Lots of posts on WPShout are art directed, so you may wish to view this in your browser --> Effective Landing Pages for WordPress

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.

What did I do to make this magical landing page? Not much, actually. I just cut out everything that wasn’t the content. That mainly just meant stripping out the sidebar and making the content area smaller by default. I also added an extra call to action and changed the copy around slightly. Below is a side-by-side:

It’s fairly simple stuff and by this point hopefully I’ve persuaded you you might as well give one a go, so I’ll show you how I did mine and then take you through the other options.

Simple styling; simple solution

My favourite bit about how I turned my normal post into a landing page is just how damn simple it is. All I did was create an extra category, “Landing” and add some styling that applies whenever that category is selected. If you use your categories more religiously than I do, the same thing works with tags or any other taxonomy you want to add.

I used that handy little WordPress function, body_class, which I’ve written about before. I then added a couple of lines of CSS I needed to think down the site and used body_class to target it.

The final product was a mere four lines of CSS:

.single-landing .container{ width:1100px; }
.single-landing #sidebar{ display:none; }
.single-landing #main { margin: 0 0 40px 5%; }
.single-landing .entry-meta{ display:none; }

And that’s, uh, all there is to it. The .single-landing class is applied by body_class and targets posts which have the category landing, so there’s no worry about this showing up on archives or anywhere else. The best bit is that to use the same thing again, all I have to do is tick a category.

If and when I want to track stats, I don’t need them built straight into my dashboard; I’ve got Google Analytics to handle that for me.

It’s not a bad solution.

The plugin options

There are, however, vastly more complicated options and when I was first checking out my options these seemed to dominate the landscape.

Premise is a premium option… with a premium price tag.

Copyblogger Media’s Premise seemed to be the option that all the cool kids were using, and for your $165 you get some nice features like A/B testing, but for $165, you’d kinda hope it did more than just spit out some HTML with your logo on it.

It does some pretty handy other stuff too, including letting you securely sell eBooks and other digital downloads, so if you’re after something that lets you do that, it could well be worth the price tag.

Or MaxInbound is a slightly cheaper option.

Another premium option is MaxInbound, priced at a more reasonable $49 or $99, depending on the licence you go for. MaxInbound boasts email form integration — including Gravity Forms — as well as the standard MailChimp, Aweber and others.

If you’re after a plugin that makes landing pages for you and that’s all, MaxInbound might be the one to go for.

There is, of course, also a free option available in the plugin directory. Ultimate Landing Page is pretty basic, but if you don’t fancy coding yourself, it should do the job.

Take your pick

Those are your options, then, for creating a landing page. The way I’ve done is very simple, very easy and has undoubtedly been effective. The two premium plugins do, however, offer more. Premise’s A/B testing is pretty handy, but by no means is it the only way of A/B testing, should you want to go for that. MaxInbound looks like a solid option and Ultimate Landing Page is pretty basic.

So which one are you going to give a try?

This is a post from WPShout. If you enjoyed the post, please head over to the site and share or leave a comment! --> Effective Landing Pages for WordPress

Lots of posts on WPShout are art directed, so you may wish to view this in your browser --> Affiliate Marketing For WordPress

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.

As I did earlier in the year, I’ve kept this one relatively brief and I’ve used a screencast to show you how I do it.

Making links nice

The first thing I’ve now got is all my links in one place and standardised, all going: wpshout.com/go/product-name. I’m doing this with a plugin called Thirsty Affiliates. It’s the only premium plugin I’m using on WPShout and it’s a great way of sorting and organising affiliate links, as the picture below shows.

Using custom post types, Thirsty Affiliates provides an awesome way of giving your affiliate links a really professional look. You can sort all your links in one place and change them universally if the seller changes affiliate provider instead of having to go into every single post and page you’ve mentioned. It’s also got a neat little addon for the post editor screen which gives you all of your links in one place so you can easily add them into a post.

It really is an awesome little plugin and I thoroughly recommend you check it out.

Automatically linking

All we’ve achieved so far is make our links look nice, but that’s not too much of a help; we want to have our links added automatically to certain words or phrases for maximum profit.

I do this by using a slightly unorthodox method: a plugin called SEO Smart Links, which is meant to be used for setting up internal links to improve SEO, hence the name.

Install the plugin as usual from the Plugin Directory and activate it. Then, under Settings find Automatic SEO Links. You can then add a word to automatically link and a URL to link to, and that’s it.

That’s all there is to it

This really isn’t complicated stuff and I’m just using two plugins here to make links look nice and then automatically add them into posts. It’s another one of those things that could have been really complicated, but with the right help from a couple of plugins isn’t.

This is a post from WPShout. If you enjoyed the post, please head over to the site and share or leave a comment! --> Affiliate Marketing For WordPress

Lots of posts on WPShout are art directed, so you may wish to view this in your browser --> Why WordPress?

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!).

My personal recommendation is WooThemes. WPShout runs the WooFramework, something I’d thoroughly recommend. WooThemes have over 100 paid and free themes and their monthly subscription is great value, so you should definitely check them out.

2. The hosting

WordPress is supported by virtually all hosts, but some are vastly better than others. On WPShout I recently conducted an independent survey to find the best WordPress hosts; I’d thoroughly recommend you check out the results in order to find out which host is best for you.

