How To Convert a Blog Post Into a Website
If you have a particular blog post that is getting a lot of search traffic, it might interest you in turning the blog post into it’s own website. There are many reasons why it could be beneficial to do so. One reason is that it can allow you a way to expand on targeting further related keywords based on the primary set of keywords the blog post is already ranking for. Another reason is that the general topic of the article could be expanded into it’s own blog. The key thing to know is that if you have a blog post that is consistently receiving traffic, it is possible to convert the post into a website. In this post, I will show you how it can be done.
A few conditions need to be assumed prior to following these steps. Number one, your blog needs to be a self-hosted WordPress blog. Secondly, you need to have modified your permalink structure to %postname%/. WordPress is database driven and creates dynamic urls. Meaning, pages do not physically exist on your server. Instead, they are dynamically created. For example, if you have a post with the url http://www.yourblog.com/my-post-about-dogs/ in theory, this should exist on your server here: public_html/my-post-about-dogs/index.php. But, if you FTP into your server, you will see that this does not exist.
And that’s the trick. This is how you can convert the blog post into it’s own site or even separate blog. In order to do this, you need to login to FTP and create the physical directory that WordPress has created dynamically, and either upload an index.php file, or simply install a new WordPress blog inside the directory. The beauty of this trick is that even though you have overridden the existing dynamic structure with a physical directory and file(s), the existing dynamic reference is still maintained within the original WordPress install.
That means your existing blog post will still show up in all of the sections in your blog. Formally, if it was still appearing on the home page, even after you override the post by manually uploading a directory and index file, it will still appear on your original blog home page. The same applies to the post reference from the archive, category, search, and tag sections. However, when the post title is clicked on, instead of the original post being loaded, the newly uploaded section will load instead. If you simply uploaded a directory with index.php file, the index.php file will load. If you decided to install WordPress inside the directory, the home page of the newly installed blog will load instead.
The above screen shot shows a blog post I wrote about pizza coupons and specials. The post picked up a lot of traffic in Google so I decided to override the post with a physical php file instead. The dynamically generated URL for this post is http://www.garryconn.com/pizza-hut-specials-coupons.php.
So, in order to optimize this page and capitalize on the traffic, I created my own web page from scratch, saved the file as pizza-hut-specials-coupons.php and uploaded it to the root directory of my server. (i.e. public_html/pizza-hut-specials-coupons.php).
Once I did that, the physical file overrode the existing dynamic file. The end result is now I have my own specially created web page that maintains the same permalink structure as the dynamically created one by WordPress.
Above, I had mentioned that you can do this if your WordPress permalink structure is set to %postname%/, this can also be done if you have it set other ways such as %postname%.php. The key is the make sure that your permalink structure is not set to default: ?p=123. The reason is because you will not be able to manually upload physical files to your server.
I hope all this makes sense. If you have any questions about how to do this, feel free to leave me a comment and I’ll provide assistance as soon as I can.
September 13th, 2010 at 9:33 am
Thanks Garry. It's a good tip but I like to keep things inside of the blog for easy inter-linking purposes, and in case the layout ever changes. There are a lot of things you can do with templates to make them look like their own page, but still be inside the blog framework. Your thoughts?
September 15th, 2010 at 10:27 pm
I'm not fully understanding why you would want to do this? How does this benefit your site? Can you please provide a little more detail. I understand what you are doing with the php file, I'm just not sure how this benefits your site.
September 19th, 2010 at 7:01 pm
Am not quite sure how this could help. Could it be that you might want a different look, theme and feel about such particualr posts or what? At least that URL is generating traffic so why change it?
Could it be that you might want that traffic on a 'proper' blog/site where you can further build pages on that site? Could you please expand on it?
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March 3rd, 2011 at 6:16 am
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