Making WordPress Pay

Posted on January 7, 2009
Filed Under marketplace, techniques | 6 Comments

or “How I turned a $10/m blog into a $200/m blog in 3 hours”

Sounds great huh? First a little history though. One of my other sites is a niche blog I’ve run for about 18 months for fun. I have a pretty healthy stream of between 10 and 20 new posts per month, reasonable traffic, and have pretty regular email contact with individuals and companies sending me stuff to blog about. A few shareasale links and other affiliate links were earning the site about $10 - $15 a month - enough to cover the hosting costs.

The catalyst

In late November I received an email offering me $500 for the site and domain. On the face of it this seemed like a pretty decent offer, after all it was gaing to take me 5 years to earn that much at the current rate. But I enjoy posting on the site and would miss it - so I politely declined the offer. It was worth more than $500 to me to have fun posting, it would be like selling a pet!

It got me thinking about the value I’d built in the site though. I should try to get some cash out if it - but how? The old monitization question!

I really didn’t want to litter the site with Google Ads, start affiliate linking every second word, or otherwise blasting ads in the face of my readers. I needed a subtler approach - so I did two VERY simple things.

STEP 1 - Build a rate card

I looked at my site and saw three logical spots for ads. I tweaked my templates a little to accomodate these in standard sizes. I gave them simple names, and standardised pricing per month. I wanted a minimum number of transactions - so selling individual days wasn’t for me. I wanted a one off monthly, quarterly, or annual fee through paypal.

Setting the value of the ads was tough - and to be honest I think I set them too low. But more about that later.

Things I included in the rate card

Three slots gave me three price points - with the top ’site sponsorship’ slot being both the most expensive and the most exclusive.

STEP 2 - Pause before sending every email

Before I emailed anyone in relation to the site I paused and thought ‘would they advertise?’. If the answer was ‘yes’ or even ‘maybe’ I added a closing line about the new ad scheme I was launching next month. I personalised this to suit the individual. I stressed that the ads were sold monthly, and were in limited supply. These emails are my primary contact with potential advertisers.

It is tempting to post on the blog about the ads - but this is, in my opinion, a bit daft. My readers don’t care - and so will just be irritated by a post saying ‘ooh look, we do ads!’. Any potential advertisers will see that we run ads when they see the ads we run. To a potential advertiser ‘we run ads’ is a stronger message than ‘we would like to run ads’. If you haven’t sold any yet you can always give some away to friends, top targets, and other people who would look good on your site. This at least lets you say ‘we run ads’ - even if you didn’t sell them.

So don’t post about it - just add a footer link to ‘advertise with us’. Don’t link to your rate card, link to a contact page with a VERY brief overview of your ad scheme.

Immediate response

Within 48 hours I had sold 4 ads. Two of which were the top priced site sponsorship slots.

How much to charge?

The answer to this is ‘as much as you think you can’. Personally I did a quick back of an envelope calculation. I figured that I should be able to sell the high profile site sponsorship for every month of the year, but would probably be lucky to sell all the other slots.

I knew that I could buy ads on a similar site in my niche for about $5 a day. 30 x 5 is $150. That’ll do for starters.

As it turned out, selling the first four months took no time - so I could probably have charged significantly more. The other ads I priced as percentages of this headline ad - if I sold them all they’d total double the site sponsorship each month. So the maximum my site could pull in was pegged at around $450 / month.

Running the scheme

I’m pretty happy with WordPress (you’d hope so - being wpguy!) so I run my scheme using a combination of a custom plugin to manage the content of the ads, a Google Spreadsheet to handle scheduling and accounting, and a moleskine notebook to remind me when to change what. This is fine for now, as placing a new ad takes no more than 5 - 10 minutes. It gives me full control, so I can bend the rules if I want to.

You can run a basic scheme by just using a sidebar content widget and manually updating the content at the appropriate time.

Make sure you use at least Google Analytics and Wordpress stats, and track outgoing links using both. This lets you see how effective the campaigns are. If you spot an ad that is really under-performing just drop the advertiser an email and suggest they change the design as you think it should be doing better than it is. Not essential - but the last thing you want is to have someone badmouthing your site because they had a crummy ad.

Promoting your scheme

The ad merchants are great - project wonderful and google adwords (and dozens more like them) allow you access to thousands of potential advertisers and take just minutes to sign up for. They have scripts to do almost everything for you. Life is sweet! But, they pay peanuts in my experience. Going it alone lets you set your own price - but that’s pointless if you can’t access potential advertisers.

