Using the WordPress Admin for Lead Generation

If you are like me then you spend a lot of your day navigating around the WordPress admin, looking at the admin screens to carry out different tasks. For the right type of client, they probably spend a lot of time in there too. Therefore I thought it was a good idea to try and use the WordPress admin as a little marketing opportunity. Here is how I went about it.

This all started out with me asking the question of how can I get across to current clients the other work and services that I could offer them. My website is not great, it is just a blog (something which I need to work on!) but usually you would list your service and products on your site. However it is probable that current clients don’t really visit your website that often, after all they already have a relationship with you and contact you in other ways.

Therefore I wanted to explore ways in which I could get this information across to clients. I started to think what is the one place that I have access to add content too, which all my clients see on a regular basis. I have clients that spend much of their days in the WordPress admin, managing their sites content to generate them leads and therefore I thought that I could use the admin in some way to engage clients with new content and services from me.

For a while now I have been using a plugin I wrote called WP Basis to make some changes to the WordPress admin screens in order to make the experience easier for clients to use. The plugin takes away some of the unwanted stuff such as menus and meta boxes that are not used and would just confuse the client. However one thing that it did do was to provide a different dashboard screen for clients, rather than the complicated default dashboard.

The default WordPress Dashboard Screen can be a little complicated at first glance.
The default WordPress Dashboard Screen can be a little complicated at first glance.

With this in mind I went about altering this dashboard screen the client sees to include some additional information. The following assumes that you already have a plugin that adds a custom dashboard page for your clients. If you need a little more help with this take a look at how I have done this with the WP Basis plugin on Github.

The approach I decided on was to use tabs. I wanted to make the dashboard feel as native a possible, fitting in with other WordPress admin styles etc. There is already a tabbed section on the WordPress About page. This is the page you are directed to when you have upgraded to the latest version and therefore it seemed logical to use the same approach.

The WordPress About page already contains a series of tabs.
The WordPress About page already contains a series of tabs.

I added the following function to output the content of the new dashboard page.

https://gist.github.com/wpmark/1dba36c8a04160ea7709

The above code adds the welcome tab and I have made this code extensible so that I can add tabs in the future using other plugins to show other things. The tabs work in that you declare a tab and a tab name using a filter and then you do the same declaring the callback function for the tabs content. You then create a function with the same name as your callback in order to show whatever content you like here.

Making it extensible means that I can use the base plugin on all sites (WP Basis) and then add other plugins which add tabs and tab contents to the client dashboard. Below is an example of a tab that was added to one site – this actually advertised services for another agency as it was a site built by me for them! Each linked through to their website with information about the service.

An example of a tab added to provide information about other services.
An example of a tab added to provide information about other services.

This is very much work in progress and I have lots of ideas for other content to appear on the dashboard of clients. Some ideas are below:

  • Use RSS to grab the latest blog posts and display them on the dashboard
  • Show latest offers and promotions. Again this could done using an RSS feed from another WordPress site which would automate this.
  • Videos of how to use the site
  • Contact form for support, which creates a ticket on your support system

What do you think? I would love to get some feedback on the ideas here.

3 responses

  1. Paal Joachim Romdahl Avatar
    Paal Joachim Romdahl

    Hey Mark

    This looks really cool!

    I made a tutorial myself http://easywebdesigntutorials.com/creating-a-custom-dashboard-widget/
    customizing the welcome panel. I really like the style and your thoughts on providing self promotion for your clients.

    It looks like you also created a custom functions plugin you call WP Basis. Interesting! I have myself a custom functions plugin that I added the custom welcome panel to.

    I’ll have to dig some more and see what you have!
    Thanks for writing the post. Perhaps you could also add the code snippet that the Basis uses to remove the panels and to then make ready for the above code. Sharing the full code in this article on creating what your showing above in the screenshot.

  2. Mark,

    Great post man, I forget how I came across this as I was reading from post to post and looking at Github users, (something I spend to much time on). I would love to chat with you about a few ideas I have that I could use this plugin for. Keep up the great work man and hope to speak with you soon.

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