Since the recent launch of WordPress 3.1, I’ve seen quite a few people who don’t like the admin toolbar that shows up on top of all pages and posts. While I think it’s great as it gives me quick access to what I use most often, other people don’t care for it to much.

Here’s how to remove it in a few easy steps.

1. Login to your WordPress admin area
2. Click on “users” in the sidebar
3. Click on your profile
4. Uncheck “Show Admin Bar”

The unofficial step #5 would be to drink a beer and gaze longingly at your toolbar free site.

It’s no secret that a lot of affiliates make a load of money with coupon sites. People love saving money and when they see a shopping cart with a coupon code field they generally will leave and try to find a code before completing their order. I know quite a few affiliates with coupon sites and they work. My buddy Eric Nagel is even selling one of his sites that made him $37,000 in a year, all from coupons.

I’ve had a few coupon sites in the past that I designed with WordPress, and one of the troubles I had was getting people to click the link to set the cookie instead of just copying the code.

There are a few plugins and themes out there, but most are boring and didn’t fit that basic need I had. Then this morning I saw a tweet from my friend Chris Guthrie that he released a new WordPress plugin called coupon code plugin, which does exactly what I want in a coupon plugin.

The plugin is pretty simple with an easy to use interface. You insert your affiliate code, coupon code, name, and even a short code, and then it does the rest.  You just tell it where to insert the code. If even automatically masks your affiliate link if you want it to as well as tracks clicks.

There are also multiple styles to choose from, so you can customize it to the look of your site.  When someone clicks on the coupon code, it opens your link and automatically copies the code.  It sets the affiliate cookie, the person orders using your coupon, and bam, you make money!

Nice work on this plugin Chris.  For $37, it is well worth it.  Especially since coupon sites can have crazy conversion rates since the buyers are already in the buying mode.

Check out the plugin and watch the video to see how easy this plugin is.

I’ve been on a split testing craze lately trying to eek out every dollar out of every campaign.  If you read my previous posts on how I doubled my conversion rate just by changing the background color, then I’m sure you see the power in split testing everything on your landing pages.

What happens though when your site is in WordPress?

There are two ways to approach your split testing in WordPress that I’d recommend. The first is geared more if you are sending traffic to specific landing pages via paid traffic. To split test, just create two identical pages (make sure to hide one from search engines if you care at all about your search rankings), change the element on 1 of the pages you want to split test, then send traffic to each. Find the winner, ditch the loser and test something else. Repeat, over and over again.

Simple right?  Yep, it’s not that difficult.  If your traffic is coming all from organic traffic though it becomes a little trickier.

Luckily you can use Google Website Optimizer to conduct your split tests for you.

Just setup Google Website Optimizer like you normally would and then go download the Website Optimizer WordPress plugin. Then just use this formula for your first test.

1. Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress
2. Create the landing pages and the conversion page
3. Create the experiment in the Google Website Optimizer
4. Use the textareas added in the page or post edit form to embed the control, tracking and conversion code provided by the Google Website Optimizer

The next step is to watch your profit increase.

If you’re not familiar with how Google Website Optimizer works, make sure to check out these tutorials.

How do you split test pages in WordPress?

If you’ve been around Internet marketing for more than 5 minutes, I’m sure you’ve heard about the importance of split testing your landing pages. I believe that the only time you should stop split testing, is when your conversion rate reaches 100% (which honestly won’t ever happen).

I’ve had an old campaign running with search traffic that I haven’t touched in about 2 years.  It doesn’t get a ton of traffic, but makes a consistent profit of $50-$100 a day. I got lazy with the campaign as I have just had it on autopilot.

For the past year or so the conversion rate has been hovering around 1.05%. Not to bad for a $75 CPA.  It had been a few years since I did any testing with my landing page so I figured I would make one minor change and see if it made any difference.

The only thing I changed was the background color.

Everything else on the site stayed the same, but I changed the background color from red to a light blue at the beggining of October.  Since then my conversion rates have shot up to around 1.97%.  With a $75 CPA, just that little increase means a lot more profit and it only took a few minutes to change.

I used a WordPress theme on the site called WP Bankable I got from Theme Forest. Here is a quick screenshot of the theme and the backgrounds (my landing page looks different, but uses the same colors).

All in all less than a 5 minute change almost doubled the conversion rate.

Make sure  to never stop testing your landing pages. Test everything!