My niche site has a key advantage - I’m in constant ongoing email contact with individuals and companies who sell things that I blog about to people who read my blog. They know I’m impartial, that I don’t just regurgitate every press release I receive, and that I exist (i.e. the site isn’t run by a bot). In short - I have a direct trusted route to my potential customer - many of whom have already benefited from links from my posts in the past.

Part two
In part two of this case study I’ll expand on the scheme promotion aspects, and look at other ways to gain the attention of potential advertisers…

Raw theme

Posted on January 7, 2009
Filed Under themes | Leave a Comment

An old fashioned theme post! It’s been a while - oh, and happy new year to the folks reading this in January.

(Interestingly enough around 80% of the readership for this post will be seeing it once it’s more than a month old, if it is typical of this blog, something that I ALWAYS have to remind myself. But hey - happy current year to you guys!)

So the RAW theme from 3oneseven.com - worth considering if you have a site to build which needs to stress a relatively small number of items on the homepage - and if you have some strong photography / design elements to play with.

The theme is especially notable for being stretchy rather than fixed width, and looking pretty good at  a range of browser window sizes. Links to preview, source etc… on the theme announce page.

Geolocation in Wordpress?

Posted on December 17, 2008
Filed Under experiments | 3 Comments

Does anyone know how I can get the GPS in my Google G1 Phone to talk to my browser when I’m posting to WordPress? (Oops - I’m posting tweet sized posts again).

Video in wordpress

Posted on December 17, 2008
Filed Under themes, video | Leave a Comment

Do you remember, back in the day, how many hoops you had to jump through to stop WordPress killing your YouTube embed code. It was a nightmare. Save from HTML view, and redo the whole post if you made a typo because opening it for edit would kill your scripts.

Those days are long gone - this video took 16 seconds to embed, including firing up a new window, doing a search for wordpress 2.7 and grabbing the embed code. Video is so easy it hurts!

So now we are interested in making our video look GREAT - not just making it turn up.

Queue a nice new theme from Elite which gives a very ‘video site’ feel to WordPress. Preview it here because the screenshot doesn’t really do it justice.

You keep all the good stuff of your blog posts, they are just centered around video content rather than text. So you still get your SEO goodness, your commenting, your stats, and pretty much everything else. Plugins should work well too to drive alternative rating systems, polls and other side content.

If you have a predominantly video based project which demands a blog engine which presents video in a youtubey fashion you could do a lot worse. This is a pay theme, but the low cost and the time it would take you to format all those styles for housing videos seem a good trade off to me.

Paying for a WordPress Theme - Is it worth it?

Posted on December 17, 2008
Filed Under themes | 1 Comment

Paying for a WordPress Theme is becoming more common, even for personal bloggers. Often termed ‘premium wordpress themes‘, pay themes are really any theme which demands a licence fee to use.

I’ve deployed a few sites recently where the cost of a $200 theme licence presented good value to my client against the time it would have taken us to re create the detail available within the theme. Customisation from a solid base theme from the likes of Woo Themes allows for a more sophisticated development where budgets are tight. Great for the credit crunch!

Woothemes is probably the best known source, although there are others like brian gardner who have been releasing pay themes for years.

What to look for

There are always lengthy bullet lists of amazing features associated with any pay theme. It is easy to get distracted by these, and miss the critical stuff. This is the critical stuff.

Timeliness - does the licence allow you to continue using the theme indefinitely on your site, are theme updates and patches free (for a year at least), when WP2.9 comes out will the theme be updated

Support - can you get email, twitter, IM, and other forms of support quickly (under 24 hours)

Updates - check if this is the first version, how old it is, if it’s three months old without even a minor update make sure you email and ask about support in detail

Developer option - most themes allow you to make a single payment for multiple deployments, if you think 5 clients might use a theme this is usually the cost effective way to go

All the rest of that great long list of features should be read - but won’t matter if you don’t have good answers to these three.

Comment below with examples of sites you’ve deployed with a pay theme and I’ll link them up so people can see what to expect, and how far a theme needs to be pushed to look ‘unique enough’ for the site owner.

no more excuses - time for WP 2.7

Posted on December 5, 2008
Filed Under why wordpress | 1 Comment

If you’ve been wondering about trying out a build of 2.7 now is the time to do it - before it goes live - it makes you cooler. Honest.

