How to Turn Your WordPress Sidebar from Boring to Soaring Transcript

How to Turn Your WordPress Sidebar from Boring to Soaring Transcript This is a transcript of the video webinar, edited slightly for easy reading! You can find the video recording at www.writershuddle.com/seminars/webinar-march2012 Ali: Seth is a fantastic guy, he knows loads of stuff about websites and how to put them together, how to get things working so that your writing can really shine and the technology doesn t get in the way. He has a great website at sethleonard.com, and he s got some free ebooks which I ve just been reading myself, that you can sign up for when you join his newsletter, as well as a free four day course on launching your website, so there s some fantastic resources there, completely free, that I suggest you check out. Today he s here to talk to us about website sidebars, how to take your sidebar from boring to soaring, and I m really looking forward to hearing what he has to say, so over to you, Seth. Seth s Free Courses Seth: Right, thank you very much Ali, I am excited to be here, I am looking forward to sharing all of this with you. Actually, to make it easier for those of you who registered for this webinar, I ll send some of those freebies your way, maybe tomorrow, in an email, so you don t even need to go do anything else, and you can get started with those guides. The other course that Ali mentioned is The Web Launch, it s a free course and it shows you how to set up a WordPress site in four days. I can t send you that because it s actually a step by step course, so if any of you don t have a Ali Luke, 2012 www.writershuddle.com P a g e 1

website you can go there, get it set up, and then maybe watch the recording of this and add some of the things once you have your site set up. If you don t have a site set up, just sit back and relax, try to take some of this in for thoughts for the future, and then when you have your site ready to go, you can come back and be ready to rock. Why Writers Have a Great Advantage Online Seth: Again, I am excited to be here. I really like working with writers, because there are a lot of things I can work with people on in terms of technology and strategy and everything, but content is really important, and there s a lot of people who are not very good at creating content. Those of you who are able to write well, you have a strong leg-up on the other people once you have the technology pieces set up, so I am looking forward to helping you with the technology so you can do what you do best, which is write extremely well. Ali Luke, 2012 www.writershuddle.com P a g e 2

The Webinar Agenda Seth: The agenda for today: I want to give you just a quick introduction of myself, so you know who you re listening to We re going to look at what a sidebar is very briefly Then we re going to get into the topics we re going to cover: How to highlight your best post in your sidebar Adding social media buttons, follow or fan buttons in your sidebar Adding an email signup form, which is very important Adding some custom elements, if you just want to add certain blocks of text or an image, I m going to show you how to do that Your questions and our answers Ali Luke, 2012 www.writershuddle.com P a g e 3

An Introduction to Seth Leonard To introduce myself, I m Seth Leonard, as Ali mentioned, I ve been building websites since about 1995. My first websites were terrible, and it took a long time to figure out what I was doing in those early years, so know that everybody starts at a very basic level, and then learns how to improve. I ve worked with a lot of individuals, businesses, startups, small businesses, non-profits, big companies, everything in between, and I ve had a really good time learning a lot of different things about how websites work well. Currently I am training and mentoring people who want to build their own successful websites, and that s really the focus of my work right now, which is why I m here, working with you all today. My website is sethleonard.com, the free course that Ali mentioned is at theweblaunch.com, and you can find me on Twitter @sethleonard. So let me I need to switch my screen here to a browser so I can show you guys some things, give me one second. Ali Luke, 2012 www.writershuddle.com P a g e 4

Ali, what do you normally do when you re entertaining folks when you re figuring something out technically? Ali: Oh, I d normally just talk to them. So, you were just saying that you ve been making sites since 1995, which is fantastic. I think I started learning HTML in about 1998, but I couldn t actually figure out how to get a website online, so I had a site which only existed on my computer, which was a bit rubbish. Seth: You ve got to start somewhere. Ali: The best thing I could do with HTML was make the text flash, so thankfully I ve come a little way since then, but I know that I still have times when I m confused how to do something with a website, and often I just poke it round until it either breaks, or does what I want. I m pretty sure that you have some more efficient ways of working, so I definitely recommend that people check out some of your stuff. Oh, and there is my beautiful site, up on the screen. Hooray! Ali Luke, 2012 www.writershuddle.com P a g e 5

