, and click a “Publish” button. The blog application will then publish your post onto the web, making it a part of your blog.

Most business blogs are published in reverse-chronological format, with the most recent post at the top of the first page. 

Different Ways to Publish a Business Blog 
When I say “ways to publish a business blog,” I’m talking about where your blog will be hosted and located on the web. Basically, you have three publishing / hosting options:

1. Have the blog hosted by a blog company.
2. Make the blog an extension of your website.
3. Give the blog a domain of its own.

Option 1 - Host your blog with a blog company.
In this option, your blog will reside under the blog company’s web domain. For instance, Blogger’s web domain is blogspot.com, so if Jane Doe setup a blog under this domain it would look something like this: http://www.janedoe.blogspot.com/. Jane will never truly own this domain, because it is part of Blogspot.com. This is one of the down sides of this hosting option.

Option 2 - Make the blog an extension of your website.
In this option, your blog will reside on your own web domain, but as a sub-domain. In other words, the blog will be an extension of your website. One of my marketing blogs, for instance, is an extension of the website ArmingYourFarming.com. I publish my blog to a sub-domain of my website: www.armingyourfarming.com/realestatemarketing.

Option 3 - Give the blog a domain of its own.
In this option, your blog will reside in the top-level (or “root”) directory of your website domain. So the blog becomes the website itself. When somebody types in the root web address ending with “.com” … they land on the blog itself. This blog that you are reading, http://www.ceoblogwatch.com/, is an example of giving a blog its own domain. This is a blog, but it resides on its own domain. It is not an extension of a website like my real estate marketing blog under option #2.

Which Option is Best?
All of my blogs are published through options #2 and #3 above. I avoid option #1 entirely. There are several reasons for this. First, I like having the website and blog under the same domain. It’s just easier to manage that way.

But there’s a more important reason why I avoid option #1. I once had a blog disappear from blogspot.com (remotely hosted by Blogger). I mean it just up and disappeared. I emailed Blogger’s “support” team, but they basically ignored me. Did I violate some term of use? Not that I’m aware of. It was just a harmless informational blog. I wasn’t selling anything … I wasn’t even running ads. Just a basic blog. And then poof, it was gone.

Because the blog was hosted by Blogger, I had no way to retrieve anything. And because Blogger is a free service with “as-is” disclosures, nobody seemed to care that my blog had vanished.

After that incident, I vowed never again to host a blog under somebody else’s domain. I still use Blogger as a blog publishing tool, but I publish the blog itself onto my own domain, where my website is hosted. Bottom line — I recommend you put your business blog onto a web domain that you own, regardless of which application you use.