2 Plugins that Target New Readers

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Have you ever been to a new department store before? You’re not familiar with the place, and the friendly staff is there to help you find your way. That’s nice.

20 visits later, that same staff gets on your nerves. The extra help has turned into extra irritation; he keeps greeting you the same way, stands near you as you’re browsing around, and keeps giving you a recommendation, clearly showing that he can’t remember who you are. You’re forgetable. That gets to you, more than the shopping experience itself.

Sites which offer great content can sometimes be like that department store. I’m talking about popups (often used to call the reader to subscribe to the newsletter). These popups can be effective in increasing site subscription, but after that, it can also turn off readership experience during subsequent visits. Your reader has subscribed, and yet he keeps seeing the same “Hello, thank you. Please subscribe. Here’s why…”, followed by a few lines of ridiculous claims that every other site can do too.

So the trick is to make these notifications targeted to new readers, cause these are whom these popups are supposed to be for in the first place right? Seth Godin says…

One opportunity that’s underused is the idea of using cookies to treat returning visitors differently than newbies. It’s more work at first, but it can offer two experiences to two different sorts of people. (Source: In the Middle, Starting)

Here are two WordPress plugins I recommend to offer that added differentiated service:

1. What Would Seth Godin Do Wordpress Plugin: - allows you to add a customized header at the beginning of your page. New visitors will see a different message (customizable) from regular readers.
2. Wordpress Popup Scheduler Plugin: - makes popups less annoying. You can set the popup (for subscription or special announcements) to appear only for new users at the specific page which they visit your site (landing page)

The “What Would Seth Godin Do” plugin is a gem because you can also set a custom message for returning visitors (e.g. “Welcome back”).

Do you have your own favorite plugins that do targeting? Share them here.

How to Up-Sell With WordPress

Up-selling is a marketing term for the practice of suggesting higher priced products or services to a customer who is considering a purchase. It is often done at the point of purchase and the item suggested is related to the item the customer is currently purchasing.

So how do you take the concept of upselling in blogging? A dimension to upselling in blogs is to think of the blog article the reader is viewing as the item he is purchasing, and as he finishes the item, he is about to make the purchase. Hence to up-sell articles, ideally you’d want to have similar posts that you offer to that reader after he finishes your article.

That’s exactly the name of this plugin: Similar Posts. It allows you to display a list of posts which are related or similar to the current post, based on a series of calculations done by the plugin already. I’ve used this plugin on a couple of my sites and so far, its suggestions have been an up-selling dream. The reader is tempted to click on one of the other articles (”You might also like to read…”)  the plugin recommends after having read the intended posting (since he finished reading, he has shown considerable interest in the topic). This means a higher “average time on site” statistic, and greater customer involvement.

Plugin-in page: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/similar-posts/

Author’s page: http://rmarsh.com/plugins/similar-posts/

How To Cross-Sell With WordPress

Cross-selling is a marketing term for the practice of suggesting related products or services to a customer who is considering buying something. Cross-selling enables your business to promote your other products and at the same time, help customers solve problems which they might not have identified (or remembered) at the point of transaction.

A cool plugin that helps you do cross-selling with WordPress is Cross-linker. This gem allows you to set-up words which are automatically hyperlinked to desired URLs as indicated by you. So for example, if you have a site on Marketing and another on Motivation, you could automatically link all “motivation” terms in site A to your targeted site B (as I have done with this posting), hence driving traffic to your other sites too.

Here are some other suggestions on how to use this plugin:

1. Linking terms and abbreviations you often use to information sites explaining these words. Readers will appreciate the understanding.
2. Linking certain keywords to your products page.
3. Identifying the most popular postings you have, followed by linking words to these postings. These popular postings are magnets which build credibility. Direct readers to these posts too.

Plugin Page: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/cross-linker/

Author’s Page: http://www.web-developers.net/