Category Archives: WordPress

WordPress 3.0 Just Released

wordpress

Well, partway through today I started noticing WordPress 3.0 was available as an upgrade on my sites… I always love new WordPress versions (especially the big updates) because WordPress is already so cool to start out with.

I thought I’d take a moment and write a post about why I love WordPress so much – from an internet marketing perspective.

The main reasons:

  • Super easy installation (takes 1 minute via CPanel)
  • Very SEO friendly, out of the box (it isn’t hard to rank an basic site on the right terms)
  • Plugins (I don’t think enough can be said on this front – to date there is almost nothing I haven’t been able to bend, twist or contort WordPress into doing for me – and most of that has been accomplished via third party plugins that are readily available)
  • Themes. I’ve forked out well over a thousand bucks for premium themes, so I’ve got a nice collection now, but premium themes take WordPress to new levels and allow things you just can’t do out of the box. They let you make a very cool content management system look good. My current favorite? Headway.
  • Automation. Autoblogs are fun – and WordPress is a very cool platform to develop them from, simply because of all the very advanced plugins that are available for WordPress.
  • Compatibility. Because WordPress is based on PHP, it is easy to find scripts to work with it, and equally easy to find programmers who can work on it.
  • Ease of use for things that would normally require a programmer. Right on this page, as I’m writing this, I have options like allowing comments, hiding this post from the feed, creating a thumbnail for the post, autotagging it, posting it directly to Twitter, inserting a YouTube video – all with a couple clicks, and that is a tiny list of what is available!

This list is by no means exhaustive, but it is what sprung to mind. The more powerful WordPress gets, the more we’ll be able to do with it. (That’s probably self-evident, but I’ll say it anyways =).

I find it fascinating that this open-source software has truly spawned an entire industry – WordPress related plugins and themes are big sellers online.

The one thing I would love to see is true multi-domain support in the WordPress core. Now THAT would be fun from an internet marketing perspective. My ever-growing network of sites can be bothersome to update one at a time, and a central control panel for the empire would be very, very cool.

Soon I’ll post my favorite plugins for WordPress; I’ve discovered some very cool ones lately that bear sharing.


Using Google Analytics or Optimizer on Outbound Links with WordPress

GUEST POST by Bradley Spencer

Hey readers of Jonathan’s Blog. Today I’m going to share with you the exact code I use to make my affiliate links a lot prettier without having to buy a script or software or anything. And it only takes about two minutes and works with WordPress, Drupal, Blogger, or any CMS for that matter. And best of all you can track everyone who uses the hoplink in Google Analytics or Google Website Optimizer. This is the same system I created as ‘the missing link’ for using Google Website Optimizer to split-test my landing page at WordPressLandingPage.com and the system I use every day at my affiliate sites.

The problem I had before (that this solves) is that my affiliate links were ugly and people didn’t want to click on them, and also that I had no way to keep track of how many people I’d sent to a merchant from within Google Analytics. And, maybe most of all, I had no place to put the code that Google Website Optimizer gave me to put on a ‘conversion page’ But this little file solves all of that. Sounds great, huh? Well let’s dive right in.

Step 1:

You are going to need a few very common tools to make this work. So the first thing we want to do is gather those tools. Here is what you are going to need:

  1. FTP Access to your server
  2. Text Editor (any will do, but not a big word processor like Word that adds markup. You need a lo-fi text editor)
  3. Download this file which gives you example code you can use to get up and running in minutes.

Step 2:

Once you have your FTP connected, your text editor warmed up, and you’ve downloaded the file from Step 1 above, just watch this video to see how to get set-up.

Making the Most of Your Hoplinks:

So far the best reasons I’ve found for having these hoplinks are that they are better looking links than most affiliate links and that you can use goal tracking to see how many people you send to your merchant. If you can think of other uses for these hoplinks, then by all means leave a comment. I’m always looking for new uses.

About the Author:

Bradley Spencer is a WordPress and SEO consultant who can help you make the most of marketing with wordpress.

URL Rotator Script for WordPress

One of my favorite WordPress plugins is GoCodes. It is kind of a personalized TinyURL for WordPress, on your own blog.

Apart from using it to cloak your links in things like blog posts and emails (redirect users through your blog to the affiliate link), you can also use it as a stationary URL that you can change at any date in the future without disrupting your link infrastructure.

For instance, if you were promoting a particular offer for some time, then the offer suddenly went dead, you could easily just replace the target URL with another offer, with very minimal effort. Far better than having to replace all the links in your blog and email campaigns!

Recently it occurred to me that wouldn’t it be great to be able to build some crude split-testing ability into that same concept? This would be perfect for testing CPA offers, as you could send a certain amount of traffic to each offer and find out which converted best.

I know there are URL rotating scripts out there; but I really like working with WordPress, and any manual scripting really slows things down.

So I hired a programmer to build me the newly created URL Rotator wordpress plugin.

Essentially what this allows you to do is specify a group of URLs you’d like to cycle through, then specify a jump key that allows you to reference this group from anywhere.

For example, I want to create a jump key to cycle through three different search engines.

I create the jump group to include:

http://www.google.com
http://www.yahoo.com

http://www.bing.com

I then create a jump key of ‘searchengine’ on my site, so I can send people to the url http://www.jonathanboettcher.com/searchengine and it will automatically cycle through those three sites. Try it – the link is live.

The plugin also has a hit counter that you can reset – crude but effective way of measuring overall traffic. IE if you’re testing three offers and you send 300 clicks, you know that each offer has received 100 clicks.

In addition, we designed the plugin so that it can pass along any URL variables you send to it. So if you’re trying to do keyword tracking, you can do that.

I’ve decided to release this for free, as it is my first WordPress plugin, however depending on the demand for it I may decide to start charging a small fee for it.

Get it now while it’s free!