Small Business Blog Integration Advice by Jim Degerstrom

Small business owners considering a blog to enhance their website should review the different methods of integrating the content into their main site. Three options for blogging will be reviewed with suggestions to help you maximize the value to your visitors and search engines. A blog is an easy method for adding fresh content to your site without paying a web developer for each new page created.

Blogs, aka weblogs, first began as personal daily journals. An online diary with what you had for lunch does not seem like a practical way to promote a small business. The vast majority of blogs are still personal and non-commercial, while others have become monetized by including advertisements. Blogging for business is a trend that deserves attention.

Times have changed. Small business blogs are a great opportunity to provide your customers advice, news, and reviews. The value a blog provides to small business owners is fresh content that you may easily add to your site. Websites that are launched and collect dust without growing will not be search engine magnets. A good blog should result in your site being visited and indexed by the major search engines frequently.

It’s important to understand the structure of a blog compared to your commercial website.

The big difference between your site and the blog is how each is created. Most websites are done in HTML. Individual pages are usually created by a web designer with a significant cost per page. Blogs use templates which allow the owner to easily create posts from a control panel. Each post becomes a new page, so adding one a week adds 52 pages to your website per year. Several major online service companies allow you to create a free blog, and you may begin adding content immediately.

For the small business owner, the template and control panel with automatic uploading makes it easy. Where you choose to host determines how your content is integrated into your site. This can be a critical decision when part of your goal is search engine optimization.

Here are 3 common methods for hosting your newly created blog content, and explanations of each.

1. Free hosting by the blog service provider. Blogger by Google, WordPress and TypePad are well known.

2. Setup a sub domain of your main www domain which replaces the www with “blog” in your web address.

3. Setup a subfolder “blog” below the root directory so the address would be your www domain plus /blog.

Free hosting is the method of choice for owners of most personal blogs. Very small commercial businesses may use free blog hosting to take advantage of the zero cost startup. The free blog is fine. Reconsider hosting. If you have a website and host your blog with a free service, your content is remotely located without any connection to your main site. For most small business owners, the other options will yield better results.

The sub domain option attaches your blog to your main www domain. For the sake of clarity, the sub domain can be any word, and I used “blog” here as an example only. The normal address with www followed by dot and then your domain name, and finally dot and the suffix com, biz, info, etc. becomes a similar address with blog followed by dot, your domain, dot, and the suffix. For your main website to grow and benefit, the new blog content must be integrated with your original site, and not viewed by search engines as a completely new website.

The subfolder “blog” creates a longer www name, but the disadvantage is minimal. The major advantage is your content is no longer remote or separate from your domain. When search engines visit your site to index content having the blog content in a subfolder means it is indexed as part of your main site. With the other methods, if your original website was launched and never changed, it remains stale. Instead of a dynamic new addition, you have a dusty commercial site in one place, plus a separate advice, news or review site that grows and grows.

Tip: Consider paying for a custom template to match your main website. Blog templates are provided by each of the major service companies that offer free blog hosting. A person can sign up for a free blog with free hosting and be publishing in minutes. The limited choice of color schemes is unlikely to match your existing website, so a near or exact match is preferred.

In conclusion, you may want to search for blogs related to your business and see what other people are doing before you jump in and regret choices later. Consider your purpose. Avoid blatant self-promotion and provide visitors with valuable news, advice, or insight into your business to help and inform rather than sell. Link to your main site from the blog and keep the hard sell there.

Finally, other add-on options for your blog are available as free services to allow visitors to subscribe to posts, notify blog directories each time you post, plus other methods to promote your blog. Check the help files and forums of the services you are considering to learn as you go. Happy blogging!

Jim Degerstrom offers small business advice based on 30 years in management, sales, and marketing, including President or General Manager of small companies in 5 states. He is proficient in website and graphic art design, and runs his online Small Business Resource Center at http://www.jimdegerstrom.com from Kissimmee FL USA.

Article Source: Small Business Blog Integration Advice

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I specialize in safely migrating valuable websites from free hosting to more secure and versatile independent website locations without loosing search standing. If your site is at risk, contact me — Wade Watson

Advantages of Hosting a Blog on Your Own Website by Robin Dale

The real benefit of hosting a blog and maintaining it has been a quick way to spread your business across the internet audiences. It has been proved by the search engine marketing specialists and bloggers in the past few years that a blog can benefits your website or business in very effective ways.

When you decide to host a blog on your website, the first question that comes up is where to setup a blog on your own website or separately. Each one has its own advantages that will help your website.

