Wishlist Member, Amember, and Cart66 are just a few that immediately come to mind.

But these plugins come at a cost, and offer features and functionality that most small business owners simply don’t need and will never use. Each of these membership plugins also have a considerable learning curve associated with them, not to mention the upfront cost, and usually, on-going charges for support.

But what if you run a small business and simply want to give clients access to a protected area of your website where they can access “customers only” documents or other media?

Today I’d like to share with you how you can do just that with a few free WordPress plugins.

Here Are The Plugins You’ll Need:

- Members
- Custom Registration Link
- Peter’s Login Redirect
- Login Logo

Once you’ve installed and activated the plugins I listed above, you’ll want to go to the settings for each and make a few changes. But first, go to Settings >> General >> and make sure you check the box in the “membership” line next to “Anyone can register”.

Now on to setting up the plugins.

Members – This is a user, role, and content management plugin for controlling permissions and access. After enabling the plugin in the settings, you can also create a custom error message for users that don’t have permission to view the protected pages/content. Obviously in this custom message you should include a link where they could navigate to learn more about how/why to join.

Once enabled, this plugin creates an input panel with checkboxes and you need to check those boxes on posts/pages you wish to protect like so:

Custom Registration Link – This plugin lets you modify the registration link of your WordPress website. This will result in greatly reduced spam registrations. The default WP registration link is “www.yoursite.com/wp-login.php?action=register” and is heavily targeted by spam-bots. This plugin will change this link to another one and make the old one invalid.

Once you’ve activated this plugin, go to the general options and put in a new url for your registration page.

Peter’s Login Redirect – This plugin let’s you redirect subscribers to a particular page/post after they log in. Pretty self-explanatory here but you want to make sure you are sending subscribers to a central page to act as sort of their membership “hub” allowing them to them jump off to other protected content.

Login Logo – This plugin allows you to use your own logo on the WordPress login page. Here’s an example:

This keeps your customers from getting confused, especially if they aren’t exactly tech savvy. Many people don’t know what WordPress is, so this helps out in that regard. They’ll see your logo on the registration and login pages and know they are in the right place.

That’s pretty much it. When you want to give a customer access to your Member’s Only page, just send them the link to your registration page.

You may also want to put a link to your Members/Customers Only page somewhere in your website navigation or in the footer.

I should also note that you could accomplish the same thing I have with a number of other plugin combinations. The above combination just happens to be the mix I am using for one particular project, and it has not failed me yet.

Good luck!

WordCamp Orlando was held at the UCF Rosen School of Hospitality Management. I actually happened to be staying with my family at the Hard Rock Hotel a few miles down the road before hitting the parks and holiday parade at Universal, so the timing couldn’t have been any better.

WordCamp tickets were only $20 and included a t-shirt, lunch, open bar reception, and other goodies. Some of the sponsors had pretty amazing giveaways for attendees. (I’m looking at you, WP Engine.)

My ticket was actually comped by my hosting company, ZippyKid, who was also a sponsor. Thanks again guys!

So, because of family obligations in the afternoon, I was only able to partake in the morning sessions. There were two tracks, a “publisher” track and a “developer” track. I chose to sit in on the publisher sessions and the three sessions I got to see did not disappoint.

The first session was called “Designing your brand through user experience”. Dan Maccarone provided some good insight into the topic and showed several real life examples of how design could both help, and potentially hurt your brand.

The next session was “UCF’s use of WordPress as a CMS”. This session was great because I get the question a lot from clients about “Why should I choose WordPress over other website platforms?”. Matthew Vaccaro and Justin Sisley gave a great presentation on how they researched the various platforms available and why they ultimately chose to build UCF Medical School’s new website using WordPress. The slides from this presentation are embedded below and are well worth a look.

The final session of my time at WordCamp Orlando was titled “WordPress in the Newsroom”. In this presentation Ibrahim Madha talked about how Salon.com uses WordPress. It was great to see how a really big website like Salon.com had modified the dashboard and editor to meet their unique publishing needs. Ibrahim hinted that some of the plugins the Salon.com team had built in-house might be released to the public in the near future, which would be awesome to see.

