3 Sexy WordPress Plugins that Will Boost Your Targeted Traffic

How Email Can be an Exceedingly Sexy Way to Attract Targeted Traffic

Many people think email is an old fart’s game. It isn’t hip. It’s not sexy.

And you know what? They’re probably right.

Many studies have shown that teens, for example, use email less frequently than those farther along life’s road.

And of course email isn’t hip either. Email hasn’t been hip since about 1998 when Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan starred in You’ve Got Mail.

And sexy? Well, it was probably never sexy.

So if your market is hormone-addled teens who care desperately about what’s cool this very half-second, then these plugins may not be for you. But if your market is pretty much anyone other than that, then email is still an excellent way to get new and returning highly targeted traffic to your site. And if you’re a site owner, that IS sexy.

Social media and bookmarking plugins can absolutely help you attract more visitors, and so you should use them, but in the pursuit of social media traffic, many site owners often forget boring old, dependable old, highly-personal old email.

These three types of email plugins can help you turn that amnesia around.

 1. Subscribe to Comments

These days it’s easy to find yourself automatically logged into a site that you never registered for. This, of course, is convenient when you want to leave comments. There’s no hassle of registering and then checking your email, etc.

For a site owner, then, it’s easier to attract comments. But just because someone has left a comment on your site doesn’t mean that they will remember to follow the conversation … or even remember that they visited your site.

The solution to this, of course, is to allow people to subscribe to comments. Return visitors (and especially those who have left a comment) are about the most targeted type of traffic you can get. They have already expressed interest in what you’re offering. Yet with so much on the net, it’s easy for them to forget that they expressed that interest.

PLUGINS

Subscribe to Comments Plugin

This plugin comes with a “full-featured subscription manager that your commenters can use to unsubscribe to certain posts, block all notifications, or even change their notification e-mail address!”

Subscribe To Comments Reloaded

This plugin allows site owner to enable “double opt-in.” This means users must confirm their subscription to the comments before they will receive notifications.

2. Subscribe to Updates

Some people may never leave a comment on your site, but they will still want to keep up with your new material. And some, of course, would like to do that through email.

These days, there is little that’s more personal than email. For many, the first thing they do in the morning is check their inboxes. People get hired by email, fired by email, sent pictures of loved ones by email, and some even propose marriage by email. (Yes, it’s happened.)

In short, email is a personal thing. And people protect their inboxes relentlessly.

And so when someone gives you their email address and ASKS you to send them updates, you know that they’re hooked. They are about as targeted a visitor as you will ever find.

PLUGINS

Of course you could join an expensive email marketing service like Aweber or ConstantContact, and they have their advantages, but if you just want keep your visitors updated with new material, then it’s easy to do for free.

Subscribe2

With this plugin, you can automatically send updates every time you publish a new post, or you can set the plugin to send updates on a periodic basis (such as once a day, once a week, etc.). You can also allow users to sign up for updates in only certain categories.

Feedburner Email Subscriptions (Email FAQ)

If you use Feedburner, you can offer your visitors email updates through their service. Feedburner sends out a daily digest of your updates. You can brand the emails with your own graphics, and you also have access to the users’ email addresses.

 3. Email a Friend

The only people who know what a person likes as much as that person are their friends and family. And so allowing your visitors to send their friends and family an email with a link to a page on your site is like having a volunteer army of your own personal evangelists combing through the populations of the world to find exactly the right people who should know about you.

PLUGINS

Recommend a Friend

In addition to offering the option to send an email to a friend, this relatively simply plugin also lets you tweet the post on Twitter, and it lets you post a message about the content on your Facebook wall (it’s not just a “Like” button).

Tell a Friend Widget Plugin 

This plugin is really much much more than an “email a friend” plugin, but it includes an “email a friend” component, so I include it here. In addition to the email component, you can post to several social media and social bookmarking sites; you can send your message to IM platforms; and you can even easily blog about the content on your own blog. It really is quite impressive.

Tell a Friend Widget Plugin – Email View

Sexy? You Decide

So, yes—email may not be sexy to some. It may not be hip. It may not be cool to the cool crowd in second period lunch. But if you run a website, targeted visitors surely are.

And if you liked this, you’ll probably also enjoy these other posts:

• Send HTML Emails with WordPress and the e-Newsletter Plugin
• Collaboration E-mails Plugin for WordPress

 

(Thanks to dollen for the image. Thanks to Changing World Photography for the image. Thanks to hoyasmeg for the image.)

Tags:

• comments
• email
• updates