Blog Bites Man

A few weeks ago I blogged about ways to use a wiki for marketing, but didn’t include this one: using a wiki for creating ad landing pages. We recently created a landing page theme (skin) for Confluence (the wiki my company sells). It’s a bit of eating one’s own dog food… mmmmm.

Similar to a web content management system, the wiki allows anyone (with permission) to create a landing page. The theme looks like the website, but it allows me to drop in whatever hero shot or navigation I want. I could create a totally self-contained landing page, but in our case felt it important to give users a choice of where to navigate to.

Here’s a screenshot of one of the landing pages, you can compare it with our website.

To be clear, the wiki is very different from a CMS because, among other things, it doesn’t have workflow and is a lot more free-form. But for a smaller company, it works well.

The navigation and testimonial in the right hand column can be re-arranged in any order and customized with different words, links, or graphics. It takes 10-20 minutes to create a page, depending upon how much you customize the content. We also had built into it the ability to customize the metadata, so we can include nofollow in the head tags.

For now, A/B testing will be done manually. One day I’d like to hire a service or platform to do multivariate A/B testing, but for now this is a really good way for us to create landing pages quickly, easily, and without relying on any IT resources or web developers.