One of the first decisions you have to make about your blog is how it should reside on the Web. You have three choices:
There are benefits of each approach.
Hosting the blog at its own domain is easy enough to complete, and provides the blog with both its own unique address and unique identity. Additionally, it positions the blog separate from your main website, which may not be a good thing; you want to integrate your marketing efforts as much as you possibly can. That said, this approach probably offers the best shot for maximizing your search engine exposure because you have two separate sites to put.
Hosting the blog in a blog hosting service, however, and taking advantage of the blog host's domain doesn't have a lot of advantages. In fact, it's simply lazy. All the hosting services let you place the blogs they host at any URL you specify. Why would you subsume your corporate brand to a blogspot.com URL when it might exist at your own brand's domain? In my experience, this option is really a nonstarter.
Then there's the option of hosting the blog on your site, but on its own page or subdomain. This is nice option, as you gain the benefits of a distinct page for your blog while retaining the benefits of existing under your main corporate domain. Type of the best of all possible worlds, if you ask me.
The ultimate option, posting your blog to your site's home page, certainly gives your blog prominence, as well as supplies a constant stream of fresh content to your home page. It doesn't, however, provide a unique URL for your blog, which kind of diminishes its identity. Additionally you lose the benefits of having a second strong URL for your content.
Most of these blog-hosting services are free, so you don't have to pay a single penny to get your blog ready to go. The downside is that you may not be able to completely customize the blog as you would if you were designing it from scratch, although it's really a matter of degree. Most of these services allow you to provide your own HTML templates for the blog design. What's nice about these services is how easy they make it. Setting up a simple blog is as easy as making a few choices in a form; posting is as easy as writing what you want and clicking a button. They take the process and make it extremely user-friendly.
The chief downside, a minimum of for inexperienced users, is that your blog's URL is associated with the hosting service's domain. For example, a blog hosted by Blogger exists in the blogspot.com domain, such as this: yourblog.blogspot.com. That's under ideal for any organization wanting to establish its own online identity.
Fortunately, most of these services let you publish your blog to any domain you specify, even if it requires a bit more effort to setup in that fashion. So you can possess a blog hosted by Blogger or WordPad, while the blog itself resides in the URL of your choosing either a distinct URL or a page or subdomain of your existing website. Which are the top blog-hosting services? Here's the list I go by:
For that matter, your web hosting service might offer blog hosting, too; many do. It's worth checking that too.
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Note: This article was sent to us by: Joseph Thompson at 03192011
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