Today is “Ask Chris a Question” day. Or at least the day I’m going to answer a question…
I’ve had 4 people ask me this same question in the past two weeks. Let’s say you’ve had a company website for years. You update it from time to time, but don’t know how to install a blog on the website. Meanwhile, your company has already started a blog. How can you link it to your website? And how do you link the website to the blog?
There are a number of ways to accomplish this.
One way is to create a link in the navigation.
If you note the navigation bar above, I link to my company website “Marketing Resources & Results” in the nav bar with the link on the far right. In websites, it seems the far right link is reserved for “Contact Us”, but in blogs, I see the company link most often on the far right.
I use Thesis theme on WordPress software to create an easy to manipulate tool bar in the blog.
On my company website, I have my blog link attached to a graphic on many of the pages for an easy click thru.
I also have a link located on every page down on the bottom toolbar.
You might wonder, “Why doesn’t she have it on the top tool bar?” You may want your link on the top or side navigation. But having the blog link on my top tool bar, doesn’t match my strategy for why I even have a blog.
My strategy on creating, writing and publishing a blog is to ultimately drive more traffic to my company website. I don’t want the river to flow upstream. So I make it easier to get to my company website from the blog, than back to the blog from the company website.
That said, when I’m networking with my business card at functions, I find it easy to say, just go to my company website and click on the blog link on the bottom toolbar.
What’s the relationship of your blog to your company’s website. Do you want traffic to flow from blog to website or website to blog? Does it matter? I’d be interested to hear your thoughts.
{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
Great post, Chris. My blog has two purposes: Drive traffic to my website but also share and demonstrate my expertise in marketing strategy. I have multiple links to my company website from my blog. I also showcase my blog with a very prominent link on the home page of my website. I like how you have a link to your blog from every page on your site; very smart!
I think it also important to suggest that a company needs to make sure that their website and blog are both relevant to each other before linking them together. It is not always appropriate to link a company website with a blog and vice versa. If the blog contains off topic info to the company website, then customers are going to get confused. I see this all too often where a company will start a blog, completely lose focus on it and then it hurts their overall reputation as a company.
Thank you for the info. Maybe my question has been discussed in a prior article. What are your thoughts of making a small business website and the business blog one in the same, just a single website? Is this acceptable? My business website and blog are currently the same site, but I’m considering separating them into two sites.
Jeremy Jesenovec
Jeremy:
Most marketing people want to have the blog and the website on the same domain in order to raise the page rank and back links to the company website. When you write an interesting article and get a trackback (the link someone puts on their blog to link to an interesting article), the trackback will be to the company website domain which in turn raises the overall traffic to that domain. It’s a good thing, as long as the people reading your blog are the people that you want to visit your company website (potential customers for instance.)
If you decided to have a separate domain for the blog, perhaps you want to have a separate blog with a narrower niche that would supplement the current company blog.
This is just my opinion, What do other marketing people think?
Chris
Hi i actually want people to go from my blog to my site. But my main question is can I link back from my articles to my site from within the text as a backlink or will this hurt my site
please help