Get Your Blog Out There: Hosting
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Since it slowly crawled into mass consciousness during the late 90s and exploded during Web 2.0, blogs have become reliable sources of information for most users, setting the precedence of citizen journalism and the representation of new media. What seemingly started as glorified digital versions of personal diaries has since evolved into news and marketing engines.
Now, not only individuals have jumped into blogging, many big name corporations and smaller, independent businesses have employed it to push information and brand awareness beyond what their main site has to offer. It helps a lot in delivering content to a targeted audience, engaging to them on a much deeper level while attempting to reach out to untapped markets.
All these are beneficial and can easily be added to or aligned with a marketing campaign’s goals, so if you have yet to delve into blogging for your brand, it’s highly recommended that you do. As the old adage goes, it’s never too late to start; so here are a few key pointers on blog hosting to get the ball rolling.
If you already have your own Web site, it’s best to host your blog within its domain. This unifies your blog as a bona fide sub-segment of your business and you also get to keep your readers within your brand’s walled garden for improved site traffic. They can easily do some background checks on you and see what else you have to offer without having to point to some other location online.
You can easily buy a domain from a number of domain name registrars but the most popular one to date is GoDaddy. It sells domains on the cheap with frequent special offers and discounts, and offers an entire slew of value-added services ala-carte. These include Web site and blog design and building (and tools if you want to do it yourself), host servers, feature-rich CMS (or content management system, for creating, publishing and managing posts, and customizing blog elements) and business packages if you’re planning to offer eCommerce on your blog.
On the other hand, if you’re operating a relatively small business without a Web site and working on a budget, you can initially have your blog hosted on free blogging platforms like Blogger or Wordpress. These services usually have good features, decent templates (or easy-to-follow page layout specifications if you’re feeling extra code-happy), good CMS structures and hefty integrations with other services online.
Another option is to get a domain as an investment for a future full-developed Web site and have it point to your Blogger or Wordpress blog’s URL for the meantime.
However, as your blog, your business and your network of readers and clients grow, it’s best to actually create a main Web site and then integrate your blog into it. Set aside a dedicated subdomain paired with an independent page under your site, and you’re good to go.
A word of advice though, site migration is not really a quick and easy process. Even with the help of a seasoned Web developer or service, it can take a day or more to accomplish depending on the size of the migration. So just be patient and make sure you still continue on publishing new blog posts to keep your readers piling in.
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RSpears @ April 22, 2010
