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.