The WordPress Theme That Takes The Work Out of Blogging

February 16, 2007 by Trish Jones
Filed under Website Promotion Strategies

Not all WordPress blog themes are created equal… You have to use this one to believe it.

It’s true, WordPress comes complete with two preinstalled themes and there are dozens of free WordPress blog themes available on the Internet for download, but all WordPress blog themes are not created equal.

For the hobbyist, the free themes are fine, or if you’re already a proficient Internet Marketer since you’ll have some idea about how to drive free traffic to your website. But the one thing about any WordPress theme is their limitation in terms of flexibility.

And whilst the WordPress blog was flexible enough for most of my clients needs, some of them still wanted one page sales letters to sell their products or a service but they only wanted to know the very basics of search engine optimization and many of them were not interested in relying solely on Google AdWords.

I’m also aware from a survey carried out by Mike Filsaime that over 50% of people who market online are new to the Internet and blogging, so my mission has been to find the easiest solution for those getting started on the Internet.

And then… a few weeks ago I hit the jackpot!! Okay, not quite, but I didn’t realize that I had the solution in my hand or should I say driving my blog, that would help the ordinary person market online without the headache of static websites, SEO, designers and webmasters.

WELCOME SEMIOLOGIC PRO!

What on earth is this!! Well, it’s a WordPress blog theme, which I’ve been using for over a year now, and is recommended by Blog Evangelist Sherman Hu as well as recommended on the highly acclaimed subscription only website, StomperNet.

Although I’d been using the software a year, there were a few features that I wasn’t aware of and stumbled on them accidentally… thankfully!

I knew for example that the software enabled you to create a static front page which gives the blog its own front page, just like you see on static websites, so on entering the blog, visitors would perceive the blog to be an ordinary website. What I didn’t realize however, was that the theme had a sales letter template built into the software!

Now, why am I so excited about this…?

Now you can create a sales letter and have it as one of your blog pages. If you wish, to make it easy to marketing your product or service, just purchase another domain name and have it redirect to that page one your blog. So, instead of having www.marketingteamx.com/dvd-scratch-repair-machine - obvioulsy a made up name, but can you imagine having to give someone that domain name? So you’d purchase the domain name www.dvdscratchrepairmachine.com. and which you’ll use to market your product or service and have it redirect to www.marketingteamx.com/dvd-scratch-repair-machine.

Well, so what Trish, people have been doing that with websites for years so what’s different?

What’s different is that blogs have their own search engines, which means they get indexed by the search engine spiders faster than a static website (sometimes in days) and the Cascading Style Sheet canvass in Semiologic Pro has already been optimized for the search engines so all you do is write a blog page, select the sales letter template and your sales letter will get indexed in just the same way your other posts and pages within your blog will be indexed.

No need to learn Microsoft Front Page or Dreamweaver

And, you have the benefit of an instant search engine optimized salesletter!

See what I mean here by going to Denis de Bernardy’s salesletter for Semiologic Pro software… Ensure you take a look at the address bar in Internet Explorer or Firefox and notice the extension… i.e. www.semiologic.com/sem-theme-pro - indicating that this web page is an extension of the www.semiologic.com website.

So, you can either download a free WordPress theme, pay $49 for a good one, or you can take the search engine optimization work out of marketing your blog and use what the Pro’s use.

I asked Denis de Bernardy to comment on his Semiologic Pro Theme a few days ago and this is what he considers to be the key aspects of the software…

a) Things work. It may come as a surprise to many bloggers, but most open source software does _not_ work well.

b) It’s relatively straightforward to set up and customize a site. The bulk of the front end is customizable without editing php files.

c) It addresses the most important SEO aspects out of the box without any action from the user, including an optimized canvas, avoiding duplicate content, and structuring the site in such a way that the most important piece of information is put forward in keyword-rich page aggregates.

d) It’s straightforward to insert site-wide ad units using Ad Spaces. And you can investigate all sorts of monitization strategies via split tests using ad distributions.

e) Once you’ve configured a site the way you want it, you can clone it in one click.

Go and check it out for yourself, try it on a few of your blogs that haven’t been performing quite so well and notice the difference in terms of traffic and ranking.

Happy Blogging,

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Comments

2 Responses to “The WordPress Theme That Takes The Work Out of Blogging”

Taylor@Ascend Dreamweaver Classes on October 28th, 2008 1:44 pm

Personally I feel dreamweaver is very user friendly and easy to learn. I’ve seen many people pick it up quite quickly. This word press theme does seem like a helpful resource, thanks for sharing.
Trish Jones on October 30th, 2008 10:56 pm

It’s a matter of preference Taylor and I do envy those who can use Dreamweaver … I gave it a try many times and gave up. I can use FrontPage easily but don’t like it … messy code!

I really do dislike putting up my webpages with FP though so perhaps I ought to give dreamweaver another try.

Thanks for the post,

Trish