Tuesday’s Tool: FAQ-Tastic WordPress Plugin- Generate Content and FAQ Pages
This weeks Tuesday’s tool is the brilliant and underrated WordPress plugin, FAQ-Tastic . The plugin will simplify the process of making FAQ pages for your blog but the real potential of the plugin is it’s ability to generate pages and pages of valuable content on the fly.
The plugin can be as simple or as complex as you want it to be- make a simple FAQ page or have FAQ’ be user generated when a reader asks a question. I am going outline functions that that are the most powerful and easily used.
After you install FAQ-Tastic here are two ways to create FAQ pages for your site: make either a single page with a list of questions and answers or make an index of questions linking to answers on separate pages.
You can also add element where readers can ask you a question and their question and your answer will become a FAQ.
We are going to keep it simple. The format that interests us is making a list of questions that linking to answers on separate pages.
After install, create a “group” for your FAQ Questions. Could be something like “Candle Making FAQ Page” assign it to a page you have all ready created called “YOUR TOPIC FAQS” or in this case also called “Candle Making FAQ Page” . Any questions created will appear on that page and the question will link out to answer page- all created by FAQ-Tastic.
Why is this brilliant and how can I use?
In a matter of seconds you will have placed a FAQ question on a FAQ page AND created a new sub-page with its own URL and keyword rich title. With very little effort you could create 50 questions and 50 new content pages all related to you topic.
You can also create a new question group called “Terms and Definitions” and create pages and pages of definitions of commonly used terms in your niche. In minutes!
Now, you have all these pages with answers to commonly asked questions about your niche. You can use a plugin like Alinks and assign keywords to those URLS. So every time you use the keywords scent throw on your site it will link to your sub-page created by FAQ-Tastic plugin.
if you don’t want to use Alinks or can’t ( my theme clashes with this great plugin) you can just manually go through your posts creating crosslinks.
You can edit the sub-pages just like any other page if you later want to build on the information. Your WordPress theme may display sub-pages in your sidebar. You can recode to collapse the sub-pages or the easy and better way is to hard code your pages into sidebar- and lose the sub pages. Just remember to manually add when you create a new page.
The plugin . like other WordPress plugins takes no time to install. The user interface of FAQ-Tastic is awful. ( sorry guys! ) it is NOT at all intuitive however given the complexities of the plugin and what it does they are forgiven. There is a bit of initial learning curve to using it but well worth the effort.
Some other options you may chose to use are offering reader ability to “rate” your questions and answers. If you have a lot of traffic and comments you can also activate option for reader to ask a question and when you answer it will be added to FAQ ( also a great way to create content)
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