Learn best practices of business blogging. Blog is used to record opinions, information, etc. on a regular basis. Business Blogs can be used for SEO, to educate potential customers, for lead generation etc.

1. Business Blogging Best Practices
You might have probably heard that hosting a business blog will help you in your internet marketing
plan and you have started planning to have a business blog. Business blogging no matter helps, whether
goal of your business to have website is lead generation or if you have a shopping cart or if it just exists
for branding and educate your potential customers, business blogging can help you with everything. It
will help you in SEO as well.
So what’s the best practice to host a business blog, on a sub-domain, in a folder structure or on an
entirely new domain? Here are the pros and cons of choosing between these options for business
blogging.
Having a business blog on a sub-domain or sub-folder has following benefits:
 Search Engine Optimization (SEO): Most of the Search engine optimizers will advise you to go
for business blogging for the simple reason that it will help improve website’s ranking in search
engines. Now the question is How? Whenever you publish a new blog post a new web page is
created that can be indexed in search engines to help you get found online, so for this you really
want your business blog to be associated with your main website. That way, any SEO juice you
generate from your blog will automatically benefit your business website as well. Hosting your
blog on a free platform’s URL like http://businessname.wordpress.com will only guarantee that
the SEO credit you’ve built gets applied to the blogging platform, not your own website.
 Branding: There are a few negatives associated with hosting your blog separate from your main
website that affect your company’s branding. First, even if you link to the blog from your
website’s main navigation, your site visitors will get sent to a completely different website,
which may not espouse design and branding elements consistent with your main website and
may result in confusion. Furthermore, sending site visitors to a blog on a free platform can result
in the perception of your brand as unprofessional or unreliable.
 Centralization: If you have planned to have a separate domain for business blogging then you
lose the engagement to happen on your main website, and you want your blog visitors to
associate your blog with your brand name. Because our ultimate goal is to attract visitors to
your main website by using your blog. So by hosting blog on a separate domain you’re sending
website visitors away from your main website. Another thing with this is that you have to run
separate link building campaigns, one for your corporate website and another for business blog.
By now you might have probably figured out that its best to have a business blog either as a sub-domain
(e.g. http://blog.businessname.com) or in a sub-folder (e.g. http://website.com/blog). Free blogging
platform like blogspot, wordpress, typepad etc. are strict no no for business blogging.
Original Article Present on: Business Blogging – Choosing between sub-domain,
sub-folder and separate domain.