Ask HN: Is a website & blog combo the way to go? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Is a website & blog combo the way to go?

6 pointssendos7 comments

I've noticed that many startups have their main website and also a blog on the side, usually under the name of the startup founder (e.g. webwidgets.com as the company website and bobmarcus.com as the blog)

Is this the preferred/recommended method these days, for getting your website noticed? You write a bunch on content on the blog, it gets noticed by people and by search engines and it all links back to your main website?

Are there any numbers on how common this is and how much it helps promote the main website?

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Putting the blog in a sub-directory on your startup's domain will give you more content on that domain and therefore more "google juice".

If you put it on a subdomain, it is considered a completely different site. In this case, just like if it was on a different domain, you theoretically get some benefit from back-links to your primary domain. Putting the blog on your personal domain allows you to blog about things not related to the business. This gives you a bit more opportunity to write interesting articles that aren't overly self-serving. Assuming you can find an audience, you'll get rewarded with traffic to your startup's domain.

Of course, you could always have two blogs, one for personal, sometimes talking about the startup and one for the startup. Probably not worth it unless you really have enough content for both sites. An added benefit of using your personal blog to talk about the business is that if you sell it, you don't lose all of your content.

This strategy is interesting but seems to beg the question: how do you get traffic to your blog?

With a myriad blogs out there, I assume it's difficult to get your blog noticed.

Is it easier to drive traffic to your blog than to drive it to your main website? If yes, is this because search engines prefer sites with more "meat" (text) in them?

Think of blogging about your company as a form of content marketing. Writing posts about your product and/or industry and using some basic seo practices in the posts can help people(customers??) find your blog.

For instance if you were selling a service that does online analytics for the music industry, write posts about the music business using the data you collect. Include relevant keywords such as 'online artist tracking' 'statistics for band', etc. Those keyword phrases revolve around what potential customers would be searching for in Google when looking for a service like yours.

Outside of organic results like above, drive traffic to your blog by producing content that is meaningful, useful, and interesting to your readers. You want your content to have value to your readers.

Join the conversation on other blogs, through commenting. IMPORTANT don't spam..add value.

Tell good stories.

Check out http://www.mint.com/blog/ the used their blog expertly all the way through their exit and to this day.

My startup uses a wordpress-based website - since last September - which looks more like a blog than a startup home page (which has been ok so far since we started out small - bootstrapping and later getting getting some revenue and funding).

In order to get startup web site visibility tech-related blog posts (in average 2-3 postings a month) have been the main source (with del.icio.us, twitter, reddit, hacker news and google as the main traffic drivers).

We will probably eventually change to a more business like website, but blog-like will do for now.

Conclusion: unless you have extremely viral services, your startup blog is likely to drive (much) more traffic than the rest of your startup website.

Obligatory Kathy Sierra read: http://headrush.typepad.com/creating_passionate_users/2005/0...

Further to the main question, should the blog be on a different domain or is it preferable to have a blog subdirectory on the main website?

Yes, communicate what you're doing and why. It will help others understand and also help you solidify your plans as you write.

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