Wendy Cholbi

Technology-to-English Translator

AWeber introduces Subscribe by Commenting to the Web Form plugin

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I’ve previously written a guide to using the AWeber WordPress plugin. Last week, AWeber announced a new feature in the plugin that lets your blog commenters subscribe to one of your lists without filling out a separate form.

Specifically, this feature adds a simple checkbox to your blog comment form. If a commenter checks the box, the commenter is treated the same as someone who fills out your AWeber subscription form: They will receive a confirmation email message asking them to click a link to complete their subscription.

Want to see it in action? It’s on this very post! If you’re reading this in a feed reader or in your email, swing by the original blog post to see my shiny new checkbox.

It’s super-simple to activate on your own blog, and I’ll show you how in a minute.

First, let me be perfectly clear that the AWeber WordPress plugin does not automatically subscribe commenters to anything; they have to check the checkbox and complete AWeber’s double-opt-in confirmation process. You cannot set the checkbox to be checked by default (that would be a pretty clear violation of AWeber’s stated privacy policy, after all).

Commenters can subscribe with one click

I activated the new feature as soon as I heard about it, because I figure if someone is interested enough in my blog to leave a comment, and they’re not already subscribed to my Weekly Web Tips, I might as well give them a really easy way to subscribe without filling out another form or clicking through to another page.

Here’s how to activate this feature on your blog:

First, navigate to Settings –> AWeber Web Form in your WordPress dashboard. Assuming you’ve been able to connect your AWeber account to your installed plugin as described in my instructions for configuring the AWeber WordPress plugin, here’s what your plugin settings now look like:

You just need to do three quick things here:

  1. Select a list from the dropdown (if you only have one list in AWeber, that will be pretty easy).
  2. Edit the “Promotion text” to accurately reflect the list you’re asking your commenters to sign up to.
  3. Don’t forget to click the blue “Save” button!

The two checkboxes here are checked by default. The “Allow subscriptions when visitors comment” is the important one here. Leave it checked to give commenters the option to subscribe.

A note about blog registrations

The second checkbox, “Allow subscriptions when visitors register to your blog,” is irrelevant for most of us, because you shouldn’t even be allowing registrations to your blog unless you have a good reason, such as a membership site. To check this setting on your site, visit Settings –> General in your WordPress dashboard, and verify that there is no check in the box labeled “Anyone can register.”

On the other hand, if you do have a membership site and you want to add your members to an email list at the same time they sign up, this is a super-simple way to do it. In this case, you’d want to UNcheck the first box, so that only new registrations to your blog, and not blog commenters, are added to the membership email list.

Remember that you can’t autosubscribe people, though, so you will almost certainly have members who register but don’t bother to check the box and thus don’t receive your emails. So you’ll want to have a backup method to ask those members to subscribe.

Anyway, here’s a shot of my saved settings for the AWeber WordPress plugin after I chose my list and edited my promotion text (the very same text you’ll see next to the checkbos on the comment form of this post…infinite meta loop alert!):

As you can see, it’s quick and easy to add a subscription checkbox to your comment form with the addition of this new feature to the AWeber WordPress plugin.

Limitations of the AWeber WordPress plugin “Subscribe by Commenting” feature

The plugin only allows you to connect one AWeber list with your comment form, so if you have more than one list, make sure you choose the one most relevant to your blog commenters sitewide to add to your comment form. You can switch lists and re-save after you’ve selected one in the drop-down menu, but remember that the new list will now apply to all your comment forms. There’s no way to let commenters on different posts subscribe to different lists.

There’s also no way to let commenters subscribe to one list and blog registrations to another — both checkboxes are connected to the same list. So if you are contemplating the membership-site option, you won’t be able to also use this plugin to add newsletter subscribers from your comment form.

Even with these small limitations, the new “Subscribe by Commenting” feature is a welcome addition to the AWeber WordPress plugin.