I wish I had been able to stay for more sessions but the presentations I was able to watch made me even more excited about WordPress as a platform. Not to mention the fact that being among 100+ other WordPress junkies makes you realize what a great community WordPress has created.

I’m looking forward to my next WordCamp in the near future!

An education derived from TV, Magazine, and Bill Board advertisements.

It’s a concept (an art, perhaps) that I think you’ll be exposed to and see a lot more of in the future. Teaching sells. Not only does it sell, but it spreads too. You’re more inclined to pass along an ad to your friends that teaches them something cool, more so than just any ‘ol regular ad.

Look at this JC Penney ad in the June/July 2011 issue of Esquire Magazine:

Rather than just saying “Hey, check out this suit…buy this suit.”, they included a teaching element in the ad…a pocket guide to playing blackjack. This does a few things for them.

For one, it makes the ad more memorable. It stands out because unlike most of the other ads they aren’t just saying “Hey, check out this suit…buy this suit.”

They’ve also given you, the reader, something of value. This is the Law of Reciprocity at work – I give you something, you feel more compelled to give me something.

There’s also something to be said for putting the reader in the right frame of mind, picturing themselves in a casino perhaps with that suit on.

Now, I think they could have made the ad a little better by showing the model actually in a casino. And if that were the case, maybe a darker color suit would have been good too. I think these two slight changes would have been a better fit with the blackjack guide, but hey, somebody’s getting paid the big bucks for a reason. What do I know.

But all in all its a great example of aducation in the wild. Everyone wanting to get more clients and customers should find ways to employ the art of aducation.

Despite the fact that I get so many coupons from them, I never seem to be able to scrounge one up when I’m thousands of miles overdo and REALLY need that oil change. My fault, not theirs. But funnily enough, at that point in time, I usually rationalize putting it off until I get another coupon. This hurts both me (well, my car) and them.

So when I received the most recent email from them which contained a QR code, I immediately thought:

Cool, I’ll scan this and it will take me to their mobile app or at a minimum their Google Places page where I’ll always be able to put my hands on a coupon when I need it. Mu-ha-ha-ha.

No such luck. The QR code takes you to their Facebook page which doesn’t really have any useful content besides pictures of all of their locations throughout the state. This is a prime example of how not to use QR codes in your marketing.

Perhaps it would have been a little better if they’d said where the QR code would lead to, such as “Scan this code to Like Us On Facebook”. And certainly some more enticing content should be posted on their wall if they want visitors to convert into Likes.

If I were handling the mobile strategy for this company, I’d build a simple mobile app listing all of the locations, phone numbers, and hours of operations; a page with some tips to get better gas mileage or extend the life of your oil; a coupon of course (which they could change out easily based on the current offers they’re running); and maybe even a place for me to subscribe to SMS messages from them so they can alert me when they’ve got a REALLY great deal running.

It would probably cost them less than $1,000 to have this app built and maybe a couple hundred bucks a year to maintain it. A drop in the bucket compared to what they’re spending in the newspaper and on direct mail. But I guarantee it would pay off in both customer loyalty and customer frequency.

This is a funny video from Scott Stratten titled “The Problem with QR Codes”

The sport consumed me. Whether it was baseball season or not, I could be found practicing my hitting, throwing balls onto the roof and catching them as they rolled off, or pitching to my mom or dad in the backyard. If I wasn’t playing baseball, I was watching it, following the Braves in the days of Bob Horner and Dale Murphy.

I played short stop and pitcher. Because of all the work I put into it, I was on the All-Star team every year except maybe my first.

One year, because I was such a good pitcher, I was asked to move up to a higher level league with kids that were a year or two older than me to play. Despite the age difference, and playing with kids bigger and stronger than myself, I was still in the top 3 pitchers in that league.

When it came time for All-Star team selection, I was shocked and disappointed to learn that I could not be on the All-Star team that year because I was not old enough. Looking back, I guess when you’re 11 or 12, you don’t quite understand things like that.

I was so upset that I vowed to quit playing baseball. I just thought that being left off the team because of my age was so unfair, and besides, I had recently found a new passion in tennis.

