• Tweet

I lack design skills, and I think I’m probably too lazy to read up on all the CSS/XHTML/HTML/PHP skills that I’ll need to make a decently designed landing page. Luckily, for retards and cheap bastards that don’t want to outsource, some jeannious wrote WordPress. Wow, k thx. WordPress is simple to pull apart with free themes and plugins waiting for your manipulation. So all my lazy ass referrals, get your shit together and lets make a WordPress landing page.

THIS POST IS REALLY EFFING LONG WITHOUT ANY PICTURES FOR YOU 2ND GRADERS… SORRY

Finding The Right Theme

The main problem I found when looking through about 1000 different wordpress themes is that they are too damn skinny to really work as landing pages. If you find a theme that you think will work but there are somet things about it you want changed buy aren’t capable of doing it yourself, hit up Digital Point and get some noob to do it for 10 bucks.

I wanted something that was wide, with no sidebars. The only themes that are any good for this are ussually for photoblogs, and some personal blogs. I ended up finding the Photopress theme from Performancing. It works great for single page landers as its wide as hell, H1 and H2 tags are well sized for your headlines without editing the CSS properties. Anyways, I’m gonna use that theme for this tutorial, so if you aren’t, this guide probably won’t come as much help.

Get Your Domain Name

Obviously you’ll need your domain name first. Get something relevent to your niche and keywords you’ll be targeting (it will help with Google quality score in the long run). Say I wanted to spam acai berry keywords with a Shamwow offer or something rediculous like that. I’d run a few keywords and sites for acai berries and shamwow through Google’s keyword research tool and come up with a good keyword domain like ScrubbingBerriesWithShamWow.com or something retarded (that’s a little to long for Google, so try replacing Berries with Balls or something).

Setting Up WordPress

Point your nameservers to the right place and install WordPress once things are propagated. You can download it and install it yourself manually, but I use Fantastico as it sets up everything I need for me (databases and all those SQL PHP acronyms I don’t understand at all… I already told you I’m retarded). I think it costs me about 5 dollars on top of the 50 dollars or something a month on a kickass managed VPS with Wiredtree. If you are serious about Internet marketing, but not quite all there are the technical side of things, get a managed VPS with them. Shared hosting is known for shitty downtimes, and paying for clicks that lead to a timed out landing page is not fun (I know this through unintentional experimentation on my Dreamhost account).

We’ve got WP installed, so now its time to get down to business with the theme. You can upload the basic theme via FTP (FileZilla, FTW). You might have to change some of the file permissions to view some of the theme files or edit them and use whatever plugins you’d like to use. I just stick with 755 for most things and I believe that keeps my blog safe. If not, go steal it and shit. Read here for more information on WordPress permissions.

WordPress Settings

Lets look into the basic settings of this theme. At the general settings page, you’ll have your website title available to fill in. It’s a huge bit of text on the top of the page and it works like a kick ass headline. For my ShamWow -Berry – Balls domain I’ll try something simple like “My Amazing Berry Ball Cleaning Experience With ShamWow!” You can fill in the smaller sub-heading/tag-line with the likes of “It Really Works!” or “My Balls Have Never Felt Shinnier!” Everything else there can pretty much stay at their default settings.

Privacy may be important for some of you using WordPress for pure PPC. I like to test out a few different ad texts when I use WordPress to quick set something up, and most of the time I just rip reviews and ad copy from other sources. In the not so far off future, Google will start giving major bitchslaps to those that don’t use a lot of original content off the side of their landing pages. I like my domains and eventually want to use them for SEO as well as PPC (There is a shit load of cash in SEO in the long run), so I don’t want to get put in the duplicate content sandbox when I’m copying others. I’ll tick “I would like to block search engines, but allow normal visitors” if this is the case. If it profits, I’ll make it original and allow crawl bots to index the pages. There are also a few plugins you can use if you just want to make your copied content non-indexable. Google them.

In your Reading settings, change it to show just 1 post on the homepage. This is important for those that might wind up on your home page. If they see 10 posts (10 different split test copies) that are all basically trying to scheme people into buying ShamWows to dry your balls, they might suspect something is fishy.

Permalinks are up to you. I’d suggest using a URL slug editing plugin on each page or post you use so you can better target your landing pages and keywords. This should result in some better quality scores for your campaigns. Yay for less money spent!

Plugins?

That’s about all you’ll really need to do to change your settings. Two plugins I recommend for landing pages are some statisical tracking stuff (WordPress.com Stats plugin) and some comment spam filtering plugin (Your install should already come with Akiskamet if you use Fantastico), especially if you are leaving comments open (this can allow for more dynamic content and you might even get a few positive reviews on the product you are promoting… don’t let through any negative comments, though).

Let’s start ripping apart this theme in an editor. If you have the correct permissions set, you can just do it up in the Theme Editor included with WordPress. However, there are security issues that can come about, and the Theme Editor is very basic. I much prefer to use Notepad, Notepad++ or Dreamweaver to edit any code. I’d go with Notepad++ for anyone a little unfamiliar with coding. It’s got a lot of neat little extras that make it easy to pull apart the lines of code and marks what tags end what other tags. I believe Dreamweaver also does this, however it isn’t free and pirated software is not cool… definetly not cool like ShamWow Super Affiliates.