Comment card image adapted from Boonerator on Flickr, used under a Creative Commons ShareAlike License

WordPress Plugin: AWeber Web Form

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Last month, AWeber released its official WordPress plugin, so their customers can now install web forms on WordPress websites without copying-and-pasting bits of code. In short, adding a sign-up form to your sidebar just got a lot easier.

As a big fan of both WordPress and AWeber, I’m delighted to see the two working together like this. And AWeber has announced that more applications are being developed — I, for one, would love to see seamless integration with E-Junkie.

But let’s get back to WordPress.

In the illustrated steps below, I’ll show you how easy it is to use this plugin on your own WordPress site — as well as describe a couple of limitations you should be aware of.

Step 1: Install the plugin in the usual way

If you need a refresher, go check out my post on how to install a WordPress plugin, or grab your copy of my free WordPress Essentials Toolkit by subscribing to my Weekly Web Tips (if you’re already subscribed, thank you! Your download link should be over there on the right).

If you’re using the search function inside WordPress, type the phrase “AWeber Web Form” (yes, with the quotes). You’ll find this handy plugin right away. Go ahead and install and activate it.

As soon as you activate the plugin, you’ll see a red-bordered message at the top of your screen (shown in Figure 1), telling you to update your settings to start using the plugin.

Click on the red “settings” link or navigate to Settings –> AWeber Web Form to proceed.

Figure 1: Upon activation, the plugin asks you to update your settings.

Step 2: Connect your AWeber account to your WordPress Dashboard

On the Settings page, as shown in Figure 2, you’ll see the two steps you need to complete to link your AWeber account with your WordPress Dashboard.

Figure 2: Two steps to connect your AWeber account to your WordPress Dashboard

Step 1 is to get an authorization code from AWeber. See where it says “Click here to get your authorization code”? Do exactly that, and you’re shown a mini-login form for AWeber, shown in Figure 3.

Enter your AWeber login name and password (not your WordPress login and password — they should be different for better security!) into the form and click “Allow Access.”

Figure 3: Fill in your AWeber login name and password to begin the connection process.

Once you’ve confirmed that you are the owner of the account in question by entering the correct login name and password, you’ll see a Success! message, followed by a verrrrry long string of random letters, numbers, and characters. This is your activation code.

The screen is shown in Figure 4. Although I grayed out the actual code for security purposes (because that code is unique to my account), I wanted you to see how long the code is so you know that’s normal.

Figure 4: Copy the incredibly long string of gibberish code AWeber gives you.

Now, you’ll need to select this entire piece of code and copy it.

Next, go to the AWeber Web Form settings page (the same page shown in Figure 2). Where it says “Step 2: Paste in your authorization code,” paste that long string of characters. The field where you’re pasting it does not look long enough to hold it, but it will. You won’t be able to see the entire string once you’ve pasted it — just the end.

Now click the blue “Make Connection” button.

Figure 5: Success connecting AWeber to WordPress.

If you copied and pasted the entire code correctly, you’ll get a success message as shown in Figure 5.

That whole make-a-connection step is the hardest part of using this widget, but fortunately it’s a one-time process — and whew, now it’s over!

The plugin helpfully tells you exactly what the next step is, and provides a link straight to your Widgets area so you can install a web form right away.

Step 3: Make sure you have a web form to use

This WordPress plugin doesn’t let you create or edit web forms — it lets you pick, preview, and use web forms you’ve already created inside your AWeber account. So if you don’t have any created, now would be the time to go and do that.

If you need instructions on this process, login to AWeber and follow their prompts, or check out the section on web forms in my Love Your List AWeber guidebook (until Friday, you can get a Personal Office Hour as an add-on to your Love Your List purchase — you can use your hour anytime before the end of February 2011).

Step 4: Set up your form widget

Inside your WordPress Dashboard, navigate to Appearance –> Widgets.

You’ll see a list of available widgets in the large left pane of this screen, and a list of widget areas in a column on the right.

