On a few occasions I have been asked why you should host a blog on your own website instead of using popular web applications such as www.blogspot.com.  The argument is that blogging on an existing blog system is lower initial cost and provides a common interface where many others view and post blogs.

Here are a few reasons why you DO NOT want to host your blog elsewhere, but rather host it under your own domain on your own website:

1. SEO (Search Engine Optimization):  Getting your company found on the internet should be very high on you priority list.  One of the most important items to get ranked high in the search engines is to have high quality and relavent content on your site.  Blog data is exactly that - highly relavent content.  When you post your highly relavent content on blogspot.com, the search engines rank blogspot.com with that content - not yourcompany.com.
2. Company brand:  When someone is reading your blog - they should have your logo in their face.  Not blogspot.
   
3. Ownership of the content:  The only way that you can be sure that your intellectual property and your content remains your property is to have it hosted on your website.
4. It really is not that expensive:  For less than a couple hundred dollars you can set yourself up with a quick content management site with your logo to host your blog.

I have been asked many times about why Killion Technology Solutions uses Joomla instead of Drupal.  We have looked closedly at Drupal because we know that it is much more powerful for developing very high end content management websites such as created by NASA, Popular Science and Yahoo! Research.  However, what Drupal lacks is the plethora of "free" or inexpensive extensions & templates that are available with Joomla.  There is a trade-off that we must make.

Keeping in mind that the majority of our clients are small businesses and have a limited web marketing budget, we feel that Joomla is the better solution.  We have been able to develop very high quailty, stable, full featured websites using a Joomla content management backend for far less than what it would cost to do with Drupal.

That said, Killion Technology Solutions is always looking for new and improved ways to deploy content management solutions, please let us know if there is some cool new (cost conscious) technology available to the content management community.

There are many other very high profile sites that use Joomla:

• US Army Corps of Engineers
• Porsche - Brazil
• Mitsubishi Motors
• Olympus of Australia

Facebook and Twitter are great tools for getting your existing and potential customer base actively involved in your business.  This is absolutely free advertising that only requires a little time to setup and maintain.  You can regularly post notifications and/or pictures to your Facebook company profile and all that follow you will receive that information.

1. Create a Facebook account for you personally (www.facebook.com) and then create a Facebook profile for your company: http://www.facebook.com/pages/create.php
2. Upload your logo your profile.
   
3. Create a Twitter account for you personally, then log out from that account.  Create a separate Twitter account for your company (this will require a second email address): https://twitter.com/signup.  Log into your personal account again and follow your company. 
   
4. Link your Facebook profile for your company to your Twitter account so that any changes made to your profile automatically get sent out to all of the people that following your company on Twitter.  This is done from within Facebook - at this time it is a banner advertisement on your Facebook company profile.
5. Make a post on your Facebook company profile page (a simple announcement that you are now on Facebook and Twitter is sufficient).  Verify that your personal Twitter account has received notification.
6. Link to your Facebook and Twitter profiles on your website as MMI has done on their main page.
7. Suggest that your personal friends and family become Fans of your Facebook account.
8. Regularly check your followers in Facebook and Twitter to see if there are others to suggest.  Viral marketing comes into play in this case - the more that are following you, the more likely others are going to find and follow you as well.