Just when you thought you had made the choice, WordPress as the blogging platform of choice, there is another important, yet confusing choice many internet marketers must make – “do I use WP for my sales and content pages too?”
In other words, when you build a site, should you use WordPress for everything – writing static articles, main pages, sales pages or landing pages?
Let me start by saying that I have done both – and you can do either…you can use WordPress to build sites with both static content and traditional blogs – OR – you can use WordPress for your blog and use html to design the other pages in your site.
CONTENT AND SALES WEB PAGES
First, let’s remember that to really grow your online business you need to have a mix of content sites – these become your “web” for attracting traffic to your sites, and you need to have “action” pages – or I often like to call them “money” pages because their main purpose is to monetize your internet business.
Here are two choices for developing these “static” money and action pages as well as having a blog.
1. Have a set of domains where the focus is around SEO, content such as articles, blog posts, Q&A, FAQ, etc… the objective is to cast a wider and wider net to pull traffic into that domain – with the ultimate objective of sending this traffic to your “money” pages. Then, on another domain(s) you have your “money” pages. These are typically smaller sites very focused on conversion – either squeeze pages, pre-sales pages or an actual sales page for your own product.
2. I have also used sites that are a combination of both on one domain where you have a mixture of content pages, blogs and sales pages.
Honestly – I haven’t seen a really big difference in either approach, they both work if you have done the right keyword research and testing, send relevant traffic to the “money” pages and tweak the money pages to get higher and higher conversions.
NEXT DECISION – WORDPRESS OR HTML?
We all hear about how search engines love blogs and search engines love WordPress – but does that mean we should use WordPress then for every page on our site?
There is one main reason that search engines like blogs – they are dynamic – lots of on-topic content posted with frequent updates which triggers some positives in the complicated world of search engine optimization.
In other words, search engines like most WordPress sites because most WordPress sites are blogs – they like blogs period!
Our suggestion then is to use WordPress as your blogging platform and use html for the other pages in your site.
Why not use WordPress for the static pages too…?
The challenge with WP for static pages are…
1. Themes that mix a blog design for posts and a different design for a static page are few and far between, and the ones that are out there are quite complicated.
2. WP goes through MANY updates and patches any one of which can impact any custom themes -so just when you get something setup the way you like, the next update may wreck it all…this has happened to my sites many times and is a MAJOR pain in the butt.
3. It is harder (at least for me who knows some html) to tweak a site with WP, so I prefer to stay with html for my static sites.
Yes, use WordPress for your blogs, it is optimized to bring you lots of traffic for regular blog posting – but html is still the better approach to building static pages such as content, landing and sales pages.
