Daily ArchivesSeptember 9, 2021

Every website owner, blogger, marketer, and WordPress website owner who is selling products, services, courses, or programs and building an email list cares about one thing: how to increase website conversion rates. As a result, you’ll find a huge number of blog posts, articles, and infographics touting “the best button color” and the “best call to action color” to increase conversions.

Myths about Button Color

Studies, color experts, designers, and conversion experts will tell you things like:

• Red is a signal for stop. Red is a terrible call to action color. Don’t use red.
• Green is calming and represents go, so you should definitely use green for your call to action buttons.
• For the highest conversion rate, use yellow or orange for your call to action buttons because the colors are bright, cheery, and positive, and Amazon uses a yellow-orange button.
• Blue is the most trustworthy color and it helps reduce stress, so you should make your buttons blue.

These same resources will share the results of studies and tests they have run, where a website changed a button from blue to orange and website conversions increased 18%.

The problem is that almost all of these articles, conversion tests, and color tests contradict each other and the reason is simple: There is no special button color guaranteed to earn more clicks. But, while there is not one single color that is the right color for WordPress buttons or a website call to action, there is one color that is the right color for your WordPress website.

How Do You Know What Color To Make Your WordPress Buttons?

When considering the color of the buttons for your website, first consider the color palette you are utilizing.

Website Color Palette

When selecting a color palette for your WordPress website, you need to take into account these three things:

1. The Brand: The website colors need to represent the brand position, feel, and message—remember, colors have meaning and that meaning needs to align with your brand.
2. The Customer Persona: The website colors need to resonate with the ideal client or customer to help them connect with the brand.
3. Action Color: Select one contrasting color to be the action color for your WordPress website. Use that same color when you want users to take action.

Now you can start your selection of a button color!

Website Button Color

When selecting the button color for your WordPress website, you need to take into account these three things:

1. Visual Contrast: Contrast is more effective at grabbing a users’ attention that any one color because high-contrast will ensure the button stands out. For example: if the primary website colors are blue and purple, don’t use a blue or purple for the call to action button. Instead, select a contrasting color like yellow or orange for the button.
2. Visual Consistency: Use your brand action color for every call to action button across your WordPress website to train visitors to click everything they see a button of that color.
3. The Brand: While using a contrasting color for your WordPress buttons is critical, the color you choose also needs to remain on-brand. For example, if you’re a girly tea house with soft pink and green website, you wouldn’t use a dark navy blue button, but a bright turquoise button could do the trick nicely.

When in question on what colors complement each other well, utilize a color wheel. Colors that are directly across from each other usually work well together.

The Best Color For WordPress Buttons

Bottom line? The best color for your WordPress call to action buttons is an on-brand color that has a high contrast against your primary brand colors because the more contrast there is, the more attention the button will get. Just remember to use the same color for all of your call to action buttons for visual consistency.

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Affiliate marketing is one of the easiest and fastest ways to begin monetizing your blog. As an affiliate blogger, you are using your blog to market and promote products from other businesses and when someone clicks on one of your unique affiliate tracking links and makes a purchase, you earn a commission.

Managing affiliate links and affiliate marketing campaigns on your blog can be a lot of work, but not if you have the right tools in place to streamline, automate, and track various parts of the process.

8 WordPress Plugins for Affiliate Bloggers

If you’re an affiliate blogger, here are eight WordPress plugins you can’t afford to ignore:

1. Pretty Links & Pretty Links Pro

Pretty Links and Pretty Links Pro provide WordPress bloggers with the most robust link management solution available. The free version allows you to cloak affiliate links with your own domain, group and organize links, redirect links, nofollow links, pass parameters to your links, and track click stats so you can see which links are clicked and how often they are clicked.

With the paid Pretty Links Pro version, you get more advanced reporting tools and added features like the ability to import and export affiliate links, add affiliate disclosures, automatically create links, split test URL redirects, redirect users based on their location, and more.

2. OptinMonster

If you want to build an email list for your blog, the Optin Monster WordPress plugin is a must. With OptinMonster, you can add lightbox popups, slide-in signup forms, sidebar forms, after post-opt-in forms, exit-intent popups, floating bars, and more. This lead generation plugin also tracks the performance of each opt-in on your site. You can perform split tests and boost your email signup rates as well.

3. EasyAzon

With the EasyAzon WordPress plugin, you can easily promote and market Amazon products on your blog. This Amazon affiliate blogger plugin gives you the ability to search for Amazon products from your WordPress dashboard, automatically cloak affiliate links, open affiliate links in a new window, insert images with affiliate links, create product popups, and add Amazon buy buttons right to your website. It even lets a visitor add an item to their Amazon cart!

