A good friend of mine, Phil Gerbyshak, has been a rock star middle manager for a long time. He speaks at conferences, trains teams and runs a help desk for a huge company.

On the side he has become a social media coach and has developed a strong  body of work around better management.  Recently the blog network he was a part of decided to change their business model and all the hard work Phil did building up Slacker Management went up in smoke.  Yes, the blog network turned him off.  Luckily, they did it in a nice way and moved all of his work to a new blog that he now owns.

If you have ever moved a website of blog before, you know how devastating this can be.  You will not have the same audience and you will not have the same search engine credibility.  It sets you back years if you are changing domains and have built up a good amount of content.

Please go visit Phil at the management expert blog – and leave a comment and show him some love.

There is also a lesson in this.  Do not build your primary website or blog on something that can be taken away later.  Free blogs are fine for links and toying around, but not a place to build your real resource.

You want to register your own domain and work with a company that will help you host your own website or blog.  If you are trying something different, such as building a lead generation engine, do it on a sub domain of your main domain to preserve your main website.

Phil Gerbyshak had full confidence in that blog network being around – but now finds himself needing to move and start building his audience all over again.  You do not want to do the same thing.

I actually do not call myself a business blog consultant.  It seems like an odd term.  People that have not work with blogging for business might thing that business blogs are not serious tools for business.

In the past years, I have focused a lot of energy on using business blogs to generate Internet leads.  This has proven to be very effective.  Instead of thinking you need a business blog consultant, you probably need a content marketing consultant instead.  But the business blog will be a big part of that lead generation content marketing strategy.

How it works is simple.  You combine keyword research, calls to action that appeal to your target market and content creation that focuses on solving the needs of the people you want to reach.  Then those people start finding you and requesting what you want in larger and larger numbers.

So should you hire a business blog consultant?

Certainly a consultant can help you succeed faster.  Business blogging and content marketing is a vast topic, but some things work much better than others and some things can actually hurt your effort.  If you have a budget, hire a business blog consultant or buy a packaged business blogging system.

If you do not have a budget, start a business blog anyway.  A consultant or social media coach can help you improve your effort in the future when you are ready.