Write, write, write and share, share, share is the mantra. But what if you aren’t a techie? What if you don’t know where to get started? What if you’re somewhere in between?
To get started with social media in a professional way, you need some place to put your material so that you have something to share. If you have a company website, that’s great. Put a blog on it.
If you have both a website and a separate blog, that’s OK, but we find it’s better to have your blog on your website’s domain. It can be installed in a subdirectory, causing little or no disruption to existing pages. Or you can even have a developer make your entire site a WordPress site so that it works together seamlessly with your blog on the same domain, everything tied in together. (For an example, please refer to clevelandjazz.org.)
Keeping the blog on your company site improves the liveliness of the site, which helps something called “domain authority.” Search engines like when sites are updated frequently. To the search engines, it means that you care about your site and are putting effort into it. It is apparent to the engines that you are providing something of value to people searching for services like yours. Thus your domain authority score goes up.
Here is a good architecture for a website in terms of what we’ve been talking about–domain authority:
On your main domain, you can maintain your regular website pages and also include the blog software. So you would not have a separate domain like “blog.mywebsitename.com” or “totallydifferentdomainname.com.” And on all the pages on the site, you can install social media sharing icons in strategic places.
Do you have to use a professional to install your blog?
In our opinion, yes. Popular blogging platforms such as WordPress do get hacked. Professional web developers can help you by backing up your site, blog and database regularly and installing security measures. And they can create a design for the blog that professionally reflects your existing site design and/or marketing material.
How much does WordPress cost?
WordPress is free, but if you have a professional install it and design and code a theme, quite frankly that takes time and money.
Can I use a pre-existing theme?
Yes, you can – however, be warned. Some themes are gateways for hackers. And it is always good to have a graphic design techie work on the graphics and programming to present your business in the best way. If you use a template, there are always things that have to be done to give the site a more professional touch. Even adding the logo can take some design work to make it look professional and work well with the theme.
Sorry to focus so much on the “hire a web professional” part but it is true that 1) you get more leverage out of your investment in marketing by doing as much of it as you can in a professional manner, and 2) we have helped people all too frequently to recover from hacked sites, and we’re sure other developers have too.