Where to Host Your Blog on Own Website or Separately?
There are two ways you can host your blog, either by creating an account on the blog platforms like Blogger or WordPress or simply installing your own blog software on your own website. Hosting a blog as a sub-domain of your own website looks like a professional approach and often preferred by those who want to boost their website ranking on search engines using blog as a tool.

Search engine ranking benefits
Setting up the blog in as a sub-domain on your existing website also benefits to your websites search engine ranking. Any new content that is added to your blog will be treated as new content part of your main website. Every new blog posts that you create are easily and quickly indexed than regular web pages. It thus helps promote better indexing and visibility of your main website, if the blog is hosted on the same domain name.

Backlinks benefits
If you spend some time and efforts on writing quality contents on your blog, you can easily attract the quality backlinks using those articles. If you host your blog on your main domain then all back-links will benefit your main domain. If your blog is on an external domain then back-links will not be directly passed on to your main website. However, you will still get the benefits if you are able to pull the PR and links from your separately hosted blog to your main website by cross linking. But, in order to get benefits via cross linking from your externally hosted blog it will need to be successful.

Brand targeting for business owners
Some business company’s or website owners can choose to start a blog on a completely new domain name. This can help if you wish to differentiate between the branding of your website and that of your blog. If the blog you are setting up is not directly related to the content on your main website, then you may not wish to combine the two on the same domain name.

If you wish to target on enforcing a collective brand for your company rather than creating a new brand for your blog, installing a blog as a part of your main website will help. If a blog is installed in a sub folder of your existing website, the blog URL will include your primary domain name in the address bar and appear as a cohesive entity.

Technical resources
If you are setting up a blog on your main website or domain name, you will require a certain level of technical skills in order to install the blog and add the database. If you are starting a blog using one of the free blog platforms then no software installation is required and a blog can be set up in a few easy steps.

Cost benefits
Another common reason for setting up an external blog outside of your main company website is the possibility for using one of the many available free online blog hosting services such as Blogger or Word Press. Most leading social networking websites such as Facebook also allow users to set up their own blog using their website platform. These services are usually free whereas setting up a blog on your main website or private domain name will require web hosting space and technical infrastructure.

So, decide your own where to host your blog, if it’s similar to your website and hosting it to boost your search engine rankings then definitely host it as a sub-domain of your own website.

Robin Dale is the webmaster for the SEO|SEM|UK Web Hosting at www.teeky.org, offering useful & quality articles and news about Search Engine Optimization, Internet Marketing, Search engine marketing, Dedicated Hosting, hosting tips & UK Web Hosting.

For More Articles, Visit Us @ UK Web Hosting Blog

Article Source: Advantages of Hosting a Blog on Your Own Website

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I specialize in safely migrating valuable websites from free hosting to more secure and versatile independent website locations without loosing search standing. If your site is at risk, contact me — Wade Watson

Discovering The Best Blog Hosting Solution by profitweaver

Creating a blog is probably the easiest way for anyone to create a presence on the Internet. They are easy to maintain and are probably the simplest way to communicate with someone else online. The biggest hurdle that anyone will have is to set the blog up in the first instance, but even that can be straight forward if you choose the best blog hosting to start with.

Before we get into that however, there is the question about free blog hosts to answer. Many will wonder why they have to buy hosting at all when there are good free hosts about, such as Google’s Blogger and the WordPress site (not the actual software).

The answer is that either of these systems are great for creating simple blogs. If you simply want to communicate with friends and family, or just want to keep on online diary, then either of these options are fine. All that you need is an email address to register, choose a theme and away you go.

However the best blog hosting can offer you an awful lot more than that.

In the first instance there is he question of control. With your own blog on your own site you can do what you want. Both Blogger and WordPress do impose restrictions so there are some things that you will not be able to do. If your plan is to operate commercially, then you will be walking the thin line straight away.

The second major drawback is flexibility. Once you have started blogging, you will undoubtedly want to do things in a certain way, create your own themes and add additional functionality to your blog. The free hosts impose restrictions on these activities, so your artistic endeavours will be curtailed. If you want an element of flexibility to get your blog just the way that you want it, then a free host is not the one for you.

The third potential problem could be rather more serious.

Because your blog is hosted on a third party site, if the third party takes a dislike to anything that you do, they can shut you down and your blog could be gone. Both Blogger and WordPress have their own TOS of course, and the chances are that if you are very careful about what you do, you will be ok. The risk, however, is always there.

