Lost in the blog world

[BridalHotspot]

I want to start a blog, but honestly I have no idea where to start as I've got so many questions so I hope someone can help me out.

I have a Magento e-commerce website so I've got the possibility to integrate the WP extension. Would that be a good idea or is it better to have a separate blog and separate server?

Which blog platform is considered to be the best and what are the main differences between the big blog platforms?

Should I use my business (domain) name for my blog or have a separate (domain) name?

How often are you 'supposed' to blog per week/month to build a strong blog?

Many thanks in advance!

[nurzhyk]

Better setup your blog on same domain.

Example

http://www.bridalhotspot.co.uk  - Magento

http://www.bridalhotspot.co.uk/blog/ - Wordpress

Updates on blog - new post every 2-3 days. For your market it not hard because you can post news not only about your own clothing but about celebrity wedding etc.

[BridalHotspot]

Amazing insight, Kenyon!
I could visualise everything while reading your response and you have answered all my questions. Thanks for taking the time to reply, really appreciated!

[BridalHotspot]

Thanks Paul, that is some great information, especially the test period

I'm in the bridal business so there is tons of stuff to blog about and I'm planning to get my Facebook followers (over 11.000) involved as well by asking them in what topics they would be interested as that might bring some ideas that I wouldn't have thought about.

I understand your reply about the best platform, I guess that I will just have to do some research to see which platform would suit me and my company best.

Many thanks for your reply!

[KenyonManu3-SEOSEM]

-Wordpress is hands down the most powerful and easiest to use blogging platform. It's open source and the developers involved is immense and it's still easy to use. Almost as easy as setting up a social media profile, maintenance is simple with the plugins available too.

-Magento on the other hand is one of highest regarded E-commerce platform and it is not known for it's blogging capabilities. Hence the WP plugin.

So really it comes down to your main purpose and where you will spend the most time. If it's blogging go with wordpress and add a e-commerce plugin. If your main purpose and demand on time will be E-commerce (updating and adding products, changing inventory) Then stick with Magento and use the wp plugin.

For your name I would suggest using your business name and or any keywords you want to rank for. (do keyword research!) Bing is still big on EMD's (exact match domains) which means you will get a pretty good seo advantage by naming it what your main keyword will be. Google does also but has recently lowered EMD's ranking influence.

You can also just have the blog be an inline part of your site. It would be a page on your site and still be on your server and would appear like this www.syls.com/blog. That would be best if you want external and internal links pointing to certain products to help there rankings. You could also use a subdomain like blog.syls.com which would put you on different server. This would allow you to link to your products and they would be considered external. Google is smart and will figure out the relation pretty quick so having 100 links pointing to your main page isn't going to do the trick.

Most likely an inline blog on the same server would be best for you. If any of your blog content gets linked to that way your site will get some link juice. The more you blog the better off you will be. That being said it needs to be good content google will penalize your for publishing crap content (scraping, duplicate or keyword stuffed crap). That being said you can always use a platform like content.ly to outsource making good relevant content and then make what you can in addition when you have time. Start out small learn your niche make some content and get better, google will take notice eventually and if you do a good job and become more relevant your rankings will improve.

[ThompsonPaul]

As long as the blog is directly related to the content of your ecommerce site, you absolutely want it to be part of the main site, Sylvana, (e.g. mywebsite.com/myblog) not on another server and not with a separate domain name.

There are plenty of different blog platforms. Asking which one is best is like asking "what's the best car?" It depends on many factors. Sorry that sounds like a cop-out, but it's true.

In general, for a straightforward blog, WordPress is terrific. It has the considerable advantage of being so widely used that there are a huge number of resources out there to help new users get up to speed.

For a  strong blog, you should post when you have something worthwhile to say. Posting fluff just to keep to a schedule is pointless and will hurt your reputation in the long run. That said, if you don't have the resources to come up with and post something worthwhile at least twice a week, you'll struggle to get good value from your blog. That's a somewhat arbitrary number, but it points up the fact that  posting once or twice a month doesn't create a blog of much use to visitors, and therefore not much value in the eyes of search engines.

Wonder if a blog's really for you? Designate a 4 or 5 week period and write 2 or 3 blog posts a week - even though you have no blog to post them on. If you can do that consistently for a month and enjoy it, you can probably sustain a blog. Plus you'll have a great stockpile of posts with which to get started, or to keep in reserve for one of those weeks when you're too busy to write something new.

Hope that gives ya some food for thought?

Paul

P.S Have no experience with the Magento WordPress integration, so hopefully someone with direct experience with that combo can weigh in here too.