Should My Blog Be Part Of My Domain or Stand Alone?

As with most questions, the one at the title of this post has the potential to be fairly loaded.

In an ideal world, your blog will exist on your domain – benefiting from all the authority that you’ve worked to build up on your website – and lending the authority that you will work to build up on your blog back to your website.  Just as two good people enter a marriage and become a great couple, a website and blog married on the same domain is an ideal solution.

So what’s so loaded about that?  The simple fact that we do not live in an ideal world.

Just as not every person is emotionally adept at entering a marriage, not every website is technically adept to host a blog.  This doesn’t mean that the marriage reticent among us are not fit for relationships, nor does this mean that technically challenged websites are not fit to connect to blogs. It just means that for some of us, both websites and people, compromises and workarounds must be made.

As we enter 2011, content marketing will begin to inhabit a far greater role in successful online marketing programs.  As you navigate through this change, don’t make the common mistake of haphazardly launching a blog.  Start with a blog marketing initiative and be sure to devote the necessary resources of both time and money.

If you are soon to launch your corporate blog – know that the ideal solution is to host it on your main domain.  But if  for some reason that’s not possible, make sure you carry over the design of your main site so from a visitors perspective, they don’t know the difference.