So, we come down to choosing the best blog hosting. Where to you start? You can begin by reading web host reviews, which can help guide you. Reading other people’s opinions can help eliminate some of the choices, and there are a lot. In a nutshell, you will want to consider the following:-

Best Blog Hosting Support

Support is critical if you are to succeed. I don’t mean the help that anyone would give to a new customer, but the knowledge that if something should go wrong, and sometimes they do, there will be a course of action you can take to help you get around the problem.

Blog Hosting Resources

The resources I am talking about is the amount of disk space that you are allocated by your blog host, and the amount of bandwidth that you are allowed to use up every month. The disk space is the physical room that the files you create will take up, and the bandwidth is the amount of memory allocated to doing things, like serving up files, photos etc. Some activities are more memory hungry than others. Hosting photographs for example will take up a fair bit of disk space and will hog a fair bit of your monthly bandwidth allocation.

If you choose the route of getting your blog hosted, then you will need to ensure that your blog hosting is reliable and will no disappear after a few months. Try and choose someone with a proven track record.

One way to discover the best blog hosting is to read web hosting reviews, especially from those that have that experience already.

Article Source: Discovering The Best Blog Hosting Solution

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I specialize in safely migrating valuable websites from free hosting to more secure and versatile independent website locations without loosing search standing. If your site is at risk, contact me — Wade Watson

1 – Blogging: Let’s Get You Started! by Chonticha Marijne

Copyright 2006 Chonticha Marijne

So what is blogging really all about? First off, let me tell you that it’s a lucrative business to blog and that blogs are easy to set up and manage. Imagine getting paid to write about subjects that interest you, whenever you want, wherever you are! The flexibility involved allows you to maintain your blog at your own pace, and with Internet cafés easily accessible all over the globe, even your vacation won’t get in the way of your blogging… Or should I say: even your blogging won’t get in the way of your vacation?

In this article, let’s take a look at the profitability of a blog and set up one of our own, free of charge! Interested? Read on!

First, you need to get yourself a blog. There are several options – host a blog on your own domain or get a free one. For starters, let’s talk about the free blogs. You can obtain one at http://www.blogger.com or the newer (and better!) http://www.wordpress.com. WordPress is a free blog engine that is robust and infinitely expandable.

Blogger is actually owned by Google, so it will be detected by Google’s radar faster and you will be indexed more quickly. WordPress.com, however, is a relatively new option so I have no comparison on the speed of getting indexed by search engines. However, WordPress is better in the sense that it has more advanced features such as Trackbacks and Categories. You can also manage your sidebar links more efficiently (more about this later).

Get a free blog at either Blogger or WordPress. Then, familiarize yourself by publishing your first post on your blog and tinkering around with the options and templates.

Here are some words to start expanding your blogging vocabulary:

Permalink – Permalink stands for permanent link, which is a URL (Uniform Resource Locator) that leads to an individual post that you make in your blog.

Trackback – When you post about someone else’s blog post elsewhere, your post will show up in their “trackback” section. This feature, however, is not available with a Blogger account.

Pinging – Blogging seems to be paired with pinging almost every time either one is mentioned nowadays. Pinging is actually the action where a certain aggregator is notified whenever your blog is updated, so that the aggregator may show the newest post of your blog on their website. This is a useful way to gain traffic, which I’ll discuss in a future article.

Content

Next, let’s look at the type of content that’s suitable for your blog in order to make it profitable. You need to understand that there is no fixed scope that your blog should have, which means you can write about whatever you’re interested in. Mind you, the difference between a profitable blog and a non-profitable one is the way you write. What would you prefer: reading your university professor’s lecture notes or the latest novel by your favorite author? People prefer to read “light” items most of the time. When they check out your blog, they are not only looking for information, but they are also looking for information that they can access easily.

So, to attract more visitors as well as to keep your current readers coming back for more, it’s very important to add a personal touch to your blog posts. This can be done by simply imagining that you’re talking with your personal friend. An extra bonus for your readers would be a great sense of humor, so try to add funny comments in your articles where relevant.

Another important point is to avoid addressing your reader as a plural unit. Don’t write as if you’re preparing a speech. Instead, write as if you’re having a conversation with a single person, an equal friend, because this will make your reader relate to you more easily.

Besides that, it’s also very useful to establish your own personality through your words. We’re very curious creatures, so naturally your visitors would want to know as much about you as the information you’re offering them.

Having a distinctive personality in your blog will make a world of difference between your blog about gadgets and all the other blogs about gadgets out there. This is a lot like creating your own brand name, where people immediately remember your blog’s name when they need information about gadgets, just like how people immediately think of McDonald’s for fastfood or Nike for sportswear.

