Bye, Bye Blogger

When it comes to using the web, I'm amazed at how much there is to learn every day. A case in point is blogs. Blogging is a good thing to do for a number of reasons. First, it allows you the opportunity to communicate with the people who are interested in what you say. Secondly, and a critical point at that is that a blog also provides you an opportunity to reach people you don't know who might be interested in what you have to say. It provides the opportunity to create a following and will hopefully lead to new customers.

I've been blogging for quite some time, my first post was in October of 2007 and encompasses something like 65 posts in total. What I did not know until recently was that my site was not receiving the benefit of all this activity. See, we've been using blogger, which is a Google product. It has nice functionality and best of all, its free. But, unfortunately, by using blogger in its standard format, the domain for our blog was vann-group.blogspot.com. This means that instead of driving traffic to our site, we were in fact helping drive traffic to Google. I'm pretty confident in saying that Google does not need my help to drive traffic.

There are a number of other reasons why its not a good idea to have your blog tied to a free blog tool like Blogger. Hubspot has a post - Why Business Blogs Shouldn't be On Blogspot.com" that you should check out for more insight into the topic. Also, if you are interested in seeing how well your site is maximized for the web, check out Website Grader, also a Hubspot tool. The first time we ran www.vann-group.com through the grader in December, we rated a 51 - this morning we are up to a 70. I expect it to go even higher now that we've moved our blog to www.blog.vann-group.com. So, if you have our blog bookmarked, please change the bookmark, or even better subscribe to the blog using an RSS feeder.

As an FYI, we are using WordPress as our new blogging software. WordPress is also free, but is an amazing tool. If you are going to start a blog, I would highly suggest using it.