Walter, Companies do indeed need to realize how much time and effort goes into blogging. It’s far from a free marketing gimmick.

Andrew, Sometimes setting up a blog for creating backlinks is desperate, but not always. I’ve seen situations where a company sets up several blogs to discuss completely different topics, which makes sense in and of itself, and has the further advantage of creating numerous interblog links.

Karen, You put it very well – every business is different and one shouldn’t undertake a blog project before thinking it through carefully.

I would certainly have thought that setting up a blog using the same domain would have been the shot for corporate blogs in most cases, and I think that your point about the user experience is particularly strong – running the blog on a separate domain does run the risk of making your company come across as being a little uncoordinated from a visitor’s point of view.

But as you say, there are some legitimate advantages of running the blog on a separate domain. I would have thought that setting up a separate domain simply for the purpose of inbound links sounds a bit desperate, but your points relating to other advantages of this approach seem to make sense.