Switching to Studiopress WordPress Themes and Landing Pages

In this post I talk about Studio Press Themes, Premise landing pages/membership sites and and the Scribe content marketing system.

I’d like to tell you about why I’m switching most if not all of my websites to Studio Press WordPress themes powered by Genesis and how if you’re hunting around for themes for any purpose, these folks can likely take care of your needs. And, for other laypeople like me, what that actually means in real-life terms. Also, I’ll explain why I think it would be in your best interest to create your websites using these same resources whether you’re an amateur, up and coming designer or hopeful internet marketer of some kind.

I don’t know you, but I suspect that if you’re looking for a quick, professional way to make a great site you’ll find this short article useful.

What you’ll find with the resources I’ll describe here are the following benefits.

WordPress itself if free
You can make websites fast
You can change them around easily without messing up your content
You can have membership sites! (both paid and unpaid)
You can have landing pages, sales pages and video pages with just a few clicks
There’s a program that analyzes your content for you
There are awesome tutorials and instructionals on creating killer sales copy
The Studiopress online forum/help community is very responsive and helpful

Does that look like a lot of bullet points? Well, all that stuff is there in these themes. Those are some reasons why I’m sticking with this company. Here’s the rest of the story.

Have you been doing what I was doing for a long time? Searching for ways to make great, consistent websites for as little money/free/cheap as possible? Do you have lots of ideas and are looking for ways to make them shine online?

I’ve had personal blogs, professional sites, marketing projects, sites to promote my coaching and martial arts training. Each one deserved its own look, but I didn’t have money to have a designer create each one, and I didn’t have time to learn how to design because I was too busy doing other work. Sure, I picked up some skills along the way, but when it came down to it, i did rely on other people and services to get it done well.

So I tried Joomla, WordPress, had a designer do one site for me, and even way back in the day I had some sites built with MS Word (those looked awful). Then a while ago I bought a WordPress template from Studiopress and used it for one of my projects. Eventually the project came to an end, and I sort of forgot about Studiopress for a while.

I kept on trying different things and spent some money on a couple ideas that just didn’t work out when I suddenly remembered this theme I bought for the other project. I went back to the Studiopress site and actually started to look around and I found a ton on things that could work for me for different projects.

Results

The results recently have been fantastic. I’m able to put up my site(s) super fast now and concentrate on my content and business ideas, rather than worry about design.

Old school fallacy.

Don’t be fooled into thinking that you as an average person or small business owner need to spend a ton of money on design. Some niche business will need or choose to hire someone, but don’t get caught up in sales pitches. Most of the resources out there that used to cost many thousands of dollars are now free or cheap and are super accessible.

Solution…

So the reason why I’m switching to mainly Studiopress themes and a couple of their other products is because of their framework called Genesis and how they’ve made it so that you can switch back and forth among all of their themes, have a totally different look to your site and not have to worry about losing content or formatting, unlike with many other frameworks.

What does that mean for you? Okay, when you look at an average website, it might have been written as a stand alone site, as-is, using one or more programming languages. That’s pretty basic, right? In WordPress designers can make a framework and then have themes that can change the look and feel of the site that are commonly called “child themes”. So what you’d do it click a button to install their Genesis framework, then click a couple more buttons and have the “child theme” installed. Guess what…it’s that easy.

And if you go with what they call their “pro plus” membership you’ll have access to all of their past and future themes. I’m always changing my mind, so I like to switch things up pretty often.

You’ll see in earlier posts of mine that I’ve also advocated a couple other companies. I still stand by that. They’re great solutions. Studiopress has just gotten so flexible and diverse with their ideas and solutions that I’ve just had no need to use the other themes as much as I used to.

Here’s something else…mobile responsiveness. Nowadays everyone is looking things up from anything from a huge monitor to a laptop to tablets and smartphones. You want your site to look good no matter what device someone is using. All of Studiopress’ new themes are responsive to whatever sized screen someone is using, so your site is still going look great.

There are some specialized things that you might be looking for as well, especially if you’re running a business, starting in internet marketing, or affiliate marketing. Here are some solutions that Studiopress and Copyblogger (their parent company) offer.

Landing Pages, Membership Sites and Sales Pages (with or without Video)

If you already know what a landing page is then great, read on. Otherwise, here’s the nutshell. Ever been to a site that has almost no menus, lots of sales copy and just a big “buy now” button or something similar? Internet marketers of all kinds use this sort of things to get people to concentrate on the page they’re on without being distracted by other stuff. The theory is that people will just sit still for a moment, read and then even buy the product if it’s any good. It works! Of course it does. In today’s age of constant flashy things and things to click, it’s great to have people actually read your words.

In comes Premise.

They created something called Premise. With Premise you’ll be able to incorporate into your WordPress site (any site, even if it’s not a Studiopress theme), landing pages, sales pages, video pages, video sales pages and lots more. The links here bring you to their own page where they give you plenty of examples of what those do and what they look like. Suffice it to say, if you’re trying to sell anything, advice, goods, services, whatever, you’ll eventually realize that you need to use these types of pages on your website, so please check them out and give it a serious read-through and consider picking it up. I got it and it’s been worth it.

The thing that I believe that they don’t emphasize enough is that they actually teach you how to write sales copy! No, really. When you use a Premise landing pages there’s an option to insert example text for that page type. You can use that as a baseline to insert your own content.

Also, on the Premise site, once you’re a member, you’ll have access to instructional and tutorial material that will very much help you create killer sales content. And their blog posts are incredible too.

Membership Sites. Premise 2.2 can now take care of your membership site needs (with paid and unpaid content or subscriptions)

Learn Sales Copywriting and SEO with Scribe

Now, if you’re thinking that you want to take this to a whole other level all together you can subscribe to their learning course, Scribe (again by Copyblogger – there’s a video tour of the program there too). What this thing does is analyze your content that you already have and gives you a report on what search engines will think of it and it gives suggestions on how to improve what’s there. It’s pretty crazy that there are tools to do this, but welcome to the 21st Century. You can check it out for yourself here. I really can’t do it justice with my review.

By now hopefully you’ve opened a couple of those links. If I did it right they opened in a new page or tab. If not, right click on one of them (or use these: Studiopress, Premise, Scribe) and then click “open in new tab”. Then come back here.

You’ll see that they cost some money. Not a lot, but there are fees associated with them. Well these are professional and think about what you’re getting for very very little money relatively. I thought about it for a while then just did it. 100% worth it for me.

Related post: Roundup of Great Themes and Plugins w/great pairings of the themes with the plugins.

This is advice that I’ve given before and I’d like to state it again…

When you’re in there in the purchasing process, sometimes you’ll come up to the option of “Standard License” or “Developer License”. I personally suggest the developer license and/or the option that offers packages at a discount. (In the case of Studiopress, they call it their “StudioPress Pro Plus All-Theme Package ”.

The reasons for this is simple:

When you get developer type licenses you usually get to use the themes anytime, anywhere (check with the official offers for the specifics).
You’ll probably get updates and new releases for no extra cost. That’s valuable!
Also even if you don’t consider yourself a web designer or developer, consider the fact that if you’re into Internet marketing, or if your growing your business or blog, you are in fact “developing” and might need to expand as time goes on.

Use any of the links in this email. Here’s a few of their official banners too! Very fancy, right? Enjoy.