Big Mistake: Hosting Your Business Blog on a Hosted Service
Posted on November 3rd, 2008, in Blogging, Business | 7 Comments »
Think you made a smart move by letting some hosted blog service deal with running your company blog? Well, I would say you’ve probably made one of the biggest mistakes in your businesses endeavors to understand and integrate blogging into your branding efforts.
Bad for Branding
Who are you trying to brand, yourself or Blogger? If you host with any of the numerous services currently offered today, you are no doubt giving away some of your branding efforts to whomever is hosting you, and while that might seem like a fair trade, in the long term it truly isn’t, as people will come to expect you to be on that service later on, even if you decide to switch.
Bad for Control
Which brings me to my next point. If you can’t control everything on your site, it isn’t your site. WordPress.com doesn’t allow you to use advertising, though if you are an open source foundation, advertising might be your only revenue source. Google Blogger is difficult for most companies to easily skin and integrate into the normal look and feel of the rest of their site.
There are so many issues depending on a service to provide your blog, a voice for your company, and one of the biggest is that they can delete your site at any time if they don’t feel it adds value or if it crosses a line for them.
While this might seem trivial, since most businesses won’t post anything that would fall outside of the Terms of Service, accidents can and do happen.
Bad for User Experience
Many businesses don’t go the extra mile and find someone to properly integrate the hosted blog with the rest of their design, creating a jarring shift in the user experience, and making users question if they are still on your company site. Most of this is due to the difficulty of finding someone that knows the hosted systems well enough to shoehorn your design into their theming language.
Bad for Search Engine Optimization
People won’t be linking to your website. They will be linking to your blog on some hosted service. Part of the allure of blogging is that it will bring traffic to your business, but if people go to the blog, and then leave, they aren’t giving you any direct traffic.
If you then decide to move your blog, you can’t set up any type of redirect, and you’ll end up with people going to your old blog instead of your new one. If you always host your own blog on whatever software you enjoy, then you’ll be able to switch out software without truly losing any links or traffic.
Conclusion
Please don’t host your professional, business or corporate blog on some service as you are only doing a disservice to yourself.
It really doesn’t take much time, money, or energy to install one of the many pieces of blogging software on your web hosting server, and publish articles to it, and you’ll be glad you did.
I realized this the week after WordCamp, when I discovered I couldn’t put my Google Adsense thingie in the margin of my blog on WordPress.com. I knew I’d need my own expanded website eventually, but didn’t realize it would be sooner rather than later. So I’m working at getting something set up elsewhere.
Lots of small details you just don’t know at the beginning.
- PhylHighly risky too. If you get traction and bandwidth others will try to knock you off.
No one cares until you start to make an impact. Once you do – watch out!
I’ve heard horror stories of people losing their blog because their blog address was used in spam
John Townsend´s last blog post..Chattanooga Real Estate Today Launches a New Blog
- John TownsendI totally agree with this. Did you know that the massively popular site FiveThirtyEight ran into major problems the last week of the election because it was blogger hosted?
Ryan´s last blog post..4 Great Family Resorts
- Ryan[...] Peralty at Branding David has a post up that says it’s a big mistake to host your business blog on a hosted service. He makes the following [...]
- Is Using a Hosted Blog Service Appropriate? | PureBloggingWhat I hate are businesses/people that are trying to use a free service (blogger, wordpress or others) as a professional marketing tool. When you see “businessname.blogsport.com” or”businessname.wordpress.com” it makes you wonder about the company. At the very least you think that they would invest in the $10.00 for a specific domain name to hide this.
I know its not exactly what you were getting at but I think it has to do with things along the same line.
- KevinKevin – That’s exactly what I meant.
Though with some services, like WordPress.com it is like $20, but still well worth it to hide the fact that you are using a free service, though at that point, I don’t see why they don’t go the next step and switch over to using the WordPress.org software, especially if they are already hosting the rest of their site somewhere else.
- David PeraltyI think it’s a good idea for a business to go ahead and get the Blogger and WordPress.com subdomains if they’re available just to protect their brand to some degree.
I agree that they wouldn’t want to use it as a primary blog but they can be used to funnel traffic to the main, self-hosted, company blog.
Frank C´s last blog post..Dazzle Video Creator Platinum Review
- Frank C