One of my newsletter subscribers recently sent me a copy of blogging advise someone had given her. She has an online store and has started blogging but would like to make her blog more effective. Being unsure, what to do she came to me for a second opinion. Here’s some bits of what she was told. There are other bits of pro arguments too and overall pretty balanced but I would like to highlight two points that jumped up.
- if the blog is on your site, it takes up database space — which slows down your shopping cart. No biggie for a person who isn’t selling stuff — but, as you know, time is a huge factor in online shopping and if it takes too long for pages to load are carts to get products into them, you lose your audience really fast
- with your site hosted by someone else, you also get the benefits of their blogroll — meaning the links to other blogs that you and others put on your sites….others can easily blogroll you to give you those coveted return-links
Here’s what I think:
Database speed is a valid concern of course but a good web host will be able to handle multiple database queries at once without a hitch. Many a times if you look at the execution time of the scripts, including shopping carts, many of them are done in 10ths or 100’s of a second. It’s not something an average shopper will notice.
Despite it all, a blog is usually pretty lean and run with minimal of resources. Out of the many blogs I’ve helped people set up, I have not encountered a problem with this and one of the sites I run is a hosted shopping cart. If your database or script is slow, it’s more likely something you’d take up with your host. That said, to optimize things, it’s always better to have the shopping cart on one database and any other scripts like a blog on another database. This cuts down the queries on one database. Alternatively, you can always use Blogger to publish your blog to your site. Blogger does not use any database but rather builds regular HTML pages and copies it over to your site.
The biggest reason you want the blog on your site is because you will be building traffic for your site. If you build a blog on blogstream, blogspot or any place where you don’t own the domain, you’re building traffic for other people’s site, not yours. If that company decides not to offer that service anymore or you outgrow it, you’ll lose all that hard earned traffic immediately.
That same rule applies to link backs you have built. The links people use to link back to you doesn’t belong to you if you don’t own the domain. Besides, you can build a blogroll on a blog that’s hosted on your site. The key thing here is building for long term. When we’re in business, we’re in it for the long term, so why build a blog for the short term?
If you’re hoping to get traffic from a network of blogs who are using the same blogging system, you need to consider, how valuable that kind of traffic is. I would rather have 100 people who are really interested in my niche, who I have a better chance to convert into a lead or customer than 1000 people who are just blog hopping. Wouldn’t you?
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