unintuitive

I’ve done a lot of landing page design (and re-design, and re-re-design) recently, and I’ve come up with a nice list of tools and plugins to use when constructing an affiliate landing page.

From my experience, landing pages don’t need to be nearly as complex as a blog. I find myself disabling a lot of the basic functionality of Wordpress, such as removing the ability to post comments or subscribe to an RSS feed. Though it can take some work getting everything working right, the upsides are worth it.

1. Wordpress - Now, why would you use Wordpress, traditionally a blogging platform, as a backend for your landing page? Simply because it’s easier than hacking together something on your own, especially in these halcyon days of Google Quality Scores. Believe me, I’ve tried coding sites more complex than your typical ebook-scroll-forever-long-copy pages, and I just ended up wasting a lot of time reinventing the wheel with PHP frameworks like CodeIgniter or the Django Python framework. Using a CMS saves time, ’nuff said.
2. Wordpress All-In-One SEO Pack - This plugin is useful for reducing the time spent optimizing each individual pages on your landing site. It gives you the ability to adjust the meta tags for each page, alters the page titles to be more search engine-friendly, gives you the ability to choose your own page titles rather than auto-generating them, and more. It just generally makes life a lot easier by automating boring, repetitive (yet necessary) tasks.
3. Google Sitemaps - Having a sitemap on your website is good for a variety of reasons (helps the page get indexed, impacts quality score, etc). This plugin will generate a sitemap based on all of the pages in your Wordpress-powered site. It will also ping Google every time a change is made to posts or pages, encouraging the Google Bot to re-spider your page.
4. WP-Cache - This plugin can be very useful, and can indeed be a life-saver if there is an unexpected spike in traffic. WP-Cache drastically cuts down on the load Wordpress exerts on the MySQL database. The plugin makes a static “copy” of every page and post so that the database isn’t called every time someone ends up on your landing page. It makes your site load faster for visitors and reduces the chance that your Wordpress installation times out / server crashes / web host bans you for using too many CPU cycles.
5. Wordpress.com Stats - Awesome! After installing this plugin and entering your Wordpress.com API code (necessary for the plugin to work), you are given access to a nice little graph of inbound traffic, referrer stats, and page views among other things - all in your Wordpress Administration interface. It’s a great way to get a quick snapshot of traffic. It’s not too heavy on the details, but for that I give you…
6. Google Analyticator - The Google Analyticator gives you an easy way to insert the Google Analytics code into your site without messing with the code or inserting a bunch of Google script directly into your page. It tracks outbound links automatically, gives you the option to track download links, and a few more options. It’s especially handy if you don’t like to hack up your header.php code directly.
7. WPAds - I saved the best for last. This is a simple, yet powerful plugin that lets you rotate ad code in your site. You just give the ad a name, paste in the ad code, and the plugin will generate short PHP tag you can insert directly into your theme. It also gives you the option to insert the ad directly into the content of your pages or posts. The plugin is relatively feature-lite (which I think is a good thing). It only gives you basic impression tracking, but it’s great if you need to rotate ads on your landing pages or don’t like inserting a bunch of code directly into the theme.

Plugins I don’t personally use, but about which I’ve heard good things:

1. WPOpenAds - This plugin smooths out the integration of OpenAds into your Wordpress landing page.
2. Adsense Deluxe - Just like it sounds, this plugin makes it easy to insert AdSense ads into your site.
3. WP-Amazon - Also relatively self-explanatory, this makes inserting Amazon affiliate links into your site a trivial matter.