Header

Let’s get at the header.php file first. This is obviously the header of the theme, including everything above the navigation bar.? Let’s take a look at the lines of code at 27 – 30:

<div id=”header”>
<a href=”<?php echo get_settings(‘home’); ?>/”><?php bloginfo(‘name’); ?></a><br />
<?php bloginfo(‘description’); ?>
</div>

It is just telling that when you click on the blog name that it will take the user to whatever you designate as the home page (you can choose to change it to a static page in your settings). Well, I don’t want people to jump to my home page, because I generally use individual posts for split testing landing pages. I could take out the link to the home page by ripping out the <a href=”<?php echo get_settings(‘home’); ?>/”> and </a> tags, but then I looked at my Stylesheet properties after I tried and saw that the font size would be about 4 times smaller. Instead of doing something not stupid and simply changing the CSS, I decided to be lazy. I’ll leave the link in, but just keep it linked to the current page. This can be done by replacing the home page link with just a #. Your code should look like this.

<div id=”header”>
<a href=”#”><?php bloginfo(‘name’); ?></a><br />
<?php bloginfo(‘description’); ?>
</div>

Then on some lines below this we have the navigation bar:

<div id=”navbar”>
<ul>
<li><a href=”<?php echo get_settings(‘home’); ?>”>Home</a></li>
<?php wp_list_pages(‘title_li=&depth=1′); ?>
<li><a href=”<?php bloginfo(‘rss2_url’); ?>”>RSS</a></li>
</ul>
</div>

I’m using a single page lander. What the hell do I need users jumping around to pages that aren’t the offer page? Granted there are many situations that you should build a mini-site for a lander (and that can be done in WordPress and even used with this theme) as it can boost quality and help increase leads/sales. However, I don’t that for this application. The lines of code listed above were all deleted to get rid of navigation.

If you do plan on using a navigation bar for your WordPress landing sites, make sure you get a plugin that can manage navigation order as this can greatly vary your LP success. If I’m not mistaken there is a plugin called PageNavi and PageMesh that can do this for you.

Save the header.php file and upload it to the Photopress theme folder. Refresh your landing page and make sure everything checks out. If it does, lets go on to the home page.

Home Page

There isn’t much to do here (on your home.php file) as you probably won’t be sending traffic to your homepage anyways, and most people you send to the page shouldn’t be interested in what it looks like and are usually to stupid to care… especially if they are looking to buy ShamWows to wipe up their spilt acai berry smoothies.

Because your homepage might kind of turn into a landing page, you’ll want to optimize the headline a bit. It is missing a line between the post header and it isn’t centered, both which should help increase conversions and will break up the copy a little better. Look at these lines:

<h1><a href=”<?php the_permalink() ?>” rel=”bookmark”><?php the_title(); ?></a></h1>

And change it to this:

<h1><center><a href=”<?php the_permalink() ?>” rel=”bookmark”><?php the_title(); ?></a></center></h1><hr>

We just added some simple center tags with a horizontal rule that should appear below the post title.

If they do happen to stumble upon your homepage (type in traffic, curious surfers, etc.) you’ll want to get rid of some things.One thing I don’t want them to see is that I made these landing page posts 2 months ago. The more current the user thinks my bullshit is, the more likely they are to buy it. You can dynamically insert today’s date and time, but I’m too retarded for that so I’ll skip that for now. So, lets delete a bunch of stuff here.

<p><?php the_time(‘F j, Y’); ?> | Filed Under <?php the_category(‘, ‘) ?> | <?php comments_popup_link(‘Leave a Comment’, ’1 Comment’, ‘% Comments’); ?>&nbsp;<?php edit_post_link(‘(Edit Post)’, ”, ”); ?></p>

That was all on line 10. Deleting it will get rid of the time the post was made, the category (I don’t use these as I can just create my own slugs instead which work nicer), comments which aren’t too important to show off, as well as an edit post link which they sure as hell don’t need. Basically this is all stuff users could click on to take them away from my GET YOUR FREE FUCKIN SHAMWOW TODAY! (I really wouldn’t click that link if I were you) link.

Another thing I don’t want is the navigation to the next page of posts, which would just be alternative landers for me. You can knock that out by deleting the following line of code:

<p><?php posts_nav_link(‘ &#8212; ‘, __(‘&larr; Previous Page’), __(‘Next Page &rarr;’)); ?></p>

Index Page

The index.php file is odd. I’m not sure what the hell it is because generally index means home page. However, it is laid out like a post page. Not sure what the theme author was thinking with that kind of name for the post page files as it really confused me at first. Anyways, here is what we’ll do with it.

Center the title and add a horizontal rule under the title. If you can’t figure that out, look above at the home page file. It should be the same.

That’s all I really did to this file. Doesn’t seem to need anything else.

