Social Networking For Your Business
November 18th, 2008 | Posted by Debra Simpson in Blogs and Blogging
If you don’t have a Facebook profile for your business, it’s something to consider. Especially if you’re looking to market your business online. However, for as much buzz as Facebook is getting, the heart of social networking is your blog. It’s the RSS feed that pumps your message to the masses on the Internet.
I have had solopreneurs tell me they need a website, not a blog. For all intents and purpose, a blog is a website as far as the search engines are concerned. So why would you want to blog for your business?
Blogs, especially blogs set up for social networking, offer you a complete, easy self-publishing platform for your business. Often I hear solopreneurs complain that they can’t get their webmaster to make any changes for them in a timely manner. Now, that’s all taken care of with a blog. You don’t need programming skills to create your blog content.
Then, there’s the RSS feed. With that feed, which comes with a blog, you can start to spread your message, increase your online visibility, your perceived expertise and drive traffic to that static website, if you have one still!
So, a free blog, or self-hosted?
You’re reading a self-hosted blog. The benefits of self-hosting your blog are far too many to share in one post, so let me share the basics. If you self-host your blog, you’ve bought the URL (website address/domain name), you’ve purchased a hosting package and you’ve had the blog installed. Or, you’ve used a turn key blog site, like Blogi360. The important component in all this is that YOU own the blog, unlike the free sites. You own the traffic to the blog and can use the blog as you wish without worrying about violating one of the free blog site rules and finding your free blog gone.
If you already have a blog and want to know what to do next to get your blog seen and heard, tune in Friday, November 21st for Syndicating Your Content at 3pm PT and find out how your blog and a Facebook profile can work to leverage your business online.












Great post Debra.
One tip I might make is that, if possible, you get the blog under your own domain so that you are building content and web traffic to your own domain name.
Some people will do blog.mydomain.com which is not nearly as good as doing mydomain.com/blog or even just mydomain.com if your blog IS your web site. The worst idea, IMHO, is to do mydomainblog.com or mydomain.blogger.com if you are trying to build traffic to your primary domain name.
By adding content to a domain on a regular basis you can elevate the search engine rank of all pages on that domain. This doesn’t work if the content is split around different domain names.
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