Every affiliate marketer knows the importance of creating quality landing pages. Your landing pages are a huge factor when it comes to your campaigns and if they are successful or a waste of money. I’m assuming you at least know a little about HTML, otherwise you need to learn some of the basics (unless of course you just want to outsource everything).

Being a designer by nature, I always used to create my landing pages from scratch. While this is great because I get things the way I want, it takes a lot of time away from building other campaigns as it’s very time consuming. Now I have changed how I do things and just take pre-made templates, throw in some content, and I’m up and running. I figured I would give you my sources of where I get my landing page templates to hopefully help you in your campaigns. So here are a few.

Justin Dupre’s Marketplace

For the past year and a half I had this idea to create landing pages for affiliates. While I was dragging my feet on this idea, Justin launched his marketplace. While it just recently launched, he has some quality templates so it should only get better. I bought a template a few days ago and had an issue with the download and sent him a message, and he took care of the issue extremely fast even though he’s living in Thailand. I don’t know Justin other than reading his blog and Twitter, but this guy is legit. He knows his stuff, and his blog is probably one of the best resources around if your just getting started in the affiliate game. Go buy some landing pages from him, they are cheap and good. Visit Justin Dupre’s Marketplace.

ThemeForest

If you build your sites using WordPress, then you will find some good themes at ThemeForest. They aren’t free, but that’s nice as you won’t have 1000′s of other people with your same theme. Most of them are for sites and not just blogs, so it is an easy way to get a professional site up and running in a short time. I’ve probably bought 10 themes from them and have never been disappointed. Visit ThemeForest.

oDesk

If you want to pay someone to create a unique landing page for you, oDesk is the way to go. I know there are a ton of freelancer sites around, and I’m sure you can find quality people to create sites for you at all of them, but I personally prefer oDesk. For one they take live screenshots of your freelancers screen so you know you’re not paying someone hourly to sit on their butt and play World of Warcraft all day long. Also you can usually get a custom 1 page landing page designed for around $20, which is a great deal if you ask me. Visit oDesk.

Those are the three sources I personally use when looking for a new landing page template instead of designing one. There are other services out there that look like they have some quality pages that you could check out. I haven’t used any of these, but are worth a look. Good luck.

• AutoLP
• LP Elite (I bought these templates and wasn’t super impressed. For the price though, it is worth it)
• Affiliate Theme – Looks to be a good theme for WordPress
• Captain Dyl – Looks to be like a good package
• LPDesigner.com

Anywhere else I’m missing?

Everyday for the past few months when I drive into my office there is an old homeless guy standing on the same corner, wearing the same exact clothes, holding the same exact sign begging for money at a very busy intersection that I pass. While he may or not realize it (I’m sure he does), he is a total marketer and has got me thinking about split testing my landing pages this week.

This guy makes his living by begging for money, and I’m sure he does well enough to survive as he is usually in the same spot. Actually he used to stand a few blocks down the road every day until one day I noticed he started doing a little split testing to see which spot brought him more money. Every other day for a week he changed spots and now I never see him at the old spot. I’m guessing his split testing revealed that the new spot was more profitable (probably because it was easier for cars to stop there).

So he did what a lot of marketers do and found what worked better no matter if it was testing out 2 landing pages, or 2 corners to beg from. The same principles apply for both situations. A lot of people will do a test, find what works best and stick with that and not worry about making great conversion rates even better.

Recently I noticed he took his split testing to the next level. After finding out what corner was best, this week I noticed he had a new sign, although his old sign was next to him on the ground. Each day this week he has switched out the old and new signs, I’m guessing to see which one works best for him. Each of the signs has a slightly different message, but both elude to the fact that he is broke. Possibly changing the verbiage of his sign might help improve conversions.

My point of this post isn’t whether or not you should give money to people begging, but to get you thinking about split testing. If you’re doing split testing with your landing pages and ads, great. Once you find a winning combination, DON’T STOP! Keep testing and making changes. You will never have a perfect ad or landing page until your conversion rate is 100%.

How often are you split testing your landing pages and ads? What tools do you use to track your tests?

As a designer of websites, I often hear people tell me things about sites I have created that I’ve never seen before. After countless times of trying to figure out what they are seeing that I don’t, I come to the conclusion they are using a different browser or version than me.

Alas, the days of guessing what my sites look like is over. I came across BrowserShots.org this week which is a great tool that allows you to view your website in over 40 different browsers. While you are building your sites, make sure your visitors can see what you want them to see correctly. Your sites need to be cross browser friendly so your visitors aren’t leaving your site just because it isn’t rendering correctly in their browser.