From Website to Blog (Part 4)

Let’s continue with the series I started on how to transform a website into a blog, the idea being that blog will attract more traffic because of its more interactive nature and because search engines really like them. If this is your first encounter with the series, you’ll find the previous posts here:

• Part 1: Pros and cons of changing a website into a blog
• Part 2: Initial steps for transforming a website into a blog
• Part 3: How to keep the old site alive while you prepare the new blog

As well, there’s a little aside to the series on what to do to configure WordPress immediately after you install it that is also of interest.

Choosing a Blog Theme

When we left off last time, I promised we’d discuss blog setup in some more detail. I’ve mostly done that in the aside mentioned above, but I wanted to go over some of the more concrete steps with an actual blog used as an example.

The site we’re transforming is a silly little site I create over a year ago called “No Debt Is Good”. It started out as a single-page site about debt-free living and ended up with a few pages on it. Nothing fantastic, I was using it mostly to demonstrate the concept of a single-page AdSense site and now I’m “sacrificing” it for the greater good. Actually, my mortgage is up for renewal in October and so I’ve suddenly developed a real interest in getting rid of debt, so this topic is very much a propos.

One of the most difficult things for me when I’m creating a new blog is deciding what the blog will look like. If I were a spammer, I wouldn’t care one bit, but as a general rule I like to use blog designs that look good and still manage to blend in the AdSense ad and link units quite nicely. There are literally thousands of WordPress themes out there to choose from, so this is not an easy task. Lately, however, I’ve been finding myself using Brian Gardner’s free WordPress themes as a starting point. This blog uses a variation of his Silhouette theme, for example. After much deliberation, I chose to go with a variation of his Vertigo Blue theme for No Debt Is Good.

A Fine Balance

Brian’s themes are nice for several reasons. One is that he uses proper semantic markup throughout the themes. Unlike most themes, the blog name is not wrapped in an <h1> tag at the top of the page. The <h1> tags are in fact reserved for the titles of the blog posts and the individual pages. Another reason I like them is that they’re ready for monetization: adding AdSense to his themes is pretty easy.

Now, where you place your AdSense ads and how many you place on the page is one of those things that AdSense publishers debate quite heatedly. On this blog, for example, I try to make the AdSense unobtrusive: there’s a link unit at the top and the individual post pages have a half-banner ad as well. That’s pretty much it. This works well for me because I know that my regular readership isn’t likely to click ads anyhow, so there’s no point in obscuring the content just to get a few more clicks in. For some topics the minimalist approach makes the most sense, especially when the ad inventory is relatively small and/or the bid prices for ads falls quickly after the first two or three ads. (See Uncommon AdSense for a detailed explanation of why.)

But when you’re in a competitive topic space and/or you’re not so much interested in a regular readership, try a more aggressive approach to AdSense ad layout. This is what I’m doing with the modified Vertigo theme on No Debt Is Good. I’ve taken the big “V” graphic out and replaced it with an ad unit. I’ve also embedded an ad unit right at the start of the content and inserted one immediately after the content. The theme isn’t done yet, as I still need to create a for the header and tweak a few other things, but it’s mostly there at this point.

Static Home Page or Not?

As you transform your site into a blog, one of the decisions you’ll have to make early on is whether the new blog should look like a website or look like a blog. If the former, you’ll want to use a “static page” (a WordPress page, as opposed to a post) as the home page. If you want it to look like a blog, you’ll want a conventional blog home page with blog postings on it.

I’m going for the static page, but I haven’t enabled it just yet. I plan on using the SEO siloing technique to finely target the ads on the various pages, so I need to create a few categories first and create some landing pages for those categories. Using static pages fits very well with the siloing technique.

There’s another reason to stick with a website feel as opposed to a blog feel, and that’s when you don’t plan on updating the site very much. Users expect blogs to be updated on a regular basis. If the site doesn’t look like a blog (even though it is) they won’t necessarily be looking for regular updates. Be sure to drop all the date references (as in “posted on …”) from your theme in order to reinforce the website feel and to not make the content appear to be outdated.

Stay tuned for more…

Sponsored Link: Want an interesting and mostly unobtrusive ad effect? Try Peel Away Ads. You can see one in the top right corner of the page. Easy installation on any site.

Eric Giguere is the author of Uncommon AdSense and the award-nominated (that just means it lost!) blog Make Easy Money with Google and AdSense.

Comments