Have you been working hard to produce meaningful content for your WordPress blog, but just aren’t getting the website traffic you deserve? Fear not, the SumoMe plugin (app) may be just what you are looking for.
Created by Noah Kagan (@noahkagan) and his crew out of Austin, Texas, this marketing suite is the culmination of over four years of development aimed at bloggers and other web content providers looking to grow their personal brand.
SumoMe for WordPress has garnered a lot of Buzz in the past year, mostly because it purports to help you with major aspects of Internet marketing: list building, social media sharing, and meaningful analytics. Face it, anything that helps you generate traffic, encourage sign-ups and gain shares is welcome.
Is the SumoMe app really the answer for you? Let’s look at what SumoMe offers and see if it truly can make a difference.
- SumoMe List Building Features
The SumoMe List Builder option lets you show visitors an attractive pop-up for attracting subscribers. It’s Smart Mode technology actually senses when readers are about to leave, then presents them with a lightbox asking for their e-mail address. A non-intrusive reminder of your value as a content provider and why people should extend their relationship with you beyond one blog entry.
It offers seamless integration and transfer of your list’s email addresses to leading services like AWeber, Infusionsoft, GetResponse, and Constant Contact. SumoMe is conscious of mobile technology’s growing importance as a source of traffic, and thus optimizes its pop-ups for market leading smartphones.
- Tracking the Heat and Analytics on your WordPress Blog
For those not familiar, heat maps are a color-based way of data representation that can help you identify which parts of your blog are being clicked, or not. This information can be used to optimize the layout of your WordPress blog, and subsequently improve website interaction. For example, moving your call to action (CTA) or track what pages are receiving the most visits.
Take advantage of SumoMe to set up real-time heat maps, so that you know immediately where visitors are clicking. This is great, because:
- Looking at heat maps offers a more intuitive analysis that looking at raw numbers.
- Better insights into how visitors navigate your blog and at what point they begin to leave.
- SumoMe Share (this one is my favorite!)
Of all the advantages of SumoMe, one that has garnered a lot of interest is its sharing tool. On your blog, SumoMe Share allows you to put social share icons on top of your images, making it easy for visitors and subscribers to pass on your content from their desktops or mobile phones.
The Share app is connected to Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Pinterest and twelve other major social networking services. Its Smart mode lets you sit back and not have to guess which sharing options work best on a dynamic basis.
The paid Pro option (see below) lets you have different settings for mobile and desktop visitors. It also lets you download CSV files containing historic traffic data and well as Urchin Tracking Mode (UTM) to see where your traffic actually comes from.
The Bottom Line on SumoMe
For most WordPress bloggers, small businesses and solopreneurs, SumoMe’s “free option” marketing suite is more than adequate for boosting your traffic and adding people to your network via list-building and shares. You get a robust set of tools for the “cost” of some SumoMe branding on your blog, a fair trade up to when you want to take things to the next level.
Speaking of which, the paid Starter option ($10/month) you will get the company’s VIP support and be able to suppress SumoMe’s ubiquitous blue tab. The complete Pro option ($100/month) gives you all the bells and whistles (e.g. A/B testing, Advanced Display, Enterprise Integration, etc.). However, bloggers who only want specific tools (e.g. Share or List Builder) can do so for $20 per month per option.
To learn more about how SumoMe can help you build your list, get more traffic, and social media engagement click here.