I stumbled upon Ramit Sethi’s blog IWillTeachYouToBeRich.com. Ramit is the the co-founder & VP of Marketing for PBwiki, a wiki startup in Silicon Valley and he blogs about personal finance.
Ramit runs a great blog with some excellent content and a wicked sense of humor. But I was most impressed with a little conversion trick he’s running on his blog.
When someone comments on a post they are taken to a page that invites them to signup to Ramit’s mailing list and to visit his discussion forum. The copy and look of this page all make it seem like Ramit is rewarding the visitor for the comment and granting access to private, top-secret info. Check out the screen shot below.
Why do like this idea?
The visitors who comment on a post are usually ones that are most interested in your content. They are, in other words, “hot leads”. But with most blogs, these visitors will often move on and never revisit unless they’re hooked up to your RSS feed. But RSS feeds are not enough.
To keep your visitors coming back, why not offer them a newsletter subscription or an invitation to join a forum.
Ramit does this and improves upon the idea by using the sense of ‘exclusivity’ to make the visitor feel that they earned the right to access the forum and subscribe to Ramit’s newsletter due to the time they spent commenting. I bet this aura of exclusivity boosts the value of his forum and newsletter in the visitor’s mind and should lead to more returning visitors.
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