This is the second post in my Online Marketing Strategies series.  Sorry for the delay in getting this out.  Appologies out of the way let’s dive in.  Today I’ll discuss developing a solid website or blog strategy.  I’ll also do a deep dive for choosing a domain name and a CMS.

The main focus of a website strategy is to build an information rich website that allows you to respond customer needs – whatever they are. (Click To Tweet)

You might think deciding on a blog or website platform would be a somewhat elementary part of your plan, but it’s not.  Here are a list of things you need to consider when thinking through your plan of action. 

• What should you use a traditional website or a CMS?
• What will your domain name strategy be?
• Where will you host your website? Do you need in house support or will the support provided by the hosting company do?
  • I use GoDaddy
• Is your website mission critical?
• Shared hosting or dedicated hosting?
  • I use a shared hosting plan now because my blog is small.  As the blog grows I’m sure that eventually I’ll need a dedicated hosting plan.  I also use GoDaddy for this.
• Unix, Linux, or Microsoft operating system running on the server?
• Data backup.
• And Price

Domain name strategy

What will your domain name be?  There are several things to consider here.

• Company or product brand focus
• Keyword focus
• Personal brand focus
• Catchy phrase focus

When you’re small I suggest you consider personal branding over the other options.  My thought is that I’ll always be Rodney Goldston.  However, if I launch a blog under a business name and build content that endevour might go out of business one day.  In fact it’s likely (checkout my post on what to do if nine out of ten businesses fail).  Although the company might not exist the content might still be relevant.  You can move the content but then you’re dealing with branding another site under a different domain.

With that said there are plenty of examples of success in each of these strategies, here are a few.

• Keyword branded site: SEOmoz is a website run by Rand Fishkin about SEO it may also be the name of his company I’m not sure.
• Personal branded site: Obviously this site uses personal branding, and so does Seth Godin
• Company branded site: Coke runs a blog called Coca Cola Conversations
• Catchy phrase site: Erica Napoletano runs Red Head Writing a popular site because her rants are edgy, and helpful (a winning combo).

Content Management Strategy

First you’ll need to decide on using a traditional website or a CMS system.  By traditional website I mean a primarily HTML coded site (There is likely not much reason to do this).  CMS is short for Content Management System.  Most sites today are running on some CMS platform.  This site runs on a self hosted version of WordPress.

Other CMS platforms you can consider are Joomla, Typepad, and MovableType.  It’s worth noting here that because a website runs on a platform traditionally associated with blogging it does not have to look like a blog or even have a blog on the site.

View the entire Online Marketing Strategies Series.