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May

2010

WordPress Plugin Nickel Sale – Subscribers Only

UPDATE: I’ve put the opening back to Tuesday 1st June at 6.00pm GMT (1.00pm EST) – see this post for details.

Following on from the very popular WordPress AutoResponder plugin (WPAR) I released last month, I now have another plugin that is both great as a standalone plugin but also complements WPAR perfectly.

It’s called “Subscribers Only”…

(BTW, there’s a new version of WPAR now available – v1.3.3 – which you can go download from your personal download page. We hope that we’ve now fixed the niggling little problems that a few people were having and that it’s stable for everybody. We’ve also added a couple of extra features too.)

While WPAR makes it possible for you to easily gather subscribers on your blog(s), this new plugin virtually forces people to become WordPress subscribers.

Note the subtle difference in terminology here.

WPAR subscribers are people which have requested to join your blog mailing list and will be sent email messages on a schedule you set and also allows you to send out broadcast emails.

WordPress subscribers are people who join your blog using the built in WordPress sign up page.

(You can tell WordPress to only allow people to comment on your blog if they’ve first joined up. You’ll find this under “Settings >> Discussion” in your WordPress admin panel.)

Okay? See the difference? WPAR subscribers and regular WP subscribers.

So what does this new plugin do?

Well, it’s called “Subscribers Only” and what it does is it hides parts of pages and posts and shows non-WP-subscribers a message that they need to subscribe in order to read the content.

This is DYNAMITE.

Imagine this.

You write a post or a page that explains how important it is to do something – the WHY – but then leave out the crucial bit that explains the method of doing it – the HOW.

All they see is a message saying something like “This content is for Subscribers Only”. Get it?

The only way that people can read that missing content is if they follow the link and join as WP subscribers, then once they’re logged in they can see it all.

Do you see the power of that?

How about making it a little bit more powerful and more persuasive?

Well, we’ve also made a change to WPAR so that you can now tick a box to say that any new WP subscribers also get automatically added to WPAR. (Any new WPAR subscribers already get automatically added as WP subscribers.)

So the moment a visitor to your blog reads a post with some missing content and subscribes to be able to read it, they also get added to your autoresponder sequence.

In fact you can just point people to your WPAR sign up page or sidebar box, and they will automatically get added to both WPAR and as regular WP subscribers.

Do you see why I say this is DYNAMITE?

Every single WordPress post you make can now be a source of new subscribers. You don’t really need to write an ebook to give away in return for a name and email address, you can just blog and hide some of the content.

You can even go through some of your older posts that you know get search traffic and amend them, removing key information that can only now be seen by subscribers.

Okay, that’s enough explanation I think. This will become part of the PluginGreat.com premium plugins, and will eventually be sold for $27.

But before that, I’m holding a nickel sale so you can get it at the lowest possible price.

UPDATE: On Tuesday 1st June at 6.00pm GMT (1.00pm EST), I’ll be kicking off the nickel sale here on this blog.

***WARNING***

A nickel sale I did a few months ago went a bit pear shaped as the autoresponder service I was using failed to send out the email until nearly 2 hours after it was supposed to go out. Many people were left waiting for it but didn’t get it until many sales had already gone through, and so didn’t get as good a deal as they would have done.

So my advice is, if you want to be one of the first to grab it and get it at it’s lowest price, keep an eye on my blog.

Regardless of whether or not the email is sent out on time, if you hang around on my blog at start time, you’ll see a post appear with the location of the nickel sale. Okay?

That’s how lots of people got in early last time.

-Frank Haywood

Apr

2010

WordPress AutoResponder Plugin Now Live

Sorry, I’m late, I got stuck while out and only got back a few minutes ago.

The Nickel Sale for the WordPress AutoResponder Plugin is now live and the link you’re after is:-

NICKEL SALE CLOSED

Apr

2010

WordPress AutoResponder Nickel Sale

UPDATE: The Nickel Sale is over but you can purchase the WordPress AutoResponder using the payment button below.

***

As you might have guessed from the title, the plugin I’ll be launching is a WordPress autoresponder.

I’ve long thought about how nice it would be to have a simple autoresponder *plugin* rather than have to mess about with setting it all up in an autoresponder service. I don’t know about you but I’ve always thought it a bit like using a sledgehammer to crack a peanut.

I have plenty of little niche blogs that I’d like to gather names and email addresses through, but because they’re niche sites, it’s never seemed worth the hassle of setting it up in the autoresponder service I use.

I mean, come on, how useful is it in my main niche to gather a list of people interested in petrol lawn mowers for instance? 😉

Even ignoring the niche aspect of the plugin, I figured that for lots of people just starting out that the last thing they’d purchase is a monthly autoresponder service.

If you stop and think about it, there are plenty of bloggers out there setting up their first sites who have read that they need to be gathering email addresses, but aren’t quite sure about it all, and don’t want to commit to a service.

So I looked around to see what was available in the way of AR plugins for us marketers. I expected to find at least one half decent plugin, but to my surprise the one that really looked promising didn’t allow you to gather a name – all you could get was an email address.

Also, the interface was a bit clunky and it meant you had to go to different areas of the WP admin panel to do different things. I wanted it all in one menu area.

And then there was no widget so you could easily place the form in the sidebar like I do on my personal blog. I know that’s very effective, and is important to have in.

There were a couple of other plugins that sort of claimed to do the job, but it was clear they’d all been planned by developers not marketers. Many of them are just simple list mailers and have no kind of delayed autoresponder ability. It seemed that nobody really knew quite what it was that WE needed.

And that’s why I created this plugin.

I fully intend to turn it into a powerful tool that’s a first choice for bloggers, and my pledge is that all minor version releases up to v2 will be free upgrades. I have some great ideas for it as I really know what’s lacking from many autoresponder services – I’ve felt that pain.

So on Friday 30th April at 6.00pm GMT (1.00pm EST), I’ll be kicking off this nickel sale.

***WARNING***

The last nickel sale I did a few months ago went a bit pear shaped as the autoresponder service I was using failed to send out the email until nearly 2 hours after it was supposed to go out. Many people were left waiting for it but didn’t get it until many sales had already gone through, and so didn’t get as good a deal as they would have done.

So my advice is, if you want to be one of the first to grab it and get it at it’s lowest price, keep an eye on my blog.

Regardless of whether or not the email is sent out on time, if you hang around on my blog at start time, you’ll see a post appear with the location of the nickel sale. Okay?

That’s how lots of people got in early last time, and that’s probably how it will happen this time too.

-Frank Haywood