Wordpress verses Static landing pages

Status
Not open for further replies.
J

Jon12345

New member
Sep 14, 2006
187
0
0
Brighton, UK
Have been considering using Wordpress to do affiliate landing pages but find it a pain in the arse to edit.

What are the pro's and con's of using Wordpress verses putting a site together using Dreamweaver? e.g. ease of use, speed of creation, how much Google likes blogs verses static etc.

Thanks,

Jon
 


I have this debate with myself almost daily.

IMHO - wp is good for traffic, and it is an easy way to automate sitemaps, RSS feeds, etc.

But static landing pages seem to make more sales (for me). I usually set up a domain with both, and use the blog to lever people to my landing pages. You can also include the static pages in your xml sitemap with the google sitemap gen. plugin.

There are some wp themes that have been developed to create good landing pages. The ones I found were not free, but I am going to get around to trying one.

I would be happy to to take suggestions on good themes for landing pages.
 
So bitsdawg, are you saying that you have tested static verses blog for the same offer? And if so, how much of a difference was there in sales conversion for that page?
 
Yup.

But so many factors matter.

In my cases, the blog tended to grab traffic from many different sources, where traffic to the static pages was much more targetted.

So the difference in conversions was probably 40% - but can I say it was all static vs. blog? No.

I am just pointing out a system I use. If you read here, about these blog or flog landing pages, you can see that others have another system that seems to be very effective too.
 
I want something where I send my PPC traffic to. My concern is that I might not get such a good quality score if I use a static page and therefore I have considered a blog, with its rich linking structure. But at the same time, I find it a bastard to edit, add tables to and find a theme that does leak too much traffic due to sidebar links dragging the attention away from my pitch.

Never heard of the term "flog" landing pages before but I'm liking it. :) What sort of system do they use? Are you referring to seo or PPC?
 
Just do a search for flog on this board.

And again, you can find blog themes that are designed to work as landing pages - with minimum distractions.

You know that there are no right answers or wrong answers. Lots of things work. Just pick something and test it. It is what we all do. When you own 50 websites, you won't agonize over each one.

It is simple enough to set up a blog in a subdomain and static pages on your main directory, or the other way around. Split test them, and you'll have your answers.
 
I use both and it is different for each campaign so I can't really say it depends on how landing page is set up. I prefer Wordpress because for me it is easier to set up and I can create pages with proper permalinks in minutes that increase my Quality Score. Also it is easier to do SEO for a wordpress page (simply install seo plugins) and that also increases QS. Google also tends to like wordpress blogs a bit more.

Flog I believe is a fake blog. For example personal blog where this "person" writes about his/her experience with the product but the actual purpose is to market that product.
 
I hate Wordpress. Blogs get hacked all the time, comments suck, and a variety of other things make WP a huge turn off for me.

But there are things a blog lets you do that you really need to be doing to give your site more traction in the search engines.

So the best solution is to create a regular, static html site and then create an rss feed page for the site. You can do this manually or google "create rss feed" and there is software (free and paid) that will do this for you. Personally I think it's better to do it manually because then you can learn how to add the exact blurbs of text you want to appear in your feed. But automating this works too.

After you have an rss feed set up for your site you can do things like ping your site every time you've updated, subscribe to your own blog at yahoo or google or msn to get a new site indexed fast, add your website url to top blog directories (which are usually showing up on the first page of Google right now for many keyphrases)....plus you can submit your feed to rss directories for easy backlinks. Basically your site becomes a blog in Google's eyes after you add an rss feed to your html site and you'll even show up in Google's blog search results.

People can subscribe to your feed just as they would with a blog so they can be notified up updates, etc. But you never have to deal with lame comments and stuff.

I do all my sites like this now - hybrid sites. Created in regular html with an rss feed page created just for that site's content.
 
I agree with those who believe that static nonWP HTML sites are better. They're easier to edit in the exact way you want them in order to increase conversions and ctr. Even with some lp templates for WP you're still somewhat limited. Stick with slicing up photoshop with html.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Top Bottom