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.

Every once in a while I want to populate a new blog with articles from InfoGoRound. The usual method of cut and paste can be horribly tedious and time consuming, so I turned to some free software I created several years ago to convert InfoGoRound articles into neatly formatted HTML files.

InfoGoGetter allows you to name files with any extension, and use any template you want, so I created a template.xml file that looked like this:

<item>
<pubDate>Mon, 26 October 2009 12:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
<category>Wordpress</category>
<category>Blogging</category>
<title><!--TITLE--></title>
<content:encoded><p><!--ARTICLEBODY--></p></content:encoded>
</item>


Of course, you’d want to change the date and category names to ones that fit your blog, but that’s all there is to it.

Then, I went through and converted all the articles I thought were useful with this template and saved them with a .xml extension.

Once I was done, I used a search and replace tool to remove spaces between the paragraph tags, since the WordPress import documentation said that linebreaks would convert as extra br tags, which would make way too much space between paragraphs.

Then, I opened a Command Prompt window, navigated to the directory where all the articles were stored, and typed:

type *.xml > file.rss


This command works like cat in linux/unix to concatenate all the xml files into one big file.

Then all that was left was to import the new file.rss into WordPress.

The Import menu is under Tools in the WordPress admin sidebar.

Simply choose the RSS import option, find the file on your hard drive, and voila, they’re all done!

Of course, the more articles you want to import, the more useful this is. Still, even with just 11 articles, it saves a fair chunk of time.

I’ve got a new WP theme called ModernTimes… this one with a right sidebar and left sidebar versions.

Left Sidebar Version

Right Sidebar Version

Feel free to download and use as you wish.

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…

If your blog is news-oriented, this isn’t for you. However, if your blog contains a lot of evergreen articles and how-to information, you should definitely take a look at the Reposter WordPress Plugin. Reposter will take the articles from a category you select (ideal if you’ve got a ‘tutorials’ section!) and re-publish your old articles on a schedule you supply.

It’s pretty simple to use. Once you’ve activated the plugin, click on Settings to see the Reposter tag. From there you’ll get an administration screen with all your categories listed, and options beside each one.

Reposter doesn’t change the URL of the post, so your old links and search engine links will remain. It does update the post date and re-ping the article, so you get fresh new traffic from last year’s work.

A great idea to drive traffic back to brilliant posts of the past.