Coaches, not just my own coach but others from around the league, visited with me at my home and tried to convince me to reconsider. I was a stubborn kid and wouldn’t hear it.

I never played baseball again. It’s one of the biggest regrets I have in life. A fine example of what I like to call “Little League thinking”.

The only reason I’m writing this is because I think there are a couple lessons here that I hope my own kids can learn from:

#1: Don’t let other people’s rules determine your future. I let one silly rule make the decision for me that I was not going to play baseball again. What if I had stuck it out and come back next year more determined and driven by my anger? Would I have been an even better pitcher? You bet. Who knows how far I might have gone in the sport.

#2: The younger you are, the more you need to listen and at least consider the words of people older than you, especially when you know they are just trying to look out for you. Looking back, this was true when I was 12, and it’s still true as I write this today at the age of 32.

Lead generation is an often overlooked but very profitable way to monetize a niche site. Most commonly, niche sites are monetized with Adsense, affiliate links, and even some private ad sales. While Adsense and affiliate links work to a certain extent, it can be tough for a fairly new or even well established niche site to get interest from private advertisers.

I’ve used lead generation to overcome this on some of my niche sites, and my income from lead generation now surpasses what I bring in from Adsense and affiliate links.

I first became aware of lead generation after reading this Shoemoney post a few years ago. Now, the type of lead generation Jeremy suggests is slightly different than what I’m describing here in that his strategy involves building a site for one particular business or client, whereas what I’m going to talk about below involves using your existing niche site to generate leads for a variety of businesses or clients. But I definitely tip my hat to his post which turned the light on in my head regarding the possibilities of lead generation.

The Basics
My simplistic definition of lead generation is gathering someone’s contact information and selling it to someone else for a fixed fee. You could say that its similar to affiliate marketing, but usually with affiliate marketing you are paid on conversion, meaning someone has to actually purchase before you get paid. Not so with lead generation. Companies simply pay you for the lead, then the onus is on them to convert that lead into a sale.

For example, I have niche sites about retirement communities. I know…contain your excitement. It just happens to be a topic I’m extremely familiar with, so it works for me. My website visitors are looking for information on the communities available to them, so in a nutshell, I collect their contact info., send it to the community for a fee, and the community sends them more information and gets in touch with them to try and make a sale.

You can learn a lot more about the basics behind lead generation from Shoemoney’s post I linked to above. When I was just starting out I also purchased and learned a lot from Chad Frederiksen’s Local Lead Plan. Local Lead Plan is definitely geared toward working with local businesses and building sites specifically for them, but I am applying a lot of what I learned in that course to my niche site lead gen activities. There are also some sample contracts provided in the course that I have put to good use when signing up new clients.

The Approach
Email is the quickest way to get your proposal out to several businesses for consideration. Here’s a rough email template that I’ve had success with. Feel free to use/modify it to fit your niche:

XXXXX,

Hope the new year is off to a great start for you.

I wanted to run a unique idea by you. I own the website, xxxxxxxxx.com and most of my website visitors are looking for more information about communities just like yours.

In addition to traditional advertising options, I also offer a “pay for performance” lead plan.

Here’s how it works:

If someone wants more information I have them fill out a form (name address, email, phone, etc.) which is then forwarded to you (or the sales office) to follow-up.

I charge $XX for any lead sent. Currently there are XX communities listed there now and they are getting around XX-XX leads per month.

The model works great because you only pay for actual leads sent, not “clicks” or “impressions” that end up being of little value to you.

My question is, would this type of model be of interest to you guys?

Would you be willing to test out the concept over the next month? I wouldn’t ask for payment for any leads sent the rest of this month. This would give you a chance to test it out and see if the leads are worth it to you.

Let me know what you think!

Thanks,
Ryan

Direct Mail has also been good to me for getting new clients signed on. I usually send a two page letter, the first being an introductory note introducing myself/my site and the 2nd page goes into the details of my lead generation program. Here’s an example of what I send:

[box type="download"]Download sample letter[/box]

Now, I just send this in a standard #10 envelope, but if you want to step up your game you might consider sending your letters out priority mail to get a little more attention.

