Vince Samios - Internet Entrepreneur

Email Lists in Word Press – Contact Commenters Plugin

Make sure to get FREE DIY SEO link packages Vince's Links

Quite a few people just received an email from me, the title read: “What is your web effect [NAME]?” – and yes – unfortunately it said exactly that. I’d intended for [NAME] to be replaced with the recipient’s name, sadly that didn’t happen.

Let me wind the story back for a minute – This is something I’ve been contemplating for a while, but I’ve never sat down to actually try to find a solution – how can I email everyone that’s ever made a comment on my blog?

I’ve been collecting email addresses of people that connected with the content on my blog enough to gave their details freely, and added their comments on an article I’ve written. Some of these people might be interested in future articles, and from a marketing perspective it would be great if I could email these people regularly.

I wanted to email people who have commented on my wordpress blog in the past, and I wanted a plugin to handle my email lists.

The solution came from an obscure wordpress plugin called Contact Commenters - it’s so obscure it’s only ever been downloaded 1,695 times! – This, compared to the All in One SEO Pack which has been downloaded 4.8 million times in total, and already 3,480 times just today!

The download and install is the same as any other wordpress plugin – download, unzip, and upload into the wp-content/plugins directory. Activate the plugin from the plugins page in your wordpress admin… voila….

In the tools menu you’ll see a Contact Commenter’s sub-menu - it takes you to this page:

As you can see in the image above, Contact Commenters wordpress plugin allows you several list options:

1 – Email all commenter’s
2 – Email all commenter’s who haven’t been active in the past 7 days
3 – Email all commenter’s who commented within a date range
4 – Email everyone who commented on a post
5 – Email your top 10 commenter’s from the past X days
6 – Email all new commenter’s from the past X days
7 – Email up to 5 email addresses you enter manually

That’s pretty comprehensive if you ask me – and kinda cool! Emailing new commenter’s is a great way to welcome people to your blog and introduce them to your other content. Emailing inactive commenters is a great way to bring people back to your blog, and emailing everyone who commented on a particular post lets you notify people of updates or related posts.

All very cool!

Clicking through to Step 2 Contact Commenter’s Plugin allows you to remove people from your list and compose your email.

I sent an email to a selection of 135 commenter’s – I tried to make the most of the [NAME] tag, which will be replaced by the commenters name, in both the email title and email body – I later discovered this was only replaced with the commenter’s name in the email body – possibly a simple oversight but one which resulted in 135 people receiving very obviously impersonal emails from me – sorry about that…

You can send unique emails to all people, or you can BCC everyone to the same email – for deliverability purposes I chose to email everyone individually.

I clicked “Send Mails” and the waited…

It took about 3 minutes for the page to finish loading – it would have been nice to receive a notification letting me know all emails had been sent – but apparently they were anyway.

Within seconds I had an email in my inbox from myself – as you can see the [NAME] tag wasn’t replaced in the title, but it was replaced in the email body.

All in all I would recommend this plugin – use it judiciously and don’t spam your readers, but also make the most of the tools at your disposal.

The Contact Commenters Plugin for Wordpress is a new alternative to auto-responder list building that come with some extra barriers to list building. I also recommend adding a little line into the theme code below the comment form “We may send you emails once in a while, by submitting your comment you consent to receive these emails” – it shouldn’t be necessary but better safe than sorry

UPDATE:

I’ve just had an email from Ajith - the developer of the Contact Commenters plugin:

Vince,

I appreciate your review and feedback. I have extended the [NAME] tag support for subject line as well.

Best Regards,
Ajith Edassery

Awesome!

Tags: Contact Commenters, Email Lists, Wordpress Plugin

Caring Sharing Internet Marketing

Bill hicks says to his audience “By the way if anybody here is in Advertising or Marketing… Kill yourself!”

Amusingly, retrospectively, Mark Attwood used to pull this anecdote out at the internet marketing seminars we did. Life can be so ironic… (Take note, this sentence is also here for SEO purposes… SEO Karma? Also amusing… and quite a cool concept…)

But I think we can do a bit of caring sharing internet marketing… and actually… to our benefit… Here’s three ways how…

Affiliate Links

Declare your affiliate links and provide an alternative non-affiliate link. – like I have in my Domain Samurai Review and DomainFace Review – (Take note, some more healthy on-page SEO with good internal linking…)

If anybody follows Jason Moffatt (and his (apparently not) self appointed alias “Profit Moffatt”), he actually inspired me to first start declaring my affiliate links and providing non-affiliate alternatives… He was just such a bloody rowdy salesman, and then he’d dump an affiliate link in your face…

And every single time I saw his affiliate links I thought “Right, so everything else Jason said, was bullshit… He’s just trying to earn a desperate buck.”

I didn’t trust the things Jason Moffatt was telling me about, and actively distrusted them. If you don’t follow Jason, I won’t recommend him - his email subscription form is on his homepage http://www.jasonmoffatt.com

So from then on, I declared my affiliate links on my website, and I gave people the option to click on a non-affiliate link. I only write genuine reviews, and I would prefer people take me seriously than earn a buck. My integrity is worth more than any affiliate link.

