WordPress Tips for Business Blogs

Editor’s Note: Mark McLaren (one of our speakers from WordCamp Seattle 2009) originally posted this to a local email list and gave us permission to republish it here.

I have noticed a number of list members using WordPress.com to host their business blog, and I thought I would offer a few suggestions.

You can continue to host your blog on WordPress.com but use an upgrade (about $10 a year) to map your own subdomain to the site. That way your blog URLs will start with http://blog.yourdomain.com/ rather than http://yourusername.wordpress.com/.

There are lots of reasons to do this, including improved search engine optimization, but the most significant is that if you ever decide to switch to a self-hosted blog, you will be able to change hosts without losing any URLs.

Details for subdomain mapping are here:
http://support.wordpress.com/domain-mapping/map-subdomain/

In almost every case, I recommend using a self-hosted installation of WordPress right off the bat. Again, there are many reasons for doing so. One is that, at the very least, it will allow you to place an obvious link to your main website in the navigation of the blog.

Typically, when you host your blog on WordPress.com, there is no easy way to get to the main website from the blog, which is a significant usability and web marketing issue.

First of all, people will be going to the blog from the main site. You want them to be able to get back to the main site without having to think about how to do it.

Second, people will be landing on individual blog posts from many different sources: search engines, links pasted into email messages, other web pages, Twitter, etc. You want them to be able to get to your main website quickly and easily from any page they land on.

Even if your main site runs on .NET, it is still possible to use self-hosted WordPress. Here is an example I built for one of my customers: http://www.photosafaris.com/blog/

(Editor’s note: Thanks for the tips, Mark, and we’d love to hear feedback in the comments!)

DECEMBER 17, 2009 UPDATE:
There are more reasons to choose self-hosted WordPress over WordPress.com.

You can’t install Google Analytics on WordPress.com. If you are going to go to the effort of maintaining a blog, you should track visitors. The analytics that are included in the WordPress.com Dashboard are inadequate.

There are thousands of outstanding plugins and custom themes for WordPress that you cannot use on WordPress.com. The range and depth of plugins and themes is hard to convey in a few sentences. Some plugin examples are the Disqus comments system (shown here on Jeremiah Owyang’s blog) and the Share This plugin. Installing these plugins takes only minutes and significantly increases your blog’s chances of success.