Comments

I like to use comments to stimulate feelings of hope for future ShamWow owners. Putting something like “I just bought ShamWow and my butt has never been this dry!” can do amazing things to your conversions. One thing I don’t like, though, is that it displays the dates on the comments. I can’t have a bunch of comments all created seconds after each other or made months ago and have people believe them. Time to get rid of them.

From line 31 to 35 you’ll find this:

<?php comment_author_link() ?> on
<?php if ($comment->comment_approved == ’0′) : ?>
<em>Your comment is awaiting moderation.</em>
<?php endif; ?>
<?php comment_date(‘F jS, Y’) ?> <?php comment_time() ?> <?php edit_comment_link(‘(Edit)’,”,”); ?>

Replace is with this:

<li class=”<?php echo $oddcomment; ?>” id=”comment-<?php comment_ID() ?>”>
<?php comment_author_link() ?>
<?php if ($comment->comment_approved == ’0′) : ?>
<em>Your comment is awaiting moderation.</em>
<?php endif; ?>

We just got rid of “on (insert the date here)” and a link to edit the comment. Simple simple future ShamWow/Acai Berry Goober Affiliates.

Footer

The footer here is basically where all the side bars and crap would go for recent posts, random posts, recently comments, a blog roll, and all that other shit. Frankly, you won’t be needing that. All we need is a straight up, simple footer for the landing page. Basically, you are going to want to delete everything.

If you are using Notepad++ which you should be, you will be able to find out what to delete here easily. Click on <div id=”footer”>. It will highlight its ending tag. Delete everything between the opening and closing div tags here. That should mean that line 9 to 48 is now gone.

Now you’ve got to do a little planning before this next step. Your footer will provide links to other pages you use to boost your quality score. Here is a list of links I like to use (click the links to find generators for that page type):

• Home Page Link
• Terms of Service
• Privacy Policy
• Disclosure Policy
• A Resources Page
• Contact Page

To add an extra keyword to your landing page, I usually use my main keyword for the home page link. SHAM FUCKING WOW! You can also use the # tactic used in the header if you don’t want any wanderers on your homepage. Just use page slugs like /tos, /privacy, /disclosure, /resources, and /contact for the other pages. You can make the pages before or after you upload the footer and make sure they link so you can up your QS with Google. I’ll break my footer up with the vertical tube ( | ) key.

| ShamWow | ToS | Privacy | Disclosure | Resources | Contact |

Insert these links between those div tags from earlier. If you don’t know how to write out an anchor in html… don’t quit your day job yet.

Your ToS, Privacy, and Disclosure are pretty much just copy and paste from those generators I listed. Your resources page will be made up of links to related resources. Try to use places like Wikipedia, About, Dictionary, and other websites that probably won’t be within your range of competition. Would you make a kick ass ShamWow LP and then link to my much better converting LP? If you are retarded you could I guess. On your contact page, just put up an email address you can be contacted at or use a contact form. Google likes to see these so those with problems or questions can inquire. Hell, it might even make you an extra sale if you can explain what exactely they get if anyone happens to use it. Don’t use an email account you mind getting spammed at. Gmail, FTW.

Get all of these files uploaded if you haven’t. Check it out and see if everything is gold. If something goes wrong you effed up because I’m always right and you are always wrong. I may have missed something in this guide, and if I did, just comment here and I’ll try to fix it.

Adding Your Copy

I’m not going to write much further as this is already around 3000 words and I should have just made this an ebook to sell to you noobs for 20 bucks a pop, but as far as content and landing page designs go, you’ve got to try out a lot of variations until you find something that works. It’s a lot of play between your keywords, copy, and who the hell you are trying to sell SpamWow or Dingle Berries to. If you are really new to the game, take a look at what others are doing, keep track of landing pages that stay in Google for weeks at a time, copy, and then optimize what they have.

WordPress is great for content as it is simple to arrange and move content in your visual editor, and copying pages is a snap to split test them. The versitality of WP and what it has to offer for new marketers is great just because it is so damn simple. Within a month, if you can’t profit off this type of landing page, you probably won’t ever profit. Just keep experimenting and tracking keywords, conversions and try multiple landing pages (you might have to try 50 different pages, but it will work out eventually).

The landing page we’ve just developed will work great for review/personal type landing pages. If you can nail some keywords that let people know how great your ball wiping experience was with ShamWow, you could probably generate a shit load of sales. People love hearing that others found ShamWow to be the best against everything else they tried.

Add in some comments to support what was said and they look like testimonials except from real people!

There is so much more that I could say about optimizing your landing pages, but I’m just too damn lazy to do it, and it is worth about 200000 other posts. This is enough for now, right?

The Result!

Thanks to Laura’s Weight Loss I was able to throw up this wordpress landing page layout up on one of my domains. I didn’t make all the changes there that I did here as I developed some better ideas writing this, but you probably won’t even notice them. Check out what I did at **Move along… move along**… (go make it yourself)

Alright… I think this post is done, but I’m not sure. I’ve got a date with a super hotty tonight so I’m gonna post this for now. Let me know if I did something wrong though and I’ll give you a cookie.