Where should you have your blog? Should it be on your existing website or somewhere else? What are the advantages of each?
By Keith Lunt, ©howtostartmyblog.com

Putting Your Blog On A Separate Platform
This solution means that setting up the blog is very easy to do. You can go over to Blogger or WordPress.com and sign up for a new blog and then within minutes have your blog up and running.

Add to this the fact that because the blog is on a separate platform whenever there are any updates they are dealt with for you. There is no upgrading the blog’s source code whenever there is a new update or security release, it all just happens in the background.

You also do not have any costs. There are no databases or extra hosting space to pay for and if your blog goes viral, there is no bandwidth to worry about. Lastly, all of the backups and so on that your blog will need will be done for you.

In a sentence – the blog is totally managed for you. It sounds great, so why would anyone host the blog themselves?

Hosting Your Blog On Your Website
First of all, you can customise your blog to exactly match your website. It can look exactly the same as your website so visitors going from one to the other do not see it as looking any different. Also, by using your current URL that stays the same. This can give visitors a lot of confidence.

But the big advantage is that by posting often you are creating a lot of new, fresh content on your website. The search engines will see a huge bank of articles on your website and will also see that you are keeping your site up to date. If there are frequent posts then it is certainly not going to damage your search engine ranking and will almost certainly help you along the way.

It will also look a lot more professional to your visitors and customers that blog is part of your website and not on a free blogging platform such as Blogger, whilst you are also free to do what you like, whereas the free tools sometimes have limitations on what you are and are not allowed to do.

Which Is Best?
So, which of the two options is best?

If you are totally afraid of the technicalities of setting up and running your own blog then using a blogging platform is the best way forward. However, if you are happy to give it a try and either experienced in everything involved or willing to learn (it is not that difficult) then the winner is hosting the blog on your own website.

The slight problems of installing and maintaining your own blog are far outweighed by the advantages of running your own blog and the freedom that gives to you.