But don’t worry - you won’t be living too far out on the edge - current official wordpress advice is “Due to the recent security release of WordPress 2.6.5 and the stable WordPress 2.7 Release Candidate 1, it is recommended that you upgrade to RC1 so when the final WordPress 2.7 version is released, the automatic upgrade will update your version quickly and easily.”

You’re going to have to upgrade eventually - you might as well get it over with this week, and live the good life from there. Trust me - I’m the wp guy!

wordpress google checkout

Posted on December 2, 2008
Filed Under code, mechanic | 4 Comments

How to integrate Google Checkout with WordPress? A simple enough question!

I decided to test the two obvious routes for flexibility, time, and complexity. Route 1 - using the Instinct eCommerce WordPress Plugin, Route 2 - a custom application of the checkout code to a raw WordPress install.

My hunch is that the Google Checkout code is now advanced enough that it should compete pretty well with the Instinct plugin for smaller shops - and should give better flexibility.

In this first post I’ll discuss step by step how I get from no website to an operational WordPress shopping cart with Google Checkout fulfillment in place.Â

11:40am - Install WordPress

Here I cheat slightly and use my hosts 1Click WordPress installer to do this for me in the background. I pick a test URL and set it off. Should take 5 minutes. Time to make a coffee.

11:45 - Download eCommerce plugin

The plugin is available here - I used version 3.6.8 rc1 which was the recommended release today. As with any decent plugin, you just upload and activate the plugin. For such a complex plugin this is commendable, as many would have resorted to a small config file to avoid a lot of work on the interface. I know I probably would! Lazy WPGuy.

11:52 - WP Installed

Finally WP is installed on the server. I complete the setup (title, admin etc…), download a backup, and upload the plugin. The snow must be slowing my broadband… gives me something to watch as I wait though!

12:10 - Activate & Basic setup of plugin

Activating the plugin is a snap - I now need to setup the basics of my checkout account, email addresses etc… All setup is on a new top level tab labelled ‘eCommerce’ - so no hunting around under Settings and Plugins for the admin pages. I’m going for the default in most cases.Â

12:15 - Add some example products

I make up a couple of categories, and some example products and add them using the admin forms. This takes no time, and the front end site allows me to add them to the basket, and then check basket contents.

12:18 - Setup google checkout

Create google checkout account. Simple 2 minute process at Google. You will need a credit card in order to prove you are real entity. You will now have an ID and a key for Google Checkout Merchant.

12:20 - Set up in WordPress

Now add these to the plugin. Simply copy and paste into place, and return to Google to set the callback URL. This has to be an https address - which may be an issue on your host. Or may not. I also selected ’sandbox’ to allow us to put through test transactions.

12:27 - Test

Add to backet, view basket (or ‘verify your order’ as it says - need to change that!) and click on the Google Checkout button. Sure enough - I’m at Google Checkout, it lists my basket contents perfectly, handles the shipping options and recognises my usual Google Checkout payment options. Bingo!

Results

Now, I haven’t worked on the theme, or added all the products I need to yet - but that was a definition of painless. Despite waiting for my FTP client for at least 10 - 15 minutes during the install we have a working eCommerce website based on WordPress up and running and taking sandbox transactions within 50 minutes.Â

Another hour to create more products and apply a more appropriate theme and I think you could have a passable web shop.

Next… the direct approach.

Wordpress mechanic - conditional sidebar

Posted on November 28, 2008
Filed Under random | Leave a Comment

So you want to have a different ad, sub menu, or enquiry form in different sections of your website. How do you achieve this?

It is amazingly simple to achieve if you only want to distinguish between types of pages, i.e. search pages, homepage, category pages etc…:

<ul id=”nav”>
<li<?php if ( is_home() ) { echo ‘ class=”current”‘; } ?>><a href=”#”>Home</a></li>
<li<?php if ( is_page(’about’) ) { echo ‘ class=”current”‘; } ?>><a href=”#”>About</a></li>
<li<?php if ( is_page(’thing2′) ) { echo ‘ class=”current”‘; } ?>><a href=”#”>Thing 2</a></li>
</ul>

How to display something only on the sidebar for posts which exist within a certain category is less obvious - but just as easy. A function like the fictional post_in_cat(”Highlight posts”) would be very sweet - but this solution is almost as easy to implement.

You need to know the title of the category you are looking to highlight. This line prints the phrase if the post is in the Highlight posts category.

<?php if (single_cat_title() == “Highlight posts”){ echo ‘this is a highlight post! woohoo!’; } ?>

keep looking »

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