How to Advertise Special Offers with your WordPress Blog

If you operate a blog-based Web site — or even a Web site that includes a separate blog — there’s a good chance that you can use the built-in category and RSS feed features to distribute special offers to site visitors by e-mail.

I set this up on my WordPress-based Flying M Air Web site the other day and it works like a charm. Let me explain how.

The Goal

Before I explain how to set this up, let me take a few moments to explain why you might want to do it. The best way to do that is to explain what my goal was.

Flying M Air offers helicopter tours, charters, and excursions throughout Arizona. Some of our flights begin and end in Phoenix, which is about 1/2 hour from our base in Wickenburg. The folks who buy Phoenix-based tours and charters cover the cost of our flight to the starting point, but with a penalty to our profit margin.

My idea was to “piggyback” other tours out of Phoenix on existing tours. So, for example, if I knew I had a flight at 1 PM, I could offer similar flights out of Phoenix in 12 noon and 2 pm time slots. These piggybacked tours would be offered at a discount to encourage customers to sign up. This would enable me to serve multiple Phoenix-based customers with one round-trip to the Phoenix area, thus maximizing my revenue for the trip.

What I wanted to do to get the word out was to publish the special offers on the Web site and automatically e-mail these offers to potential customers who were interested in receiving offers. I’m not talking about spam here. I’m talking about a mailing list that people voluntarily subscribe to and could unsubscribe from at any time. Something I wouldn’t have to manually manage. (God knows I have enough work to do.)

How I Did It

I started by creating a “Be Spontaneous!” category on my Flying M Air site. The purpose of the category is to publicize “last-minute” special offers for specific dates and time slots. Because not everyone would know what “Be Spontaneous!” means, I also added a link to the category on the top navigation bar, with a more obvious label: “Special Offers.”

I then created post-dated entries with the special offers I wanted to advertise. Only one offer would appear at a time. I’d have to manually delete the offers after the date (or perhaps leave them there so visitors could see the kinds of offers they missed).

Next, I went to FeedBurner and set up a feed for the special offers. While there, I set up the E-mail Notification feature. You can learn how to do that in my Informit.com article, “Add Email Notification to Your Blog with FeedBurner.”

Finally, I added a subscription form to the sidebar of the site. I also got fancy and added an introduction to the Be Spontaneous! category that explained what it was all about and offered a subscription link.

That’s all there is to it!

FeedBurner E-Mail Notification Article Now Online

Back in December, I added individual RSS feeds on FeedBurner for the book support categories on my site. The main reason I did this was to take advantage of FeedBurner’s e-mail notification feature.

E-mail notification is like RSS feeds for novices. Instead of requiring users to know how to set up a live bookmark or configure a feed reader to get new content, it simply delivers new content to subscribers automatically once a day via e-mail. Whether I write one entry or ten in a day, the contents of those entries are compiled nightly into a single e-mail message and sent out to subscribers. That’s all they get. No junk mail, no spam, no annoying reminders. Best of all, the e-mail message includes links that subscribers can use to check out the article on my site or leave comments. And a link to unsubscribe that actually works.

When I set this feature up for my book support categories, I wrote an article about it that explained, with screenshots, how to get the job done. I submitted it to my overworked editor at Informit.com, she gave me the thumbs up, and it ended up in Informit’s publication pipeline. I approved the edits in mid January and began waiting to see it appear online.

Informit apparently publishes new content weekly on Fridays. At least, that’s how it seems to me. My articles always seem to come out on Fridays. “Add Email Notification to Your Blog with FeedBurner” appeared this morning.

Enjoy.

The WP.com Write page

A new feature with WordPress.com blogs is additional information and options on the Write post page. This includes tips about the types of files you are able to upload and information about how much disc space you’ve used. If you need more space to store your files, click the Buy more link.

If you upload large files, such as movies and audio files, you may find you quickly need to add more disc space.

Another really great feature is Autosave. WP.com saves your posts as you go along, so you don’t have to keep clicking the Save and Continue Editing button.

WordPress.com evolution

WordPress.com is the hosted WordPress service. You don’t have to mess around installing and updating files on your own server; instead you log in to your account and everything is done for you.

One of the exciting features of WordPress.com is that it’s not static: it evolves almost daily, with more and less subtle changes and developments occurring all the time.

One downside of this is that some of the instructions and screenshots in our book are a little out of sync. But then, that’s what this website is for…

In the last few posts we’ve concentrated on server installs. This post, and several to follow, aim to do a quick review of what’s changed over at WordPress.com since the book was published.

