Social media can be a huge driver of traffic and revenue for a company with an effective web presence, but how do you actually go about setting up an effective site?

That’s what many of the entrepreneurs at Web Fuelled Business asked this week, in one form or another. In the past three days, I helped over a thousand companies in Manchester, Nottingham and Birmingham as they plunged into an intensive day-long workshop that tackled the most crucial aspects of using the web to drive business growth. And when the entrepreneurs took the floor, several questions came up again and again:

• Should my blog be on my web site or a separate site?
• Should my Twitter handle and website URL match up?
• What platform should I build my site on?

I was going to blog the answer to all three of these questions tonight, but then I remembered another question I got today: How long should a blog post be? I advised on 300-700 words, and since answering all three questions pushed me well over 1000 words, I’ve decided to take my own brilliant social media advice and split them up into a short series. So today I’m just tackling the first question.

Ideally, your blog should be integrated with the rest of your website, if for no other reason than your own sanity: why burden yourself with maintaining two sites? This will also make it easier for you to use related content from your blog on key pages in your web site, and to make other SEO-boosting interconnections between your blog and other parts of your site. Since a lot of blogging platforms (like WordPress) also let you create regular web pages, it just makes sense to do that as a single site if you’re starting from scratch.

Even if you build and/or host your blog and your website separately (e.g. you have a website built and hosted by a local web company, and a blog hosted on a site like WordPress.com) you should set them up so they share the same domain. In practice that often means setting up your blog on a separate subdomain. If your site is at www.yourcompany.co.uk then you can set your blog’s address to blog.yourcompany.co.uk — many blogging platforms offer the option to have a “custom URL” or “custom domain” as part of their service. On WordPress.com, you can set up a free blog, and it costs another $12 or $17 per year to have that blog on a custom URL (like blog.yourcompany.co.uk) rather than on the default of wordpress.com/yourWordPressusername

I’ll answer the other two questions over the course of the next week. It’s the least I can do, given how nicely everybody lined up to ask them. We Canadians may think of ourselves as an orderly people, but the Brits put us to shame.

Web Fuelled Business enterpreneurs lined up to ask questions of James Dening and me during our lunch break today.