Easily Decrease Bounce Rates While Increasing Sales!
WordPress related post plugins are a fantastic way to not only decrease bounce rate but to improve interlinking (SEO) for your blog posts…
However, if you’re like most bloggers who are monetizing your site, you’ve often wondered whether there was a way we could put our OWN carefully picked items into those handy and stylish little boxes!
If you’ve looked through the WordPress repository of free plugins you’ve certainly come up empty handed as the features just have not existed…
Until now…
Meet WP BoostPress!
Rather than explain it, it’s probably best to SHOW you what it looks like!
Beautiful right?
Well… sometimes!
When I first saw this plugin I was eager to get my hands on it to do a review for you as I thought it would be the cat’s meow! After being unable to get a reply from the developer for a review copy, I purchased a license and dug right in.
The first thing I noticed was that “all” you get is a zip file. No manual, no instructions, no kiss on the cheek. Just the plugin. Alrighty….
I also noticed, after installing the plugin that it has an identity crisis and in the dashboard calls itself Wp SuperPress. Oh well I’ve seen crazier things. Where is the settings page. Oh wait, there isn’t one… okay… stumble over to the post editor page…
In the post editor, right under the writing box, you’ll see the important fields for “SuperPress” (I told you it is confused about it’s identity!) Trust me when I say you can’t miss it because it’s a HUGE box that is probably much bigger than it needs to be.
This actually works as expected. You will have “Related Content” 1-4 and each can either “Autodetect” (which grabs a related post) or it can use “Autodetect Off” which enables you to manually add the Title, URL and Image.
The Upload button works great for uploading but not so great for using images already in your media library. Fortunately, you can easily copy and paste an existing media image URL into the image box. Piece of cake there.
Pop stuff in (or let them default), save draft, hit preview… and take a look!
And…
It’s either going to look great or terrible depending on whether your content column is standard width (narrowish) or has been widened out like mine has.
For me, by default, there was an odd about of extra space on the right due to my content width and it did not center and did not look good. I made some faces and decided to go try to change its settings. Oh wait, it didn’t have any.
Okay, off to add a little custom CSS to my themes custom css file to override the appearance. But it continued to ignore my code. WTF?
The plugin has all of it’s CSS done as “inline” which is an old sub-optimal method and something I didn’t expect to run into!
Eventually some “!important” CSS tags gave me a work-around to get the effect you see in the screenshot – but it was a lot more time invested than I wanted to spend!
In case you need it, let me save you some time and give you my custom CSS. (The height setting is because I tend to make overly long post titles, my fault!)
Then after getting ready to leave the developer some feedback on the WSO thread, I saw someone mention using it on pages. It wasn’t running on pages was it? Oh yes… it was… without permission.
If you have a pretty “regular” blog where you do not do interesting things with your Pages and do not use them as a CMS and do not use them to make squeeze pages… this is fine.
However, if, like me, your pages often double as sales/squeeze pages… this is a huge annoyance. And there is no settings page to disable it.
This may be a non-issue for you (it likely is) but for me it’s an aggravation. So lets fix it:
In your dashboard, under plugins, editor… select “WP SuperPress” and then locate the /content.php file. If you don’t know how to do this. I’d suggest great caution.
And now WP BoostPress shows on posts and not pages… fixed!
Whew! Are you tired yet?
WP BoostPress/SuperPress Review
I think this is a HOT idea that is very much needed… an an implementation that is about a Beta version 0.8 rather than a Ready-For-Sale 1.0 release.
However, the truth is that it’s being released as a WSO and it’s super cheap ($10 at the moment) and it does what it says on the label.
I have zero doubt that if the developer continues work on this, it’s going to be a $97 plugin before the middle of the year. It immediately needs a version 1.1 to get the css out of being “inline” but it also needs a settings panel added and several on/off options included by version 1.2
It needs work (lots of work) but there is so much potential here that I’m certain you can see why I picked it up.
Something that is neat is that if you could set the “blurb” that goes above it, you could easily use it as a “Products I Recommend” feature box in ADDITION to a regular related post plugin. Something to think about and perhaps an easy way to increase monetization for affiliates!
I’m going to give this a 3 star (of 5 star) rating due to both potential and problems:
You can check out WP BoostPress here!
Let me know what you think!
So you use a related post plugin that lets you specify the outbound links? Do you think something like this might be useful in your business?