4. Adsanity

The Adsanity WordPress plugin makes inserting banner ads, display ads, in-post ads, video ads, and other types of ads much easier. The ad management plugin also enables you to manage your ads and affiliate campaigns right in the WordPress dashboard, schedule how long you want to display an ad and view performance reports.

5. MonsterInsights

The MonsterInsights WordPress plugin provides important Google Analytics insights and the ability to track your AdSense earning and the performance of your affiliate blogger links. With affiliate links tracking enabled, this Google Analytics plugin will help you see the most profitable pages on your blog, identify the most lucrative traffic sources, and discover new affiliate content opportunities.

6. WP RSS Aggregator

WP RSS Aggregator gives you the ability to display content from your affiliate networks on your WordPress blog. With this WordPress plugin, you can create product pages on your website and automatically populate them with products from your affiliate networks and even create blog posts based on affiliate products.

7. Affiliate Coupons

Affiliate Coupons is a WordPress plugin that allows you to beautifully promote coupons and special deals on your blog in just a few easy steps. This WordPress coupon plugin allows you to create vendors and predefine affiliate links, create coupons and link them to vendors, display coupons, filter/sort your coupon presentations, show coupons in your sidebar, and show coupons in varying layouts.

8. Affiliate WP

With Affiliate WP, you can easily and quickly create an affiliate program for your own products, courses, programs, and services right in your WordPress site. This easy to use affiliate marketing WordPress plugin allows you to create your affiliate program, manage affiliates, offer direct links, and provide brand assets and graphics. It includes affiliate and real-time referral tracking, integrations with several popular WordPress plugins, coupons, custom referral rates, customizable emails, and so much more.

Tools For the Affiliate Blogger

If you want the best return from your investment as an affiliate blogger, check out each of the eight WordPress plugins listed above. And, if you’re looking for rock-solid managed WordPress hosting that you can rely on, be sure to check out the plan from Hostdedi. With automatic updates to your platform and plugins, image compression, and expert advice, Hostdedi can handle the hosting while you focus on your strategy as an affiliate blogger.

There comes a time in the life of many WordPress sites when you want to start selling something. Maybe you wrote an ebook, or are looking to offer a way for your users to support your work?

Whatever the reason is for looking to sell something if you’re on WordPress the easiest way to do this is to install WooCommerce. You can easily add WooCommerce to WordPress. WooCommerce is a standalone plugin that sits on top of WordPress, and is very easy to use, has tons of support, and is very popular (for a good reason!).

Today I’m going to walk you through how to add WooCommerce to my WordPress site. I’ll show you what it takes to set up WooCommerce on your WordPress blog. I’m also going to talk about a few extra plugins you may want to use to maximize your store.

But first, let’s start with how to add WooCommerce to your WordPress site.

Installing WooCommerce

To start with WooCommerce head to the Plugins menu and then click “Add New” in the top left of the screen. Click “Install” on WooCommerce and then when it changes to “Activate” click that to turn WooCommerce on for your site.

Immediately after you activate WooCommerce, you’ll be taken to the setup wizard. This is going to save you from hunting through all the different settings pages that WooCommerce has and help ensure that you have your store set up correctly.

WooCommerce Tutorial [2021] >>

The wizard starts by asking you to set your location, currency, whether you want to sell digital goods, physical goods, or both types of products. The final option is where you get to choose what you share with WooCommerce about how your store operates.

For my stores, I leave this checked because I want to help with the development of WooCommerce. If you’re not sure, then you can click through the link at the bottom to see what they collect and how they collect information. They do not collect any of the private data about your users.

10 Reasons to Choose WooCommerce >>

Next, you can choose the payment gateway you want to use with your site. By default Stripe and Paypal are offered because they’re the most popular payment gateways. There are other options, and depending on where you live one of the alternatives may be a better choice for you.

One other note on payment gateways is that it’s worth testing which one converts better. One client I worked with began with PayPal but then started to prefer Stripe as their preferred gateway. When they took away PayPal as an option they saw a 20% decrease in sales, so they opted to turn PayPal back on and adjust their preferences accordingly.

9 Types of Ecommerce Business Models for 2021 >>

Next WooCommerce is going to ask you about shipping. If you’re in Canada or the United States, then you can use WooCommerce JetPack to get live rates on your shipping. Here it’s going to ask you what your default weights and measurements are. For most people, WooCommerce will set this adequately based on the location information you set in step one.

It’s important to note here that JetPack is not free. There is a free tier, but it may not include all of the features you may need for your site. The live shipping rates and the live taxes are free, so the main things you’ll need for your WooCommerce store are taken care of.

Options for WooCommerce

Now we’re moving to a few things that you may or may not need on your WooCommerce site if you’ve already been using it as a blog. The WooCommerce wizard will offer to install and activate the Storefront theme.