Dashboard changes

As soon as you log on at WordPress.com (WP.com) you’ll see that the Dashboard looks a little different. The Dashboard Administration panel itself has a few, mainly cosmetic, changes. The quick links to write a post, view comments and so on are on a single line near the top, with links to your own recent posts immediately below. At the very top (below the toolbar) you may find a Quick Tip. The Sidebar area now contains WP.com news and links to other WP.com blogs.

You’ll also see new links in the Toolbars across the top of the page. The Bookmarks item has been replaced by Comments and Blogroll links, while the Import link has changed to Upgrades.

There are many more items on the second row of links too: what was merely Dashboard, Blog Stats and Feed Stats has added Friend Surfer, My Comments and Tag Surfer.

In the next few posts I aim to work through these different areas of the Dashboard and alert you to changes you should know about.

WordPress Category Feeds

If you’re an RSS feed subscriber or frequent visitor here, you may have caught my how-to article about including category feed links for each post’s category. You can see how this looks on every post on my site — at the top of the post is the category name with a tiny feed icon before it. (On this site, I’ve set up something similar at the bottom of every post, although I’m not sure if it’ll remain there for long.) Clicking the feed icon opens the RSS feed page for that category. You can copy the link and paste it into your feed reader to subscribe to the category.

I wrote the article right after I made this modification to my site. It seemed like a good WordPress trick to share with readers, so I put it online. At least 130 people read it on my site. But then I got to thinking about it and realized that I might have a good paying market for the article. I submitted it to my editor at Informit and they bought it. So I had to take it offline.

Fear not! Informit.com is a free source of articles on the Web. So when it gets through editing and into production, it’ll be back online there and I’ll have a link to it on this site. Unfortunately, that’ll take at least a month. I’m not Informit’s only writer and there’s plenty of other content for them to get online. I’m still waiting for four articles I’ve written for them in the past month to appear online — three of them are of special interest to WordPress users.

But I thought I’d take a few moments to explain why I went through the bother of creating category feed links here. Read on to see if this technique might benefit you.

Why Category Feeds?

Without repeating too much of what’s in my Informit article, here’s the deal.

Everything I’ve read about successful blogging says that a blog must have a specific topic to succeed. If you visit my Web site or subscribe to my primary RSS feed, you know that I’m just not following that rule. My site/blog covers all kinds of topics: computing for Mac and Windows users, specific computer applications (Excel, Word, WordPress, QuickBooks), flying, writing, photography, stuff going on in my life, travel, blogging, productivity, and so on. It’s a hodgepodge of information and opinion and I seriously doubt whether everything I write about is of interest to anyone.

While I could start multiple blogs, each of which covers a specific topic, I’ve been there and done that and I didn’t like it one darn bit. Too much work to do, especially when it’s time to upgrade!

Fortunately certain topics are of interest to a lot of different people. One person might like what I write about WordPress while another might like what I write about flying. Neither of them care a bit about the other topic. They don’t want to subscribe to my main feed to get the tidbits that interest them. They might not even want to visit the site regularly to see what’s new and interesting for them. They stop by once or twice, read things they like, see things they don’t care about, and forget to come back.

I want to capture those visitors and keep them coming back for more. I figure that the best way to do that is to offer RSS feeds (also viewable as “Live Bookmarks” in Firefox — my browser of choice — and possibly other browsers) for every topic on the site. This way, people who want to follow certain topics I write about can do it without having to wade through the stuff they couldn’t care less about.

How WordPress Makes this Easy

WordPress makes it easy to publish category feeds — it does it automatically. All a reader has to do is know the URL for the automatically generated category feed. And all I’ve done is give it to them on a platter, by creating a link with the feed URL beside the category name in a post header.

My upcoming Informit article goes into the how-to aspect of this in some detail, with the code I used to make it happen. Copyright agreements prevent me from repeating that code, which is the main content of the article, here. (Sorry, but I do write for a living, which means I need to get paid for my work sometimes.)

I did write an article some time ago that explained how to create an RSS feed page like the one on my site: “How to Create a WordPress RSS Feed Page.” As that article explains, you can use the wp_list_cats tag to include your RSS feed link for a category in parentheses after the category name. That’s handy on an RSS feed page like the one I wrote about, as well as in sidebar listings of categories. For most folks, that’ll be enough.

I used a more “in your face” approach. I just hope it works.