There’s ongoing debate about whether it’s better to have your blog hosted off site, at hosts like Blogger.com or WordPress.com, or whether to make it a part of your main website.
Most experts tend to favor making it a part of your own website, in part for the fact you’ll get the search engine spiders devouring your entire site regularly, and in part because of the increased traffic you can expect to enjoy to your main website as people discover your blog, and then follow links to your main site.
Recently, however, I saw a caution from a major internet marketer who claimed that in spite of increased traffic to his site after he started a blog and RSS feed, his sales plummeted!
He attributes it to the fact his blog and RSS so fascinated his site visitors that they ended up never bothering to go back to the main site and his sales pages. He says that his traffic logs showed that tons of traffic was exiting his site from the RSS feed in particular, through the links in the feed.
This highlights the value of split-testing when you’re involved in internet marketing. The conventional wisdom is that adding a blog and RSS feed to your site will increase your traffic and your sales. The only way to know for sure, however, is to test the idea.
For some, at least, the conventional wisdom may turn out to be wrong.
The marketer who publicized this went on to say in his article that once he moved the blog and RSS to a separate site, his sales reverted to normal within a short period of time. Now he links the blog to his main site and enjoys the benefits he sought.
If you stop to think about it, traffic to your blog isn’t really traffic to your website, if the visitors never leave your blog. Traffic from an off site blog, where people have clicked over to your site after seeing your blog, is certainly more legitimate. Those folks are going to see your sales page, and perhaps buy your product.
Experts also debate whether it’s better to have the page rank from your blog pages spreading around your main site via your inter-site linking strategy (you have one, don’t you?), or to be able to “deep link” to your main site from a blog that is hosted elsewhere.
The latter is said to get your main site spidered much more quickly than normal. I’ve seen this issue debated hotly, but most SEO experts seem to me to be of the opinion that external links carry more weight with the search engines than do internal links. At least that’s how I read it.
Then there’s the argument that blog host sites give your blog a less “professional” look than if you host it at your site, and maintain it with WordPress. Personally, I don’t think that argument holds water. Many of the blog templates I’ve seen on independent hosts are attractive, and most of them allow you to import and use a variety of templates. In fact, you can now get a hosted blog at WordPress.com and enjoy most of the benefits of hosting the blog yourself.
One good argument I have heard in favor of a standalone blog is the ability it affords you to edit the content of your RSS feed, differentiating it from your blog, if you want to. That one I agree with unreservedly.
I also agree that being able to archive all of my posts and maintain a backup file would be another advantage to hosting it at my own site, with standalone software, if only for the peace of mind of having the backups, and not having to worry about a permanent crash of the blog host’s server.
Think about the issues above when setting up your blogs. You’ll be glad you did!
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