Adding a blog or forum to site

[jhb]

I was wondering if anyone has added a blog or forum to their site and if so are they using a separate domain name, sub-domain, or something else? Also, which tools are you using for your blog or forum?

Thanks

jhb

[GonzaloGil]

We suggest setting up second level domains such as:

forums.yourdomain.com
blog.yourdomain.com

We like vbulletin (this forum software), and for Blog, i would recommend wordpress.

[hanzoswords]

ive set one up but havent used it yet, im going to have a custom theme made for it

http://forums.hanzoswords.com

[kernphilip]

I setup a blog at

http://blog.prosoundsupplies.com

[Rungreen]

But how is this done?

[kernphilip]

I created a blog with blogger, then went though their tutorial on how to have them host it but use your own domain name. You can find that tutorial here:

http://help.blogger.com/bin/answer.p...373&topic=8911

Since your domain name is probably pointed towards 3dcart nameservers you will need to open a support ticket and ask them to create a cname record for your domain name (in my case http://blog.prosoundsupplies.com) pointing to the entity hosting your blog or forum (in my case ghs.google.com)

Hope that helps!

[jhb]

Just wanted to update and say we set up a separate domain name that we already owned as the blog and pointed it to our website. We are already getting sales via the blog as one keyword is already ranked number one on google. Interestingly, we are also using feedburner to republish the blog on our homepage via BuzzBoost which is therefore providing our homepage with new content every time we update the blog.

[ScribeTime]

Hi JHB,

Thanks for the update and information. I've been planning to setup a blog on my site through Blogger, but am not sure where to start. I like the idea of having blog content automatically updated through BuzzBoost on the homepage.

Would you mind providing a few detailed instructions on how you accomplished this? You said that you setup your blog on another domain name, but pointed it to your website? Can you elaborate? - Also does feedburner have a monthly fee? I briefly checked out their website and couldn't find any pricing info.

Thank you!

[jhb]

Feedburner is free. I set up a Wordpress blog at the new domain, you can use a subdomain instead as others have done above, and then used the feedburner feedsmith plugin to set up my RSS feeds to point to feedburner. Using the free account I created in Feedburner I pointed Feedburner to the Wordpress blog to get the feed started. One of the free options in Feedburner is methods to publicize your blog and one method is BuzzBoost to republish your feed as HTML. After formating the HTML to my liking using css attributes I was able to paste the html to the footer of our homepage.

It sounds like a lot but wordpress is pretty cut and paste, especially with the PlugInstaller plugin that eases the installation of additional plugins. Feedburner was also pretty easy. I spent most of my time on formatting the results of BuzzBoost. BuzzBoost even lets you specify the number of items and amount of text to add to the html, so I found it pretty useful.

The blog is now accounting for about 1% of our traffic in October. Not bad for the first full month and only 4 items published.

[ScribeTime]

Thanks for the information. I look forward to getting started. Glad to hear you're getting pretty good traffic for your first month.