Ecommerce KPIs To Grow Your Business and Increase Revenue >>

Storefront is the default theme that WooCommerce provides to make sure you have something that looks nice with WooCommerce. If you’ve already got a theme, then you probably don’t need this. Most themes look fine with WooCommerce out of the box, so if you’re not sure, I wouldn’t worry about it. Eventually, you will want to look at making sure your theme is a lightweight theme because lightweight will mean a faster site and the ability to convert more leads.

The wizard is also going to ask you about installing MailChimp so that you have an email marketing plugin for your store. Many bloggers already have an email marketing solution, and if it’s not MailChimp, which is the default offered option, then you can uncheck the box and not install MailChimp.

One thing that WooCommerce offers here that you do want is to automate your taxes. Taxes can be very complicated. Some countries have hundreds of tax zones and sorting them all out is a full-time job. Just let WooCommerce JetPack take care of that for you.

Now the WooCommerce setup wizard is going to ask you to install JetPack. Click “continue with Jetpack” if you do plan to use WooCommerce for taxes.

When you continue with JetPack, you’ll be asked to set up an account with WordPress.com. WordPress is what powers JetPack on your site to set up your account. If you have a WordPress.com account already then sign in to your existing account.

With that done, you’re almost ready to go. You still need to set up your Stripe and PayPal Payment gateways.

1. For Stripe, you’ll need to add your Stripe account keys to the WooCommerce Stripe page. The process is reasonably straightforward copy and paste operation.
2. To setup Paypal, there is a button built into the WooCommerce settings page to click that will grab your API keys from your PayPal account. All you need to do is click the button and then sign in to PayPal.

Now your WooCommerce site is ready for you to enter products. Let’s start that process by adding a basic ebook to our WooCommerce site.

Adding an eBook to WooCommerce

To get started go to the Products Menu and then click “Add New.” Clicking will take you to the place to add products. It should look very familiar if you’ve been blogging with WordPress for a while.

Start by adding the title of your book at the top of the page. Under that, where you have been putting your blog content, set in the long description. In the default WooCommerce theme this shows up just under the product on its page.

Next, you choose the product type. For a downloadable book, we can leave it set as a Simple Product. We do need to remember to check both the “Virtual” and “Downloadable” boxes or else WooCommerce is going to expect us to ship something and hold the order as processing instead of completing it and delivering it to our client.

Next, set the price of your book. You can even schedule a sale price here so that you can set it, and then forget it without having the book stay on sale forever.

Now we need to specify the file that we’ll be delivering to customers when they purchase our book. Click on “Add File” and then click on “Choose File.” From here the WordPress media uploader will open. You can choose an existing file, or you can upload the file you want to use.

Now you can set the number of times a user can download your book and the number of days until the download link expires. I usually set the download link to a few days. Setting an expiration on the link helps stop people from sharing the link (and your book) with others.

Scrolling down to the bottom, you can set the short description for the product. The short description goes right beside the product by default so it’s the first thing your customers can read outside of your product image.

Finally, don’t forget to set a product image. For a book, the cover is probably sufficient. On the right side of your screen under Product Image click Select Product Image. Here you’ll see the familiar WordPress Media Gallery open again. Choose an existing image or upload the new one.

Now you’re ready to publish your product. You can see what my demo product looks like with the default TwentySeventeen theme below.

Other Need-To-Have Plugins

While we do have all the basics of WooCommerce setup with our WordPress site, there are still a few things you’re likely to want to add. You don’t need these plugins, but they’re going to help you maximize your store.

First up is Google Analytics for WooCommerce. You should be running Google Analytics on your site already so that you can tell how your content resonates with your customers. This plugin helps connect Google Analytics with your WooCommerce store so that you get eCommerce metrics in Google Analytics. While you may not do much with it to start, long-term this data can help you understand where problems are in your store.

Advanced Inventory Management Options for WooCommerce >>

It’s important to communicate with your customers, but it can be hard. By installing Follow Ups, you can automate this process. For our ebook above, you can send purchasers an email 15 days after they purchase the book to ask them if they’ve enjoyed reading it. You can follow up again in 20 days and ask them to leave a review on your product.

If you end up with more than one product, then Smart Offers is a must have plugin. What Smart Offers let’s you do is offer other products to your customers. Say they purchase your second ebook; you can offer them your first at a discounted price if they buy both at the same time.

Bottom Line

While there are a number of steps to set up a WooCommerce store, it doesn’t take long. With the WooCommerce wizard, it took me less than 30 minutes to set up the WooCommerce store above.

Know you know how to add WooCommerce to your WordPress site.

With a small amount of effort, you can own the relationship between yourself and your customers. You can retain the maximum amount of revenue from your products, and you can have another asset for your site. WooCommerce makes all of this easy.

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