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Transcript of Opt-in Content Locker WordPress Plugin – Intro Tutorial

Hey guys, this is Pam Neely. I wanted to talk to you a bit about this very cool little plugin called “Opt-in Content Locker.” It is paid but it’s $14 and I’ve had a lot of fun with it and it’s a great way to get some subscribers. What we’re going to do is I’m going to walk you through the soup to nuts instruction of installing it on this page and we’ll keep going after the dog bakery page, just because it’s fun.

Let me tell you more specifically what a content locker does. You may have heard of gated content. Gated content is any kind of content that requires either an email address to be given or maybe a Facebook like or a Tweet. It requires some kind of give and take from the visitor to get access to the content. So what Content Locker lets you do is it lets you maybe give people the first, say, four paragraphs here and then the rest of the content is blocked and they have to give their email address to see it at all.

Lets walk through exactly how this works. I’m in my dashboard, same drill as always. We’re going to go to “plugins.” This time, because this is a paid plugin, you won’t find it when you search, so you need to go to “upload” and “browse.” We’re going to go to “my desktop,” and there it is. We’ll click “install now.” Now, we’re going to activate it. Great. There it is right away.

Lets do settings. We’ll just walk through the whole page, and this “enable soft-mode locker,” that’s so the search engines can still see your content even though it’s locked by javascript so we definitely want that. “Send a thanksgiving message.” That’s just a thank you message, that would be find. “Send your name” is good. I don’t want no reply at StartABakery.com because I want them to be able to reply, so I’m going to put in contacts. I’m going to change this to “thanks for subscribing.” I’m going to take out that.

Now, if I was going to offer them a free report or something in exchange for signing up, you would want to put that link in right now. Another great thing to put in this is to try to get some feedback from your readers. We will talk about this technique when we do welcome emails. Basically, if you can get people to reply back to you once they’ve just signed up — and often when people have just signed up, that’s when they’re most likely to take action. They just gave you their email address, they’re impressed with you, they want to engage with you. So if you ask them then, you’re much more likely to get a response.

I want to frame this as like, “gosh, could you do me a favor. Could you –?” That might be a better way to say it. That’s plenty. We like our paragraphs short because reading is a drag, unfortunately. That’s the email message they’ll. I might also — I suppose I could put in the URL. He does not have HTML code in this, which would be better, but we can work with it. That would be a great update if he would like to do that.

Intro. This is what they’ll see on your page. This is the copy that I like. Again, it’s a little bit of personality and it’s kind of playful. So here’s the name. I would just put in name. Again, you can disable this if you want to grow your list faster frankly and email. That would be fine. By the way, I can’t remember what the source is, but email shouldn’t have a dash in it anymore. Do we want to enable extended email address validation? We do, actually, and you would want to do this only if your site is running current versions of things, but as you can tell with this mechanism for opting people in, there’s no double opt-in. So they could absolutely just give you a fake email address. Some of them will, in all honesty. Most of them won’t, though, which is good for faith and human nature.

It’s nice to just check it because you’ll increase the likely hood of getting more subscribers; getting more email addresses that you can actually use if you’ve got that checked. Here’s the subscribe button label. I would put in something like “unlock this content.” Terms and conditions, I usually leave blank. I would put “you are directing to the –” exactly what it says there. I definitely want to enable Google Analytics because I always want to know what’s happening.

Now we go into “design settings.” Color for the box backgrounds, I’m partial to white but again, this is all easy. Stuff you can do on your own. That’ll do. Font color. Font size, lets make that easy for them to read. Put field border color, that’s okay. Background color, it should be white. It is. Here’s the button color, that’s really important. Lets give it a nice, clear orange. Actually I lied, lets do a little bit more of a tomato. Great. Oh, if I’m going to do that , I don’t want white. We’re going to leave that alone and we’re going to change this. They make it fairly easy. I actually am kind of fond of this little interface. The button font colors black. Font size.

Alright, so here we go. As you can see, we’ve got a lot of integrations here. MailChimp, iContact, Get Response, Campaign Monitor, Mad Mimi, Sendy, Benchmark, and AWeber. So most notably what’s missing is Constant Contact. You could definitely email him and when I come around to doing my Constant Contact tutorials I will see about checking with him as to how to do that.

Enable MailChimp. We want to do this. We want to go get our MailChimp key. This is my dashboard, obviously. Lets go to profile. Extras, I believe it is. There it is. Your API keys. Here’s my API key. I’m just going to copy that and it is just awesome how this immediately starts to work. Oh, so you can — that’s a new thing that he added in this new version. So that’s just awesome. I definitely want to sell him the welcome list — that’s just fantastic. I did not see that when I entered GetResponse. It doesn’t happen with GetResponse. Does it happen with AWeber? No it does not. I believe AWeber requires double locked in so it might show up later when you populate the forum.

What we need here, though, is the list ID and this is going to be great, you’re going to love this. Lets find the list ID, that might be a little bit more challenging. Overview. Lets try just putting in the name. I don’t want the subscriber count. We’ll just leave that. Lets see if it works. Ask users to confirm their subscriptions, yes please. I do want to send the welcome message. That’s all I have to do. This may work better after I save it too. I’m going to update that as well. Lets go down here. We’ll hope for the best.

Anyway, we’ve got all this teed up, at least enough to start trying it. Now, what we do is, it couldn’t be simpler, we’re going to go into any one of these posts. I said I do dog bakery, so lets do dog bakery. You could gate the entire post. What I would recommend is you give them the first, say, two, three, four paragraphs just so they get enticed into reading it. Then we’re going to put “opt-in locker.” That’s the opening tag. Lets do this. That would be the closing tab. Just like it was bold. Obviously those are brackets, they’re not parenthesis. So lets update, and view post.

Yay. Isn’t this great? I love this plugin. Anyways, “this content is for subscriber only.” So you can put in your name and lets see if I can’t do something that it won’t recognize already. We click “unlock this content.” Boom. It may, indeed, send me a welcome email and that’s cool. Basically, I’ve got their email address. Even if they don’t — I haven’t had the welcome email feature so I’m still enthused about this even without the welcome email. Though it is better to do double opt-in for long term results.

Lets go back in and take a look at this because you will be able to track how many subscribers you’re getting from this which is helpful and interesting. There we are, opt-in locker and you can see subscribers. Boom. There I am. I’m going to wait a minute and see about what happens with MailChimp. As you can see, that’s how it works. It’s also, what’s great about this, is that it’s smart enough that if you’ve got multiple pages locked — like if I had bakery management software locked — once I’ve given my email name, it’s not going to ask for it twice. So it really reduces the annoyance factor. I think it’s a really clever little thing. It’s gotten me quite a few subscribers. More than I expected and If you’ve got any budget at all and if you’ve got content that would work with this mechanism, I would highly encourage you to test it.

Take care, talk to you soon. Bye.