Blogs can help you establish credibility and generate leads for your business. But be careful: who’s getting the credit for all your hard work?
Creating content can be expensive. Whether you’re posting a professionally shot 
video, a self-shot video post, or text post that you’ve labored over to get just right, you’ve invested your time and/or money. Is your website or domain getting the long-term search “credit” for your effort? If you are posting your content to a third party blogging platform (like WordPress.com or Blogger), you aren’t. Don’t get me wrong – they and other hosts are solid platforms and easy to use – but if you are trying to build a business through your blog they could be holding you back.
The location of your content does matter
Some will argue that if the content is good, people will find you and link to that content. They’re right – but guess what – the all-important search engine “credit” all goes to the host (the all important part of the web address right before the “.” – www.yoursite.wordpress.com). So big deal, you have inbound links and people are paying attention – why should you care? Two very good reasons:
- If you are blogging for your business and you have a website, it’s not getting any significant search benefit. When you link back to your business, you might get clicks. But as far as search engines are concerned, the 3rd party blog content is only distantly related to your primary website through those links. Content on a blog within your domain gives the entire domain credit.
- Even if you don’t have a website, someday you might want to take your blog to the next level – do something the 3rd Party Host won’t easily allow, or allow at all. You will want to move to your own domain. The larger your blog, the bigger the pain. You can post links to your new blog, or even copy your old posts over to the new blog. But guess what? You’ll lose most of the benefit of all that good content. The old content on the new site will never be ranked as highly on the search engines as the content on the old site.
What to do
If you are just starting out – start right with your own blog. If you are already established on a host platform, not all is lost. You should explore moving to a self-hosted set up as soon as you can. Not sure what’s involved, contact us, and we’ll help you figure it out.
Some people are concerned that owning a blog can be a difficult and expensive. If you are already blogging on a hosted platform, you’ve mastered the difficult stuff. Hosting isn’t nearly expensive or complex as it sounds. If you are just starting out there are plenty of sources for examples and coaching (we do that too).
And don’t forget to regularly backup what you own – for a self-hosted WordPress, I use WordPress Database Backup.
Happy blogging.
Photo credit: Web Success Diva
