Tag Archives: wordpress

by | July 21, 2016 · 11:14 am

Quick How-To: add a static welcome page to WordPress.com without losing your blog

Hi, guys!

I’ve been MIA for a couple of weeks, and for a good reason – as you’ve probably noticed, I am now running #ComedyBookWeek. It’s been a full-time job for the last month or so, what with setting up an official website, approaching 100 book bloggers, and gathering 112 (and counting) books to participate. Not to mention the daily highlights and social media – luckily I’m on leave right now, otherwise, I’d have a nervous breakdown!

Still, I had to take a little timeout and post this How-To, because it took me forever to figure out what should take you five minutes to do. If you’ve looked on #ComedyBookWeek webpage lately, you might have noticed that the front page is now a static one, showcasing all the books on offer. To see the actual blog posts, you now need to click on the “Blog” tab at the top. This makes the page look more professional from the event point of view, rather than the WordPress standard landing page being a blog. Plus, it gives more weight to the books on offer. Incidentally, this is what most professional authors do – when you go to their website, the welcome page is about the author and their books. I am going to revamp this blog in the same way, so I wanted to give you heads up and write down how I did it for #ComedyBookWeek webpage .

Please follow the steps below exactly – if you only assign the front page, you will notice that your blog will DISSAPEAR! And we don’t want that.

Here are the steps:

  1. Create a landing Page that you want to be your “front” page. For this blog, it will be my “About Ana” page. Here are all the pages used in comedybookweek.com:Add page
  2. Create a “Blog” page. Just trust me – add a new page, call it “Blog” or whatever you want, but DON’T WRITE ANYTHING in the body/text box.
  3. Now go to your WP Admin, and in Settings-Reading, assign two static pages as shown below. Assign your welcome page to “Front” and your empty “Blog” page to “Posts.”Reading settings
  4. In Appearance-Menus, add pages and rearrange them as desired. Here’s what #ComedyBookWeek menu looks like:Menus

That’s it!

You’re welcome 🙂

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by | January 21, 2016 · 2:24 am

Even more fun with WordPress widgets: how to create an Amazon affiliate link and make a ton of cents!

So I was procrastinating today and watching my sales creep up with eReader News Today, when I noticed that they are an Amazon Affiliate. How genius, huh? Not only they take our money to advertise, they get paid by Amazon, too. Not that I mind – of all the advertising websites I’ve tried, they’ve so far delivered the most value for the money…

They also gave me an idea – I’ve decided to become an Amazon affiliate too! Cause, you know, thousands of people are clicking on the Shizzle, Inc link…well, not thousands, just 100-200 per month, but that’s a start, right? So why not make the link an affiliate one and earn 4% on whatever sales happen as a result? At least it’s an experiment and something new to learn.

First things first – sign up to be an affiliate. Because I’m already registered with Amazon, it was ridiculously easy. Took about 5 minutes and I have no problems to report, or lessons learned – just make sure to have your tax number ready. The only bugger was that I can’t get paid by direct deposit, as I’m not in the US – so I’d opted to be paid with a gift certificate.

Next it came to creating a link – all you have to do is search for a product of interest, which in my case was Shizzle, Inc:

AA search results

Once I’d found it, I clicked on “Get link” and chose “text only” – to make long story short, I could not get image and text html to work and have found a work-around.

AA html

Then, I created a new “text” widget on my WordPress.com website – for more advice on creating links with text widgets see my MailChimp explained post. This is what this new widget looks like:

AA widget

The tricky bit was how to make the link stand out. Previously, I’d created a link to Amazon using an image widget, which worked well and was easy to use – just click on the image and you are there. I didn’t want to have a “naked” link only and as mentioned before, when I pasted in “image and text” html, I ended up with a lot of code visible to everyone. So I cheated: I put a text widget with HTML in the sidebar first, followed by the image widget, but without title or url link:

Two widgets

And here you go – I now have a working affiliate link in my sidebar, which should be earning me a cool 4 cents each time someone buys a book via my website! Yay!

Have fun 🙂

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