Module 5.3

Location, Location, Location

Today’s Plan   Why the location of your blog is more important than you might think.   How the location of your blog can affect the impact it has on your business.   What you can do if you need to change the location of your blog

Why Location Matters

  If you’ve ever rented an apartment or house, you know that it’d be silly to invest money in that property. You don’t own it, so at the end of the day you are adding value for your landlord, not you.

  The same principle applies to having your blog somewhere other than your own domain.

What I Mean By That

  evolveyourweddingbusiness.blogger.com <-Blogger owns this domain. With this, you are posting to a page on the blogger.com domain.

  www.evolveyourweddingbusiness.com/blog <-I own this domain. I bought it and added a blog page to it.

  When you put your blog posts on a domain that is not yours (like blogger.com, wordpress.com, tumblr.com), you are building SEO value for their domain, not yours.

Problems This Causes

  In module 5.1, we established that more blog posts means that your site will have more pages indexed with Google, but that is only true if your blog is on your domain.

  There is also a level of professionalism that is conveyed by owning your own domain. It’s just like email addresses. If I emailed you from heidiisawesome@gmail.com, it would definitely come across more amateur than heidi@evolveyourweddingbusiness.com does.

  Domains are not expensive, but they are a great investment when it comes to presenting yourself as a professional.

It’s Not Just About SEO

  Let’s say someone reads a great post that you wrote, but then they can’t immediately find out how to access your main website. You are writing this content and then just losing potential customers because people have no tolerance for websites that are not easy to navigate.   Having your content somewhere that you don’t have 100% control of is dangerous.   Using tools like Wordpress.com and Blogger don’t give you the flexibility you need if you want to reap the full benefits of having a blog for your business.

  Unless you have very few posts, you shouldn’t just abandon your blog and start over on your own domain.   Google has already indexed these posts and you don’t want to lose those rankings.   You want your blog to be part of your website so moving your blog will depend on how you have your website set up.

Making The Move

  If your website is a self-hosted Wordpress site, you can refer to the links below which explain how to move from Wordpress.com to self-hosted Wordpress and from Blogger to self-hosted Wordpress.

  If these articles don’t make sense to you, just hire someone to do it for you. There is no sense screwing up your website or blog when you could spend a modest amount to outsource it to a professional.

  Either search for someone to migrate your blog to your website or post a job on a site like elance.com or odesk.com

How To Do This

  Is a one time hassle worth being able to use your blog to grow your business forever?   Think of the long term. You’re better off moving your posts now than later when there are more of them.

“But that’s such a hassle”

Quick Recap/Homework

1.  If your blog is not on your domain, review the links below to see how migration works.

2.  If you aren’t able to do it yourself (and most people aren’t), search for someone who can migrate your blog to your self-hosted website or place a job listing on Odesk.com or elance.com.

Coming Up in Module 5.4

  How to come up with blog post ideas   How to find out exactly what your potential customers want to learn about   How to create an idea garden that you can refer to anytime you’re unsure what to write about