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
