The Corporate Blog URL Debate

I wanted to share a recent debate I had with my team: “should we dedicate a new URL to our corporate blog or use an extension of our main website URL?”

We explored the following three options.

Option #1= an extension of our existing corporate site URL: http://www.blog.mindjet.com (or the equivalent http://www.mindjet.com/blog)

Pros:

• Clearly identifies it a s our “official” corporate blog
• Distinguish it from personal blogs related to the company
• Easy to implement (both from back and front end perspectives)
• Blog traffic adds to corporate site traffic
• Links to this URL should help our corporate URL ranking in key search engines
• Easy to navigate from blog to corporate site
• Helps build the corporate brand

Cons:

• Could be perceived as less neutral and open than a totally new URL (even if our policy will be to be fully open)
• Could limit the number of third party blogs linking to it
  

Option #2 = a new URL inspired by the combination of our company name and the term “blog”: http://www.themindjetblog.com (or the equivalents http://www.mindjetblog.com or http://www.mindmanagerblog.com)

Pros:

• Leverages the corporate brand
• Could increase the number of third party blogs linking to it
• Clearly differentiates the blog domain from the corporate domain

Cons:

• Could confuse readers (Is this the official blog or not?)
• Requires specific resources to drive traffic to it
• Requires some more back-end efforts (tracking traffic for example)
  

Option #3 = create a totally new name: http://www.totallynewname.com

Pros:

• Creates a new brand which could prove useful
• Could be perceived as “independant” from the company
  

Cons:

• Could confuse readers (Is this the official blog or not?)
• Requires specific efforts to drive traffic to it
• Creates a new brand that could defocus from our main ones
  
  

Our decision:
Based on our philosophy to keep things simple and maintain complete integrity, we decided to select Option #1: http://www.blog.mindjet.com/ . In addition, we also registered all the domains we could imagine would apply to Option #2 and are redirecting the traffic to http://www.blog.mindjet.com/. That way, we will avoid having anyone actually register those URLs and confuse our users.