Sometimes you want a post, sometimes you want a page.
It’s not always easy to tell. In the early days of the blog, I only created posts, just trying to fill the needs of readers and my publishing schedule.
As I got more comfortable with blogging and creating content, I realized some things would be better off as static pages with a fixed, always-there url.
The more pages I created, like for special features like the monthly eBook Cover Design Awards or our blog carnival, the Carnival of the Indies, the more logical it seemed.
More pages arrived when we started hosting submission forms, opt-in forms, download pages and lots of others. Today there are 81 pages on the blog.
The newest was published today.
Turning Posts Into Resources
It’s my suspicion that pages will work very well as resource destinations.
- They are easier to find than posts
- Also easier to update
- And they are probably better for search engine optimization (SEO)
Of course, foundation posts work best for this, and I’ve started with a blog post dating from 2010, and one of the more popular destinations for search traffic, Self-Publishing Basics: How to Pick the Size of your Book.
This is pure foundation content, and now we’ve expanded it to include more information, and brought it up to date.
The page features all the standard book sizes you can produce at Lightning Source, CreateSpace, Blurb, and Lulu. One stop shopping if you’re wondering who produces a specific size.
We’ll also now start redirecting our internal links to the page rather than the 2010 post.
As I go through the archives and converting more posts to resource pages, I expect to end up with something of a hybrid information site and blog.
I think that makes the resources here better and easier to use for readers, and that almost always means SEO will be positively affected.
Here’s a link to the new page:
Self-Publishing: How to Pick the Size of your Book
Would this approach work on your blog? Have you tried creating “jump” or resources pages?
Photo: bigstockphoto.com
Hi Joel,
Is this something you can only do on a WordPress blog? I use blogger and the only way I know to make a static page is to make one that shows up in the tabs at the top of the page. But I’ve been looking at your “foundation” posts and “Start here” section today and love that concept–and I’ll be brainstorming how to make that fit to my blogs. Thanks for the great content (I actually added your link to one of my static pages today!)
I forgot to add that at the end of the first couple of paragraphs of the post I add a link simply saying ‘read more’ or similar which points to the full article on the page (like the posts you do on goodreads that jump to the website for the full article).
You’re doing the right thing for the long haul Joel. Building a website rather than transient articles floating around in a blog. Especially as your content is helpful to people over the long term.
It will be easy to ‘point’ new readers towards existing pages and save you answering the same questions over and over.
I realised I was too ‘mean’ to write a ‘throwaway’ post, so I write stuff up as a page (a ‘how to’ usually) and then publish the first paragraph or two as a post, much like you do on goodreads etc. Best of both worlds then, a legitimate reason to post AND a permanent addition to the website.
Enjoyed the book covers this month, getting scarily close to submitting my own, nervously I might add!
Great idea, Ian, I haven’t heard of that specific strategy before, but for the right articles it makes a lot of sense. And you won’t have to go back and convert posts to pages later!
Hi Joel,
I’ve just started bloggin – only 2 weeks ago – but I’m doing this right from the outset.
Apart from general posts, I had the idea to put together information about my specialist area of knowledge (horses) with the ultimate aim of turning it into a writer’s resource ebook. I’m inviting any writers who need info on the subject to ask, and I’ll just keep on putting snippets on that specific page until I have enough to be worth publishing.
Makes sense to me!
Deborah Jay, that’s a smart move and will provide you with pages to link to as you write new blog articles.