Depending on your theme, you might see only one widget area, probably labeled “Sidebar,” or there might be many (the Atahualpa theme that I recommend comes with four different default sidebars, and you can add new widget areas, so make sure you’re adding your widget to the correct widget area!). In Figure 6, you can see that I created some extra widget areas for my header, and I’m adding this widget to an area called Header Widget 2.

As shown in Figure 6, click on the available widget labeled AWeber Web Form, and drag it over to one of your widget areas. When you see a dotted rectangle appear, you can let go and drop it.

Figure 6: Adding the AWeber Web Form widget inside your Appearance --> Widgets page

You can reorder your widgets (or drag them to different widget areas) by simply clicking and dragging. Once you’re satisfied with the location of the Web Form widget, click on the tiny gray triangle on the right side of the widget title, to open the widget settings.

Figure 7: Widget settings, step 1

Figure 8: Widget settings, step 2

The widget itself helpfully guides you through the process. Clicking the drop-down triangle next to “Step 1: Select A List,” as shown in Figure 7, gives you a list of your lists (if you have only one list, this step is super-easy — but it won’t be auto-selected).

After you select one of your lists, you should see a second drop-down area appear automatically, titled “Step 2: Select a Web Form.” Pick the web form you want to use — again, if you only have one form, there’s only one choice, but you still have to select it. It won’t be selected by default.

If you don’t see Step 2 appear automatically, or you see the wrong forms listed in Step 2 (both of these happened to me when I first set up this widget), you’ll need to clear your browser cache and cookies. Here’s how to clear your cache, and here’s how to clear your cookies.

When I first installed this plugin I found that I had to clear my cookies each time I changed the widget settings, which was annoying and counter-intuitive, but today when I played around with the plugin, I found I could change the settings without having to clear my cookies. So perhaps there was an issue that was fixed, or maybe the Internet was broken when I first installed the plugin.

Once you have both a list and a web form selected, a link labeled “preview form” appears below the dropdowns. This lets you see how the form will appear, so you don’t have to log into your AWeber account just to remind yourself what it looks like.

If you need to make any changes to the form, however, you will have to go to your AWeber account to make those changes. Anytime you change the form inside AWeber, the changes will instantly and automatically be reflected in your widget.

When you’re happy with your form’s appearance and placement, click “Save.”

And that’s it! You might want to go visit your website to make sure it’s showing up correctly (and isn’t too wide for your sidebar, or displaying any other formatting weirdness). Remember, if you need to resize the form, you’ll need to do that from inside your AWeber account.

Limitations of the AWeber Web Form plugin

This plugin is a great step forward for WordPress and AWeber users. I’m happily using it myself, in the header of my site (I edited the form to include a picture of the WordPress Essentials Toolkit cover, a customized Subscribe button, and text inviting people to get my free PDF by subscribing).

There are a couple of important limitations you should be aware of:

  1. You can only use one instance of the widget. Most of us will only need one, but this limitation could get frustrating if you want to place two different forms in two different places in your sidebar, or into two different sidebars.You can still use the old-fashioned way (copying and pasting AWeber’s form code) to add multiple forms to multiple places, but it would be nice if you could use this widget in more than one place.
  2. This plugin only works inside a widget. This means that you can’t use it to put a web form on a page or inside a post. And you can only place a web form into your header or footer if your theme has (or lets you add) widget areas into those sections of your site.
    So, for instance, I used the old-fashioned copy-and-paste method to place my newsletter sign-up form on my Subscribe page, and if I write a blog post inviting readers to sign up for a future teleclass, I won’t be able to use this plugin to insert the sign-up form.

I can still give this plugin a hearty thumbs-up, because what it does, it does well and seamlessly, and I love the way AWeber has built it to guide new users clearly and quickly through the process of installing, connecting, and setting it up. Many thanks to the AWeber team for developing this plugin!

Are you using this plugin on your site? Got a question about it? Leave me a comment!

