I have seen numerous blogs with pop ups on the main page. This is because Darren Rowse had done a case study on popups on one of his blogs. Then John Chow and ShoeMoney got on the band wagon. Interesting to see it on blogs, as this system does work for sales letters and other aspects of a website. Pop Ups are great when trying to capture your leads that are about to leave or potential new readers.
But I think blogs have constant readers and constant followers. I really think it belongs to a sales type website where you will never be able to see that customer or reader again. Then again I can see it working for blogs because you want to capture new readers. I even wrote a post about why popups work on my other sites, sales type websites though. Well I wanted to test this theory out on this blog, I already capture leads on this blog by way of user comment - new user comments.
So I decided to try a new way of capturing leads, especially ones that have never been here before. BUT I wanted to do it differently. So far Darren, Shoe, and Chow use a popup overlay - it covers the website and pops up a box with a reason to optin to their news letter. Well I want to do the same but do it in such a way it captures the attention and doesn't kill user experience. I went ahead and found Instant Slide Up and grabbed it.
If you are new to the website you may have notice a slide up optin box at the bottom of my website. It is also time delayed at 2.5 seconds because they say after 4-6 seconds a user may leave due to lack of interest. So I try to keep them onto the website but also try to get their attention if they leave.
So this system actually slides up and does not disrupt a users experience. It does captures their attention because it slides up and I customize a Google logo. It even has a nice optin box to capture leads. The only down side is I am limited to characters, while the overlay boxes can be adjusted to fit content.
It also allows users to scroll through my blog and the slide up option just sits at the bottom. With the overlays it can freeze the scroll bars and stop you from browsing the website. I think allowing your readers to browse the website helps you gain more trust. But then again, freezing users to try to convince them to optin can be beneficial, especially on exit.
With Instant Slide Up, you can set a time frame when to repeat - everytime or once per visitor. You can also use it to promote a product, hence its announcement option. So let's say you want to survey your readers, use the slide up script to go ahead and ask every unique reader. Or you can use it as an advertisement platform. But using it as an OptIn is very powerful, since it does capture someones attention.
So I find poups or slide ups do work for a blog, well slideup worked for me and you have seen proof with Problogger and his stats that it worked. So they do work both in the sales and blog world. It is just trying to capture readers and potential users, but without annoyance. Most of your current readers will not leave your page anyways because of your popups, they are already dedicated readers.