You may also want to test who you send it to in an organization. Sometimes I send it to the owner of the business, and sometimes I address it to the “Director of Marketing”. I’m still trying to figure out what works best.

Initial Offer
You’ll hopefully start to get some call or emails from interested businesses. If this is your first time doing lead generation and don’t have any prior results to share, you might consider letting them test out your program for a few weeks for free or at a reduced rate. Be sure to cap their trial at a set number of leads. This will give them a chance to determine the quality of the leads you’re sending, and assuming all is well, you’ll have no problem convincing them to participate long term.

After you have a few clients running in your lead gen program, you should use your best judgement as to whether to offer a free or reduced trial to convert new prospects. In most case you can just reference the success others are having and more or less say “take it or leave it”.

Collecting and Distributing Leads
I use Wufoo to create forms to collect and distribute leads. I like it because it keeps track of all leads that come through the system and notifications of new leads can be automatically sent to me and the business I’m promoting.

The more information you collect from the visitor, the more valuable your lead will be to the business paying you for the lead. I require all my leads to include name, mailing address, phone number and email address. In my mind, and in the mind of the communities I work with, if someone is willing to give up all that contact info. they are a serious prospect. Much more so than say, someone who provides a fake name and a throw-away email address.

You’ll have to figure out what works best for you and the companies you choose to work with.

Landing Pages
I try to keep the landing pages that my lead gen forms appear on as simple as possible. I use the “full width” page template so users don’t get distracted by links or ads in the sidebar. I’ve still got the regular header/navigation on the page though, so I’m sure I lose some conversions because of that. But most of my forms average between 20 and 30% conversion.

I’ve tested having just the form vs. a few pictures with a description of the information they will receive then the form and have found that the pictures and description version seems to convert better. I also include some “trust signals”, letting people know that their information will only be shared with the company they want information about. Here’s what one of my lead gen pages looks like:

I’ve thought about trying a landing page service like unbounce to test whether having a dedicated page increases conversion. The issue is that this would take visitors away from my site which I’m not too keen on. I’m interested to see what Brian “Copyblogger” Clark’s Premise ends up providing, as at first glance it seems like it might be useful for building lead gen pages in WordPress.

Maximize the Opportunity
There are a few steps you can take to maximize the number of people seeing and filling out your lead forms. Here are a few ideas that have worked for me.

On-site
You want to highlight and make your lead gen forms more noticeable to visitors to entice them to take action and fill one (or more) forms out. I have links to lead gen forms where appropriate on my site based on the business and their location, but I also have a “Featured” page that lists all of them. After reading this article over at DIY Themes I’ve recently started using a Hello-Bar on my site which links to my “Featured” page and so far it seems to be working well.

You could also try a sidebar ad, a banner ad, or an ad at the end of your posts promoting your “Featured” page or individual lead gen forms.

Newsletter/auto-responder
One of the best things I’ve done to increase the amount of leads is to add each business individually as an auto-responder message to my newsletter subscribers. Because I have several clients I’m generating leads for, I have to be careful to spread these out, and be sure to intersperse them with pure content messages. This isn’t difficult, and even the messages that promote these businesses are seen as valuable content by my readers. I rarely get a spam complaint from these messages.

PPC
Most niche site owners don’t promote their sites via PPC. Since most niche sites are monetized with Adsense, it doesn’t make a whole lot of business sense to buy clicks from Google just to sell them right back to Google. But with lead generation, it’s different since you have the opportunity to buy clicks for much less than what your pay out per lead is. Just make sure you have your pages dialed in and converting at a rate you’re comfortable with before going down this road or you could lose your shirt.

Getting Paid
On the first of every month I send my clients an invoice for all of the leads that were sent in the previous month. I use Freshbooks for this because it allows clients to easily pay online through PayPal or credit card, and I can also schedule late payment reminders to go out at set intervals (I use 5, 10, and 15 days) to clients who are slow to pay.

Most of my clients pay online but I do have a few that have to have a check cut by their accounting department and send to me via snail mail.

Advancing the Relationship
After clients see success from all the leads you’ve sent them, it makes it a lot easier to discuss other ways that they can put their business in front of your readers through banner ads, newsletter or e-book sponsorships, and the like.