And remember: You can call me for free during Thursday’s Office Happy Hour, or get your own Personal Office Hour if you need a helping hand with anything web-tech-related. The Personal Office Hour is a one-week experiment — I’m only selling them until December 24, but you have until the end of February 2011 to schedule and use your hour.

Teleclass Nuts & Bolts, part 2: Getting the Word Out

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Our story so far:

I’ve taught quite a number of teleclasses about various tech topics, but I only realized recently that the setting-up and managing of teleclasses themselves is a tech topic that you might need help with.

I’ll describe the technological steps that I go through each time I set up and run a new class, from beginning to end.

Last week I talked about conference lines. Now that you have a dedicated phone number for your teleclass, how do you give that number to the people who need it?

Open the doors or close the gate?

The first decision to make is whether to require people to sign up to join the class, or just broadcast the telephone number to the world.

If you are charging admission, you obviously want to collect payment before giving people the call-in details. An example is the Bite the Candy teleclass on backups and upgrades I’m doing on June 10 with Cairene MacDonald of Third Hand Works.

It costs $37 to register for the workshop, and Cairene has a nifty system set up so that buyers automatically receive an email message containing call details once their payment has been received (I’ll describe how I set up systems like this in future installments of this Teleclass Nuts & Bolts series).

If your teleclass will be free, it’s still a common and accepted practice to ask people to register. An example is the free teleclass called three ways to get more out of your AWeber investment (you can still sign up even though the class is over — you’ll get the recording), which I did with Shannon Wilkinson to promote our Love Your List workshop.

Why do you want people to sign up, instead of just handing out the number? So you can get your (electronic) hands on their email addresses, which you can then use to send marketing messages. In our case, we wanted to promote a paid workshop, and we also wanted a way to send people the recording after we held the live teleclass.

Of course, people will (rightfully) complain if you do this in a sleazy way, so it’s always a good idea to be upfront about what you’re going to do with their email address, and then make that something good. Such as sending them a recording of your class afterward, asking their opinion, thanking them with a special offer, or any number of other good-citizen marketing techniques.

Open to all

A note (and a question) about ungated calls: I’ve heard it said that giving something away (like an ebook) without requiring an email address means it will spread 20 to 50 times more people (not 20% to 50% more, but 20x to 50x). I’m not sure if those numbers apply to teleclasses, however (and I wonder if anyone has any information or statistics on this).

Teleclasses are different from ebooks, because they happen at a specific time. I’m sure that many more people will have access to the dial-in information if you make it public (for instance, simply publishing the phone number on your website, your blog, your Facebook and Twitter accounts, etc.). But that might not translate into more people actually calling in. Or it might. Does anyone out there know?

If you’re going to make the call-in information public anyway, I’d suggest going one step further and broadcasting your call as a live Internet radio show. You can do this for free at sites including BlogTalkRadio.com and TalkShoe.com (I personally prefer TalkShoe because there are no restrictions on when you can broadcast, you can have more live callers, and you can also schedule “private” broadcasts). People can listen on their computers or call in, you can easily get a recording (which will live on in your public archives, too), and you also get a bit more exposure by using the Internet radio site as a platform.

Countdown to the call

Whichever way you choose to set your call up, you’ll want to make yourself a Call Countdown Calendar, scheduling your publicity-generating activities so they build to a peak in the day or so before your call.

This is a chance to use your normal online activities to promote your call. For instance, if you hang out on Twitter, tweet a few times each day, and ask for retweets. Update your Facebook or LinkedIn status to include a note that you’re excited about your teleclass (with a link, of course!). Write a blog post (or several).

If you asked people to register for the call, I highly recommend that you set up a reminder email message to go out to everyone who registered, on the day before or the day of (the morning of the teleclass day is best, in my opinion). If you added them to an email list service like AWeber, it’s a cinch to set up a broadcast message containing the call-in details.

In my next Teleclass Nuts & Bolts installment, I’ll talk about recording your teleclass.

