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.)

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

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Tracey Rissik on July 20, 2010 at 8:17 am said:

Hi Richard,

I’ve seen this great plugin on Katie Freiling’s website and many others – and it shows on the blog posts in the top right side of posts.

However when it’s on a site I’m working on, it shows as a wide bar across the top of pages (about page).

Please could you let me know how to create a smaller more square box like Katie’s site? It’s not obvious from the plugin customisation area, nor from the comments I’ve read on this website.

Many thanks
Tracey

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Richard K Miller on August 7, 2010 at 10:47 am said:

@TC Nielson: Does the big empty box disappear after 5 visits? You might try pasting the HTML you’ve used for your box into its own post, simply to test that it works as you expect.

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John on August 10, 2010 at 2:46 am said:

I’m really glad that “my old plugin buddy” Seth Godin is still a blog doorman separating new and returning visitors.

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Jane in Australia on September 27, 2010 at 9:41 pm said:

Hi Richard,
i love love this creation of yours.
I have installed this plugin to my as yet unlaunched self hosted WP Blog
see link above
my groovy IT son tested it for but the RSS goes nowhere.
I sent him your code, he said yep mum it’s all there and added…
‘its what’s in the /blog/feed folder that is missing’.
can you guide me as to what I need to do?
Mostly I learn all these things my self but son is my backup.
(a friend has same onhers and it goes nowhere also. she is also on WP)
I have several 4 Richards in my life and they are all cool guys,

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- Richard K Miller on November 11, 2010 at 9:19 am said:
  
  Hey Jane! Thanks for your comment. It looks like you have the plugin successfully installed?
  
  Reply ↓
Max on September 28, 2010 at 9:01 am said:

Great plugin!
Would it be possible to activate the cookie only when a user visits a specific page on your blog/site, so that after visiting that page the welcome message would disappear?
I’ve been looking for a plugin that does this and yours is the one that came the closest.
I’m currently using the plugin with wordpress.

Thanks,
Max

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- Richard K Miller on November 11, 2010 at 9:13 am said:
  
  Hi Max, that’s not currently possible but it sounds like a good feature to add. Thanks for the idea.
  
  Reply ↓
Nathan on October 1, 2010 at 12:45 am said:

I can’t customize my message because the settings option is not coming up in my plug-in section for WWSGD. How do I customize the settings?

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Karim on October 2, 2010 at 8:20 am said:

Thanks for doing this for us, I have a small tiny request though. I’m tryign to implement this on my website, and the welcome message is used to direct the view to a sales page on the website.. However the WWSGD message still appears on the sales page, which looks weird.. Is there any way to specif what pages the welcome message appears on?

The sales landing page is on one of the “pages” of the wordpress blog. I’d like the WWSGD to still appear on the blog posts, homepage, search page, tag pages, catogiries pages etc.

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Howard Andruejol on October 7, 2010 at 7:28 pm said:

Richard,
great plugin! thanks for sharing!!
(and a special thanks for replying to all the comments you get.)
one quick question. is there a way to show the message for new visitors before the post but the message for returning visitors after the post?
greetings from Guatemala.

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- Richard K Miller on November 11, 2010 at 9:12 am said:
  
  Hi Howard! You’re the first to request this! You must have a very specials situation.
  
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Janet Stanley on November 21, 2010 at 8:55 am said:

Hi Richard,

I installed your plugin in my site and provided a first message but it appears on the main blog page only. If I click on any post to visualize it separately…No message! This is also true if I load a post directly. I’ve also tried to put a higher number on the visits and to tick “posts and pages”…
I’m using Thesis 1.7
Any hints on where the problem may be?

Thank you in advance,
– Janet

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Ché Lucero on November 29, 2010 at 11:14 am said:

Richard,

Really great plugin! I am having a bit of trouble with it though. I am using a fairly modern WP (3.01) with thesis 1.8 as my theme. I am having some inconsistent results with the way that the box appears. I have the same code in the before/after, and the default of 5 visits. When I load up the site, the box appears. However, when I click into any post, it does not appear. Do I have something set wonky? Thanks!

-Ché

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- Richard K Miller on December 13, 2010 at 7:49 pm said:
  
  @Ché: I assume your thesis file for a single post (probably single.php) contains a call to the_content() right? Does it work if you try any other themes?
  
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Jean on December 26, 2010 at 2:10 pm said:

Handy tool for guys like me who use their WP sites as a CMS rather than a blog.. Thanks for the article. I’ve give WWSGD a go..

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John on January 12, 2011 at 1:52 pm said:

Hi Richard,
This is a great plug-in.

I’m using the plug-in to show a sales page for a product at the top of all posts and pages.

Is there any way to have the WWSGD box show above the posts/pages headline?

I am using Thesis as the theme.

Thanks for any direction.

John

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kristinoy on January 17, 2011 at 4:11 pm said:

I have a frame on my bloggsite with this text:If you’re new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting! So far so good. But when people clik on the link RSS feed this message pops up:
“This page contains the following errors:

error on line 3 at column 486: Extra content at the end of the document
Below is a rendering of the page up to the first error.”

I have installed your plugin sucessfully so….do you have any ide what I have done wrong and where I can do changes?

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- Richard K Miller on January 21, 2011 at 12:59 pm said:
  
  @Kristinoy, what browser are you using? It sounds like the error may not be related to the plugin but related to clicking on an RSS link. If your browser isn’t setup to handle RSS feeds, it may return an error like that.
  
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John on January 25, 2011 at 4:40 am said:

Richard -

Great plugin, I’m finding that for some reason it is displaying the text of my message properly to new and returning visitors on all my posts.

However, on the *first* post of my homepage (my homepage has the first 10 posts, shortened with “continue” button) it has the text of my WWSGD plugin as part of the excerpt.

I did some searching, and saw some people are having the same problem on the WordPress support forums but I can’t find a response.

Do I just have the settings wrong somehow? Thanks!

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- Richard K Miller on January 28, 2011 at 5:01 pm said:
  
  Hey John, unfortunately that’s the current behavior of the plugin. It shows the message on the first available “content”, which happens to be the first of your 10 posts for you. What WWSGD needs is the option to place the message at an arbitrary location, a feature planned for future development.
  
  Reply ↓
  - John on January 31, 2011 at 10:28 am said:
    
    Ah, gotcha. Well at least it doesn’t show up in the RSS feed.
    
    Still looks a little weird in the excerpt on the homepage, the only real fear is that it may affect clickthrough.
    
    Perhaps a quicker feature to implement might be an option to turn it off on the homepage or in excerpts.
    
    Anyway thanks for the response. It is still a highly useful plugin.
    
    Reply ↓
Henning on January 28, 2011 at 10:17 am said:

Hi Richard,

I’ve installed your plugin on my blog and now I am wondering if the caching plugin I use does interfere with WWSGD ? At least the box does not disappear after 5 visits of the page. It seems like the cached results depend on the users who went there in the first place: either the WWSGD box is cached or not depending on there status of being newbies or returning visitors. DO you have any idea to work around this issue?

Henning

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Daniel on April 11, 2011 at 1:39 am said:

Hey Richard,
This is probably a newby question, but how do you add a hyperlink in the feed?
The code on install is
If you’re new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!”,
Was just hoping you could give an example on how to add a link to another page in place of the rss feed.
Cheers,

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