Remember how I said caring sharing Internet Marketing works in our favour? (I hope this doesn’t cheapen the motives behind it, but here goes…)

400% increase in CTR, and then a further 400% increase in conversion to sales… 16X more sales…. by providing a non-affiliate link option!!! The boys at Market Samurai and Domain Samurai noticed a similar thing when they declared an affiliate link…

Guest Blog Posts

I wrote about guest blog posts literally half an hour ago … By letting people write guest blog posts on your site, in exchange for guest blog posts on thiers, you become the central hub and authority in your niche – read the guest blog post strategy here.

Do-Follow commenting

Since I’ve got nothing to lose by removing the no-follow attribute from comments on my blog – I’ve installed the do-follow plugin for wordpress. When you comment on my blog you receive link juice, and I receive a little bit of extra content. Further, I build a larger audience of repeat visitors because they are invested in my website. Cool…

Get the do-follow plugin for wordpress here.

There are ethical and moral ways to earn money online (notice I said “earn” – not “make”) – stop trying to screw people and be genuine! [Most] Humans are instinctively aware of deception and falsehoods.

Tags: Affiliate Links, Affiliate Marketing, Bill Hicks, do follow, Internet Marketing, Jason Moffatt, Mark Attwood, Moral Marketing, Morality, Profit Moffatt, SEO, Wordpress Plugin

Contact Form 7 IP Address, Date/Time and Page URL

In a previous post I wrote about adding an IP address field into Contact Form 7 1.9.3

Since then there have been major updates to Contact Form 7, which renders the initial how-to inaccurate.

Luckily - in recent updates Contact Form 7 has added a new tag [wpcf7.remote_ip] which replaces the Adding IP part of my tutorial.

Two functions which haven’t been added and which now no-longer work with my old how-to are adding date and time to Contact Form 7, and adding the Source Page into Contact Form 7.

The function for adding the source page is still the same: Continue Reading…

Tags: Contact Form 7, IP Address, wordpress contact form, Wordpress Plugin

Adding Visitor IP and Current Page to “Contact Form 7″ Wordpress Plugin

I’ve loved using the Contact Form 7 Wordpress Plugin so far, but it was missing two VITAL features:

I was unable to send the visitors IP address with the form submission, and I was unable to tell which exact page the form submission came from if I was using the form on more than one page.

Here is a fix for both of those little short falls:

Edit the plugin - You can do this through the wordpress plugin editor http://YOUR-DOMAIN-NAME/wp-admin/plugin-editor.php

Paste the following code just above the last line of code - The last line of code is simply “?>”

function curPageURL() {
$pageURL = ‘http’;
if ($_SERVER["HTTPS"] == “on”) {$pageURL .= “s”;}
$pageURL .= “://”;
if ($_SERVER["SERVER_PORT"] != “80″) {
$pageURL .= $_SERVER["SERVER_NAME"].”:”.$_SERVER["SERVER_PORT"].$_SERVER["REQUEST_URI"];
} else {
$pageURL .= $_SERVER["SERVER_NAME"].$_SERVER["REQUEST_URI"];
}
return $pageURL;
}

Next search for this line of code which should appear directly in the middle of the plugin:

$form .= ‘<div style=”display: none;”>’;

Below this line, paste the following code.

// Addition By: Vince Samios, http://vincesamios.com
$curpageurl = curpageurl();
$visip=$_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'];
$form .= ‘<input type=”hidden” name=”page-url” value=”‘ . $curpageurl . ‘” />’;
$form .= ‘<input type=”hidden” name=”visitor-ip” value=”‘ . $visip . ‘” />’;

Now you can reference these values in the email like you would any other form field. Example below

Page: [page-url]
IP: [visitor-ip]

Another useful piece of code by “Travis” is for adding the contact form in PHP - this is useful if you would like to include it in the theme.

echo apply_filters(’the_content’,’

Article Writing

Here is a list of services Niki offers out of the box - you can also ask for something specific in the form below.

Select from the following:

Web Copy - Quality writing for websites

SelectWeb Copy 250 Words - £25 EachWeb Copy 400 Words - £35 EachWeb Copy 650 Words - £55 EachWeb Copy 800 Words - £65 EachWeb Copy 1000 Words - £80 Each - Quantity

---

Content rewriting - £3 per 100 words

SelectLess than 500 words500-2,500 words2,500-10,000 wordsOver 10,000 words

---

E-Book Writing - Formatter and PDF'ed

SelectUp to 40 pages - £400Up to 100 pages - £900Over 100 pages - £900 + £8.50/page

---

Regular Blog Writing and Posting - 350 Words - One link

Select10/Month - £30015/Month - £40030/Month - £750

---

Your details:

Name*
Email*
Primary Keywords
Notes:
In order to verify that you are human, you will need to enter the captcha code below into the corresponding box.
Are you human?

‘);

Update:
Added time and date of submission - Add this in the same place as the Visitor IP and Current Page additions.

date_default_timezone_set(’GMT’);
$timedate = date(’l jS \of F Y h:i:s A’);
$form .= ‘<input type=”hidden” name=”time-date” value=”‘ . $timedate . ‘” />’;

You can reference the time and date in the contact enquiry email by using:

[time-date]

Tags: Contact Form 7, IP Address, Page URL, Theme, Wordpress Plugin