There will be more on the subject of content the next time.

When word gets around about your command of blogging, others who need to know about blogging will start to actively seek you out!

About the author:
Chonticha Marijne runs several Internet ventures, including http://www.e-Abundance.com , http://www.e-AbundanceTools.com and http://www.e-AbundanceSystem.com . She is based in the Netherlands and particularly enjoys publishing for newcomers. This article is copyright © 2006 by Chonticha Marijne and may be reprinted in its entirety as long as both byline and copyright statement are included.

Article Source: 1 – Blogging: Let’s Get You Started!
I specialize in safely migrating valuable websites from free hosting to more secure and versatile independent website locations without loosing search standing. If your site is at risk, contact me — Wade Watson

WordPress vs. Blogger.com by Joseph Daneault

One of the most popular things out there on the internet is setting up your own blog. It’s sort of similar to keeping a diary, except for the whole world to see. You just write down your thoughts, ideas, pictures, likes, dislikes, and opinions on anything you want to talk about. People love to talk about themselves anyways, so why not let everyone else know what you think?

Some people set up blogs just for fun. There are those people out there that just love to write, so they sit down at their computer and start typing. An hour or so goes by, and they have a couple pages done without even really noticing it. It’s a good way to let out your frustrations and also to let others know how happy you are.

However, there also people out there that want to setup their own blogs to potentially make themselves a nice chunk of change. For those people, it’s important to know what blog to use, and which one will get them the most amount of traffic and all of those good things. Two type of blogs that many people use are WordPress and blogger.com.

You’re probably wondering, okay what’s the difference and which one do I want to use?

Well, many people choose to use blogger.com because it’s free, quick, and easy to setup. However, one of the bad things about blogger.com is that you don’t really have control over it, because the people at blogger.com can shut down your blog for pretty much no reason at all. You are essentially just putting your work in other people’s hands. This means that all of the work you put in, whether you like to blog or not, could be gone in a second. All of your work is gone and you have nothing to show for it.

If you’re looking for a more permanent solution, I strongly suggest using WordPress blogs. They do offer a free hosting service, but if you want a long term blog you should probably host it on your own server. They also offer a free software download where you can put your blog on your own server. The service is totally free and also can be setup in a few minutes. The only thing you need is an hosting account, which can be purchased for less than $10 and you can have unlimited domains or blogs on them. As you can see, the $10 or so is well worth the money.

One very important factor that separate WordPress from all the rest of the blogs out there, is that it has a huge number of plugins and tools you can put on your blog. These plugins and tools are definitely not available on blogger.com so this is one distinctive difference between the two. These tools and plugins offered on WordPress make your blog much more favorable to the search engines, and that is what you want.

One last thing to remember to determine differences between WordPress and blogger.com is that with WordPress you have full control over your blogging, while at blogger.com you don’t. Having full control of your blog is probably the most important thing that you need to have when setting up your blog.

Feel free to go to http://www.ilovemoneymorethanyou.com/blog/wordpress-vs-blogger-com/ to find out more information about the differences between WordPress and blogger.com blogs.

Article Source: WordPress vs. Blogger.com

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I specialize in safely migrating valuable websites from free hosting to more secure and versatile independent website locations without loosing search standing. If your site is at risk, contact me –Wade Watson

WordPress.com essentially owns the site on which your blog appears. Your blog is subject to any rules present or future and they’re interpretations of those rules. The site has, in the opinions of many, a reputation as being the strictest– and, perhaps– least predictable free host when it comes to enforcing such rules. Ask around and you’ll quickly find someone who’s WordPress.com site has abruptly disappeared, losing, perhaps, years of work and search ranking. With self-hosting, you have no such restrictions. On your free blog you may not place ads from Adsense or other sources, nor do the operators wish for users to market affiliate items on their blogs. Basically, WordPress.com, as with most free hosts, is intended for noncommercial personal blogging.

With a self-hosted “Dot-com” site, you have an assett of measurable value that could be sold one day. This is not the case with a free site, even if it ranks well in search (as many do).

I highly recommend that anyone, particulary in business, consider moving off a free host for a low-cost self-hosting arragement once they have gotten their feet wet at blogging and believe it can play a serious role in their life or business.

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It is possible to transfer the contents of a WordPress.com website to a self-hosting arrangement with all entries intact and avoid loosing valued search engine ranking. Please contact Wade Watson for more information at the following link.