Direct Response Selling WordPress Theme
BREAKING NEWS:
Earlier in the week I dropped you an email about a really cool WordPress theme we’ve been rolling out on a few of our websites.
I mentioned that over the past 30 days it’s added an additional 1,000 leads from the natural organic traffic the site receives. And that it’s sent an additional 4,924 unique visitors from FaceBook simply by using the default built in FaceBook promotion features.
I’ll show you that site in a minute so you can see a real world example and how we’ve actually implemented it.
First though, here’s what I like about it, what I don’t like & the biggest (perceived) problem that I thought I was going to have with it.
To begin it’s no secret I’m in business to make money.
Who isn’t right?
However the main issue I’ve always had with WordPress is that, sure, whilst it does make content management REAL easy, it’s not really designed to sell.
It was designed for content bloggers.
So creating things like; direct response sales pages, squeeze pages, integrating optin forms in key locations, integrating video (whether that be for sales letters or otherwise), and so on and so forth, was never as easy as it could be.
All of those critical little marketing elements you want to have in order to lead your visitors down the path to your “call to action”.
You were always largely restricted by the theme you were using.
Sure you could mix & match a bunch plugins & get something half decent, try a few different themes that might look & work half way right, but as far as I was concerned, it was always “the only available option”. It was never 100% ideal for the critical marketing elements I was trying to include.
There are themes that were reasonably “flexible” (Thesis comes to mind), but at the end of the day they still required you to get into the code a little bit and muck about changing things.
I’m no WordPress coder ;-0
Heck, half the time I’d just admit defeat & create a good old fashioned HTML squeeze or sales page simply to get it exactly how I wanted it & then link to those from the WordPress blog.
Not ideal when you’re trying to streamline the visitor process and keep things tidy.
Anyway, as you might imagine, THIS THEME – OPTIMIZE PRESS makes creating all of those vital lead capture & sales elements mentioned above REALLY FRIGGEN EASY MAN.
Now I’m not going to go through a bunch of “Features” here & tell them why they’re important to you.
You can go check them out here to read the list. Just know that this is the best WordPress theme I’ve come across to date that is…
Designed For Marketers Like YOU and I
It’s also extremely flexible without having to be a bloody programmer!
Now here’s the biggest problem that I thought I was going to have with it and why I was a little reluctant to even test it for awhile…
It aint the first theme I’ve come across pitched as a “Direct Response Selling Theme”.
There are a few others out there.
Trouble I’ve found with those is that that’s ALL they’re designed to do.
They don’t really take into account the fact that you might ALSO be using that blog as it was designed to be used.
To create a lot of high quality content to get indexed in the search engines & drive organic search engine traffic into your sales funnels.
It was either one approach or the other.
A direct response selling blog OR a big well organized content blog that generates a lot of traffic as it’s own entity.
Given that I’m really into building links and organic search engine optimization, I didn’t want to compromise that traffic source by using a direct response selling blog that tacked on the “public” content management aspects as an after thought.
After all, it’s all that content that drives me traffic.
The good news is that Optimize Press takes that into account as well. Not only has it got all the Direct Response selling elements that I need, it comes with a really nice “blogging” aspect as well.
Probably best if I just show you how I’ve implemented it at this point so you can see how it all comes together as a well oiled traffic generating, lead capturing, sales machine…
Here’s the entry page of the website…
http://www.chickenkeepingsecrets.com/
…that’s a “squeeze page” template I’ve applied to it.
You have a bunch of different layouts to choose from and you can include videos too if you like. In fact you can customize it basically however you want it.
Here is the “blog” – the main organic traffic generating component to the website (it generates around 1,300 uniques daily from organic rankings via all this content)…
http://www.chickenkeepingsecrets.com/blog/
…as you can see, it’s pretty clean & well organized.
Important in terms of search engine optimization.
Every single page in the blog is an entry point…
http://www.chickenkeepingsecrets.com/keeping-chickens/chickens-pecking-each-other-to-death/
…which leads the visitor to a call to action at the end to visit the actual sales letter for the primary product (you might also see a lead capture popup window on the entry pages).
The good news is that organic search engine traffic hasn’t been impacted at all after implementing this theme.
That means I still get the benefit there.
And if I want to do paid advertising campaigns I can create different lead capture forms or entry pages specifically for those unique traffic sources as well.
So it’s all pretty slick.
What I can’t show you is the members area unless you’re into chickens and want to become a member ;-0
But that’s also customizable with “members area templates”, unique navigation features, ability to add unique sidebars and so forth. If you run a membership site it’s really cool.
Now don’t get me wrong.
This is largely an “out of the box” implementation.
I need to do a lot of split testing here, but I’m sure you can see the potential of this total setup. This is also running the default fonts, color schemes etc. All of that stuff is completely customizable.
What’s even cooler is that…
Not only has organic traffic remained stable but this theme has generated a decent whack of ADDITIONAL traffic via FaceBook referrals at no extra cost.
You’ll notice on every single content page it has the FaceBook like button at the top and bottom of the content. It also has a FaceBook commenting feature (people can comment using their FaceBook account (rather than having to login to the website).
Again, this is default out of the box implementation (should you choose to turn that option on) and it’s produced an additional 4,924 unique visitors within 30 days from FaceBook as a result.
Not bad.
I guess that’s most of the important stuff I like about this theme (without making this even longer for you).
Here’s some of the stuff that I think could be improved.
Firstly, there is a small learning curve here.
I guess that’s to be expected of course, but it only took a day to sort out the basics of exactly what I wanted to do.
There are bunch of training videos that are short & to the point and discuss all of the critical features and that really helps.
Secondly, you’re going to have to come back and update every single existing page you have (not your indivdual blog posts – I’m just referring to content pages here – sales letters, about us and contact pages etc).
This is because you have to apply the new template you want to apply – either a squeeze page, a sales page, a membership page, or a blog page template.
Again, this is to be expected.
We use the sales page template for all of our “content pages” even if they’re not sales pages. It works fine, you just ignore a lot of the “sales page” elements.
It can also be a little confusing & tedious updating existing page content. You have to “check to include” the site header on every single page you have, otherwise it wont be included. You can forget to do that sometimes & have to come back.
Basically these are just things that take getting used to I guess.
Finally, the features for the Footer navigational links are limited. You basically can’t choose the order in which they appear which kinda sucks.
So the “home page” link is currently the last link in the footer section when ideally it should be the first.
I can live with that for now and James (the developer) has said they’ll be looking at making that more flexible in the near future.
In fact, I should add support for this theme is excellent. I manage to get a response from support within 12 hours of sending it in, sometimes much sooner.
Anyway, this is getting crazy long now.
You can tell I like this theme & I think you should give it a whirl. I’d be REALLY surprised if you don’t like it…
Hope you’ve found this useful.
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