WordPress plugin: What Would Seth Godin Do

Seth Godin advocates using cookies to distinguish between new and returning visitors to your site:

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)

I built this WordPress plugin to implement Seth Godin’s idea. For WordPress users it reduces the “work at first” to almost nothing. Installation is simple:

Download the WWSGD WordPress plugin and unzip it.
Copy the what-would-seth_godin-do folder to your WordPress plugins folder.
Activate the plugin in the Plugins panel.
Customize settings in the Settings panel.

By default, new visitors to your blog will see a small box above each post containing the words “If you’re new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!” After 5 visits the message disappears. You can customize this message, its lifespan, and its location. Your visitor must have cookies enabled.

New visitors will appreciate some context and background information about your site. This is your chance to offer them a special welcome and invite them to become permanent subscribers!

DOWNLOAD the What Would Seth Godin Do WordPress plugin

I can be reached at richard AT richardkmiller DOT com. I appreciate comments and suggestions.

FOR OTHER PLATFORMS:
(I have not tested these.)

985 thoughts on “WordPress plugin: What Would Seth Godin Do”

Justin Sainton on October 10, 2009 at 1:09 am said:

Surprised that no one here mentioned this idea. I checked through WordPress and didn’t see any function like it, and this plugin was so close that I figured I’d mod it for my needs.

Basically created a is_return_user() function. Now, based on the logic in this, I can do anything I want in any template or plugin conditionally based on the is_return_user() function, which is phenomenally useful. For example, I have a home page for a client that has a pre-loader the first time you go to it…which is great, because content is pre-loading…but I don’t want every page to pre-load, nor do I want someone who has already visited the home page a few times to have to sit through it when it’s already loaded! A simple if(!is_return_user() && (is_home() || is_front_page())) and it works perfectly!

Thanks for the great work on this.

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Jehzeel Laurente on October 20, 2009 at 12:22 pm said:

Hi,

I have a simple question. How can I disable the plugin for specific pages? For example in my /search page. I don’t want the message to appear. But it still appears in there.

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Andy Fitzpatrick on October 23, 2009 at 7:27 am said:

What a top way to integrate RSS into WordPress without pestering your returning users. Will install this immediately.
Thanks

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Stephanie - Wasabimon on October 26, 2009 at 1:30 pm said:

Also, please keep a non-javascript version! I’m trying to pare down the scripts on my site to make it run faster.

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Richard K Miller on October 29, 2009 at 8:18 pm said:

@Stephanie: No worries; I plan to keep a non-JavaScript version too!

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Marketing Meerkat on December 5, 2009 at 5:55 am said:

I like the idea! That’s cool.

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Melissa on January 7, 2010 at 12:56 am said:

Thanks for the plugin – have you incorporated this patch into the current version? http://nhw.pl/wp/2008/09/23/what-would-seth-godin-do-wordpress-plugin-patch

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Melissa on January 7, 2010 at 1:06 am said:

I can’t get the feed url changes to stick – I’ve tried the following with no luck!

new_visitor_message’ => “If you’re new here, you may want to subscribe to our RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!”

thanks for your help

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Demo Geek on January 21, 2010 at 7:09 pm said:

Is there a way to customize this plugin to not show on certain pages?

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Melissa on January 23, 2010 at 2:04 am said:

ok I’ve customised my message and it’s still showing the default message! Help!

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Melissa on January 27, 2010 at 11:54 pm said:

Thanks – I just worked out I was editing the plugin rather than using the options! Silly me!

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Michelle Hartman on February 14, 2010 at 4:43 am said:

Thanks for this plugin, it’s just what I need.

I’ll be implementing it on a few of my sites!

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Horst on February 19, 2010 at 3:30 pm said:

How can I disable WWSG Message on specific pages? I have seen that I can input the tag where I want it to display. But this is very hard work.

Bye
Horst

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Johan on February 22, 2010 at 2:02 am said:

Hi Richard. Thanks for this great plugin. My theme is not designed work with this nice plugin. I’ll have to add some code manually to set the message above the post/page. Can you please give me some ideas of what I should drop where? TXS
Johan

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BAWalker on February 24, 2010 at 7:30 am said:

I am trying to customize the rss feed message that displays using the options as Melissa says above, but the new message changes are not showing up – it still shows the default message – and the rss feed link that shows by default is not correct – it shows the update message in the admin but the actual site pages do not reflect the changes – help!

Anyone else having this problem, I tried downloading the patch that was referenced, but that is a broken line – how do we get it to work?

http://www.nextforsmallbusiness.com/2009/12/30/tips-for-creating-powerful-headlines-that-sell/

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BAWalker on February 24, 2010 at 8:07 am said:

FYI: I had to uninstall the plugin because the rss feed is not correct and shows as a broken link on the feed — we are running wordpress 2.9.2, is it working for anyone else? We also have wishlist member installed, if that might be causing a conflict?

Hoping we can get this worked out so we can use this plugin, its a great idea and does just what we are looking, so once we can get the custom message to show, I can reinstall it! Looking forward to your help.

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christians on February 26, 2010 at 3:46 am said:

Hi Richard, nice Plugin!
@Melissa: Thanks for your Google exclusion trick, great!

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Dr Snake on March 5, 2010 at 6:53 am said:

Great plugin. One slight fault, the return visitors message doesn’t show live links on the category or search excerpts pages. I use the Atahualpa Theme by BytesForAll, whether that affects it I don’t know.

For me, it could either be fixed or just have a button to not let the message show on category and search result pages.

Cheers,
Doc.

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985 thoughts on “WordPress plugin: What Would Seth Godin Do”

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