In this post I’m going to share the steps I would take to create a puzzle file for creating cryptogram puzzles out of a set of PLR articles.
The first thing you want to do is decide on the theme for your puzzles, and then pick a set of articles that fits your theme.
For this example I’m going to be using the Self-Care blog posts from Coach Glue’s latest set because self-care is a big theme on my new blog, and I want to use these puzzles as an opt-in to build my mailing list over there.
There are 5 posts in the series and my goal is to create 50 Cryptograms to put into my opt-in mini puzzle book.
- So the first thing you’ll want to do is open up a document to add your puzzles to. You can only upload CSV or TXT files to the puzzle generator and they have to be formatted correctly to work. There are example input files available in the generator so that you know how to format your word lists for each puzzle type.
- The next thing to do is start going through your articles and pulling out phrases that you think might make good puzzles to solve. I’m aiming for things that will turn into good tips for the reader once they’ve solved the puzzles.
The nice thing about using snippets of PLR articles to create your puzzles is that you’re using such small pieces each time that you don’t even have to rewrite them if you don’t want to. And once you have your list of phrases for the cryptogram puzzles, it’s easy to create word lists for the other types of puzzles as well.
- Once you have all your puzzle phrases picked out, you then save your text document or your CSV file and head over to the puzzle generator.
Something I noticed with the word file (after I’d uploaded it the first time and created the puzzles) is that the system does not recognize apostrophes or quotation marks. Commas, periods and other punctuation will show up in the solutions, but apostrophes and quotation marks will not, and so you need to clean up your list before you upload it. Remove any quotation marks, and expand any contractions to the full words and you should be fine.
- Choose Cryptogram and then click on “Create Cryptograms” and give your puzzle set a name. I called this one Self-Care Cryptograms.
- Then click on view and you will be prompted to upload your CSV file.
- The software will then generate all your puzzles and solutions automatically.
Another thing I noticed when I was creating this walkthrough is that if you create two sets of puzzles with the same list, it gives you different codes each time. So, once you have a large enough collection of puzzles, you could mix and match them into new files and create whole new puzzle sets with different codes to crack.
- You can also choose your trim sizes, fonts, font sizes, colours, etc. in the settings before you download your finished puzzles. I usually download both a PPT version and a PNG version so that I can do various things with them and pretty them up before publishing.
I hope you found this useful. I’m going to finish this up and create an opt-in page on my new blog for some free puzzles to download. I’ll share the link with you as soon as that’s done and you can check out what I’m doing to build up the non-PLR side of my business too.
One more thing before I let you go here…
If you decide to pick up the Blog Posts from Coach Glue send me your receipt and I will send you back the set of puzzles I created for this walk through. (Use promo code 50 to take 50% off at checkout)
And don’t forget, I’ve got a 2-part bonus for the Word Puzzles Generator as well when you purchase the main offer and the first upsell. (The launch offer ends on November 24 and the price will go up to at least $47 after that.)
Also if you want to add word search puzzles to the mix and don’t have the Instant Puzzle Generator yet, you can save $10 on that with coupon code RUTH10