Die popup, die!
Don’t you just HATE popups?
Well, the guy who invented the popup back when (14.4 baud modems roamed the Earth) recently crawled out of his bunker…
Turns out we can blame all this on an MIT scientist named Ethan Zuckerman.
He said:
“I wrote the code to launch the window and run an ad in it. I’m sorry. Our intentions were good.”
Heh, good intentions.
Now I have a confession to make here…
I hate popups as much as the next guy.
You’re reading a blog post, just starting to get into what the author is saying, and…
“HEY WANT MY FREE EBOOK?”
It snaps you out of your “reading trance” like a bucket of ice water in the face.
Real annoying.
And when I first started my blog about Sublime Text a few years back, I did NOT want to use a popup.
BUT…
I kept hearing other marketers raving about popups.
One even went so far as to say, “If you’re not using a popup, you’re an idiot.”
So I decided to test it for myself…
That’s right—I used a popup.
And sure enough, my popup generated a LOT of new email signups.
Way more than putting an opt-in form under my blog posts.
I thought to myself, “Josh, you’re running a business here. The goal of a business is to make money, and the best way to do THAT is to grow your email list.”
Even though I hated it, the popup stayed.
And people complained. My audience was programmers, after all, and software developers hate all marketing with a fire-and-brimstone passion.
It didn’t seem like I had a good alternative, so I gritted my teeth and held my ground.
Then one day I clicked a link to read a blog post and saw something really cool…
The link was for a post by Noah Kegan, the marketing ninja behind AppSumo.
Instead of going straight to the blog post, the first thing I saw was a full-screen invitation to sign up for his email newsletter.
And below the form was a link I could click if I just wanted to skip straight to the blog post.
I LOVED this approach.
Yeah, it was still an interruption.
But it felt more natural and FAR less intrusive than getting slammed in the face with a popup later.
I immediately started scouring the web for a plugin that would let me do this on my blog—and came up empty.
I concluded that Noah had this built custom, so I gave up in frustration.
Until…
A few months later, I learned Noah and his sumo-lings were hard at work on an app to help bloggers and entrepreneurs grow their email lists.
And one of the first features they rolled out was a “welcome mat”—exactly like what I’d been looking for!
I installed SumoMe on all of my websites (it’s free and takes just a couple of minutes), and set up my welcome mats.
When I saw the number of email signups the new welcome mats were collecting, I was giddy.
They crushed my popups—doubled the conversions, in fact.
And I’ve seen ZERO complaints since switching to these welcome mats.
Want to give this a shot on your site?
Just pop over here today: