The follow blog post is a response to Self Hosted Blogs for Business which is paraphrased in the quote below, taken directly from the site. Do you agree? Where is your business blog hosted? Please weigh-in with your thoughts in the comments!
WordPress.com and Blogger Blogs
WordPress.com and Blogger Blogs are hosted and essentially controlled by WordPress and Blogger web sites. They are free to use and very quick to set up, you can be Blogging in minutes. However, from a business perspective that is where the benefits end.
My response
Wow. While there are some very GOOD reasons for businesses to use self hosted blogs here, I strongly disagree with your this stand on using self vs free blogs for business.
Especially considering small to medium sized businesses, your very short list of benefits is not at all where the benefits end. There are many more good reasons for businesses to consider using free community blogs including: cost effectiveness (from so many areas), content testing, free SEO (yes SEO) and free relevant promotion within passionate blogging communities, just to name a few. Big or small, if you don’t need to serve ads and your primary reason for blogging is organic SEO, a free blog may be ideal. A self hosted blog may be overkill.
Design? Yes, self hosted blogs offer more and better options, but most business only need to be sharp, functional and professional looking with basic stats for tweaking content. With a little time and effort… and maybe a little help, coaching and finesse, you can absolutely achieve this via Worpress.com (for example). Your going to need a log more time and resources available to deal with a self hosted blog.
Stats? Yes, there is absolutely better information available on self hosted blogs but that doesn’t mean you need them or you’re going to use them. If you’re driving traffic to your website, in many cases the stats supplied by the free blog combined with your website stats, that are hopefully provided by Google Analytics or better, will suffice.
You CAN move to a self hosted blog later.
Choice between free and self hosted should be based on what’s appropriate for your strategy and not based on bells and whistles.
More often than not, bells and whistles just create more noise.
Thanks,
@richardbouchez
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Richard Bouchez is a certified Inbound Marketing professional specializing in Social Media Marketing & New Media content development. Richard’s web, audio & video work has been honored with Emmy, Promax & CBA awards.
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