It also makes it easier to approach other businesses to advertise on your site when you have a few “wins” under your belt that you can reference.

You now have a basic understanding of what lead generation is and how it can increase the profitability of your niche site, how to approach and land new clients, how to collect and distribute the leads, and how to get paid and advance the relationships you build with these clients.

The next step is to put it all into action. I’m interested to hear about your success, so drop back by sometime and leave a comment about your experiences with it.

Good luck!

I’m really looking for spare parts.

What I mean by that is I’m looking for ideas, tools, and concepts that I can combine with my own ideas, tools, and concepts to create the next BIG idea, tool, or concept.

In Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation, Steven Johnson writes that “good ideas want to connect, fuse, recombine”.

Johnson tells the story of the incubator, an invention that has helped millions of low-birth weight babies around the world survive the first few weeks and months of life and go on to live normal lives. He explains how the idea came about (someone saw a similar application outside of a healthcare setting), and how the idea continues to evolve (with incubators being built for hospitals in Third-World countries out of…wait for it…SPARE car parts).

Where’s My Tip came to be because of my practice of looking for spare parts. I combined my experience and knowledge of the web and e-commerce with a real life problem that many travelers face, to create one of the 9-Best Travel Related Businesses of 2010.

So the next time someone gives you a hard time about surfing the web, reading other blogs and websites, or even dabbling with creating your own sites or projects, just tell them you’re looking for spare parts.

Image credit: Spare Parts by pabloneco on Flickr

This kinda sucked and thats why I took over the entire publishing process (printing, sales, and fulfillment) when I published The Villages Florida Book.

I know right away when a book sells because the order comes directly to me. The flow of money also happens much quicker. I take orders using e-junkie and this money goes right into my PayPal account. Since I am handling the order process, I don’t have to wait for a quarterly royalty check to get paid.

There are some hassles though with handling these things on your own. Namely, having books printed, monitoring inventory, customer service, and fulfillment. I don’t mind the customer service because it gives me a chance to learn more about my readers, but I could do without the trips to the post office every couple of days.

But as far as transparency into how well books are selling goes, Amazon.com may just have that problem licked. In December they added some really neat tools to their Author Central service for authors with books in the Amazon catalog. These tools have huge potential for authors wanting to gain insight into how well books are selling and where they are selling.

Authors can now see Sales by Geography, Sales by Week, and a chart tracking the book’s Sales Rank over time. All of these are great additions and will help authors gain more insights into how their books are doing. I wish they had been available a few years ago.

Amazon Author Central Sales Tracking

Sales by Geography

Regional Sales Tracking

You can do some other cool things from Author Central such as upload a video, fill out your author profile, and announce speaking engagements or book signings, but I especially like being able to import an rss feed. Most authors, myself included, have blogs about their books and this gives authors an easy way to spread that content around without having to maintain a separate blog for it.

I learned of Author Central’s new features from this post by Scott Stratten, author of UnMarketing. It’s worth a read if you’re an author because he has some tips for how you can use various other tools to engage with customers and boost your book sales.

This post from Seth Godin from a few weeks back generated some discussion at my office about the best ways to communicate with clients and potential customers.

We have so many options today when communicating with others. Landline phone, cell phone, online chat, text message, Twitter, Facebook … and the list goes on.

In many cases, the situation will dictate the means of communication. If it’s an emergency, hit the phone lines. Something that can wait? Email or text maybe.

In working with clients, I think its important to figure out their preferred method of communication. How will you know what that is? One way is to ask. Another is to pay attention to how they reach out and/or respond to you.

If I leave a voicemail for someone asking them to call me back, but instead they send me an email, I can pretty much surmise that email is their preferred means of communication. Of course there will be exceptions, and your experiences may vary.

It’s also important to let people know your “bat signal”… the way to reach you that will not go unnoticed. My bat signal is my email. I always have my iPhone on me and I’m always checking email. I usually keep my phone on silent to avoid distractions, so I often miss calls to my cell. My desk phone is becoming useless as I get out of the office more. I use Twitter but only check @’s or DM’s every so often, maybe once a day.

