Creating Landing And Sales Pages Side-By-Side With WordPress

(Reading time: 6 – 10 minutes)

Did you know that you can use WordPress to manage search engine indexing for pages not on your blog? Yep. You can write those money-making sales and landing pages to exploit WordPress and plugins.

So cheer up your spirits, you lads and you lasses
There’s gold for the digging and lots of it, too
A health to the heart that has courage to ramble
Bad luck to the lad or the lass that would rue
— Cara Dillon “Emigrant’s Farewell”

When you’re serious about selling, you have to create a sales process. On the internet, this means having sales and landing pages.

But a sales page isn’t all that useful if you can’t measure it’s effectiveness, which depends on both copy and design. Unfortunately, WordPress has very few built-in facilities for designing effective sales and landing pages, so these pages often get built outside the WordPress installation.

The idea is to put your sales and landing pages outside your WordPress installation, and have that page as part of your Google sitemap.xml, included automatically using a WordPress plugin.

Sounds exciting doesn’t it?

Ok maybe not… but it’s important nonetheless.

What follows is a process that must be fairly common. Everyone selling on the internet needs a similar process, but I have NOT ever found a step-wise account breaking it down into easy-to-follow steps for WordPress.

Since we’re going to sit and write for a while, let’s put on some music. Something sweet and mellow while we plot how best to inspire people to become loyal customers by buying our stuff. I have just the thing: Cara Dillon, “Sweet Liberty.”

I first ran across Cara Dillon when I was visiting Glasgow (that’s in Scotland, not Kentucky) to collaborate on some computational mechanics (more on that later, much more). It was my last day there, and I was browsing through the ubiquitous Barnes and Noble bookstore with one my hosts… and I heard this utterly entrancing voice… Cara Dillon singing “Black is the Color” from her first album. I had to have it! I bought it immediately! Cara’s voice is unique. If “ethereal” wasn’t so over-used, that might be a good description. Sweet Liberty is her second album, just as good as the first.

Now that the important stuff is handled, let’s get back to work…

Custom sales and landing pages

The first step is to write the page. You could use Dreamweaver or similar. I used a CSS template from Layouts.IronMeyers.com and code everything up by hand. I’ve been doing this a long time, so I’m fast. Using the pre-coded CSS ensures cross-browser capability. This is important since I’ve been ignoring Internet Explorer pretty much since it came out, what, 10-12 years ago? But many of you use IE, and so will many of your readers. To be fair, I hear IE 8 is the best ever, so I may investigate. Later.

Here’s the procedure:

1. Create the external landing page or sales page. You can do that locally, on your own computer, using the web page creation tool of your choice. Make sure you add in Google Analytics code as discussed below.
2. Once you have the external page finished, you can FTP or (use your HTML editor if possible) to transfer it to your web site. Place it into the same directory where you have WordPress installed.

   This technique requires that the page is in the WordPress root directory to be handled by the sitemap.xml generated automatically by WordPress. Locating the page at a level above the WordPress directory would require generating a separate site map outside of WordPress. Big hassle!

3. Links in and out: The primary link into this page can be a redirect from the appropriate domain, if possible. This allows you to refer to the page publicly in a manner that advertises itself.

Adding external page into WordPress XML Sitemap

Once your new page is uploaded, you want it available to Google for indexing. Now, Google will index the page automatically from a “plain old crawl,” but we can do something a lot better. We can add your new page to your sitemap, and have Google index it within minutes.

Adding to your sitemap is easy, provided you have XML Sitemaps installed (and you should as it’s one of the first plugins recommended by Website In A Weekend). Go to “Settings >> XML-Sitemap” on your administration menu. About half way down the page, there is a form for adding your external web page. It should be self-explanatory, but there are helpful explanations for each field, just in case.

Here’s what it looks like:

Once you have your external page URL entered and saved, scroll back up to the top of the XML-Sitemap administration page and resubmit your sitemap to Google, which is where we’re headed next.

Verify sitemap.xml with Google Webmaster Tools

Once you have your page installed and added to your site map, check to make sure Google is indexing it. This is easy. Log into Google Webmaster Tools, select the site hosting the sales page, and manually direct Google to update the sitemap.xml, as shown in the screenshot below. This will take a few minutes, usually no more than 10-15 minutes.

Go get a cup of coffee, or soup, or whatever. It should be done when you get back. You will know it’s correct with the green check mark at the right side.

This is some serious internet marketing juju, and it took me a bit of time to work out all the details. I’m making it available to you as a member of Website In A Weekend.

Instrument with Google Analytics

If you want this page tracked (and you should), paste in some Google Analytics code into the bottom of the page, right above the closing <body> element as recommended by Google.

Then set up a goal for tracking conversions. Watch for an article appearing shortly that will explain how to set up goals.

Don’t forget to test!

Once you have everything set up, don’t forget to test everything. If you have a landing page, test both the newsletter sign up and any download you offer as a “bribe” for email signups.

If you have a sales page, you definitely want to make sure the sales funnel is working end-to-end, and you want to make sure you are able to measure conversion at every step of the way. Here’s one way to do that. Create a discount code that puts your price very low for testing, like $1. Set the sales limit on the $1 price at 1 (if you can), then test a sale – refund – sale cycle. Make sure you see the traffic in your statistics.

While you’re at it, create a couple of discount codes for free stuff and pass ‘em along to close friends, or use them for promotions.

Summarizing stepwise

Here’s a quick recap, stepwise:

1. Create the external sales or landing page.
2. Instrument the page with Google Analytics.
3. Add the page into your sitemap.xml file.
4. Use Google Webmaster Tools to update and verify new sitemap.
5. Create an Analytics goal for tracking conversions.
6. Test everything repeatedly.

Nothing very difficult here at all, and it shows just how much of the grunt work that WordPress does for you!