The Sidebar on Aliventures Seth: I thought I would start with yours, something familiar for folks, so there we go. Now we have the screen sharing working, and we are ready to start. So, the first thing, in case it is not clear to folks what I am talking about, a sidebar is a little section over here, where Ali has get new posts and newsletter. It can be on the right side or the left side, oddly enough, for whatever reason, right side sidebars tend to perform better. I m not sure of the psychology or logic behind that, but the right side is probably the more popular place to put it, and where people look for some of the additional material for the website. Ali Luke, 2012 www.writershuddle.com P a g e 6

The Sidebar on SethLeonard.com Over on my site, you can see my sidebar here as well, here s the course I mentioned, and I m actually going to show you a couple of things that I ve put here. There s: Popular Articles, towards the bottom of the sidebar, that s going to be one thing we re going to cover. The Follow Along section, that s going to be another thing we re going to cover. As Seen On... some of the custom blogs that I'm going to be talking about. Ali Luke, 2012 www.writershuddle.com P a g e 7

Popular Articles So, the first thing we re going to do, is set up something like this for popular articles. The reason we re going to do this, especially as writers, I think you can relate to: you put a lot of time into the things you create, you spend a lot of time working on your content, and making sure that what you re putting out into the world is exactly what you want. Then you put it up there, you get a little bit of buzz, people talk about it, and then maybe a week, a couple of weeks, a month later, it s buried at the bottom of your blog, or your site. Nobody ever sees it again, and some of that effort you put in gets lost. Rather than putting recent posts up or something, I like to be able to hand pick those posts that I really like, and have them show up, so that you can make the most out of them. If you have an entry or a post that s getting a lot of comments, or is converting people to your mailing list, or something like that, you want to get that in there as well. So let s get started. Ali Luke, 2012 www.writershuddle.com P a g e 8

Step #1: Add the Category Posts Widget Plugin The WordPress dashboard (the behind the scenes view of your site) So, here is a dashboard for a test site that I put up, and the first thing we re going to do is we re going to install a plugin. A plugin, for those of you that don t know, is like a program that you might install on your computer like Microsoft Word or Excel or something like that, it allows your computer to do something that it wasn t able to do, or to do it better than it was before. A plugin does that for your blog. So we re going to add a plugin which adds some functionality to WordPress, and allows it to do something a little bit extra. I m going to go over here to Plugins in the sidebar and click Add New. Ali Luke, 2012 www.writershuddle.com P a g e 9

Next, I m going to search for Category posts widget, and it s right here: Plugins --> Add New --> Category Posts Widget If you ever want to learn a little bit more about a widget that you re thinking of, or if you think that there's a functionality you want, you can type it in there and see what comes up. You can click on Details to read the descriptions, sometimes you can even see screenshots of things and decide if that s what you want. I m going to hit Install Now, and activate it. So I have this plugin now here, ready to go. Step #2: Create a Category for Featured Posts The next thing that I m going to do is I m going to go to Posts --> Categories, and I m going to create a new category. Ali Luke, 2012 www.writershuddle.com P a g e 10

Categories allow you to group your posts. You could have something like an Advice category, or you could have a Pro Tips category. If you re a writer, then you could have Short stories or Poems and so on. We re going to create a category, which is going to allow us to group the blog posts we want to put in the sidebar. I m going to call this Sidebar Featured. You need to put a little slug in here so it shows up in URLs, so I m going to add that category, and it shows up over here. The new Sidebar Featured category. Step #3: Add Posts to the New Category Now, we pick a post that we want to put in that category, which is going to then show up in our sidebar. So if we go over here to All Posts in the sidebar, you ll see some demo posts that I set up yesterday. To do a quick edit on any of them, just mouse over them: you don t get to edit the text of the post, but you get some extra options in here, and one of them is the category, so I can just select the sidebar featured there and hit update for Post #1. Let s say we also liked Post #4, so we can add that one, and then we ll do Post #6 as well. Ali Luke, 2012 www.writershuddle.com P a g e 11

So you can see under Categories, we have three different posts that are going to be in our Sidebar Featured section. Step #4: Add Category Posts Widget to Your Site The next thing that we re going to look at is a widget, and actually let me go back to Ali s site here. Ali Luke, 2012 www.writershuddle.com P a g e 12

A widget is a block or a section within your sidebar, so the Get New Posts section here at the top of Ali s sidebar would be a widget, then further down the Newsletter one would be a widget. Some of them are going to be freeform, where you re adding your own content in there, and some of them are going to be based on tools from plugins or that come in from WordPress itself. In the Dashboard, widgets are under Appearance --> Widgets. The Widgets section in the Dashboard. So this is the back-end of the front-end of your sidebar. In the Available Widgets we have the Category Posts (when we installed the plugin it created this widget for us) so we can drag it over here to the Main Sidebar on the right. Let s put it near the top so we can see it, and this allows us to configure the popular posts. I m just going to call it popular posts, you could call it my favourite posts, you could call it key posts, put whatever you want. In the Category Posts widget, enter: Category this is the reason we created the category, we have Sidebar Featured, so we put that in here. Ali Luke, 2012 www.writershuddle.com P a g e 13

Number of posts to show somewhere between three to five is a good number. I believe if you put zero it s going to put all of them in there, so let s change that to 3. Sort by this defaults to date, I actually quite like it random sometimes. Selecting options for the Category Posts widget. You can mess with these a little bit. You can also add an image, if you re associating images with your posts, and you can set the size of the thumbnail, but let s just keep it simple for now, and just have the title there and that s it. So let s hit Save, and then if you go back to the site, you have the oh, I forgot to add a plural there but we have Popular Post, and we have posts one, six, and four here. And so we then might want to get rid of Recent Posts, because that's not necessary. Then we ve just got the popular post here, and then you can move the different widgets wherever you want, by dragging them. You can move Popular Posts under the comments widget (that little bar showed up real quickly and then went away, that meant it was saved). Now we have the comments on top, and the Popular Post there beneath. Ali Luke, 2012 www.writershuddle.com P a g e 14

So, that s how you can add your favourite, or your most popular, or your best performing posts directly to your sidebar. The demo site, with Popular Post [sic] in the sidebar, with Recent Posts removed, and with the Recent Comments moved nearer the top. Ali Luke, 2012 www.writershuddle.com P a g e 15

Adding a Facebook Like Button and a Twitter Follow Button The next thing that I want to do is show you how to add a Facebook like button, and a Twitter follow button. A lot of people just add just a link to their Facebook page or to their Twitter page, and there s good reasons for that. You want people to know that you re active on those sites, you want to build your followers on those sites so that you can keep them updated and you can engage with them, and it s a really good idea to use social media in that way, and you do want to promote your presence on those sites. The one thing that I don t like about having just a link there, is you re then taking people away from your site, and you re taking them to the most distracting websites there are online. People will go over to Facebook or Twitter to look at your thing, and then suddenly they ve got a notification from a new friend, and then you ve lost them and they re off on their own. Maybe they ll never come back to your site again. If you have somebody on your site, I encourage you to keep them on your site, especially until you get some way to contact them (maybe through an email list or something like that, which we ll get to next). So you do want to add people to your social media, and I m going to show you here what I have on my site: there s a like button, and a follow button. People can click those buttons without needing to leave your site. They will immediately become a fan on Facebook, or a follower on Twitter, and they can stay there on your site. One click of a button, and they re good. Ali Luke, 2012 www.writershuddle.com P a g e 16

Getting the Facebook Like Button Code The way we re going to do this, and this is a bit of a long URL: developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/plugins/like. I m not sure why they couldn t come up with a better URL, but if you find a page looking like this, you ve come to the right place. You re going to add the URL of your Facebook fan page, and I recommend that everybody has a Facebook fan page. You don t need to post on it every day.even if you just put an announcement up every time you put a blog post up, that s fine, but it s recommended that you have something and you have a way for Facebook people to stay on top of your content. So, my page is sethleonardweb, and when you put that in you'll see this larger piece here on the right hand side. It ll have people that I m friends with who are fans of my page, and it ll have how many people are on there, and admin, and stuff you don t really need. Ali Luke, 2012 www.writershuddle.com P a g e 17

The Facebook button code creator. You can select/deselect/change the different options to change how your button looks. The first thing we re going to do is we re going to get rid of that send button, and we can hide the faces here, and then we re actually going to do the button count. This is going to create a nice, simple little button that s going to have the like, and before you click the like, it has a little thumbs up and the number of people who ve done it. The width doesn t need to be that big, so I ll set it to 100, and that s what our button s going to look like. Ali Luke, 2012 www.writershuddle.com P a g e 18

You re just going to hit the get code here. You will probably need to put both pieces of code into your sidebar to get it to work. Adding the Facebook Code to Your Site Now we re going to add a text widget to the site. Let s put it up top again, so we can say follow me, and we re just going to drop the code that Facebook gave us in there, and hit save. Ali Luke, 2012 www.writershuddle.com P a g e 19

So, now we have the like button showing up right there. I ve already liked my own page, but when someone clicks that button they become a fan of you on Facebook, and then whenever you post something to your page on Facebook, it s going to go to them automatically. Getting the Twitter Follow Button Code So, let s do the same thing with the Twitter follow button, and the Twitter one s actually a little bit easier. Go to: twitter.com/about/resources/buttons. It says choose a button, and you have four different ones. We re just going to click the follow button. You enter in your username here, you can just have it say follow if you want, or you can put your username in there if you check that button, and have it say follow @sethleonard or whatever your Twitter name is. You can create a larger button if you want to. Let s do it just for the sake of the demo. It has the preview, then the code, and we can just copy that code into a widget on our site, and we can actually put it in the same box that has the Facebook one in, if we want. Ali Luke, 2012 www.writershuddle.com P a g e 20

Copy that code in, and save. Now we have a follow button, and people can click that and they ll immediately become followers on Twitter, and then whenever you post something to Twitter, they re going to see it as well. Ali Luke, 2012 www.writershuddle.com P a g e 21

Adding an Email Signup Form to Your Sidebar Our third sidebar piece is adding an email signup form. This is something I highly recommend, this is a great way to distribute your content, maybe if you only want to do it once a week or something, you can say, These are the things that I wrote this week, check them out. It s a really great way to re-drive people to your site. I tend to think of all of these as methods of distribution. People don t come to your site on a regular basis, so you need to have a way to update them when something changes. That can be your Facebook, your Twitter, and through an email newsletter, or just email updates. I highly recommend giving as many of these options as you can for people to subscribe and invest in what you re doing, and then you can keep them updated as you go along, and they don t need to remember to come to your site. I m going to show you how to add a sign up form for AWeber, and for MailChimp. I m sure there are other ones out there, but to save time, I m going to focus on the two most popular ones today. Ali Luke, 2012 www.writershuddle.com P a g e 22

Adding a Sign Up Form for AWeber Select your list (if you have more than one) from the Current List dropdown, then click the Web Forms tab. So here I am in AWeber, I created a demo account for this. Once you select your list up here in the yellow bar under current list, you have a Web Forms tab over here, and you then can Create New Web Form. I m going to click on that, and this is going to pull up a lot of different options here. You have the new forms that are on AWeber, you have some popular ones, and you can scroll through and find a couple more, there s something called corporate, which are a little bit cleaner. Let s go with something pretty basic, actually I like the modern one. If you click on one of these, you have some immediate colour options which you can pick from. Let s go with a teal one, and then you click on load template. Here on the form, you have a couple of different option towards the bottom. They re not obvious, but you have a Powered by button, which is this little part saying Email marking by AWeber. You can turn that off there, by mousing over them and hitting the little X, or you can turn it back on by hitting that Ali Luke, 2012 www.writershuddle.com P a g e 23

button. I personally don t feel the need to do that, and the email privacy link is a nice one to have. You can get rid of the header, if you want, or you can add the header again. When you add the header, you can type something in here, so, Join my email list for updates, and you can change the font size or the colour. You have a couple of different font options, you have a couple of different size option. We ll bold it, and we ll go with twelve. It s wrapping onto two lines, but for the sake of this, that s okay. Another thing to think about is, the more fields you put in a signup form, the fewer people are actually going to sign up. So, for whatever reason, the more information you require of them, it makes them nervous. Even if email address seems like the most risky thing to share in terms of privacy, people don t necessarily want to add their name too if they don t have to. There s not a huge need to customise any more, I don t think that people feel that you re emailing just them one to one so a lot of the time I will remove the name, so you can have just the email. There s a footer here, you can add something again or you can get rid of that, but you have a number of different tools and a couple of things up here you can customise it a bit further if you want. Let s just stick with a basic form here. Ali Luke, 2012 www.writershuddle.com P a g e 24

If you go to the width arrows on the right, there is a Form type dropdown, and it has a Width, and this allows you to set the width of the widget that you re creating. Depending on the width of your sidebar, that might vary, so you might need to come back and play with this number a little bit. So maybe we ll do 200, and it makes it a little bit skinnier. Let s see what it looks like when we have 200, so let s save that. The form with customised header, the footer removed, and width of 200. Then you go to step 2, and then you create a form for your name. The reason for doing this would be if you have different forms, you want to know how different ones are performing. We ll call this one Sidebar Signup. Maybe if you had one at the bottom of your about page, you might put bottom of about page, or something like that. Ali Luke, 2012 www.writershuddle.com P a g e 25

The sidebar name and other options in Step 2, Settings. You have a thank you page that people can go to, you can use just the basic version that AWeber has, which just says Thank you for signing up. You can choose a custom URL, so you can create your own thank you page and then point them to that page. You can just have it redirect to the page that they re actually on, and the problem with that is that they don t actually know that it went through, so I would encourage you to use either the basic thank you version or a custom page. A custom page is great, because you can really give them a personal note, and say, Thank you, it s really great to have you, I m excited, look for updates on this kind of topics, so the more you can customise things the better. So that I don t have to come up with a URL we ll just stick with the basic version, and just hit Save, and go to step 3, and this is going to bring you to how you will publish this form. Ali Luke, 2012 www.writershuddle.com P a g e 26

The code that you need for your site is in Step 3, Publish. The first option shown in Step 3 is that you will install the form yourself, and if you click on that it gives you a very easy little snippet of code, and all you have to do is copy that. Putting the Aweber Code into Your Site We re going to go back to our widget area. We ll create another text widget and drag it up here, and we ll call it sign up. Then we ll paste that code in there and hit save, and we now have our sign up form right there. Ali Luke, 2012 www.writershuddle.com P a g e 27

Adding the Aweber code into a Text widget. The Aweber sign up widget on the site itself. It might not look like exactly what you want. This might be a little bit tall for me, so I might actually go back into Aweber and delete the header. I also have the words sign up here and then another note here, so one option might be to change this to join, or let s just change it to subscribe by email. Ali Luke, 2012 www.writershuddle.com P a g e 28

We re going to save that, and then we can go back to the design. We can delete the header, save that, and then if we go to our page, we ve lost the header and we just have straight subscribe by email. You might just want to play with things to see which combination works for you. What size of thing looks good? Do you want to have a header? Do you want to have the title right here in the top? You also don t have to have a title here for your widget. If you get rid of this, then it will just have the form. That s a little bit weird if you just put a form up and you don t really explain what it is, but maybe for the popular posts or anything else, you don t have to put a title on your widget. So that is adding a signup form for AWeber, and the next one we re going to do is MailChimp. Adding a Sign Up Form for MailChimp I have a MailChimp demo account that I ve set up here as well, and this one is actually going to be a lot easier. The nice thing about it is it s very easy to set up, the not-nice thing is that it s not very easy to customise. You re going to get a one-size-fits-all sign up form. Ali Luke, 2012 www.writershuddle.com P a g e 29

If you re on the list page, and you go to For your website, the very first option is Signup form embed code. You then get a little bit of a preview of what your signup form is going to look like here. I like the super slim form, I think it s the smallest and most compact for a sidebar. You have options here. So again you can put a title if you want, or you can remove it and maybe put the title in the widget title box instead, but let s put it here for now and make it join our mailing list. That preview updates when we move to the next option. Create embed code creates the code right below the preview, so again all you need to do is copy that code. We re going to create another text widget, we ll put that one above as well, and we ll call this MailChimp Signup, just so we know it s different from the other one. Hit save, and now we have our new signup form for MailChimp. Again, this is pretty much how it s going to look unless you want to get into changing things via the HTML and the CSS, which I do not recommend at all, but this will give you a very basic mailing list signup, which is good to have. So, depending on which one you re using, or if you want to have a bit more customisation, you might want to consider AWeber, but I also know cost is also a factor, so if you want to use the free MailChimp service, go for it, and you can have a signup form like that. Ali Luke, 2012 www.writershuddle.com P a g e 30

Creating a Custom Element for Your Sidebar The fourth thing for your sidebar is to create a custom element. Let s go to my site again as an example. I ve been lucky enough to be featured on a couple of different sites, so I wanted to add some images and links to those people. You might want to have a little about block on your sidebar that tells people who you are, and why you re creating the site. So, similar to these other widgets, you have this text option, which you can just drag over here. You could have About Me for the title, and you could type some things in here. (By the way, it is raining in California right now, so I hear the weather elsewhere is very nice, so for those of you who are often upset about the nice weather we have in California, you are currently winning.) Ali Luke, 2012 www.writershuddle.com P a g e 31

I m going to save that little block that I put, and we ll see it here, but this is not exactly eye-pleasing, it s not exactly eye-catching, it s just text. There s not a lot I can do with it, so if I want to get a bit more designey in that, or add some colour, or make the font a little bit different I think especially adding a photo is something that a lot of people would want to do there s an easy way to do that without having to learn the code that you would need to put in there. Creating the Sidebar HTML Using WordPress I m going to go to Pages, and I m going to add a new page. I m actually going to create a page that I m not ever going to publish, so I m going to give it a title like about sidebar design don t publish. It doesn t really matter what the link is here, just don t click the publish button when you re using this. You can use the save draft button to work on it, but don t hit the publish button. There are two tabs up here when you are creating the page: you have a visual editor, and you have an HTML editor. If you are in the visual editor, you have the ability to do different things like bold a word. Ali Luke, 2012 www.writershuddle.com P a g e 32

You could change the size of the text using the dropdown that defaults to Paragraph, so you could make it, let s make it Heading 3. That s a little bit small, we ll change it back. You can change the colour from the colour dropdown. Let s have that in red. And if you want to add an image, there s upload/insert with a camera and a musical note. If you click on that, you get the option to add an image. I created an image yesterday that would be good for this: a small photo of me. Once you upload your image, you have some options down here. WordPress will automatically add a link to the image: I don t think you necessarily need to link to the image itself (which is the default link). If you have an About page you might want to link the photo that you put to the About page. Ali Luke, 2012 www.writershuddle.com P a g e 33

Let s put this on the right side, and we ll leave it full size for now. If you hit insert into post it s going to put it over there. Now, the gap between the text and the image looks a little weird, because WordPress assumes that you re going to put this on a full page. When it gets into the sidebar it will shrink that a bit and make that make a little more sense. We ll add a little bit more text. We can turn text into a link by highlight it. Click the little link button and you ll have the option to link to existing content here. You just select the page or post you want, click add link, and WordPress makes the link for you. So you can save that draft: Ali Luke, 2012 www.writershuddle.com P a g e 34

You ve created this in the visual editor, and then if you go to the HTML editor, it s actually created the code for you, so all you need to do is copy that. Now we ll go back to our widget, we re going to edit the text that I put in there, and we re going to paste that code directly in. Ticking the Automatically Add Paragraphs button for a widget adds paragraphs. We ll reload the site, and now we have the photo of me, the text I wrote, and the various things here. Ali Luke, 2012 www.writershuddle.com P a g e 35

The spacing might be off, especially if you re using an image. This sidebar is a little bit narrow, so the formatting s a bit weird, but you can play with things: you might want to have the image on top and the text below. You can mix and match, but this is one way to format these blocks, to be able to add images and links and different things like that without having to know any of the code to do so. Ali Luke, 2012 www.writershuddle.com P a g e 36

The Finished Sidebar So those are all the things I wanted to show you: We have the ability to add a popular post here We have adding a Facebook button Looks like we lost our Twitter button, sometimes it doesn t load properly, not sure about that. We have the signup for AWeber We have the signup for MailChimp Then we have a custom block here where you can add whatever you want. That s all I have to share for you, so Ali, is there anything you d like to add, or shall I pull up the questions and see what we have? Ali: I think that s been absolutely fantastic. I ve definitely learned a lot, I ve been taking notes here. I ve been relieved that some of the stuff I m doing, I m doing the right way, so that s good to know! I even tried adding the Twitter button to Aliventures. I was having trouble with it, so I don t know if just the Twitter button functionality. Maybe Twitter s having one of its little outages or something, so I don t think it s just you. Seth: Sometimes that happens. Ali: Yes, so let s take some questions. Ali Luke, 2012 www.writershuddle.com P a g e 37

Questions and Answers Seth: Actually, I m looking here, we don t have any questions yet, so I know I moved fast, I know I covered a lot. If anybody has any questions, just use the ask a question button in the upper left, I m happy to go over anything you need to again, and if you want me to maybe go and look at your site, or have any questions about how something might work on your site, I m happy to do that as well. Bill: Adding an Incentive for Subscribing Bill asks how to add a freebie for subscribing, that s a good question. That s not so much about the sidebar form as it is using the autoresponders that are built in for the various services. So, for my site, I use AWeber, so what I do is I create a page that has the freebie on it that they can download, and I hide that page, so I don t put it on the site or anything like that. In my first autoresponder, when somebody signs up for my email list, they get an automatic email when they sign up which says, Thank you for joining, happy to have you here. As promised, you can download the free guides here, and that will point you to the page where you can then download it. So you can just point people to a non-public page. On AWeber, you can also attach files to an email, so if you have a pdf or something like that, you can just attach it to that first message, and then when they get that after they sign up, then they will get the free thing. You can technically put the thank you page as the page to download something, but I don t know, especially if somebody puts in an email address that doesn t work or something like that, then they get the free thing without actually subscribing, so I like to use the autoresponders for that purpose. Ali, do you have any other ways that you ve done that, or handled that? Ali Luke, 2012 www.writershuddle.com P a g e 38

Ali: I pretty much do it the same as you. I have a password-protected page, which is incredibly simple to do in WordPress, you just choose to make the page password protected and you enter a password before you hit publish. I have half a dozen or so ebooks now, so when someone joins the newsletter, they get the link to that page, they go to that page, and they can just type in the password to get the ebooks. Then they can go back at any point. I think if you put it on the thank you page they d have trouble finding it again in the future. Seth: Right, let me, can you see my screen again, Ali? Ali: Yes, I can see that. Seth: Okay, so in this page over here you have a visibility option, public, so you can just change that to password protected and put that here. Then in AWeber, you have messages, and then you have your follow-up messages, and I don t have one here, so you basically create a new message, so the first one you create automatically goes out when somebody subscribes to your list, so you could put welcome here, you could then put a link to the page here and say here s the password to get your thing when you get to that page, or down here you could attach the file directly, so those would be the two options to do that, and then this message they re going to get immediately when they sign up, and that ll have all the information that you need. Vala: What Else Can Seth Show Us? Seth: The next question, Vala asks if there are other things that I can walk people through in WordPress, I prefer learning from people to manuals. Ali Luke, 2012 www.writershuddle.com P a g e 39

Perhaps Ali and I can discuss some other options for helping folks out. Again, if you have a very basic site, or you have not started a site, my free course The Web Launch will help you get a lot of those basic things set up. Some of the more advanced topics you can learn about on my site, or maybe Ali and I can talk about doing another one of these in the future as well. Ali: Absolutely, yes. Seth: Bill asks, Once you have your page set up right? Yes, you need to have, it s a weird reverse order when you re setting up the freebie exchange, where: You make the freebie Then you have the page that points to the freebie Then you set up the email that points to the page Then you actually set up the form last So you have to set up the end result and then work your way towards the beginning of the process for folks who are wanting to subscribe. Those are the questions we have for now. Ali, did you have any questions that came up for you during the process? Ali: Is it OK to Have Posts in More than One Category? Ali: I had just one thing, because I really liked the way you talked about highlighting your best posts. On Aliventures, I have one of those text widgets, and it s just basically four hyperlinks, to four of my popular posts. Every time I want to change one, I need to go in and change one of the hyperlinks, and it s a bit of a pain, so I really liked your approach. Ali Luke, 2012 www.writershuddle.com P a g e 40

What I wasn t sure about is, if I tag something with more than one category, whether that s going to cause any search engine problems. I ve heard mixed views on that. So is it okay for me to tick the Popular category box to say this is a popular post, as well as the Writing box to say this is a post on writing? Seth: The reasoning behind that would be, basically the category pages become pages on your website, and then you have two different URLs to point to the same page. At this point, I don t think this is making a huge effect on search engines. There s a widget, Simply Exclude, where you can actually hide a category from showing up on your site. (I don t really use categories on my site, so I don t really need to hide them, because I m not really offering links to them or anything like that.) If you were actively using categories, you might want to hide the featured sidebar one or whatever you name it, so that that s not showing up as a regular piece. The idea s still the same, that you want to highlight those. If you have trouble because the category thing is an issue, you can go the manual route. If you can t get the technology to work to make it easy, sometimes it s worth just putting in the effort doing what Ali does, and manually adding those and editing those as necessary. Hopefully this creates an easier way to do it, but if that causes too many problems, you can go back to doing it manually. Ali: Okay, thank you very much. Ali Luke, 2012 www.writershuddle.com P a g e 41

Bill: What s a Good Way to Encourage Sign-Ups? Seth: Bill also asks, what is a good way to get people to sign up? That s probably a little bit larger than what we can cover here. I think offering value is the best way to do that, and that is value in your everyday content, and then perhaps a little something extra to entice them to sign up, something they cannot get on your site. Maybe that s an ebook, or exclusive access to content that other people aren t getting.. Regular value, and then a little bit of something extra, a little bit of something exclusive, is a great way to get people to sign up, but the overall thing is to be as helpful as possible, and deliver that as regularly as you can. So, that s all I have, Ali, unless you have anything else, I m happy to wrap this up. Ali: Yes, let s call it at that. Thank you so much for coming and doing this, Seth. I ve definitely learned a lot, and I know that other people listening will have learned loads from this, and we also had quite a few people who said they couldn t make it live, but were really looking forward to the recording. This has been brilliant and I know you ve gone through things quite quickly, but people will have the recording You can go back, you can watch things again, and you can go through the steps yourself with your own website and just get the hang of it, and maybe hopefully in the future, we can do another webinar as well. If there s something you particularly want I think we ve mentioned WordPress and MailChimp in particular, building an email list and stuff just put a post in the Huddle, in the Suggestions forum, and I will happily invite Seth back to do more training with us. So, thanks Seth, and people can find you at sethleonard.com. Thanks guys, so have a great day, or a great evening, wherever you are in the world. Ali Luke, 2012 www.writershuddle.com P a g e 42