How NOT To Improve Your Business Marketing With A Blog

You jumped on the inbound marketing bandwagon focused on the promises of how a blog would help your business. You know, those statistics that show that companies that blog have...  

• 55 percept more website visitors (Click to tweet!) 

• 95 percent more inbound links (Click to tweet!) 

• 434 percent more indexed pages (Click to tweet!)  

Except you made one big mistake.

You didn’t make the blog a part of your business’s website; instead you decided to just use Blogger or WordPress. Oops. So much for visitors, links and pages. All of those benefits are going to the hosting site, NOT your business website.

But all is not lost! You can change.  Here's how you can improve your business marketing with a blog.

First, let’s look at why it is so important your business blog be integrated with the company’s website.

1) Loss of SEO Opportunities

One of the greatest advantages blogging bestows on a business is to build up its search engine presence. With each new blog article, a new web page is created, which can be indexed in search engines to help you get found online. But if you host your blog outside of your company’s own website, all that SEO benefit is lost.

2) Inconsistent Branding

When you host your blog on a free hosting site, it will not have the same design and branding elements you use in the rest of your marketing, which can confuse visitors. And some visitors may perceive the use of a free hosting site as a sign your business is unprofessional or unreliable.

3) Loss of Centralization

Extra clicks mean extra work for people searching the web or visiting your site. Keeping everything together increases the likelihood that a visitor will stay on your business site long enough to become a lead. After all, if they first find your main site, but then are sent away from it when they want to read a blog article, they may not come back. Or if they find your blog first, it is an extra step for them to transition from it to your main website in order to access additional information.

The Bottom Line:

All of a visitor’s interaction with your business should happen on your main website, with the blog serving as “bait” to draw them in and driving greater search engine ranking opportunities.

But you’ve already made this mistake. What now?

Fix it.

There are two main ways to integrate your blog into your business’s main website: as a sub-domain or as a website folder.

Ideally, we would recommend that you create your blog’s home as a sub-domain of your main website (e.g. http://blog.website.com). The advantage this has over a website folder (http://website.com/blog) is that you do have some flexibility in layout and design by setting it up as slightly independent of the main website. Yet you retain all of the SEO advantages.

The Switch:

Unfortunately, switching is not painless. If you have been blogging for some time on one of the free URLs like Blogger or Typepad, you are likely to lose the search engine traffic and page rank your blog has achieved. If the site you have used will allow the use of a 301 redirect, you might still be able to salvage some of that SEO value, but not all sites allow 301 redirects.

Others may have automatic interfaces to aid in the transfer of your existing posts, but will have limits on the number of articles transferred or may not migrate comments. If you want to transfer all of your content and maintain search rankings, you will probably need to enlist the aid of programmers.

While failing to integrate your blog with your main website may not have been the best way to start out, you can still correct this mistake and continue to gain links, visitors and SEO ranking benefits from your business blog. And know that you are not alone: Many other business bloggers have made mistakes, too. Find (and fix) 14 more common business blogging mistakes in our free ebook 15 Business Blogging Mistakes and Easy Fixes.