When beginning a relationship with a client I need to know both their preferred method of communication, and also their bat signal, in case I need a quick response from them. For me, these are one and the same (email) but others may be different.

Bottom line: figure out your and your customer’s bat signal, and you’ll increase your chances of successful communication.

Image credit: Searchlight by joshuadelaughter on flickr

]]> http://www.ryanerisman.com/whats-your-bat-signal/feed 0 http://www.ryanerisman.com/24-articles-in-48-hours http://www.ryanerisman.com/24-articles-in-48-hours#comments Tue, 26 Oct 2010 01:39:09 +0000 Ryan Erisman http://www.ryanerisman.com/?p=556 Step 1: Ask for an extension. (I kid. I kid)

Alright so no extensions, you’ve got to get these articles done. I know the feeling. A few days ago I was under the gun and had to write 24 articles including Title tags, meta descriptions and headlines for a client and only had 48 hours to do it. Here’s how I got the job done.

Clear all distractions

This one might be easier for me than some because I live an hour away from Disney World. So I shipped the wife and kids off to Disney for a couple days. Sure this cost me some good money, but it was a heckuva lot less than I was being paid to write the articles, so… distractions cleared.

But it can’t stop there. If you are going to get your work done on time, you have to be vigilant against ALL distractions. Close Tweetie. Close Facebook. Your friends will still be there when you get back. Minimize your email window. NFL games on Sunday? There’s always SportsCenter. Only allow yourself to check these things when you are on a defined break (see below).

Take the first step

Getting started is probably the hardest part. Taking the first step and getting to work on the first article is a lot like Forrest Gump hobbling down that old dirt road in Greenbow when slowly but surely he picks up speed, the leg braces fly off, and he is off to the races. Just make sure you keep the momentum once you get going.

Just like a runner, when you stop for an extended period of time you’ll stiffen up and getting started all over again will be a challenge.

Use The Pomodoro Technique

(No tomatoes were harmed in the production of these articles, even though Five Guys erroneously slipped some onto my Bacon Cheeseburger…bastards.)

24 articles in 48 hours is literally a race against the clock. I use the Pomodoro Technique to make sure that time does not get the better of me. The Pomodoro Technique is a time management tool developed by Francesco Cirillo. I encourage you to click through and learn more about this fascinating method of time management, but in the most simple terms you are required to work uninterrupted for 25 minutes (considered 1 Pomodoro), followed by a 5 minute break.

I use the handy online app Focus Booster to keep track of the time.

After every 4 Pomodoros, you should take an extended break. The 5 minute breaks between Pomodoros and extended breaks after every 4 Pomodoros are the perfect time to check Facebook, check Twitter, and see how your NFL fantasy team is doing. Better yet, go for a walk or get a bite to eat. Before long you’ll need to get back to work.

Use A Writing Frame

Chris Brogan has written about how he uses a writing frame to produce his blog posts. I was using a writing frame long before Chris became an overnight success, but his advice is spot on.

A writing frame is basically an outline. If you organize your writing in such a way and break it down into sections of content before you begin writing, the process will go much faster. You will feel more like you are filling in the blanks as you go along, rather than feeling like you have to come up with the next big idea for the next paragraph.

Scribe

As I plow through the articles, I worry more about getting them done than SEO. That’s where Scribe comes in. Sometimes, usually depending on the client’s needs, after I finish all the articles I’ll take 5-10 minutes each to run them through Scribe and polish up the rough edges to make sure they are top-notch from an SEO standpoint. Just make sure you wait until the very end when all of your articles are complete to do this step. Otherwise it will disrupt your writing flow.

Dropbox

None of us think that hard drive crashes will ever happen to us. But hard drive crashes seem to know (and love it the most) when you’re up against a deadline. I use Dropbox to keep this from even becoming a concern. Every article I start gets saved to a folder on my Dropbox, and my client can even keep track of my progress should I choose to share the folder with them before I’m done.

So there you have it. That’s how I recently wrote 24 articles in 48 hours. If you’re ever under the gun like I was I hope you’ll apply some of the techniques I’ve outlined here. Good luck!