Business Blogs Deserve Better than Blogspot.com

Let me preface this post by saying I’m a big fan of Google and their online applications. Even Blogger, their online blogging software has its benefits, to some extent. Also, although my company offers business blogs as a service, this post is not about my company or our services, it’s about making the right business decision when it comes to implementing a business blog. An online business deserves every opportunity to become as successful as possible, and Blogspot.com just doesn’t offer the kind of support, services and features that are necessary to get the most out of this marketing device. I’m also not stating these reasons because I have studied other people’s experiences. I myself blogged for over three years using the Blogger service starting back in 2003, before it was even popular. That’s before I found Wordpress and became a 100% advocate of their open-source platform and content management system. So when you’re reading these opinions, rest assured it’s from someone familiar with the complete Blogger experience. 

On another note, this post was inspired by Dharmesh Shah’s great post on the same topic over at HubSpot’s Internet Marketing Blog. I can definitely relate to the same kind of headaches he experienced when trying to work with clients who are on Blogger and Blogspot.com.

Top 5 Reasons Why Blogspot.com Won’t Work for Your Business Blog:

1. Image is Everything: Users are as savvy as they come these days, and they aren’t impressed by a free blog on a sub-domain. The design and customization features of the hosted version of Blogger are for lack of a better word, limited. Not to say with some heavy tweaking and redirection it isn’t possible to get a professional, polished looking blog, but why not just start with the right software to begin with? Also, as far as consumers are concerned, a business isn’t taking itself very seriously if they aren’t going to take the few extra steps and set up an external, hosted blog. Blogspot.com blogs are really a soundboard for the personal bloggers, the diarists and individual voices. Businesses need to look elsewhere if they don’t want to be lost in a sea of soccer moms and emo teens with bad haircuts. 
2. SEO Suicide: When you setup a blog on Blogspot, you’re basically throwing your SEO out the window. Because it’s a sub-domain (yourbusiness.blogspot.com), all those incoming links you build to your blog are benefiting Google, and let’s face it, they don’t need the help ranking in their own search engine. I’m not even going to bring up the fact that Google won’t allow a 301 redirect to be placed on the blog so you can properly forward the SEO love to your company website, essentially locking your domain up and forcing you to start over when you eventually figure out Blogspot wasn’t the best choice.
3. Naughty Neighbors: Think the Blogspot.com community can do no wrong? The neighborhood is worse than you thought. Search Engine Land recently highlighted an article from News.com that stated Blogspot.com hosts 2% of all malware on the net, the single most abundant source online. And because Blogspot accounts can easily comment on each other’s blogs without the filters of other services, it’s very common to have a malicious link injected into your blog without your knowledge. A recent case of this found a blogger’s entire website and blog removed from the Google index because of this feature, simply because the link led to a malware and spam site. Guilt by association has never been so ironic.
4. Poor Integration & Features: The hosted Blogger is essentially a bubble-gum blog service. The feature set is extremely limited, with no support for article tagging, comment subscriptions and integration into blog tracking services like Technorati. The whole point of putting together a blog is to participate in the blog community, and having a blog on Blogspot.com really limits that interaction outside of Blogspot.com. It’s certainly something to consider when trying to start conversations about your market and build a reputation in the industry, let alone driving traffic to your site through those blog directories.
5. Data Transfer Nightmares: Google is known for easy migration of information, but it’s important to remember that Blogger was not developed originally by Google, it was purchased and developed from previously existing software. This is the only explanation for the hardships I endured when attempting to export my data once I was ready to make the switch. Comments wouldn’t transfer and I was only able to process a few articles at a time. Having blogged for over three years, it’s an understatement to say that it took forever. I had well over 500 posts and had to backup all the data to ensure it wasn’t lost or deleted during the migration. You’d think this would be a priority with Blogger since it’s very often the place blogs are born and not made, but it seems that stranglehold on your data isn’t getting loosened any time soon.

To summarize, I don’t want to completely write off Blogger as a valuable tool; it might be just what the millions of main-stream bloggers need; a bare-bones service that makes blogging extremely easy. But Blogspot.com, the hosted version of Blogger is not really worth the work that needs to go into it. Like everything free, it comes with a catch, and in this case it’s the deal-breaker when it comes to professional business blogs. At the very least, if you’re on Blogspot.com right now, purchase your own domain and hosting. Make the transfer before it gets any more difficult and you’re locked into something you can’t get out of. I fully recommend Wordpress for every aspect of blogging and have tried pretty much every platform on the market. If you need help with a transfer, let us know. Even if you don’t work with us, we can point you in the right direction.

Business Blogs and the Media

When the phenomenon of blogs first started, they were simply a way for people to post their personal thoughts on the web, like an online diary. Blogs were bulky, had little features and were difficult to incorporate into a business. The few pioneers in the industry knew from the beginning however, that blogs would explode into the most effective form of communication on the web. These days, you can’t escape blogs if you spend any time online at all. Along the way, blogs emerged as an effective business tool and the media began to acknowledge the profound effect they’re having on the way we do business.

Countless articles have been written about the astounding effect blogs have had on business. Many chronicle the story of a small business with an innovative product that was picked up by bloggers and spread across the blogosphere in a matter of hours, resulting in an enormous buzz that led to extensive financial benefits. Businesses have been built on blogs, some emerging in a few days just through this aspect of utilizing blogs and viral marketing to get the word out.  This article highlights one of those stories.

In 2004, Business Week highlighted the power of business blogs on their front page, finally acknowledging that businesses better start a blog and begin to compete online or their competitors would certainly take advantage of this tool and outplay them in the market. The original article blazed a trail for what would be an ever-evolving love affair between the media, blogs and any business, be it online, small, large or anything in between. The article has been so popular that it’s recently been revised into a new article expanding upon the new market, social media. They’ve updated the information because of the continued evolving market and how important it is to stay on top of the latest trends. Any business looking to be successful should capitalize on these trends to capitalize on profit, simple as that.

Obviously, blogs are playing the most significant and important role in online marketing today. The media marketing buzz continues to surround this and showcases success story after success story. Even Entrepeneur magazine agrees that starting a business blog is the most effective means of giving your business a voice in the article Should you Start a Business Blog?

So if everyone else is catching on, how do you start your own blog and take advantage of this phenomenon? We can help. Contact us today and find out how you can have a fully customized business blog built, installed and connected for your business. Take a hold of the future of your success and capitalize on the most popular, affordable, effective form of marketing today, business blogs.

Advertising With A Business Blog

There are many advantages to advertising with a business blog in today’s competitive online marketplace.

For one, blogs carry more weight with search engines because they are updated regularly with fresh, informative content. This consistently updated information is a magnet for search engine robots. When these bots crawl blogs, the more information that can be found and indexed the better. Blogs add more and more content as they develop, thus helping that information reach more customers. The users finding blogs online are typically very targetted visitors, having searched for a specific keyword found in the blog to end up there. The owners of these blogs are also advertising their sites all over the internet and participating in the very active blog community.

Social bookmarks can be utilized alongside the blog, and if used correctly can generate traffic and links to the website virtually immediately. What does this mean for you as the website owner? An increase in business, plain and simple. With the addition of more articles, the blog literally explodes within the social bookmarks. Both the search engines and social bookmarking sites are supplied consistent, fresh content and the site will achieve much more exposure.

Advertising with a blog should be the first thing you do when considering how to market your website. The blog can accumulate links, supply fresh content and provide a gateway for which your customers can use to interact with you as the business owner.

If you own a home business, there is no more popular form of advertising than a blog. There are even more advantages to blog advertising than just the content and exposure, including the addition of RSS feeds. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication, and enables a user to subscribe to your blog through a feed which is then read in a feed reader like Google Reader. This provides instantanous output of information to all the users who are currently subscribed to your feed and is an excellent way to keep people informed of new products, updates and sales.

Here at iePlexus, we’re experts in creating effective business blogs for marketing products and services on the web. We have experience with all phases of blog development and maintenance, as well as social bookmarking campaigns. Contact us today to learn how we can help grow your online business.

Why Blogs Get More Hits Than Websites

The major search engines strive to find fresh, informative content to keep their users coming back. Blogs meet this need because they are updated on a regular basis, they are full of content relating to a particular or broad range of topics, and they are very search engine friendly.

Often times, your business blog will be found through the search engines before your actual website. Take any popular keyword and type it into Google. The majority of sites that appear at the top of the lists will be sites containing a wealth of information about that topic, not just sites selling similar products. Search engines are looking for content before anything else. Write good content on your blog, on a regular basis, and not only will search engines reward your work, but other people will link to your site naturally.

Speaking of links, they are another important factor when determining the amount of traffic and ranking a website will achieve. Having good, informative content in your blog will attract other bloggers and websites to link to your site. Search engines use these links as a measure of your website’s importance and will factor them in to the equation when determining where to rank your website in their results pages.

With a little bit of time an effort, it’s possible your blog can become one of the top results in the search engines under a particular topic. This requires consistent updating of your blog, knowledge and understanding of the topic that you’re writing about, and a search engine friendly blog that’s hosted on it’s own domain name. Writing once or twice a week about new topics and linking these posts back to your main website is an excellent way to increase the exposure for both sites and will put you on the road to consistent business.