A blog site provides an ideal place to enable your visitor to connect further with your brand and blog content.
If you are a new blogger on the block, these pages can help you provide more information about who you are, establishing a meaningful context for your writing.
We take a look at the 8 key pages to include in your WordPress blog.
1 – About Page
The About Page plays an important role in establishing a relationship with your visitor. By providing insights into the personality/personalities behind the blog, you give your visitor further reason to ‘connect’ with you and your writing.
This page personalises and humanises the blog. Showing that you are more than just words on a screen – a real person – goes a long way in establishing trust.
Here you include values, mission and an explanation on your journey in starting the blog. In this way, reading your blog becomes a more meaningful experience for your visitor.
2 – Contact Page
Have you ever been on a website, wanted to get hold of the company, only to find that there is no contact information – anywhere? Enable people to get in contact with you, making you and your offering accessible.
This builds relationships and your brand, while increases the possibility of the user engaging with you and using your services or product offering.
Information which you can have on your Contact Page includes a contact form for your visitor to complete, your contact number, email address and a map (if you want to share your physical location). An added advantage of the form is creating a database of the names of people who are interested in your offering, enabling you to approach them as potential leads.
3 – Legal and Ethical stuff
Affiliation page
Use this page to show your affiliation with a particular sponsor so that your reader is aware of how you monetise your site. This is especially important if you are offering a package from your sponsor (even a discounted one) or if you are doing a review of a product or service from a sponsor.
Sharing this information with your reader is a good business practice which also builds trust as a result of your openness and transparency.
Privacy Policy
Inform your visitor about the data that you collect via your site and how it is used. This is another way of earning your visitor’s trust, giving your visitor a sense of security which in turn helps to develop a solid relationship.
Companies like Apple and Google require a site to displace privacy policy, even if you are indirectly collecting personal data through a third party like Google Analytics or AdSense, the fact that you are collecting personal information means your visitor needs to be informed.
4 – Products and Services Page
This page is ideal in giving your visitor insight into your product or service offering. Additionally, listing products and services in an accessible and user-friendly design helps to grow the business by facilitating sales.
5 – The 404 Page
While WordPress provides a 404 page, you can also use a creative 404 page to show the fun side of your site. Use the 404page plugin to create a customised 404 error page in WordPress so that you can easily create your own 404 error page which works with with almost every theme.
6 – Archive Pages
Once your website contains more content and you have a regular blog posting, this will result in archives pages. This is a collection of posts which are grouped according to category, author, date, tag etc.
WordPress Archives provide a customisation option. This includes the different archive pages such as the blog, custom post archives, author archives and an archive for the search results page.
7 – Advertising Page
Advertising and sponsorship are tow key ways of monetising your blog site. This can be achieved by opening your site up to Google AdSense, Google’s advertising network.
Revenue is earned from Google adverts appearing on your site which correspond with your audience. Money is earned when your visitor clicks on an advert which takes them through to the landing page linked to the advertiser.
8 – Blog Page
This is the central page in your site, around which all your other pages revolve. As such, this page deserves your full attention, livening it up with images and videos which draw in your visitor, complemented by content which provides a valuable and meaningful resource.
Conclusion
While different blog sites may require other pages which may be unique to their offering, the pages listed here are the essential pages which you need to have in a WordPress blog, helping you to inform your reader, while positioning your site as a trustworthy, interesting and worthwhile source of information.
