I’m running my blog www.pc-freak.net/blog for almost two years. Though beforehand I used to use the nanoblogger as my primary blog and this wordpress blog was just an experiment. Since almost a year and a bit more I’ve copmletely migrated to wordpress blogging platform.
I would say that I’m quite an active blogger and most of the days of the year I blog at least one post.
By so far I have blogged 715 times and my blog is starting to become massive, less that the amount of my blog subscribers is staying to the shocking number of 5 .
I believe my blog content is not that boring that for about a year and a half time just 5 people would get interested into receiving RSS notification whether I put online a new blog post.
As I took some time to consider what might be the cause I came to the conclusion that my current set up for blog RSS subscription via the Add-To-Any wordpress plugin is not that intuitive, and users needs to click at least 3 times before they could have added themselves as a new subscriber.
Therefore logically enough I needed a quick and easy way to improve my current situation with subscribers and increase the current critically low number of subscribers to a bit better one (let’s say few subscribers per week or month).
I took the time to research online about what kind of options do I have in my situation for an easy and silly way to install some kind of wordpress plugin which will have positive effect on my subscriptions.
After a while of useless googling, thankfully I came across something that looks promising for my set task.
The plugin which is supposed to do the trick is called What Would Seth Godin Do or as it’s shortly abbreviated WWSGD 😉
The plugin’s idea is actually very simple, if a new user comes across my wordpress powered blog, he is recognized as a referrer who is accessing the blog for a first time and therefore offered the option to subscribe in two intuitive simple clicks.
The offered default user message which could easily be changed via the What Would Set Godin Do options reads as follows:
If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
If a visitor visits your webpage 5 times, the message will automatically disappear from the screen.
The WWSGD plugin allows you to choose where do you want to position the RSS above shown text (e.g. you can set the text location to appear before or after your posts). It also gives some options to play with the plugin css styling via the configuration.
I just installed the plugin and it will take a while until I find out if it will provide my blog with some more subsribers but anyhow the plugin idea is good so I hope it will work out.
Here is a quick few liners which describes how to install the WWSGD plugin on your wordpress
1. Download the plugin What Would Set Godin Do plugin in your blog wp-content/plugins directoryI’ve made a mirror copy of the plugin so you can choose either to download it directly from wordpress extensions website.
linux:~# cd /var/www/blog/wp-content/plugins
linux:~# wget what-would-seth-godin-do.zip
...
linux:~# unzip what-would-seth-godin-do.zip
2. Login to wordpress administrator and go to;
Plugins -> Active
Look over the list of your installed wordpress plugins and find and enable the WWSGD plugin
3. Configure the WWSGD extension
Navigate to
Settings -> WWSGD
There set the options which fits you well. The WWSGD wordpress plugin works fine on my just updated wordpress 3.1 install even though it’s intitially prepared to run on older versions of wordpress.
Note that the What Would Set Godin Do extension will require you to have your browser cookies enabled in order to be able to distinguish between old and new site visitors.
Will the plugin really boost up my blog subscribers, I don’t know! Only time will tell. I’ll be glad if somebody already has experience with the plugin and can share if he has a positive results in increseing the count of blog subscribers.
I’ll be testing it and further comment back if the plugin is really useful in fulfilling my goal of increasing my blog subscriptions.
Feedback on any others who tried my article to install and set the plugin will be very much appreciated!
