wordpress - Small Business Marketing Consultant

If you are anything like me, even though you’ve heard popup forms can help you grow your e-mail list, you’ve resisted using them because we hate being interrupted by them right when we are trying to figure out if a site has useful information or not. Now there is a plugin that can help you build your list without aggravating your website visitors.

The Pippity WordPress plugin not only makes it super easy to create great looking popup forms, it also give you tons of control over how that popup behaves.

Creating a popup form is dead simple. You pick a template, customize it by following the steps in the wizard, hook it up to your email list provider and you’re good to go. While it’s simple to get up and running, you can still get fairly sophisticated with your design.

Pippity has built in support for the following email list providers:

Aweber
Madmimi
MailChimp
Constant Contact
1ShoppingCart
Get Response
Campaign Monitor
Graphic Mail
iContact

Is your email provider not on the list? Not to worry, you can cut an paste your sign up form html into Pippity and it will take care of the rest (this is method I used to set up Pippity to work with Infusionsoft).

Once you create your form you can control when it displays. You can specify the time before it appears, whether you want to wait until someone gets finishes reading an article, and how many pages someone views before they see the popup. You can set filters to exclude the popup from certain pages. You can also control whether a popup shows depending on the page or post category.

Pippity also track analytics so you can see how well your popup form (or forms, you can create as many as you like) are performing. If you create more than one popup you can compare analytics between any two forms. You can even to A/B testing with Pippity forms.

Pippity’s pricing is incredibly affordable, starting at $49 for a single site. You can get a 5 site license for $87, and if you are a developer you can get an umlimited license for $164

You can learn more about Pippity by viewing the 30 second video on the homepage of their website.

One of the reasons I’m such a big fan of WordPress (it’s one of the main tools we use in delivering our Managed Marketing Services) is because there are so many great tools that and plugins that are developed and shared by members of the WordPress community. Today I want to tell you a little bit about one of those tools – the Editorial Calendar plugin.

Regular readers here know that we Duct Tape Marketing consultants believe in using a calendar to keep your marketing system on track. Mapping out your topics, events, announcements, etc., on a calendar is a great way to make sure you create blog content on a regular and consistent basis. The Editorial Calendar plugin gives you a nice, visual way to do just that right inside your WordPress dashboard.

WordPress already has a handy feature that allows you to write posts today and schedule them to appear on your blog in the future. This is great for people who like to bang out several posts in one sitting and then release them throughout the week (or month). The Editorial Calendar makes this a little bit easier by providing a visual calendar, which makes it more intuitive for those who want to publish a post every Monday and Wednesday for example.

Personally, I like like the drag and drop calendar interface because it allows me to plan my schedule, but then easily rearrange it as needed. For example, I may make a plan to write about certain topics as part of improving my search engine rankings for a particular set of search terms. I can map out my post topics for the coming month that will focus on those terms. Let’s pretend I publish new posts every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. On Tuesday night, the news is all-a-buzz of a new mega merger that results in the new TwiGoogleBookLink+ social network. Of course, I have to write about that and publish it on Wednesday. I have two posts (the mega merger news + my original post) or I can quickly drag my original Wednesday post to a different day.

If you combine the Editorial Calendar plugin with the ability to leave a post in Draft mode (so the public never sees it) you can come up with creative uses for the calendar beyond just scheduling blog posts.

Here is a short video from the plugin’s author demonstrating the features of the editorial calendar plugin: