Photo By Seth Godin

In a new category of my blog I will be reviewing and recommending some of my favourite plugins, in this post I review What Would Seth Godin Do (WWSGD from now on).

Who Is Seth Godin?

Where ya been!  Seth Godin is the ubiquitous internet marketing guru.  He literally wrote the book on a lot of internet marketing techniques such as permission marketing, dips and purple cows.  Here is a link to his section on Amazon, Seth Godin’s Books On Amazon this is an affiliate link because I highly recommend a lot of his books (I was “yeah so what” about Tribes though).

He has this to say about using cookies to differentiate the offering  your blog has for each visitor:

One opportunity that’s underused is the idea of using cookies to treat returning visitors differently than newbies. It’s more work at first, but it can offer two experiences to two different sorts of people. (Source: In the Middle, Starting)

What It Does

There is nothing earth shattering about WWSGD, but it allows you to customise the message you send to your visitors on their first visit (or first x visits) then once they have come back a couple of times you can give them a second message.

The message can be placed on each page, post or anywhere within your theme by using a PHP function.

Why is this such A Big Deal?

The plugin does this via a cookie which is checked each time a visit is made, the message is changed with the cookie count. This means you can customise a welcome greeting for each visitor depending upon the number of visits they have made. It’s a very simple but useful tool which can make something click in people minds to convert them from one off visitor to customer or RSS subscriber.

In other words you can suck up to your visitors and make them feel special, in the hope they will do an action of your choosing.

How I Use It

On their first visit to my site I use WWSGD to tell people about my coaching services.  I do this because many users arrive at my site via a search engine query and may have no idea that I offer these services. On subsequent visits I suggest they subscribe to my RSS feed so I can push them future posts.

You can see WWSGD in action at the bottomn of each individual post.  If you clear your cookies you will see the first message, press f5 and you will see the next message.

Where To Get It

The plugin can be downloaded from:

http://richardkmiller.com/wordpress-plugin-what-would-seth-godin-do