WordPress Tips for Business Blogs
Posted by Mark McLaren on November 12, 2009 · 7 Comments
WordCamp Seattle Speaker Mark McLaren
Editor’s Note: Mark McLaren (one of our speakers from WordCamp Seattle 2009) originally posted this to a local email list and gave us permission to republish it here.
I have noticed a number of list members using WordPress.com to host their business blog, and I thought I would offer a few suggestions.
You can continue to host your blog on WordPress.com but use an upgrade (about $10 a year) to map your own subdomain to the site. That way your blog URLs will start with http://blog.yourdomain.com/ rather than http://yourusername.wordpress.com/.
There are lots of reasons to do this, including improved search engine optimization, but the most significant is that if you ever decide to switch to a self-hosted blog, you will be able to change hosts without losing any URLs.
Details for subdomain mapping are here:
http://support.wordpress.com/domain-mapping/map-subdomain/
In almost every case, I recommend using a self-hosted installation of WordPress right off the bat. Again, there are many reasons for doing so. One is that, at the very least, it will allow you to place an obvious link to your main website in the navigation of the blog.
Typically, when you host your blog on WordPress.com, there is no easy way to get to the main website from the blog, which is a significant usability and web marketing issue.
First of all, people will be going to the blog from the main site. You want them to be able to get back to the main site without having to think about how to do it.
Second, people will be landing on individual blog posts from many different sources: search engines, links pasted into email messages, other web pages, Twitter, etc. You want them to be able to get to your main website quickly and easily from any page they land on.
Even if your main site runs on .NET, it is still possible to use self-hosted WordPress. Here is an example I built for one of my customers: http://www.photosafaris.com/blog/
(Editor’s note: Thanks for the tips, Mark, and we’d love to hear feedback in the comments!)
DECEMBER 17, 2009 UPDATE:
There are more reasons to choose self-hosted WordPress over WordPress.com.
You can’t install Google Analytics on WordPress.com. If you are going to go to the effort of maintaining a blog, you should track visitors. The analytics that are included in the WordPress.com Dashboard are inadequate.
There are thousands of outstanding plugins and custom themes for WordPress that you cannot use on WordPress.com. The range and depth of plugins and themes is hard to convey in a few sentences. Some plugin examples are the Disqus comments system (shown here on Jeremiah Owyang’s blog) and the Share This plugin. Installing these plugins takes only minutes and significantly increases your blog’s chances of success.
Mark,
After I thanked you for solving a problem for me a few months ago, I took your advice and got a self-hosted website. I moved my chicken blogs from gardenwithchickens.wordpress.com to my new site on bluehost called backyardhencam.com. By the way your wife might like the site, and do get a few hens, they are wonderful pets and producers.
Anyway, I’ve decided to do a second site with bluehost called centralcoastgardening.com. Can you direct me to a link (hopefully one of yours) that can tell me how to make a transfer. I will keep the same wordpress theme. Do you recommend that I take out the chicken blogs since they are duplicated in on backyardhencam. Should I leave the wordpress blog after transferring or let it die a slow death. Ugh…….
You’ve been very helpful. I thank you for your input.
Lee
@Lee
Thanks for the kind words!
Now, about your new site. I need to understand exactly what you plan to do. Are you moving the backyardhencam.com site to the centralcoastgardening.com domain? I gather that’s not the case because it sounds like you plan to keep the backyardhencam.com site online at the backyardhencam.com domain.
What exactly will backyardhencam.com and centralcoastgardening.com have in common? I guess my main question is why would you need to move content from the former to the latter? If all they will have in common is the same theme, then you could create a new WordPress installation at centralcoastgardening.com and install the same theme. What else would you need to bring over from backyardhencam? (I do think you should not include byhc blog posts on centralcoastgardening, since, as you say, they are already online at the byhc site. The duplicate content would do you no good. You could simply direct centralcoast visitors to the byhc site to read them.)
Thanks for your prompt reply. Let me see if I explain this better, Mark.
Originally I had gardenwithchickens.wordpress.com. I created backyardhencam.com which has chickens only information (some from the gardenwithchickens.wordpress blog, some new). I realize now that I probably shouldn’t have transferred duplicates of the chicken blogs ove, but I did. The BYHC is in place, has it’s own theme and I like it. No changes needed.
Now, I want a garden only site. The domain will be centralcoastgardening. Should I transfer the gardening material from the gardenwithchicken site, or leave it and do an “all new” centralcoast gardening site with new material only? If so, how do I direct folks to the new site . I think there is a way without causing people to click through but I don’t know how?
Hope my question is more understandable. If I do the above, after I’ve created the new garden site, do I just leave the wordpress blog as is?
Okay. BYHC is in place and has blog posts taken from gardenwithchickens – along with the hencam, which is outstanding, by the way.
Now you want to do the same thing for gardening. You’ll create a new site at centralcoastgardening.com and you might or might not bring over blog posts about gardening from gardenwithchickens. It’s totally up to you if you want to bring over old posts. The main reason to do so is if you plan to get rid of the gardenwithchickens site. That way you preserve the material. Otherwise, if your not planning to take gardenwithchickens down, my recommendation would be to leave it there and put something on the home page and in the sidebar that directs people to your new centralcoastgardening.com site – and your BYHC site, as well, for that matter.
You can make a post to that effect with links to the two sites. I see that you are already doing so to some extent. Your gardenwithchickens site has built up a following – and some cache with search engines. So IMO the easy and SEO-savvy thing to do (if you’re concerned about that) is just to leave it up – with clear markers pointing to your new sites.
I did this with a Blogger blog back in ’07 http://mcbuzz.blogspot.com/ and it worked well. Sometimes, I still get traffic coming from that blog. It definitely saved me the headache of moving all the posts. And in terms of Search Engine Optimization, that would not have been a good idea anyway because all the links would have been lost.
If, for some reason, you were intent on hosting centralcoastgardening on WordPress.com, then there would be a simple solution to all this, namely, to use that domain for the site that’s now at gardenwithchickens.wordpress.com. That would solve the problem of directing people to the new site because gardenwithchickens.wordpress.com would redirect to centralcoastgardening.com. But, as I talk about in the post above, I strongly recommend that folks who are using a website or blog for anything more than just an idle pastime make the move to a self-hosted WordPress site. You will be glad you did because of all the added power and flexibility you get with self-hosted WordPress. There are a few more housekeeping things to take care of – like backing up your data – but it’s well worth the trouble.
Mark,
I made the mistake of not having my WordPress blog self hosted. As you point out, the loss of links when you move and constraints on themes and plug ins has a huge impact on your chances of success. So after many errors and ‘learning opportunities” I am now reaping the benefits of a blog.
Ive been trying to find out how you do this with two seperate servers, ie. i have my main site on IIS dedicated server, then i have a linux hosted server with wordpress/fantastic scripts etc, but how do i keep the existing URL and have /blog on the end pointing to my blog on the linux server?
any help much appreciated.
You can do this using a subdomain like blog.example.com for the WordPress blog on the Linux server while your IIS site is at example.com. It’s a matter of setting an A Record for the subdomain. You might know how to do that already. If not, your web host and/or domain name registrar should be able to help you.