How to Drive Visitors to Action with Wordpress

This is a strange post to be writing, since I’m going to tell you how to create a very rudimentary facsimile of our upcoming social marketing manager using only your Wordpress blog. I think our upcoming product is much more powerful, so I’m not that worried. Anyway, let’s get on with it!

Get your visitors to take action!

The nature of blogs, syndication and search has created an environment in which your bounce rate (the number of people who visit only one page on your site) is probably very high. So how do you lure visitors into exploring more of your site, signing up for your newsletter, or buying products?

You could try banner ads, but hardly anyone clicks on (or sees) them. You could write another blog post, but those get buried amongst all the others. The truth is, there’s not much in the way tools for adding marketing messages to websites.

Marketing messages are unique: you want them to be persistent during their lifespan, following your visitors everywhere, and then you want them to disappear, to be replaced with the next offer.

Here’s a simple method for adding a customizable HTML message to all your blog posts that you can use to drive visitors to action.

How to Drive Your Visitors to Action with Wordpress

Requirements:

• One self-hosted Wordpress blog. This might work on Wordpress.com sites, too, I don’t know.
• A theme with a functions file (functions.php).
• Decent knowledge of Wordpress will help — a lot.

Register a new dynamic sidebar

Under the Appearance menu, click on Editor. Select the Theme Functions file (functions.php). Add a new dynamic sidebar with a unique name, I used “Action” in the example below.

if ( function_exists('register_sidebar') )
register_sidebar(array(
'name' => 'Action',
'before_widget' => '<div class="action">',
'after_widget' => '</div>',
'before_title' => '<h4>',
'after_title' => '</h4>',
));

Paste the new dynamic sidebar into your posts template

Now, find your posts template. It could be Main Index Template (index.php) or Single Post (single.php), or something else. Basically, we’re looking for the template file displays individual posts. Into this file, paste the following code after the post div (usually <div class=”post”>). Make sure the name (“Action”) of your dynamic sidebar is the same as what you entered in the Theme Functions file above.

<?php if(is_single()): ?>
<?php if ( !function_exists('dynamic_sidebar') || !dynamic_sidebar('Post Action Message') ) : ?>
<?php endif; ?>
<?php endif; ?>

Note: You’ll notice that the first and last lines of code above check to make sure that we’re on a single post page before displaying our “Action” sidebar. If you’re pasting this code on the Single Post (single.php) template, these lines (1st, 4th) aren’t necessary.

So what’d we just do? We added a new dynamic sidebar element to our theme, placed after every post. In Wordpress, dynamic sidebars can be filled with widgets, little bundles of cool functionality. Usually, these contain many widgets and appear in a column next to your blog posts, but we’ve got special plans.

Add an action message

Now, click on the Widgets link, under the Appearance menu. You should see a large list of widgets in the middle of the page, and a list of sidebars on the right. Find your new “Action” sidebar and open it. Drag a “Text” widget from the middle of the page over the body of the “Action” sidebar. You’ve got it right when a black dashed box appears.

Once you’ve added the text widget, open it and add whatever message you want. You can include HTML links, too.

Add some styling

Lastly, you’re going to want to add some style to your action messages. You can paste this into your style sheet as a starting point. Customize it to blend in.

.action {
margin:20px 0;
font-size:16px;
line-height:150%;
border:2px dotted #a90;
background-color:#ffd;
padding:15px 10px;
}
.action h4 { font-weight:bold;}

Ta-da! We’re done

As you can see right below this post, that’s what you get. The message is easily editable via Wordpress to contain whatever text and/or links you want, so you can drive visitors to sign up for a newsletter, follow you on twitter, etc., and you can style it however you like.

Obviously, we’ve got a lot more great features in our soon-to-launch social marketing manager, but I wanted to give you a taste of what adding action-oriented marketing content to your posts can do to improve your site and your business. Hopefully, this will help you squeeze every last drop of value from your hard-earned Google juice.

Don’t forget: Send us a note on Twitter @heyindieinc if you’re interested in being part of our early beta. If you made a 2010 resolution to get serious about social marketing, improve your conversions, grow your social presence, and increase your ROI, then HeyIndie can help.

Lean Startup Update: January '10 Edition

Feature freeze!

Here at HeyIndie HQ, we’ve been following the principles of lean startup development, as outlined by Steve Blank, Eric Ries, and Sean Ellis. I don’t think we’re following to the letter, but you do your best when bootstrapping. I feel good about getting out of the office to meet with potential customers on a regular basis, and being really focused when it comes to our feature set.

So far, we’re learning a lot about how our customers work: what their needs and pain points are. There’s a lot more to customer interviews, of course, but we’re not quite there yet. In addition, being bootstrapped means we’re still working on other projects, and sometimes, progress can be slow. But extra time can also be your friend, allowing ideas to ferment and the best ones to bubble up to the top.

At the center of all this, we want to build a great product. Something that’s clearly useful and fun to use. Riffing off Andrew Chen’s post, Minimum Desirable Product, I can see where we are mixing and matching strategies to suit our situation. We are very focused on design and user experience, for example, since that’s our core competency. This is a bit dangerous, because we’re reacting to our own tendencies, not the market, but again, if possible, you always want to make the best impression possible. It’s a balancing act.

We’ve been working on this product for about 4 months now, 3 if you don’t count December, which was pretty much a wash given the holidays (again, bootstrapping has its minuses). But I feel like we’ve been focused on our initial product vision and getting to alpha testing.

So, what haven’t we done?

• No payment processing. It’s definitely our goal to launch as a subscription service. But we have to make it through an invite-only alpha first, and we don’t need to charge anyone for that. We have a couple possible subscription management vendors in mind, both with simple RESTful interfaces, so integrating payments when we need to will be a snap.
• No “fun” features: We have some great ideas to give the service some extra “kick” in the fun pants. But those are complicated feature sets that we don’t fully understand yet.
• No advanced analytics: We’re collecting a lot more data than we’re displaying right now. But we know we don’t want to be Google Analytics, so we want to be very strategic about adding new stats.
• No mobile support: We’re going to need this at some point, but until we gather some data, we won’t know how important this feature really is. Better to wait and see.
• No platforms: It would be easy to get caught up in building plugins and interfaces, but we’re going to wait until we know who our customers are.