The term blog is an interesting one. Years ago, when I wrote Corporate Blogging for Dummies, I loved the term blog because it denoted a sense of personality and transparency. Companies no longer had to depend on pitching the news to reveal their culture, news, or advancements. They could broadcast those out via their corporate blog and build a community via social media that echoed their brand. Over time, they could build an audience, community, and advocacy.
However, Companies could share this information beyond their properties (owned media). They also have incredible opportunities to hear their voice in other publications (earned media). Both, of course, can be shared (social media) or paid and promoted (paid media). The term Corporate Blogging was limiting, and the term Content Marketing took the lead over the last five years in covering the strategies that companies deployed through owned media, earned media, social media, and paid media sources. Interestingly, had I written the same book but called it Content Marketing for Dummies… it would have stood the test of time. But the term blog limited its lifetime.
Our site’s name was branded the Marketing Tech Blog with the URL marketingtechblog.com. I was doing the same thing on my site that I had done with my book. The term blog evoked similar responses. The term blog sounded aged, personalized, and not as professional. I continuously referred to the site as a publication. Others refer to their blogs as digital magazines. However, I feared a domain change because of all of the search engine authority I had built into that domain, so I never dared update it. Until recently, when Google stopped punishing redirects.
It was also difficult for us to share our domain. We always had to say marketing-tech-blog-dot-com and spell it out to people when discussing it. It wasn’t a domain that rolled off the tongue and was easy to translate to a URL that the person could remember and type into a browser. Martech has become the industry-accepted term for sales and marketing-related technology and solutions.
I repeatedly searched for Martech-related domains that might be available that were easy to remember and eventually found them on Martech.zone (we also have marketing.technology, but that’s quite long).
Introducing Martech Zone
We helped several companies migrate to new domains and watched their rankings eventually normalize and return. It was time for us to do the same, so I pulled the plug – after a decade – on Friday. It’s largely been an easy migration save a few things:
- You’d be surprised at how often you utilize your domain name in profiles and third-party sites! I’ve used it in thousands of site signatures and registration sites. This has been a real eye-opener!
- Our old links and domain were behind an SSL certificate. As a result, we couldn’t just throw an alias up on our site and redirect people. We had to host a second site with our old domain, install a certificate, and do a permanent redirect to the new domain. We may also need to do this with images as we have some referred URLs via email and mobile apps. I’m still observing the impact.
- We lost all of our social link share counts. I’m not too worried about this, and we stopped publicizing the share counts. I am surprised that none of the shortening platforms and social platforms follow a link as search engines do. It seems like following URLs would be a nice thing to tidy up their data.
So there you have it! We are now aligning all of our properties and social sites to incorporate the new branding… our Martech publication, our Martech Zone Interviews Podcast, and our Martech social channels (see how we changed Twitter without losing followers)!
Farewell, Marketing Tech Blog, and hello, Martech Zone!
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