WordPress Tips

What is the objective of your website or blog? Do you want to promote a service? Sell products? Expand your email list? Promote products as an affiliate?

Regardless of its purpose, in order to succeed, you need to grab the attention of your visitors immediately. Your message must be conveyed clearly and quickly.

Your website has specific pages and locations that are comparable to valuable real estate. Location, location, location. These are extremely effective areas for products, services, and other types of offers. These locations are highly valuable to your business, and you should maximize the impact these areas have.

We are going to look at this valuable real estate over several articles. This is part 1. You will want to check back next week for more even more relevant, usable information.

Homepage

Yes, this is obvious. However, the homepage is the most important page, and it gets the most traffic. However, if most of your traffic comes from a Google search or social media, most of these visitors are landing on a specific blog post rather than coming to your homepage first. However, those visitors who enjoy what they see are very likely to click on a link to your homepage to check it out.

In addition, many visitors who land on your website or blog through a link from another site will be coming straight to your homepage.

The common setup for a blog is to display the most recent posts on the homepage. However, another choice is to build a static homepage that won’t change each time you publish a new post.

Using a static homepage gives you control over the layout and the content/message that visitors see. You can use your homepage to get more exposure for your products or services, grow your email list, or as a hub that links out to the different content on your site.

WordPress makes it easy to set any page as your homepage. If you’re using a drag-and-drop builder, you can easily create a custom layout for your homepage without touching the code.

Top of Blog Posts

The area between the post title and the beginning of the content is highly visible. This area is used frequently often for advertisements because it is a great location for getting clicks that makes money for you.

Sometimes, the ads at the top of the post will be aligned to the left or right so the start of the blog content wraps around them.

While this location is often used by blogs for ad revenue, you can also use it for other purposes. Of course, if you have your own products or services to sell, you could create an internal ad that leads visitors to a landing page if they click on the ad. You could also use a simple text-based callout that gets visitors’ attention and drives them to some specific page on your site.

Directly Below Blog Posts

The area just after the end of a blog post can be very valuable, just like the area above the post and any in-content areas. The area at the end of the post will typically be well below the fold unless it’s a very short post, but this can be a great location because people will see it immediately after they finish reading an article on your blog. This gives you a great chance to make an impression and give them some sort of offer.

People who read your entire post, or at least scan till the end, will be very interested in the content on your site, and they may be interested in whatever you have to offer. This can be a great place to include an opt-in form or promote products and services.

Next week we will continue with our overview of the valuable areas on your website. Check back. In the meantime, give us a call at NOYO Web Development for a free consultation.