Is Your Blog Competing With Your Online Store?

Blogging is a great way to gain visibility and build community around your business, but doing it wrong can have serious consequences.

If you’re blogging, make sure that you’re hosting the blog on your own domain.  If you don’t have webhosting because you’re using an ecommerce solution platform like a Yahoo Store or ProStore, make the investment; you can get webhosting for about five bucks a month and you can use your hosting for photos and videos,  other files, Flash microsites and, well, basically anything else that you can think of.

If you’re using TypePad or BlogSpot or Wordpress to host your blog for you, you’re losing out on all of the links that point to that blog - links that could be pointing to your domain.  Also remember that, in terms of PageRank and traffic, the root domains we’re talking about here have a lot more links and traffic than your store does and therefore are going to have a higher PageRank and will also be weighted more heavily in search results because of this.

Another danger is cross-domain blogging is duplicate content.  While you should never never never put duplicate content on your site - either from your own domain or another site, it makes no difference - when it comes down to determining which of the domains is more reputable, the domain owned by Google (blogspot.com) is going to win every time, and that can have negative consequences for your store.