Developing Money Making Niche Sites With WordPress 2.6: Video 8 - To Blog Or Not?

Hey I love the ebook and these videos, i’ve been putting into practice everything i’ve learned. I just wanted to let you know that your video isn’t working, if you didn’t know already.

Hi Caroline
I too pre.fer to keep my blogs and niche sites seperate

Dan Mihaliaks last blog post..A New Old Friend

@Ryan, try again, YouTube had a little fit last night when I posted the video. Seems okay today.

Hi Caroline

You said it was going to be a “controversial” video… so I thought I better add to the controversy:)

To “post” or to “page”… that is the question.

Here’s an argument or two for NOT using pages:

1. you can’t (easily) edit page slugs (names) to make them more SEO friendly - I say “easily” because it seems that pages have to be published first before the name can be edited - at least that what happens to me with WP 2.6

2. pages are not included in RSS feeds… and that means technorati etc will not learn about them… resulting in slower indexing at the search engines.

3. pages can’t be easily put into “categories”, which might be useful if you have more than just a handful of pages on your site. Otherwise, you have to play around with page “parents” and “children” and possibly even the page “ordering” system in order to organize your information.

4. pages don’t have “tags” associated with them, so there is an opportunity gone begging.

The main reason most people probably use pages is to avoid your site from becoming “dated”. If you don’t want that to happen, then simply edit the template and remove all the dates where they appear - and then use POSTS to overcome the problems above.

However, one really GOOD thing about using pages… IF you can work out how to use CUSTOM page templates… then they CAN become very powerful as you can start to fiddle with php in your template - eg custom home pages etc. as in the home page on my site.

So it’s probably a mix of both that is the best answer.

Cheers
Stephen Spry

Stephen Sprys last blog post..10 things to think about before firing an employee…

@Stephen, you can edit the page slugs just the same as with posts so that’s not a problem but yeah the lack of RSS is the biggest downside imo. I think tags and categories are useful if your niche site is leaning towards the larger side where you are likely to have several of those but if you’re building a tiny site it might not be as much of an issue.

Having said all that, typical that after I create all these videos I find a nice theme to use that makes posts look pretty much like pages anyway so for my latest sites I’m not even using the themes I have mentioned in my videos and I’ve just published posts rather than pages as I have no intention of adding a blog to these sites as a later date :-)

Any chance of a look at the the theme you found that makes posts look like pages?

How’s the 30DC coming along?

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@Paddy, its Courtney Tuttles Keyword Sniper theme, version 2.0 Will post a 30DC update post soon.

I was wondering the same stuff since I’m trying the 30DC and grappling with to post or not to post. Obviously if I start 3 sites under 30DC I’ll have my work cut out for me if I have to write posts on every blog/site.

Now, it’s nice having that first post as “sticky” when you do a site under the 30DC so your main article stays at the top of your blog. That way, you could write articles that appear beneath the original “sales” post if you like.

It seems that even if you write one article a week or one a month you’d at least attract more SEO attention than if you had a static site. But I’m not an SEO maverick, just trying to figure it all out.

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