This Little Tool Quadrupled My Signups

After my recent push for Robert Plank’s Speed Copy Secrets copy­writ­ing spe­cial report on how to write copy in under an hour, I wanted to test a few other things from Robert, since he’s a gifted pro­gram­mer and offers some neat scripts.

(Actu­ally, I recently bought every­thing from Robert I could get my hands on, and so far I’m thor­oughly impressed. Specif­i­cally, his “Full-​​Blast PHP” and “Sales Page Tac­tics Vol­umes 1–3″ prod­ucts are fabulous.)

I’m test­ing just a cou­ple of Robert’s scripts on this blog, and early results are stun­ning. Let me share with you a few test results…

After read­ing Dar­ren Rowse’s eye-​​opening blog post, where he reported his optins mul­ti­ply­ing after inte­grat­ing a popover optin box, I wanted to test one, too.

In fact, I wanted to test a lightbox-​​like popover optin form. What “light­box” means is, the popover appears over the web page, while the back­ground around it dark­ens and blurs so that empha­sis is placed on the optin form.

Granted, Awe­ber does offer some­thing sim­i­lar. But I use GetRe­sponse. I also wanted one specif­i­cally for Word­Press, and I wanted more con­trol over the look and feel — espe­cially the color of the faded background.

(You’ll see why in a moment!)

To that end, I decided to use Robert Plank’s Word­Press plu­gin “Action Popup,” which you can use with most autore­spon­ders out there. (It even comes with step-​​by-​​step instruc­tions and even a video!)

Results? Well, check this out…

I typ­i­cally get around 40 unique sub­scribers a day. Some­times I get more, other times a bit less. This is from straight, organic traf­fic, as I don’t adver­tise my blog at all.

First day, 124 subscribers.

Sec­ond day, 188.

Third day (today), 137 and still growing!

Pretty impres­sive — and the day is not over yet. If you do the math, get­ting an aver­age of 150 new sub­scribers a day will grow my list by 50,000+ in one year. And that’s with­out any adver­tis­ing at all.

Here’s the inter­est­ing part.

Through­out the day, I was test­ing var­i­ous col­ored back­grounds for the fade-​​out effect around the pop-​​up. Light­box is typ­i­cally gray and dark, but Robert’s plu­gin allows you to pick dif­fer­ent colors.

(It also allows you to choose either “on entry” or “on exit attempt,” as well as the appear­ance effect — such as bounc­ing, fly­ing, fad­ing in, etc — and the fre­quency. I have mine set to once to reduce as much fric­tion as possible.)

What I’ve found is this: using a color that matches and blends with the blog’s color scheme gen­er­ated the best results. (About 18–20% more.) Why? Maybe it’s a con­sis­tency or brand­ing issue. I don’t know. But here’s an example…

Over­all, I lit­er­ally tripled (and some­times even quadru­pled) my daily optin rate strictly from my blog. So my results seem to par­al­lel Dar­ren Rowse’s.

How­ever, one caveat: results are still too early to tell since it’s been only three days — plus, it’s the week­end and traf­fic is usu­ally a bit lower. But I’m eager to see the results over a period of 2–3 weeks. I’ll report them back here, or via Twit­ter.

Also, another thing to note is that Dar­ren also com­pared pageviews and time spent, mean­ing that, while the popover may be a bit intru­sive, it did not deter readers.

Granted, this should be done on a case-​​by-​​case basis, as every blog has its own read­er­ship, and every blog and every mar­ket is dif­fer­ent — hence why I’m eager to see the results over a period of time to avoid jump­ing to a pre­ma­ture conclusion.

Nev­er­the­less, it looks promis­ing to say the least.

Another inter­est­ing stat: Robert also offers a vari­ety of other plu­g­ins. One of them is Action Optin. This plu­gin uses Ajax to refresh the optin box alone so that no new web page needs to be called when the optin is filled out.

It refreshes right there, on the page.

Plus, a cus­tomiz­able con­fir­ma­tion mes­sage appears in the place where the optin form used to be, indi­cat­ing that the subscriber’s request was processed.

This is great if you have sales copy and you don’t want to push your read­ers away — they stay on the page (and the page doesn’t reload), so they don’t lose their place or the momen­tum in the sales process.

(It’s also a sep­a­rate script, so you don’t have to use it with Word­Press exclu­sively. Any web page will do, includ­ing saleslet­ters. And it’s per­fect if you pre­fer unob­tru­sive, on-​​page optin forms rather than pop-​​ups.)

But the one plu­gin I’ve been test­ing for a while now (you’ve prob­a­bly seen it on this blog already) is Robert Plank’s Action Com­ments.

It adds an extra check­box to the blog’s com­ment form that asks com­men­ta­tors if they wish to sub­scribe to my list. In other words, as they com­ment, they can join my list at the same time. All in one fell swoop. Nifty, eh?

(Check out the com­ment box at the bot­tom of this blog post for an exam­ple. Bet­ter yet, leave a comment!)

This one boosted my blog’s sub­scribers by about 34%. (How­ever, this is not an empir­i­cal num­ber by any stretch, because it’s totally based on how many com­ments I get.)

But over­all, these are very inter­est­ing stats.

Plus, Robert’s cus­tomer ser­vice is also very impres­sive. I had a glitch using one of his plu­g­ins, and he was quick and eager to fix it for me.

Again, I’m thor­oughly impressed by Robert Plank and his many scripts. And this is just the begin­ning — there are a few more scripts I’m going to test on saleslet­ters and other, non-​​marketing blogs I own.

Click here to visit Robert Plank’s blog.

About the Author

Last 5 Posts By Michel Fortin

• Superior Value Equals Superior Sales
• On Not Playing The Blame Game
• The Future of The Internet is Cloudy
• Carve Your Niche By Dominating One
• Can Copy And Content Commingle?

Other Related Posts

• WordPress Plugins Used On The Michel Fortin Blog (68)
• There's More to Tracking than Conversion (13)
• Monetize WordPress With These Plugins (27)
• How I Grow My Blog Organically Using These 5 Tips (56)
• How I Broke Into Copywriting (12)