I’ve noticed a lot of people wondering how to use Wordpress as a sales page. Now, I wouldn’t recommend using it for this if all you’re going to have is a sales page, but if you’re planning a blog in the back end, or some other pages that you want to easily edit, then maybe it’s not overkill.

Anyway, to make life easy for those folks looking to integrate their existing sales page into a Wordpress install, here’s the secret…. YOU DO NOT NEED TO USE A PARTICULAR THEME, OR EVEN INTEGRATE THE PAGE INTO THE SITE….

Here’s the quick and dirty way to add your page to your blog:

1. Open your sales page in note pad or a text editor
2. Add the following code at the top of the page:
   <?php
/*
Template Name: Sales Page
*/
?>
3. Rename the page to something like mysalespage.php
4. Upload your new page to your theme folder in your WordPress installation

And that’s the hard part.

Now, go to your Wordpress admin area and create a new page.

Make the title Buy It Now or something like that, just in case you have the page listed in your blog section in the future. Leave the body of the page blank.

In the righthand sidebar, in the new Attributes area, choose your newly created page from the Template dropdown box.

You’re done. Save the page.

If you preview the page now, you’ll see your sales letter. All that’s left to do is make your sales page the front page of your site.

You can do that by clicking the Settings item in the left sidebar, then choosing the Reading settings.

Select “A Static Page” for your front page display, and choose your Buy It Now page from the drop down list.

And that’s it.

Now when you go to your front page, you’ll see your sales letter. If you want to change your sales letter, just change mysalespage.php or whatever you named the template page, and reupload it. It’s not elegant, but it is better than paying someone to make a new page template for you.

IF YOUR NEW PAGE DOESN’T SHOW UP IN THE TEMPLATE LIST

Someone told me their newly created page didn’t show up when the followed the directions above. The best thing to do then, is grab a copy of page.php from your template folder. Rename it mysalespage.php and change the code at the top to
<?php
/*
Template Name: Sales Page
*/
?>

Follow the rest of the directions, and at the very end of the process, replace the faked sales page template with your real sales page.

A friend and client of mine asked me about SNEmpire today. I wasn’t sure exactly what it was, but a quick Google I discovered it’s a $500 social networking script. The sales page actually looks pretty good, but I went to one of the sites running the software (imsocialize.com) and was less than impressed by the user interface presented there.

Instead of recommending a buy, I pointed my friend to several open source social networking scripts that might server her needs:

Dolphin
The demo site and the showcase of sites running this script are very impressive.

Elgg
This looks like another contender. It’s got a pretty basic interface, but from a user standpoint, the simplicity is great.

Mahara
Mahara is a little less like Facebook, and a little more like LinkedIn. If your users are all about business and achievements, this might be the best solution for you.

Insoshi
A bit basic, but like Elgg, it’s got lots of potential.

PHPizabi
A great looking site right out of the box.

While each of these will require some customization, and they don’t come with tutorials, and maybe that makes all the difference to my friend. But making sure the foundation of my business — the software — is rock solid would be more important to me than spending time on the customization and learning curve were I planning a social networking site.

I have a stack of things I want to tackle that’s at least a foot high.

I have high priority, low priority, and just about every priority on the scale in between.

I KNOW that I should be working… but sometimes, when there’s so much to do, it’s way too easy to procrastinate. FreeCell looms large on my computer, begging me to cave in to the distraction. The latest bunch of books I bought at Amazon are whispering that they want to be read. Play some games, make some tea, fiddle with the Kindle, surf the web… all the distractions seem more appealing than my actual work.

So, what to do when there’s so much to do you’re procrastinating even starting?

• Recognize what’s happening.
• Deal with it.
• Force yourself to work.

Which is exactly what I’m going to do now.

Right after I make myself a cup of tea.

DOH!

If you’re thinking of monetizing your blog by using affiliate programs, link cloaking is something that you probably won’t think of instantly. After a while, you’ll realize that your visitors can avoid your affiliate link, or replace it with their own, very easily, thereby robbing you of those much-needed bucks, and this is not a good thing.

Cloaking your links won’t completely eliminate this problem, but it will keep your visitors from immediately realizing you’re sending them off to a Clickbank (or other affiliate marketplace) link.

For most sites, I’m a big fan of GoTryThis. It serves me very well as a link cloaker, with the added benefit of embedding cookies, great stats, split testing, and other neat tricks.

However, for Wordpress sites that will either be flipped, or that I want to keep separate from my main sites, the free Link Cloaking Plugin is a brilliant choice.

Read more…

It goes against most of the marketing advice I’ve received, but Clickz reports on a MailerMailer study that shows that Sunday emails have the highest open rate, followed by Monday morning.

Other findings of the report, as listed by Clickz are:

• E-mails are getting opened faster. Nearly one-third of opens occur within the first two hours — a 10 percent increase. This is likely because more people are using mobile e-mail readers, like the iPhone.
• Short subject lines are still working better than longer ones in most tests. MailerMailer reports that open rates decrease as subject line length increases. Subject lines with less than 35 characters seem to have a marked advantage.
• Subject lines with “hot button” messages work best of all.

Read the full report here.