In The Death of The Saleslet­ter, I talked about hid­ing con­tent so it could open up based on a user’s actions and thereby per­son­al­iz­ing the saleslet­ter, dynam­i­cally, on the fly.

You can hide con­tent on the same sales page, mak­ing the page look shorter and less intim­i­dat­ing. And only desired con­tent appears depend­ing on a user’s choices.

What does using this tac­tic help to do?

In some cases, peo­ple break saleslet­ters down into var­i­ous pages, and add links to them in the let­ter. I don’t rec­om­mend this with long-​​copy saleslet­ters. Tra­di­tion­ally, I rec­om­mend that the extra con­tent opens up in a pop-​​up win­dow instead, as to not distract.

But with this tac­tic, and other than the poten­tial for per­son­al­iza­tion, which is its biggest ben­e­fit, it means that peo­ple read­ing a saleslet­ter don’t have to be both­ered by…

Read the rest of this post or share it »

I often get requests from peo­ple ask­ing me what plu­g­ins do I use on this blog. Or, what are my favorite plu­g­ins. Some­times, I post about them. But these lists usu­ally become stale fast, because I test new plu­g­ins and change them all the time.

So I wanted to post an update and list some of my favorite plu­g­ins. How­ever, it was cum­ber­some to pick and choose which ones I wanted to post about because there are so many. So I’ve decided to do some­thing dif­fer­ent this year.

Using a plu­gin that lists all the plu­g­ins in use on a par­tic­u­lar blog (I’ll share that one with you in a moment), I man­aged to print a list of all my plu­g­ins in a sin­gle post.

How­ever, the descrip­tions you will read are those of the plu­gin authors. Some of them are poor and insuf­fi­cient. Oth­ers don’t explain how I use them specif­i­cally on this blog.

So I’ve also added a mini-​​description with addi­tional com­ments to each plu­gin to explain why, how, or where I’ve used it on this blog. I sin­cerely hope this list is use­ful to you. If it is, con­sider it a Christ­mas gift from me.

Read the rest of this post or share it »

I love read­ers’ ques­tions. And some­times, the same ques­tions keep com­ing up that I decide on post­ing a blan­ket answer on this blog to cover them.

I do this as a way to cre­ate con­tent for this blog, help my read­ers find the answers they’re look­ing for, and save me time from not hav­ing to answer the same ques­tions over and over again.

Prob­lem is, many peo­ple never find the blog post that answers their ques­tion, par­tic­u­larly if it’s old and sit­ting deep in the archives. And many peo­ple don’t take the time to search for it, because it’s work and it’s sim­ply eas­ier to con­tact my staff for the answer.

I thought about cre­at­ing a fre­quently asked ques­tions (FAQ) page. But I wanted a brain-​​dead easy solu­tion to be able to do this in a snap (much like post­ing to this blog), and offer more to my readers.

But also, I wanted one that would opti­mize my page for the search engines (where spe­cific key­words are included in the titles and ques­tions), and be easy enough for me to sim­ply answer ques­tions as I go along.

Finally, I found one…

Read the rest of this post or share it »