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.

If you’ve read my previous post, you’ll know I’m working on a local business networking site in Wordpress.

To handle event registration, I checked out a few different plugins, and finally decided on Events Manager 2.0. It’s a very slick plugin that not only allows people to RSVP for events, but also ensures only the right number of seats are available, it sends confirmation emails, and produces a nice printable report of who has bought tickets.

It isn’t exactly what I need, but it’s a solid place to start hacking.

My first job was to turn the single field “seats” into “member tickets” and “non-member” tickets, make sure that the new fields show up in all the right places, and recode a few things to make sure they get added up in the calculations to determine how many tickets are left to be sold.

I also added two new admin and database fields for the prices of member and non-member tickets for each event.

Today I’m working on a Paypal integration for the registration process. Once the user has decided how many member/non member tickets to buy, I want to send them to a page where they can either print off the invoice and pay by cheque, or click a link to connect to Paypal.

Once I’m done hacking this plugin, it’s on to user registrations on the site, which looks like it could be a beast!

[evening edit]

And by golly I’ve done it. It ain’t pretty so far, and I need to make the paypal and addresses and such customizable, but the hack was successful….

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.

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…

So far in this series we’ve created a way to redirect prospects sent by affiliates to oodles of different product sales pages from one clickbank account, and created custom affiliate URLs to ensure that affiliates are linking to your site, not Clickbank’s, for their affiliate links.

Today I want to solve on other problem I have with Clickbank.

When you run an affiliate program through Clickbank, you do not know who your affiliates are. All you know is their Clickbank ID.

I don’t really need to know their mailing address or the name of their pet canary, but it would be nice to have their name, email address and Clickbank ID.

It would be nice to be able to email affiliates about any special offers they could promote to their list.

It would be awesome to be able to send out an email to all my affiliates when I’ve got a new product.

Having a ready made list of people who might promote a new product is much more advantageous than starting from 0 affiliates with each product and hoping that a few folks will find it in the Clickbank marketplace.

And should I ever want to abandon Clickbank and move to a different affiliate management service, I would definitely want to tell all my affiliates about the new setup.

So, I need, at least in some minor way, to have my own affiliate list.

I decided that the most effective way to do this is with a combination of a bit of custom PHP and Aweber.
Read more…