What’s an email list and do you need one?

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Last week I talked about some uses of autoresponders in managing your email. This week I want to talk about the idea of an email list.

Email lists: The conventional wisdom

If you’ve read anything about Internet marketing, you’ve probably heard the prevailing view, which is that you must have an email list. Apparently, you’re supposed to start collecting names as soon and as aggressively as possible — before you even have a product, before you even have a website, before you even know where your business is going.

You’re supposed to “capture” (yep, that’s a technical term) as many email addresses as possible, as quickly as possible. Then you’ll have a group of people who have given you permission to send them email. So as soon as you have a product, you can serve up a tantalizing advertisement to your captive audience. A small percentage of them will click through, a smaller percentage will actually buy the thing you’re advertising, and you’re in business.

This is what’s called a sales funnel. You start with the wide end (everyone on the Internet), and narrow it down to smaller and smaller numbers, until the few who drip through the bottom are actually bringing you money.

Why the conventional wisdom is exactly backward

The sales funnel is old-school marketing. It worked in old-school circumstances. I believe it’s time to not only treat people differently, but act differently as businesses.

Seth Godin wrote a free ebook called Flipping the Funnel three years ago in which he talked about the power of the Web and social media in marketing. I agree with much of what he said then, but what follows is purely my own take on the whole sales funnel metaphor.

Here are three reasons the conventional “sales funnel” wisdom fails to understand the real world, including the transformational online businesses we’re trying to build:

  • It’s mechanical. Each prospect at a given level is treated as an interchangeable cog. The whole process is viewed as a machine, which will produce the proper amount of a desired output (money) if you feed it the right number of cog-prospects and program it correctly. But the people you want to work with are individuals, not cogs. And your business is alive and growing, not a piece of machinery.
  • It’s violent. You’re supposed to “capture” these email addresses, then “target” people with messages that will “convert” them into cash for you. Ouch, I say! Do you want your Right People to feel hounded and hunted, or do you want them to feel like they’re getting the greatest gift in the world just by working with you?
  • It’s scarcity-based. This zero-sum system treats money as a precious, limited resource, and assumes that all your sophisticated marketing machinery is just a way to extract it from your customers. No matter if they’re empty husks afterward — you’ve got their money, so you win. What if, instead, you treated money as a renewable resource (to borrow an environmental term) and cultivated your customers into a sustainable ecosystem instead of a one-way trip through a funnel?

So what’s this got to do with email lists?

OK, back to the email list question. I love and use email lists; they are essential to my businesses. I believe you can collect email addresses with integrity and that both parties can (and should) benefit.

If I didn’t believe this, I wouldn’t be OK with asking people to subscribe to the blog. And I wouldn’t happily recommend email list provider AWeber and offer AWeber consulting services.

But an email list is just one tool, just one small branch of my small-business tree. It only makes sense to have it (and cultivate it by sending regular messages) if I’ve got a trunk to support it, and roots to nourish it.

That’s why the advice to start gathering names first seems backward to me. I believe that building a list is an activity that grows naturally out of providing a valuable product or service (just as branches grow naturally from a tree trunk).

What are you saying? is a much more important question than how many people are on your list?

With the wide availability of RSS, and the proliferation of blogs, an email list is no longer a one-size-fits-all must-have marketing tool.

Instead, an email list is only a good idea if:

  1. You have something to say
  2. You have some idea of who your Right People are
  3. Email is the best way for your Right People to receive this information
  4. Email is the best way for you to provide the information to your Right People
  5. You’re ready and able to invest upwards of $120 per year to manage your list professionally (that is, protect yourself from being labeled a spammer)

What do you think? I’d love to read your reactions. I know this is a big topic (and apparently I’m totally incapable of being brief!), and worth discussing further. So leave a comment and let’s talk!

Until next week,
Wendy Cholbi, your friendly neighborhood swim-goggle-wearing technology-to-English translator

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