WPShout is hosted by WPWebHost, on their $7.95/month “Freedom Plan”. Since I moved to WPWebHost, I’ve had fantastic customer service and as I’m on a commercial package, I can honestly recommend it as something well worth getting. They’ve even given me a discount code — WPSHOUT — which will give you 30% off the Freedom Plan.

3. The ease of use and flexibility

The chief reason remains its ease of use and flexibility. Whether I want to create a fancy portfolio, a simple e-Commerce site or a straightforward blog, WordPress is the easy option. The “famous five minute install” isn’t really true anymore — it takes me about thirty seconds to install a new WordPress site with my host, but we’ll come onto that later.

Developments such as custom post formats have meant WordPress is now much more than a blogging platform; it’s now a fully fledged CMS.

When I want to do something that would be more complicated, the vast number of plugins can just be dropped into my setup and allow me to do just about anything I could think of. If the plugin you want doesn’t exist, there’s likely to be someone with the same problem as you and a solution on its way.

4. The speed

WordPress has the potential to run extremely quickly. WPShout loads in roughly one and a half seconds and there are a couple of little tricks I use. The chief “trick”, if you can call it that, is to use W3 Total Cache. It’s an absolutely brilliant plugin which caches your site, thus reducing the amount of “work” that has to be done each time somebody loads your site.

I’ve often heard accusations levelled at WordPress of the code being “bloated”, but I’ve never seen anything to back this up nor have I seen this reflected in load times. WordPress can be slow if used irresponsibly, but a couple of simple steps and you’ll be flying.

I’ve written a fair bit about making WordPress run quickly on Shout and I wrote a fairly comprehensive tutorial for Noupe on the subject. Good places to start, though are Faster WordPress and a nice overview How To Make Your WordPress Site Load Faster.

5. The community

None of the things I’ve mentioned thus far would exist without the wonderful WordPress community. They’re the people who help you when you get stuck, make the free themes you use on your blog, develop the plugins you rely on and ultimately make the platform you use.

It’s worth mentioning the license WordPress uses — the General Public License – which gives you immense freedom to do more or less anything you want.

One of the reasons I originally chose WordPress myself was because of the active community and it remains the single main reason why I continue to use WordPress; from a great community, all else flows.

This is a post from WPShout. If you enjoyed the post, please head over to the site and share or leave a comment! --> Why WordPress?

Lots of posts on WPShout are art directed, so you may wish to view this in your browser --> Email Newsletters For WordPress

As you may have seen in last week’s competition post, I recently created an email newsletter for WPShout. You may have also noticed I ended up using MailChimp instead of a built-into-WordPress solution.

Something which used just WordPress was what I was originally after, so I set out the following criteria:

• Powered by WordPress, ideally with custom post types or a simple admin interface.
• Double opt-in, with a nice bit of code I can put in my sidebar and style for signups.
• Import and export of lists as CSVs.
• Shortcodes or similar for unsubscribe links.
• Some sort of performance tracking.
• Cheap; either a premium plugin or something with low monthly costs.

It turns out this was a fairly comprehensive list of criteria and it wasn’t possible to fulfil all of the criteria.

This left me with two options:

• Use a premium plugin, such as WordPress Email Newsletter, and sacrifice functionality I wanted such as tracking.
• Or use a third party service such as MailChimp or Aweber and not be able to send out newsletters from my WordPress dashboard.

In the end I went with MailChimp as I didn’t want to sacrifice functionality and it’s not too much of a hassle to send emails out from. I went for MailChimp over Aweber simply because I’m familiar with it (and it’s free!).

Creating a signup popup

One of the things I wanted to be able to do was create something similar to what the likes of Darren Rowse on ProBlogger use — a little modal popup which shows to first time visitors inviting them to signup to the newsletter. I initially tried to do this plugin-less, but it didn’t turn out well and so I ended up using a plugin called WP Super Popup, which essentially does the same thing as the Popup Domination plugin on ProBlogger, just there aren’t pre-designed forms.

Not having pre-designed forms was fine, though as I wanted to show my MailChimp signup form which I embedded by using an iFrame (as there’s no embed code for larger forms on MailChimp, oddly). Obviously I don’t have any historic data to go on, but so far the popup has accounted for 1/3 of new subscriptions, so seems to be doing relatively well.

Signing up in the sidebar

The other thing I wanted to do was set up a sidebar subscription form. This too was relatively easy — I just grabbed the embed code off MailChimp and pasted it into the sidebar. I did then do a couple of tweaks though — instead of adding another stylesheet to Shout by using MailChimp’s stylesheet on its CDN, I put it at the bottom of Shout’s. I then had a play around with the styling to make it look like the rest of the site, moving the buttons around so they fit in Shout’s lovely uber-wide sidebar.

Get the newsletter!

It’s been a fairly straightforward process setting up the newsletter — there were times when I had no idea what I was doing, but it all seems to have turned out well in the end! I’m now going to tell you to go and subscribe, of course. If you’re quick, there are hundreds of themes to be won, too!

This is a post from WPShout. If you enjoyed the post, please head over to the site and share or leave a comment! --> Email Newsletters For WordPress