Kill Annoying Popups.

Are you blogging yet? If not, you should consider it. Your business will benefit in more ways than you can imagine.

Here are just a few of those many benefits:

• Sales lead generation
• customer acquisition
• increased retention
• online networking
• automated e-mail marketing
• product update announcements
• special offers and promotions
• …and many more.

When you set up your blog, you need to implement systems that ensure readership continually increases.

One way is to give people the option to get short email reminders each time you add a new blog entry (i.e. so they can ‘subscribe’ to the blog and not miss any important postings.)

You can see my blog subscription form at the top right of this page (under my photo), and you may also see a ‘popup’, which is the form that slides down over the top of the page.

Both of those mechanisms allow people to susbcribe. But the latter mechanism, the popup, is very effective at getting people to subscribe, mainly because it’s so ‘interruptive’… you can’t miss it.

Unfortunately, this positive is also a negative.

Kill the popup!

The problem has been that once subscribed, (and maybe you are a subscriber), you’ve still been getting the popup each new day you visit.

I realise how annoying that has been, and I’ve been meaning to fix it for ages. Thankfully I have done now, thanks to fellow blogger Hill Robertson.

He’s created a simple, easy to follow online course that explains how to edit a WordPress blog, (which is the type of blog I use and recommend), so that the AWeber popup disappears once someone subscribes.

But if someone visits my blog today and leaves without subscribing, they will still see the popup in future. It’s simple yet effective.

I’ve implemented it, and from now on my subscribers will be able to visit this blog without seeing the annoying (but oh so effective) popup.

Thanks Hill!

-Ed.

PS. I hope the blogs I read on a daily basis kill their subscriber popups also. (And let’s spread the word!)

PPS. If you don’t blog, here are the three steps to get started:

1. Get a blog! I strongly recommend WordPress because it’s free, reliable and powerful. (My Ultimate Business Blogging home-study programme explains how (and why) to get started with it).

2. Then you need an AWeber account (aff.) which let’s you add a blog subscription facility in the way described above.

3. Finally… kill the popup (for subscribers) using Hill’s technique.

Then all that’s required is a strong and determined commitment to blog — as often as you can and to a very high standard. Easy!

PPPS. Technical Tip: You don’t need to read the following tip if you’re not already blogging (in the way recommended above) or are non-technical.

Hill’s technique works by creating a cookie immediately after subscription. Each time subscriber’s visit the blog thereafter, if the cookie exists the popup is blocked. It’s a great solution.

The only problem is that if the subscriber uses a different computer, or more likely, clears their browser cookies, they’ll start seeing the annoying popup again.

So I’ve made one small tweak — the link in my subscriber’s (AWeber blogcast) e-mail sends them first to a hidden page, the cookie is refreshed, then they’re redirected to my blog homepage to read the latest stuff.

And thus subscribers who visit my blog (by clicking the link in their reminder e-mail) will never again see “that bl**dy popup” as one of my subscribers referred to it when I met him at my last seminar

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