Effective Landing Pages for WordPress

Published under Marketing.

If you have absolutely anything you want people to do when visiting your website — be that subscribe, download, purchase,  whatever — you need a landing page.

I realised I needed a landing page earlier this year after I released my eBook WordPress Blogging Guide and nobody was downloading it! This puzzled me as it was, you know, free.

I figured I needed a landing page of sorts. The graph above shows downloads from July, when the eBook was launched, through October. I added the landing page at the start of October and it nearly doubled download rates.

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Affiliate Marketing For WordPress

Published under Marketing.

In recent weeks I’ve been trying to diversify WPShout’s income — you’ll notice that Shout now sports some links in the sidebar pointing to WooThemes and WPWebHost, both using affiliate links to do so. There are a couple of ways I’m now handling my affiliate marketing through my WordPress Dashboard and this post will run down the different ways I’m now doing this.

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Why WordPress?

Published under Hosting, Landing, Marketing.

Nearly two years ago now, I asked a number of members of the WordPress community why they used WordPress. Over those last two years WordPress has changed vastly and thus it’s time to update that post with the reasons I still use WordPress in 2011.

1. The themes

Nodoubt you’ve heard about WordPress’ free and premium themes. These are undoubtedly one of the main attractions to WordPress and certainly the reason many people use it over other CMSes.

If you’re after free WordPress themes, the likes of Smashing Magazine are the places to look. Be wary of downloading themes from sites which exist solely to link to batches of themes as they often sneak in their own backlinks, using encrypted PHP to do so. Stick to places like the WordPress Theme Directory and roundups from reputable sites such as Smashing Magazine.

However, a huge market has sprung up around paid WordPress themes and you can get some exquisitely designed themes for $50 or so. Even if you don’t want an out-of-the-box theme, you can still use one of the many frameworks available to build your site around, thus saving time (and money!).

Carry on reading →